The Lincoln Highway (50 page)

With one hand, Emmett opened the screen door, with the other, he pushed Duchess down the steps.

After Duchess stumbled a few feet in the direction of the overturned dory, he suddenly spun around as if he’d had an idea.

—Hey! You see that boathouse? There’s a workbench inside it with a whole selection of chisels and files and drills. They were of no use to me. But I bet you could get that safe open in a matter of minutes. After we liberate Woolly’s trust, we can go find a telephone together. And once the ambulance is on its way, we can head for California, just like Woolly wanted.

—
We
are not going anywhere, Emmett said, his face growing flush. We are not going to San Francisco or Los Angeles or Tinseltown. My brother and I are going to California.
You
are going to Salina.

Duchess looked at Emmett in disbelief.

—Why on earth would I go to Salina, Emmett?

When Emmett didn’t reply, Duchess shook his head and pointed to the ground.

—I am staying right here until I get that safe open. And if you don’t want to stick around and help, that’s your business. It’s a free country. But I’m telling you, Emmett, as a friend: If you leave now, it’s a decision you’re going to regret. Because once you get to California, you’ll realize that a couple of grand isn’t going to get you very far. Then you’ll wish you had your share of the trust.

Stepping forward, Emmett took Duchess by the collar just as he had at the Whitneys’, only this time he used both hands, and he could feel the fabric tightening around Duchess’s throat as he rotated his fists.

—Don’t you get it? he said through his teeth. There is no trust. No inheritance. No money in the safe. It’s a fairy tale. A fairy tale Woolly cooked up so you would take him home.

As if in disgust, Emmett shoved Duchess back.

Tripping over the stones that lined the pathway, Duchess fell on the grass.

—You’re going to the cops, said Emmett, if I have to drag you to the station.

—But, Emmett, there
is
money in the safe.

Spinning around, Emmett discovered his brother standing in the doorway of the muck room.

—Billy! What are you doing here?

Before Billy could answer, his expression transitioned from one of instruction to one of alarm, prompting Emmett to turn back around—at the very moment that Duchess’s arm went into motion.

The blow came hard enough to knock Emmett off his feet, but not hard enough to knock him unconscious. Feeling the coolness of blood on his brow, Emmett gathered his senses and rose onto all fours just in time to see Duchess push Billy into the house and slam the inner door.

T
he day before,
after Woolly acknowledged that the notion of a combination had most certainly definitely slipped his mind, he wondered if I wanted to take a walk down to the dock.

—You go right ahead, I said. I think I’ll take a moment to myself.

When Woolly went outside, I spent a few minutes in front of Great-grandpa’s safe, staring at it with my hands on my hips. Then with a shake of the head, I went to work. First, I tried putting my ear against the metal and turning the dials to hear the clicks of the tumblers like they do in the movies—which worked about as well as anything else you try doing that you’ve seen in the movies.

Retrieving the Othello case from my book bag, I took out my old man’s knife. My idea was to force the point of the blade into the seam between the door and the casing and wiggle it back and forth. But when I put my full weight behind the knife, what gave was the blade, snapping clean off at the hilt.

—Forged, tempered, and burnished by a master craftsman in Pittsburgh, my eye, I muttered.

Next, I went in search of some genuine tools. But after opening every kitchen drawer and rummaging through every closet, I proceeded to the mudroom, where I sifted through every cubbyhole and basket to no avail. For a moment, I considered shooting the safe with one of the rifles, but given my luck, I’d probably be hit by a ricochet.

So I went down to the dock, where Woolly was admiring the view.

—Hey, Woolly, I called from dry land. Do you know if there’s a hardware store in the neighborhood?

—What’s that? he asked turning around. A hardware store? I’m not sure. But there’s a general store about five miles up the road.

—Perfect. I shouldn’t be long. You need anything?

Woolly thought about it for a moment, then shook his head.

—I’ve got everything I need, he said with a Woolly sort of smile. I’m just going to wander around a bit and unpack my things. Then I thought I might take a little nap.

—Why not? I said. You’ve earned it.

Twenty minutes later, I was roaming the aisles of the general store thinking they must call it that because it generally has everything but what you’re looking for. It was like someone had tipped a house on its side and shaken it until everything that wasn’t nailed to the carpet came tumbling out the door: spatulas, oven mitts, and egg timers; sponges, brushes, and soaps; pencils, pads, and erasers; yo-yos and rubber balls. In a state of consumer exasperation, I finally asked the proprietor if he had any sledgehammers. The best he could do was a ball-peen hammer and a set of screwdrivers.

