Walter Finch slid three crisp one-dollar bills across the oak table, and Craig Lindstrom laughed because he thought the old lawyer was making a joke.
"Come on, Walter," Craig said, leaning back in his chair. "Dad worked forty-two years as a master patternmaker, and he didn't keep three dollars in a coffee can."
Across the table, Valerie Lindstrom-Cole stopped snapping her handbag clasp. At forty-nine, she kept her camel wool coat buttoned to the chin, with her car idling in the November sleet outside.
"It's Thursday at four o'clock, Mr. Finch," Valerie said. "Read the rest of the will, please."
Walter adjusted his wire-rimmed glasses. At seventy-three, he had been Arthur Lindstrom's friend and attorney for four decades.
"I am reading the rest, Valerie," Walter said. "To my son Craig, one dollar, to my daughter Valerie, one dollar, and to my daughter Hannah, one dollar."
Hannah sat at the end of the table with her hands folded over her wool coat. Her knuckles smelled of linseed oil from teaching woodshop at Grand Haven High, and last Sunday's half-finished crossword was still folded in her coat pocket.
She had cut their weekly crossword visit short that Sunday to grade shop projects before Monday morning. On Tuesday night, seventy-nine-year-old Arthur had gone to sleep in his armchair and never woken up.
"What about the house on Third Street?" Craig asked. "The pattern shop out back? And Mom's savings?"
"Article Four," Walter read. "The remainder of my estate, consisting of one hundred and ninety-two thousand dollars in Treasury bonds and the clear deed to my house and shop, belongs to whichever child brings the brass foundry token from my workshop to Walter Finch's office before nine o'clock this Saturday morning."
The radiator under the window hissed.
"A token," Craig said flatly. "What token?"
Walter placed three slips of cream paper on the oak table, one behind each dollar bill.
"Your father typed these himself," Walter said. "If nobody brings the brass token by nine o'clock Saturday morning, the estate goes to the Michigan Maritime Museum."
Valerie picked up her slip of paper and read the four lines aloud.
"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."
She dropped the paper back onto the table. Before Craig or Valerie reached for the money, Hannah leaned forward and looked at the three crisp one-dollar bills lined up on the oak wood.
In the corner of each bill's green border, written in carpenter's pencil, were five tiny marks: `14A / 9D`.
"He lost his mind," Valerie said, sweeping her bill into her purse and leaving the riddle behind. "There isn't any hundred and ninety-two thousand dollars, because he drove a rusted-out Ranger and died broke."
"The bonds exist, Valerie," Walter said mildly.
"Sure they do," Craig said, standing up and shoving his dollar bill and riddle into his pocket. "I already hired an estate liquidator for eight o'clock Saturday morning, when Miller is bringing a flatbed to strip the backyard patternmaking shop, buy the cast-iron machines for four grand, and change the locks on the house."
"You can't clear his shop before the nine o'clock deadline," Hannah said.
"Watch me, Han," Craig said from the doorway. "At eight sharp Saturday, that shop gets emptied."
The heavy door clicked shut behind Craig and Valerie. Hannah picked up her dollar bill and touched the carpenter's pencil marks in the corner.
Hannah drove home to her small bungalow near the ferry landing. In her hallway, a yellow bucket sat on a towel beneath the ceiling seam, catching a slow leak from her back roof.
Since her divorce two years ago, she had been too proud to tell her father her roof was leaking and she lacked the six thousand dollars to fix it.
She pulled the half-finished Sunday crossword from her coat pocket and laid it on the kitchen table beside the riddle.
Every Sunday for twenty years, she and Arthur had solved the Sunday crossword in blue ballpoint pen.
"Watch out for the word shrinks in a clue, Han," Arthur always told her, tapping the grid with his blue pen. "In crossword clues, shrinks is a trick indicator where they want you looking down at the floor when you ought to be looking up."
In his pattern shop, where he built wooden foundry patterns for forty-two years, Arthur had only one rule about shrinkage.
"Pine and oak move every winter," he had taught her when she started teaching woodshop, pointing up to the overhead ceiling rack above his cast-iron jointer. "In this shop I only ever use fifty-year-cured Honduras pattern mahogany for master foundry molds, because it is the one wood in a shop that never shrinks or warps."
Hannah stared at the second line of her father's riddle.
*Beneath the board that never shrinks.*
Friday afternoon, as Hannah walked out of the high school woodshop toward the faculty lot, Craig's pickup blocked her bumper.
Craig climbed out into the cold wind holding a bank printout.
"Give me your copy of the riddle," Craig said.
"You took yours yesterday, Craig."
"I threw it in the trash outside Walter's office," Craig said tightly. "Then this morning I talked to a friend at First Michigan Bank and learned Dad really did cash out one hundred and ninety-two thousand dollars into registered certificates and a safe-deposit transfer packet."
"Walter told us that yesterday."
"I thought the old man was bluffing," Craig snapped. "Valerie threw hers out too, and Walter's office is closed."
He took a step closer to her bumper. "Hand over your copy of the riddle, Hannah, and we'll split whatever is under the floorboards."
"Dad didn't write the will to be split on a threat," Hannah said.
"I've got two kids in college and a leaking roof," Craig said. "Give me the riddle, or Miller's crew takes a wrecking bar to that shop at dawn."
"You already heard it, Craig," Hannah said evenly, stepping around him into her Civic.
She waited until Friday night at eight-thirty, when the November lake wind was rattling the trees along Third Street, and walked down her father's dark driveway to the backyard workshop with her flashlight.
When her beam hit the workshop side door, her breath caught. The cedar frame around the deadbolt had been forced open with an iron bar.
Hannah stepped inside and shone her flashlight beam onto the wide pine floorboards under the workbench: someone had already pried up six boards with a crowbar, and heavy boots stopped on the gravel outside the door.