Hannah stepped back beside the cast-iron drill press and kept her flashlight aimed at the doorway.
Craig stepped through the splintered frame with a steel crowbar in his gloved hand, dusty with gray cobwebs and furious in the beam of her light.
"Put that light down, Han," Craig muttered, kicking a pine shaving off his boot. "It's me."
Hannah lowered the beam to the six pried-up pine floorboards under the maple workbench. Between the joists lay nothing but mouse nests and old sawdust.
"You broke Dad's door," she said quietly.
"The house key didn't fit the shop lock, and I spent all afternoon tearing up the pine floor," Craig said, leaning the crowbar against the bandsaw. He wiped his dusty forehead with his sleeve.
"All I remembered from Walter's office was beneath the board," he added bitterly. "Every board under this bench is dry as bone, and there's nothing under them."
"You didn't have to tear up his shop, Craig."
Craig stared down at the scarred maple workbench where their father's wooden hand planes sat in a neat row. The anger drained out of his shoulders all at once.
"Forty-two years I listened to people in this town talk about Arthur Lindstrom's hands, Hannah," Craig said, his voice dropping low in the cold room. "I couldn't even miter a baseboard without a gap, and he knew it every time he walked into my house."
Hannah looked at her brother across the torn floorboards.
"He never cared about your baseboards, Craig," she said softly. "He kept your Little League championship photo pinned over his lathe until the day he died."
Craig looked up at the wall behind the lathe, where the faded clipping still hung in a plastic sleeve. He swallowed once, picked up his crowbar, and walked to the door.
"There's nothing in here," Craig said without looking back. "Miller's flatbed will still be at the curb at eight tomorrow morning."
His boots crunched away down the gravel drive, and a minute later his truck faded down Third Street.
Hannah pulled the broken door shut and braced a wooden clamp against the frame.
She sat down on the pine sawbench, pulled out the half-finished Sunday crossword from her coat pocket alongside her one-dollar bill, and shone her flashlight on the paper.
She looked at her father's neat blue ballpoint lettering in the puzzle, then at the carpenter's pencil marks in the corner of the dollar bill: `14A / 9D`.
She worked the riddle the way Arthur had taught her to read a Sunday clue.
*Look where the plumb bob sleeps at night / Beneath the board that never shrinks / Count fourteen across in the patternmaker's light / Before the Saturday hammer clinks.*
Craig had torn up the pine floorboards because he heard *board* and looked down. But pine floorboards shrank every winter when the furnace came on, opening quarter-inch gaps between the planks.
The board that never shrinks was not the floor. It was the fifty-year-cured Honduras pattern mahogany stored in the overhead rack above the cast-iron jointer.
And *where the plumb bob sleeps at night* was the recessed cedar wall cabinet right behind the mahogany rack, where Arthur always hung his heavy brass plumb bob on its braided cord.
Hannah carried the wooden step stool over to the jointer and climbed up until her eyes were level with the overhead mahogany rack. She reached up and clicked on the brass articulated work lamp clamped to the beam.
Warm yellow light flooded the recessed cedar wall cabinet behind the mahogany planks.
Along the oak support strip directly beneath the lowest mahogany board ran twenty-four numbered maple dowel pegs where Arthur hung his wooden calipers.
*Count fourteen across in the patternmaker's light.*
Hannah counted fourteen dowel pegs across the mahogany rack (`14A`). Beneath the fourteenth peg was a vertical brass mortise strip drilled with twelve peg holes running downward.
She gripped the fourteenth peg, slid the ninth peg setting down (`9D`), and heard a quiet brass latch release inside the wall.
The recessed cedar cabinet holding the brass plumb bob swung outward on concealed hinges, opening a hidden patternmaker's compartment between the studs.
Inside sat a velvet-lined machinist chest.
Hannah lifted the chest down to the maple workbench and unlatched the lid. Resting on the dark green velvet was the heavy brass foundry token stamped with her initials, `H.L.`, beside the `$192,000` in registered Treasury certificates and the notarized workshop deed codicil.
Under the token lay an index card written in her father's blue ballpoint pen.
*Han, I heard the rain bucket in your hallway in October, so fix your roof before the snow hits. You were the only one who stayed for the Sunday crosswords, and the shop is yours.*
*P.S. 14-Across in Sunday's puzzle is seven letters.*
Hannah stood very still beside the maple workbench, her fingers resting on the cool brass token in the quiet shop while the lake wind sighed against the high windows.
Saturday morning at eight-thirty, thirty minutes before the nine o'clock deadline, the estate liquidator's flatbed truck idled at the curb in front of Arthur's house.
Craig and Valerie stood by the open driveway gate in the frost while Walter Finch waited on the side porch steps with his briefcase and pocket watch.
"It's eight-thirty, Walter," Craig said, gesturing toward the flatbed. "Let Miller back the truck in."
Hannah walked up the sidewalk with the velvet-lined machinist chest under her arm. She climbed the porch steps, opened the lid, and placed the brass foundry token stamped `H.L.` into Walter Finch's palm.
Walter examined the stamped initials, checked his codicil, and closed his pocket watch with a crisp snap.
"Verified at eight-thirty," Walter announced. "Under Article Four, the house, the workshop, and the one hundred and ninety-two thousand dollars in certificates belong solely to Hannah Lindstrom."
Hannah walked to the curb, paid the flatbed driver forty dollars for his fuel, and sent the liquidator away.
As the flatbed rumbled down Third Street, Hannah turned back to Craig and Valerie without a trace of gloating in her voice.
"I'm keeping the shop for my high school woodshop students," Hannah said evenly. "And I'm setting aside twenty thousand dollars from the estate this week to repair both of your roofs."
Craig looked down at the machinist chest in her hands, then gave a quiet nod before walking Valerie to her car.
When the street was quiet again, Hannah walked back into the workshop. Saturday sun slanted through the east window across the scarred maple workbench.
She sat down on her father's wooden stool, smoothed the folded Sunday crossword from her coat pocket beside her one-dollar bill, and filled in `14-Across` (`PATTERN`) in blue ink.