A Message at Midnight

Lena had her thumb over the screen, ready to switch the phone off, when a message lit up the darkness of her room. It was past midnight, and the sender was her aunt, who never wrote at that hour and who normally confined her contact to a long call on Sunday afternoons. The message was short and oddly urgent: “Look under the clock. Please don’t wake your mother.”

Lena sat up and listened. Her mother was asleep in the next room, exhausted after a week of late shifts, and tomorrow was her birthday. The sensible thing would have been to wait until morning, but curiosity proved stronger than good sense. She slipped on her slippers and crossed the flat on tiptoe, avoiding the one floorboard that always creaked.

An old wall clock hung above the sofa. Lena checked behind it first and found nothing, but when she lowered her eyes she noticed a white envelope taped just beneath it, her name written across the front in her aunt’s looping handwriting. Inside was a black-and-white photograph of her mother at about ten years old, standing beside that very clock and grinning to show a missing front tooth.

On the back, in blue ink, her aunt had added a line: “Clue one: ask her about the day this clock stopped.” Lena smiled in the half-light. The photograph explained the late hour of the message, since her aunt had clearly wanted everything in place before the birthday began, but it also raised a question she had never thought to ask. Why had nobody ever told her the story of the clock?

She put the envelope beside the birthday card on the kitchen table, where her mother would be certain to see it after breakfast. In the morning she would make coffee and let the conversation start by itself. For now, she thought as she tiptoed back to bed, the secret would keep for a few more hours, and she was fairly sure she would not sleep until it was revealed.