In the hours that followed, I must have hit that safe one thousand times. I hit it with the hammer. I hit it with a croquet mallet. I even tried hitting it with the bust of Abe Lincoln, but I couldn’t get a good enough grip.
Around four in the afternoon, I decided to pay a visit to the Caddy, in hopes of finding a tire iron. But as I was coming out of the house, I noticed that the rowboat overturned on a pair of sawhorses had a sizable hole in its bow. Figuring that someone had put it there to repair it, I went into the boathouse looking for an implement that might prove useful. Sure enough, behind all the paddles and canoes was a workbench with a slew of drawers. I must have spent half an hour going over every inch of it, but all it offered up was a new assortment of hand tools that weren’t going to get me much further than the ones from the general store. Remembering that Woolly had mentioned an annual fireworks display at the camp, I tore the boathouse apart looking for explosives. Then, just as I was about to walk out in a state of moral defeat, I found an ax hanging between two pegs on the wall.
With the whistle of a lumberjack on my lips, I sauntered back to the old man’s study, took up a position in front of the safe, and began to swing. I couldn’t have made contact more than ten times when suddenly, out of the blue, Emmett Watson comes bursting through the door.
—Emmett! I exclaimed. Boy, am I glad to see you!
And I meant it. For if there was anyone I knew in this whole wide world who could find a way to get into that safe, it was Emmett.
Before I had a chance to explain the situation, the conversation got a little off course—if understandably so. For having arrived while I was in the boathouse and finding no one home, Emmett had gone upstairs and discovered Woolly.
He was clearly rattled by it. In all probability, he had never seen a dead body before, certainly not the body of a friend. So I really couldn’t fault him for throwing some blame my way. That’s what rattled people do. They point a finger. They point a finger at whoever’s standing closest—and given the nature of how we congregate, that’s more likely to be friend than foe.
I reminded Emmett that I was the one who’d been keeping an eye on Woolly for the last year and a half, and I could see that he was cooling down. But then he started talking a little crazy. Acting a little crazy.
First off, he wanted to call the cops. When he discovered that the phone was dead, he wanted to drive to the station—and he wanted to take me with him.
I tried talking some sense into him. But he was so tightly wound, he marched me down the hall, pushed me out the door, and knocked me to the ground, claiming that there was no money in the safe, that I was going to the police station, and that, if necessary, he was going to drag me there.
Given the state he was in, I have no doubt that’s exactly what he would’ve done—no matter how deeply he would have regretted it later. In other words, he wasn’t leaving me many options.
And fate seemed to agree. Because when Emmett knocked me down, I landed on the grass with my hand practically resting on one of those painted stones. And then out of nowhere, Billy pops up—just in time to draw Emmett’s attention in the other direction.
The rock that I had my hand on was the size of a grapefruit. But I wasn’t looking to do any serious damage to Emmett. I just needed to slow him down for a few minutes, so he could regain a little perspective before he did something he couldn’t undo. Crawling a few feet out of my way, I picked up one that was no bigger than an apple.
Sure, it knocked him to the ground when I hit him with it. But that was more from the surprise than from the force of impact. I knew he’d be back in the swing of things before you knew it.
Figuring if anyone could talk some sense into Emmett, his brother could, I dashed up the steps, ushered Billy into the house, and locked the door behind us.
—Why did you hit Emmett? Billy cried, looking more rattled than his brother. Why did you hit him, Duchess? You shouldn’t have hit him!
—You’re absolutely right, I agreed, trying to settle him down. I shouldn’t have done it. And I swear, I’ll never do it again.
Leading him a few steps from the door, I took him by the shoulders and made a stab at talking to him man-to-man.
—Listen, Billy: There’s been something of a snafu. The safe is here, just like Woolly said it would be. And I agree with you wholeheartedly that the money’s inside of it, waiting to be claimed. But we don’t have the combination. So what we need now is a little bit of time, some Yankee ingenuity, and plenty of teamwork.
As soon as I had taken Billy by the shoulders, he had closed his eyes. And before I was halfway through my speech, he was shaking his head and quietly repeating his brother’s name.