They’d pulled a few jobs together already, nothing too large, just enough to tide them over until they moved on to the next place. But Jove had ideas of buying a boat and taking it down the Hudson. He didn’t know how to sail but he’d grown up on that river and it was all he talked about now, the lighthouses set along the shore like streetlights, the currents so fast you didn’t need any wind. He was older than Hawley, close to twenty-five, with a thick mustache grown out to prove it and three years in prison already under his belt. Hawley wasn’t even seventeen then and still unsure of himself and so he let Jove make the decisions.
He should have known, though. He could feel a pinch in his ribs as soon as they walked up onto the grand stone porch, the one overlooking the lake that wrapped all the way around the front of the great house. It was almost as if the bullet were already lodged there in his back, but Hawley was too green and didn’t know how to trust his body yet—it was only something that carried him around—and so he just held up the blanket while Jove broke the window and eased his body through the frame and out of the cold.
The furniture in the main hall was covered with white sheets. The shapes were strange and made shadowy figures scattered around the fireplace. In each corner there was a clock. A grandfather with its long golden pendulum by the stairs. Other timepieces hanging on the walls, displaying numbers and phases of the moon. There was a table that ran the length of the room, big enough for more than thirty people to eat at together. Hanging above it all was a chandelier made from antlers, the horns tied together in the middle and reaching out like the roots of a tree.
It was the kind of place built for grand summer parties. Jove had been to one long before with a pal of his from prison, a boxer named King, who’d scored an invitation after taking a dive. It was how Jove knew about this great house tucked away in the mountains, and why he thought it might be empty now. He often talked about that wild night, mingling with rich people from the city and eating caviar and smoked salmon and drinking Champagne. Hawley had listened to the story, shivering in empty railcars and hitchhiking on the highway and swilling crap beer in motel rooms, until he nearly felt like he’d been at the party himself, clinking cocktail glasses with Frederick Nunn, the money launderer who owned the majestic palace with all those clocks. It was hard to believe they were standing in it now.
Jove pulled down a few of the white sheets and revealed some taxidermied ducks mounted in flight by a window seat, a portrait of Nunn with a heavy mustache over his lip like a finger, and, set above the mantelpiece, dangling over yet another antique clock, was the lumpy head of a female moose. Underneath the moose was a small brass plate listing where it had been found and the date it had been killed.
“I guess he bagged that one himself,” Jove said.
“Guess so,” said Hawley. He crouched down and touched the bearskin rug in front of the fireplace. He was surprised how slick the fur felt beneath his fingers. The bear’s glass eyes were hard and fixed, its mouth slightly open. The skin had been cut and glued around the snout, which was made of leather and wax and slightly twisted, as if someone had tried to pinch the nostrils closed.
The men took in the grandness of the room, their cold breath puffing out in clouds and disappearing into the rafters. Then Jove wiped his nose and pushed through the swinging doors to the kitchen. The back rooms were cavernous, built for a team of servants, a stove with sixteen burners and racks of copper pots hanging from the ceiling, four sinks, a walk-in freezer, a butcher block the size of a bed, and rows and rows and rows of knives. In the pantry they found the place settings, and it was better than they’d thought—forks and spoons for a hundred people, and not just in silver but also plated in gold, an assortment of complicated utensils for every type of food—salads and snails and fish and steak and sherbet and soup and even butter.
He filled the bags they had brought. Then he found some pillowcases near the laundry room and filled those. There was a back door, and when Hawley stuck his head out he could see a fenced-off garden and beyond that, a path to the garage. He wondered what kind of cars might be inside, but he was too nervous to check. He dragged the bags of silverware back to the window where they’d started. Then he waited for Jove, who was upstairs rifling the bedrooms.
Hawley pulled the bearskin rug off the floor and wrapped it around his shoulders to keep off the cold. The underside was soft as suede. He tied the arms around his neck. Felt the tips of the claws sewn in. The head flopped on his shoulder. He touched the bear’s mouth. The teeth were real, canines yellowed and thick.
Hawley thought of the party Jove had described to him, and imagined the ice and snow melting and the grass beneath springing to life and the dry heat coming back to the floorboards like it was the middle of summer. The house would be full of guests, drinking and laughing, playing cards or listening to music maybe, their chairs pulled around the fire, the windows open and a warm breeze coming off the lake. There would be people outside on the porch, too, smoking and talking in the moonlight. Maybe some his own age. Maybe a girl.
Hawley pictured her there, leaning against one of the pillars like it belonged to her, wearing a silver dress and her hair fixed with a comb. And then the girl turned and caught him staring, and she was slipping through the doors and moving toward him with a low smile, his heart thumping as if he’d swallowed a bunch of birds, and then it grew louder and Hawley realized the sound wasn’t coming from inside him—it was the clock on the mantelpiece, on the other side of the room. The one beneath the moose head. It was ticking.
The clock hanging by the kitchen door was going, too, and so was the grandfather clock by the stairs. How did he not notice before? These machines needed to be wound each day. And someone had been winding them. Someone had the keys and was checking every hand in the house, keeping time moving forward through the winter so that not a minute was lost.
Hawley heard a thundering of footsteps overhead, and then Jove rushed down the stairs, the pockets of his coat bulging. “Time to go.” Jove grabbed one of the pillowcases, then turned the lock and threw open the door to the porch. Hawley could hear someone coming in the back entrance, then hurrying through the kitchen. He snatched up the remaining bags and followed Jove outside, the bearskin still tied around his shoulders, flapping out behind him like a cape.
It had started to snow again, the flakes coming down fast and sideways as the two men leapt over the railing and hurried away from the great house. Hawley heard a voice shouting behind them, and then came the blast, and a pain shot through his guts, in the same place he’d felt before they’d broken the window, which made him wonder for a moment even as he was sprinting across the lawn with all the adrenaline of a man being chased for his life, and then the hurt flew up and caught him by the throat and he dropped the bags and crashed into the trees at the edge of the forest.
—