another door, what had to be one of the last rooms. "Oh, that's the best part," Jill said. "He disappeared just before Spencer skipped town. No one ever saw him again." Carlos shook his head slowly. "This is one nut job of a place to live, you know that?"
Jill nodded, pushing open the door and stepping back, revolver up. "Yeah, I've been thinking that my-self."
Nothing was moving. Stacks of chairs to the right. Three statues, busts of women, straight in front of them. There were two corpses huddled together to the left of the door, a couple, holding each other, making Jill wince and look away - and there, hanging on the southern wall in heavy gold frames, were the three clock paintings. They walked into the room, Jill nervously studying their surroundings. It seemed normal...... but so did that room in the mansion that turned out to be a giant trash compactor. On impulse, Jill stepped back and used one of the chairs to prop the door open before going to take a closer look at the paintings. Well, kind of paintings. She supposed technically they'd be called mixed media. The three pieces were of women, one on each canvas, but each also contained an octagonal clock - the first and last set at midnight, the one in the middle at five o'clock. A small, bowl-like tray protruded from the bottom of each frame. They were labeled as the goddesses of the past, present, and future, from left to right.
"On the postcard, it said something about putting your hands together," Carlos said. "That's like the clock hands, right?" Jill nodded. "Yeah, makes sense. It's just obscure enough to be annoying."
She reached forward and lightly touched the tray on the middle frame, a dancing woman. There was a tiny click and the tray dipped like a scale, the weight of her hand pushing it down. At the same time, the hands of the clock started to spin. Jill jerked her hand back, afraid that she'd set some-thing off, and the clock hands quickly spun back to their previous settings. Nothing else happened. "Hands together...," she murmured. "Do you think they mean that all of the clocks have to be set for the same time? Or do they mean literally, the hands aligned?"
Carlos shrugged and reached out to touch the tray of the future goddess, definitely the creepiest of the paint-ings. The past was a young girl sitting on a hill, the present a dancing woman... and the goddess of the fu-ture was the figure of a woman in a slinky cocktail dress, her body enticingly posed, but with the bald, grinning face of a skeleton. Jill suppressed a shudder and didn't let any thoughts get started on the theme of imminent death, like I don't have enough of that already.
The tray Carlos touched dipped down, but again, it was the hands on the clock of the present goddess that moved. Apparently, the other two were fixed at mid-night. Jill stepped back from the wall, arms folded, think-ing - and suddenly she had it, she knew how the puzzle worked, if not the exact solution. She turned around, hoping that the missing pieces were nearby, and she smiled when she saw the three statues - ah, the symme-try - and the shining objects they held in their slender stone fingers. "It's a balancing puzzle," Jill said, walking to the statues. At closer inspection, she saw that each held a tray with a single, fist-sized stone. She picked them up, hefting each orb, noting the different weights. "Three balls, three trays," she continued, walking back to the pictures, handing the black stone -made from obsidian or onyx, she wasn't sure to Carlos. An-other was clear crystal, the third a glowing amber.
"And the goal is to make the middle clock hit mid-night," Carlos said, catching on.Jill nodded. "I'm sure there's a motif to the solution,a color match, like black for death, maybe... ormaybe it's mathematical. It doesn't matter, it won'ttake that long to try all of the combinations."
They set to work, trying each ball on one painting at a time, then using them all, Jill carefully studying the present clock's hand movements with each placement. It appeared that the different balls held different values, depending on which tray they were in. Jill was just starting to feel like she could figure it out - it was defi-nitely mathematical - when they lucked across the so-lution. With