Poking his head out of the storage room, Billy could see his brother at the end of the hallway, staring at the ceiling of a large room. Emmett would do that sometimes—stop and stare at a room in order to understand how it had been built. After a moment, Emmett climbed a set of stairs. When Billy could hear his brother’s footsteps overhead, he snuck down the hallway and into the large room.
As soon as he saw the fireplace big enough for everyone to gather around, Billy knew exactly where he was. Through the windows he could see the porch with the overhanging roof, under which you could sit on rainy afternoons and on top of which you could lie on warm summer nights. Upstairs there would be enough rooms for friends and family to visit for the holidays. And there in the corner was the special spot for the Christmas tree.
Behind the staircase was a room with a long table and chairs. That must be the dining room, thought Billy, where Woolly gave the Gettysburg Address.
Crossing the large room and entering the opposite hallway, Billy poked his head into the first room that he passed. It was the study, right where Woolly had drawn it. While the large room had been neat and tidy, the study was not. It was a mess, with books and papers scattered about and a bust of Abraham Lincoln lying on the floor under a painting of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. On a chair near the bust were a hammer and some screwdrivers, and there were scratches all across the front of the safe.
Woolly and Duchess must have been trying to get into the safe with the hammer and screwdrivers, thought Billy, but it wasn’t going to work. A safe was made of steel and designed to be impenetrable. If you could open a safe with a hammer and screwdrivers, then it wouldn’t be a safe.
The door of the safe had four dials, each of which showed the numbers zero through nine. That meant there were ten thousand different possible combinations. Duchess and Woolly would have been better off trying all ten thousand by starting with 0000 and working their way up to 9999, thought Billy. That would have taken less time than trying to break in with the hammer and screwdrivers. Even better, though, would be to guess the combination that Woolly’s great-grandfather had chosen.
It took Billy six tries.
Once the door of the safe was open, it reminded Billy of the box at the bottom of his father’s bureau, in that there were important papers inside—just a lot more of them. But under the shelf with all of the important papers, Billy counted fifteen stacks of fifty-dollar bills. Billy remembered that Woolly’s great-grandfather had put a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in his safe. That meant that each stack was made up of ten thousand dollars. Stacks of ten thousand dollars, thought Billy, in a safe with ten thousand possible combinations. Closing the door of the safe, Billy turned away, but then turned back again in order to spin the dials.
Leaving the study, Billy continued down the hallway and went into the kitchen. It was neat and tidy except for an empty soda pop bottle and a can of beans that had a spoon sticking straight up out of it like the stick on a candy apple. The only other sign that someone had been in the kitchen was the envelope tucked between the salt and pepper shakers on the table. The envelope, which said To Be Opened in the Event of My Absence, had been left there by Woolly. Billy could tell it had been left by Woolly because the handwriting on the envelope matched the handwriting on Woolly’s drawing of the house.
As Billy was putting the envelope back between the salt and pepper shakers, he heard the sound of metal hitting metal. Tiptoeing down the hallway and peeking through the door of the study, he saw Duchess swinging an ax at the safe.
He was about to explain to Duchess about the ten thousand combinations when he heard his brother’s footsteps thumping down the stairs. Running back down the hallway, Billy slipped back into the kitchen and out of sight.
Once Emmett was inside the study, Billy couldn’t hear what his brother was saying, but he could tell that he was angry from the tone of his voice. After a moment, Billy heard what sounded like a scuffle, then Emmett emerged from the study holding Duchess by the elbow. As Emmett marched him down the hallway, Duchess was speaking quickly about something that Woolly had chosen for himself for his own reasons. Then Emmett marched Duchess into the storage room.
Following quickly but quietly down the hallway, Billy peeked around the doorframe of the storage room in time to hear Duchess tell Emmett why they shouldn’t go to the cops. Then Emmett pushed Duchess out the door.
* * *
? ? ?
In chapter one of the Compendium of Heroes, Adventurers, and Other Intrepid Travelers—after the part when Professor Abernathe explains how many of the greatest adventure stories start in medias res—he goes on to explain the tragic flaws of classical heroes. All classical heroes, he says, however strong or wise or courageous they may be, have some flaw in their character which leads to their undoing. For Achilles the fatal flaw had been anger. When he was angry, Achilles could not contain himself. Even though it had been foretold that he might die during the Trojan War, once his friend Patroclus was killed, Achilles returned to the battlefield blinded by a black and murderous rage. And that’s when he was struck by the poisonous arrow.