I said okay, said goodbye, and left. I was—my dad’s word—gobsmacked. Halfway down the elevator, I thought of something and came back.
“Changed your mind already?” He was smiling, but his eyes looked worried.
“No. I just wanted to ask you about something you said.”
“What was it?”
“Something about presents. You said a brave man helps but a coward gives presents.”
“I don’t remember saying that.”
“Well, you did. What does it mean?”
“I don’t know. It must have been the pills talking.”
He was lying. I lived with a drunk for several years, and I knew a lie when I heard it.
2
I biked back to 1 Sycamore Street, and it wouldn’t be an overstatement to say I was wild with curiosity. I unlocked the back door and accepted an exuberant greeting from Radar. She was able to get up on her back paws for strokes, which made me think that the newer pills might be packing a punch. I let her out in the backyard to do some business. I kept sending her mental messages to hurry up and pick a spot.
When she was back in, I went upstairs to Mr. Bowditch’s bedroom and opened his closet. He had a lot of clothes, mostly slop-around stuff like flannel shirts and khaki pants, but there were two suits. One was black, one was gray, and both of them looked like the kind of suits George Raft and Edward G. Robinson wore in movies like Each Dawn I Die, double-breasted and wide in the shoulders.
I pushed aside the clothes and revealed a Watchman safe, medium-sized, old-fashioned, about three feet high. I squatted, and as I reached for the combination dial, something cold nuzzled my back where my shirt had pulled out of my pants. I yelped and turned to see Radar, her tail wagging slowly back and forth. The cold thing had been her nose.
“Don’t do that, girl,” I said. She sat down, grinning as if to say she’d do what she wanted. I turned back to the safe. I got the combo wrong the first time, but on my second try, the door swung open.
The first thing I saw was a gun resting on the safe’s single shelf. It was bigger than the one my dad gave my mom for those times when he had to be away for a few days… or once for a week, on a acompany retreat. That one was a .32, a ladies’ gun for sure, and I thought he might still have it but wasn’t entirely sure. There were times, when his drinking was at its worst, I’d gone looking for it, but I never found it. This one was bigger, probably a .45 revolver. Like most of Mr. Bowditch’s stuff, it looked old-school. I picked it up—gingerly—and found the catch that swung the cylinder. It was loaded, all six chambers. I swung the cylinder back into place and returned it to the shelf. Considering what he’d told me, a gun made sense. A burglar alarm might have made even more, but he didn’t want any police calls at Number 1 Sycamore. Besides, in her earlier days, Radar had been a perfectly good burglar alarm—Andy Chen being a case in point.
On the floor of the safe was what Mr. Bowditch had told me I’d find: a big steel bucket with a knapsack laid over the top. I picked up the knapsack and saw the bucket was filled almost to the top with those BBs that weren’t BBs but solid gold pellets.
The bucket had a double handle. I grabbed it and lifted. From my squatting position I could barely manage it. There had to be forty pounds of gold in there, maybe fifty. I sat down and turned to look at Radar. “Jesus Christ. This is a fucking fortune.”
She thumped her tail.
3
That night, after I fed her, I went upstairs and looked at the bucket of gold again, just to make sure I hadn’t imagined it. When I got home, Dad asked me if I was ready for Mr. Bowditch’s homecoming. I said I was, but I had stuff to do before he arrived. “Still okay to borrow your drill? And that power screwdriver?”
“Of course. And I’d still be glad to come up and give you a hand if I could, but I’ve got a meeting at nine. It’s that apartment house fire I told you about. Turns out it may have been arson.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“I hope so. Are you okay?”
“Sure. Why?”
“You just seem a little off. Worried about tomorrow?”
“A little,” I said. Which wasn’t a lie.
You may wonder if I had any urge to tell my father about what I’d found. I didn’t. Mr. Bowditch had sworn me to secrecy, that was one thing. He claimed the gold hadn’t been stolen “in the usual sense,” and that was another. I’d asked what that meant, but all he would say is that nobody in the whole world was looking for it. Until I knew more, I was willing to take him at his word.