Everlasting (1991)

Lynda Trent's novel, copyright 1991 in the names of Dan and Lynda Trent and listed by Open Library as a HarperCollins paperback of February 1991, follows Electra Radcliff, who comes home to Willowbrook, her family's house, after years in New York City. Her sister Amelia, who has never had to leave, still tends the carpet their Papa bought at the turn of the century. (Open Library)

Watches

Elgin watch: In a Willowbrook room hung with oil paintings of the Muses, Electra takes her father's pocket watch from her handbag and winds it by a crown worn smooth with use, admiring its gold-filigreed face. Then she holds it to her ear and tilts her head from side to side, as he taught her as a child, listening through the ticking for the faint single-note chime he said was the hallmark of a fine Elgin watch: a secret she has never told anyone and her only link to her childhood. The chime is her father's claim, reported by Electra, not a specified Elgin complication. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: Holding the watch to her ear, she tilted her head fully from one side to the other as her father had taught her to do as a child, listening through the familiar ticking for the distinctive, though faint, single-note chime he had said was the hallmark of a fine Elgin watch. (Lynda Trent, Everlasting, scan cataloged as Severn House, 1992, p. 10; Internet Archive scan OCR)