Finding Time: Time Will Tell, #1

By Jessi Hammond

Bryn Maher's grandfather died in a car crash a year ago. But was it an accident… or something else?

When Bryn finds an old pocket watch in an antique store, a watch that looks identical to the one her grandfather had lost, she buys it on impulse.

But the watch hides an incredible secret. And when Bryn discovers what it is, she is determined to find out the truth about her grandfather's accident, no matter how much time it takes…

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kincaid Publishing
• Release date: Oct 5, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386054139

Book preview

About this book

When Bryn Maher discovers her grandfather's lost pocket watch, she also finds she has inherited a special gift. Soon, with the help of her rescue kitten, Orion, and Harley, who works in an antique store, she finds herself involved in several terrifying and heartbreaking mysteries…

Bryn Maher’s grandfather died in a car crash a year ago. But was it an accident… or something else?

When Bryn finds an old pocket watch in an antique store, a watch that looks identical to the one her grandfather had lost, she buys it on impulse.

But the watch hides an incredible secret. And when Bryn discovers what it is, she is determined to find out the truth about her grandfather’s accident, no matter how much time it takes…

Finding Time

One

Bryn Maher pulled open the door of the corner store and the summer heat folded itself across her skin, wiping away the brief respite of the store’s air conditioning. She let the door swing shut behind her and sent a last glance through the wide front window. She’d put her resume in here two weeks ago and been told that they weren’t hiring as the owner handed it straight back to her.

And now there was a new girl sweeping out the shop. She was maybe fourteen or fifteen, with spiked blond hair and headphones jammed into her ears, head nodding to the beat from her iPod.

Yeah, not hiring, all right. Not hiring anyone over sixteen. Because this kid would be on junior wages while the store would have had to pay Bryn minimum wage at least.

Bryn sighed and started the two-block trek home, her cloth grocery bags swinging in her hands. She’d managed to find a tiny one-bedroom unit which cost her a little under two-thirds of her Centrelink payments in fortnightly rent, but it was quiet and had a good internet signal.

And it kept her fit, climbing three flights of stairs multiple times a day.

The corner store was part of a strip of five shops dropped randomly into the middle of a sea of residential houses and unit blocks. It sold groceries and a tired-looking selection of sandwiches and hot food (and she really should find somewhere cheaper to shop too; their prices were horrendous). Beside it was a hairdresser, a tax agent, which was only open from ten until two, and an empty shop front. The last one in the row was some kind of antique or second-hand place. Bryn had put her resume in at all of them. In the two weeks since, she’d applied for literally hundreds of jobs, both online and handing out resumes.

Her case worker at WorkForAll, the job network provider she’d been assigned to to help her find work, was probably getting sick of photocopying her resume for her.

But she needed to work. She’d moved from her home in Gerringup, where there was no work at all, to Brisbane, the nearest big city, and her meagre savings were being eaten away fast. Not to mention she was bored out of her mind. But no one seemed to want to hire a short, mousy-haired eighteen-year-old-in-two-months with glasses and last-season’s fashion sense. Even if she did have a raft of A’s and B’s and three business and retail-related certificates from Year 12.

The fact that the late-summer heat wave currently hitting Brisbane had turned her hair into frizzled waves and had stuck her clothes to her skin probably didn’t help much, either.

She glanced at the bay window of the second-hand store as she passed, as she always did. The owner – manager? assistant? – changed the display once or twice a week, and if he had a schedule Bryn was yet to find it. But the displays were always interesting, and always had some kind of a theme. Last week had been teddy bears, then delicate glass vases.

Today it was clocks