When I got back to the house, Woolly was already upstairs, so I returned to the office with my tools. I must have banged away on the face of that thing for about an hour with nothing to show for it but some chicken-scratched metal and a sweat-soaked shirt.

The next hour I spent searching the office for the combination. I figured a wily old moneymaker like Mr. Wolcott wouldn’t be so careless as to leave the combination of his safe to the vicissitudes of memory. Especially considering that he lived into his nineties. He must have written it down somewhere.

Naturally enough, I started with his desk. First, I went through the drawers looking for a diary or address book where an important number might be logged on the final page. Then I pulled out the drawers
and flipped them over to see if he had written it down on one of the undersides. I looked under the desk lamp and on the bottom of the bronze bust of Abraham Lincoln, despite the fact that it weighed about two hundred pounds. Next, I turned my attention to the books, flipping through their pages in search of a hidden scrap of paper. That endeavor lasted as long as it took me to realize that flipping through all the old man’s books would take me the rest of my life.

That’s when I decided to wake up Woolly—in order to ask him which of the bedrooms was his great-grandfather’s.

Earlier, when Woolly had said he was going to take a little nap, I didn’t think anything of it. As I mentioned, he hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before, and then he’d woken me at dawn in order to make the hasty exit. So I figured a nap was exactly what he intended to take.

But the moment I opened the bedroom door, I knew what I was looking at. After all, I had stood on that threshold before. I recognized the suggestion of order—with Woolly’s belongings lined up on the bureau and his shoes set side by side at the end of the bed. I recognized the stillness—set into relief by the delicate movement of the curtains and the murmur of a news broadcast on the radio. And I recognized the expression on Woolly’s face—an expression that, like Marceline’s, radiated neither happiness nor sorrow, but which did suggest some semblance of peace.

When Woolly’s arm had fallen from his side, he must have been too far gone or too indifferent to bother lifting it up, because his fingers were brushing the floor, just like they had at the HoJo’s. And just like then, I put his arm back where it belonged, this time crossing his hands on his chest.

At long last, I thought, the houses, cars, and Roosevelts had all come tumbling down.

—
The wonder is he hath endured so long.

As I was leaving, I turned off the radio. But then I turned it on
again, thinking that in the hours ahead, Woolly would probably appreciate having the occasional commercial to keep him company.

That night, I ate baked beans out of a can and washed them down with a warm Pepsi-Cola, the only things I could find in the kitchen to eat. So as not to crowd Woolly’s ghost, I slept on a couch in the great room. And when I woke in the morning, I went right back to work.

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.

—Are you worried about Emmett? I asked. Is that it? I promise there’s no cause for concern. I barely hit him. In fact, he should be back on his feet any second now.

Even as I said this, we could hear the knob rattling behind us, then Emmett pounding on the door and shouting our names.

—There, I said leading the kid into the hallway. What’d I tell you?

When the pounding on the door stopped, I lowered my voice in order to speak in confidence.

—The fact of the matter, Billy, is that for reasons I can’t go into at this moment, your brother wants to call the authorities. But I fear that if he does that, we’ll never get in the safe, there’ll be no divvying, and that house of yours—the one for you, and Emmett, and your mother—it’ll never get built.

I thought I was making a pretty good case, but Billy just kept shaking his head with his eyes closed and saying Emmett’s name.

—We’re going to talk to Emmett, I assured him with a touch of frustration. We’re going to talk with him all about it, Billy. But for the moment, it’s just you and me.

And just like that, the kid stopped shaking his head.

Here we go, I thought. I must be getting through!

But then he opened his eyes and kicked me in the shin.

Isn’t that priceless?

A moment later, there I was, hopping on one foot as he ran down the hallway.

—Jeezo peezo, I said, taking off after him.

But when I got to the great room, he was gone.

As God is my witness, even though the kid hadn’t been out of my sight for more than thirty seconds, he had vanished into thin air—like Lucinda the cockatoo.

—Billy? I called out, looking behind one couch after another. Billy?

From somewhere different in the house, I heard another doorknob rattling.

—Billy! I called to the room at large, with a growing sense of urgency. I know the escapade hasn’t been playing out exactly as we planned, but the important thing is that we stick together and see it through! You, your brother, and me! All for one and one for all!

That’s when from the direction of the kitchen came the sound of breaking glass. A moment later Emmett would be in the house. Of that there was no doubt. Having no other choice, I made a beeline for the mudroom where, finding the rifle cabinet locked, I picked up a croquet ball and threw it through the glass.