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RECORD CREATED 1999  ·  DECLASSIFIED 2026

Dancing
in Time

NOAH SICK

In a mountain village that kept the secrets of the powerful,
one agent follows a trail of buried truths that leads
all the way to Washington — and back through time.

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Dedicated to my beloved grandmother

Inez Panichi

Dancing in Time — front cover
Dancing in Time — back cover
Dancing in Time — spine
ESPIONAGE HISTORICAL FICTION MYSTERY WWII ERA

Some secrets are
paid to stay buried

Eagles Mere, Pennsylvania. Tucked deep in the Endless Mountains beside a lake of impossible clarity, this manicured village of grand Victorian hotels and old money was where the powerful came to disappear. No one asked questions. No one offered answers.

When Washington intelligence analyst Sarah St. Clair receives a cryptic summons from the grandmother she has spent years trying to find, she is pulled back to the mountain — and into a decades-long conspiracy that implicates figures at the highest levels of American power.

From the World War II summer of 1942, through the Cold War silences of the 1990s, to the threshold of the new millennium, Dancing in Time weaves a labyrinth of espionage, surveillance, political corruption, and a love that defies the physics of decades. The four-faced clock in the center of town has been marking this reckoning for fifty years.

Time, in Eagles Mere, does not move forward. It circles.

Setting
Eagles Mere, Pennsylvania & Washington D.C.
Period
1942 – 1998
Genre
Alternate History
Written · Published
1999 · 2026

A single ticket.

A vintage machine.

A chance to alter history.

From the Opening Pages

CHAPTER ONE

The mist never truly leaves the mountaintop; it only retreats into the hemlocks to wait for the sun to fail. In the center of the village, the four-faced clock stood as a sentinel of order in a wilderness that resisted it. To the summer guests, it was a convenience. To those who knew the secrets buried beneath the shale of Sullivan County, it was a countdown.

· · · · · · · · · ·

The bedside phone rang, waking Sarah St. Clair on the third ring to a muggy DC morning. She sat up and stretched her thin muscular arms before answering the eighth high-pitched ring. She lifted the receiver with tired irritation — and a voice she would spend the next six months trying to outrun told her that her grandmother had been found. That she was dying. And that she had left an envelope with the Pennsylvania State Police — to be picked up by noon on Thursday, but no earlier than eleven.

· · · · · · · · · ·

Sarah sat in a trance on the edge of the bed cradling the receiver in the crook of her neck. The only thing that came to her mind was Shakespeare's paraphrase — there are a great many things in heaven and earth that we do not and cannot understand. This would pass through her cranium several more times in the hours to come.

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What Readers Are Saying

"A masterwork of atmospheric tension. Sick builds Eagles Mere the way Le Carré builds his cold-war cities — intimate, secretive, and laced with the particular dread of a world where nothing is what it appears."

ADVANCE READER Historical Fiction Enthusiast

"Immersive and brilliantly written! The descriptions of Eagles Mere are so vivid and authentic that I felt like I was there. The mystery surrounding the secret facility is incredibly compelling and feels surprisingly believable. And the question, "What happened to Roxy?", kept me hooked until the very last page."

AMAZON READER Genre Fiction Reviewer

"I grew up near Sullivan County. This novel excavated things I half-knew, half-felt my entire childhood. The clock, the lake, the silence of the old families — Sick got it exactly right. This is the most honest portrait of that mountain world I have ever read."

EARLY READER Northeastern Pennsylvania
Noah Sick

"There is a town in the mountains of Pennsylvania that has no business existing."

Born in 1956, Noah Sick spent his childhood summers straddling two worlds in northeastern Pennsylvania — the grit of Dushore and Mildred, and the rarefied silence of Eagles Mere, where old money ran so deep it had its own heartbeat.

For decades, he collected threads: his grandmother's whispered stories, historical footnotes that didn't add up, absences that felt entirely too deliberate. Between 1996 and 1999, that lifelong obsession poured onto the page.

The result was Dancing in Time — a novel that reaches for truths history was paid to keep quiet. The railroad that once brought the elite to the mountains is gone, but its bed still cuts like a scar through the woods. The four-faced clock still stands in the center of town.

"I spent a lifetime trying to understand why this town, as predator, hunted me with its secrets. Some things can wait. Now it's your turn to know the truth."

The mountain didn't just hold trees — it held stories. And the stories were far stranger than anyone with a summer cottage and a glass of iced tea would ever dare admit.

Eagles Mere — the world Noah Sick grew up in

"Eagles Mere was no longer a vacation spot. It was a living, breathing mystery — with the mechanics of espionage, surveillance, and political corruption reaching the marble halls of Washington D.C."

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The Four-Faced Clock — Eagles Mere, Pennsylvania

THE FOUR-FACED CLOCK  ·  EAGLES MERE, PENNSYLVANIA

EAGLES MERE, PENNSYLVANIA

A NOVEL BY

Dancing
in Time

NOAH SICK

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