The final sentence, that the contents would change his life, reignited fantasies he’d been having about discovering a long-lost family treasure and leaving here a wealthy man.
Amid those flashes of wishful thinking, however, he’d given serious thought as to how he was going to open the safe. The rotary dials suggested that the key was an alphanumeric code, a series of numbers and letters that needed to be dialed into one or both of the finger wheels.
Aiden had come up with a list of possibilities during the train ride. Although it seemed unlikely, he tried the obvious one first, their old home phone number. He dialed the ten digits into the black dial, then into the red one, and then alternated the number between the two dials. None of the attempts met with success.
Next he tried birthdays and other dates germane to the Manchester clan. After exhausting those entries, as well as the local zip code, the license plate of Dad’s favorite Chevy and Aiden’s sixth-grade locker combination, he switched to letters. He rotated the finger wheels to spell out the names of people, places and things that had been important in the lives of his family.
A half hour of futile efforts followed. Dorminy called it quits after fifteen minutes and excused himself to work on his model trains. The old man asked Aiden to give a holler if a solution presented itself.
None did. Another half hour went by. Aiden’s fingers were beginning to tire from the constant dialing and he was getting frustrated. He needed a break.
He headed out into the yard. It was a beautiful afternoon. The sun felt good on his skin as he strolled through the short grass, trying not to think about numbers and letters and codes, trying to let his mind drift free in the hope that some fresh line of attack would slip into consciousness.
A black walnut tree at the western edge of the yard snared his attention, bringing forth another spate of childhood memories. He had often played in that tree, venturing out onto one of the horizontal limbs in imitation of a high-wire performer. Mom had caught him a few times, yelling for him to get down before he broke his neck.
The recollection jarred his mind onto a fresh tangent. Maybe the secret to unlocking the safe was some special word or phrase that his father or mother had uttered around the house. He doubted Mom’s warning was a candidate. But there were certainly other possibilities, comments unique to the family.
“Blackie Redstone!”
He knew the instant the words popped from his mouth he’d found the key. It was so obvious he was surprised he hadn’t thought of it sooner.
He raced back into the shed. The top rotary dial was black, the bottom one red – clear evidence to support his conclusion. But the primary clue was the nature of that faux-name and what it signified within family lore.
FIVE
Aiden had been passionate about rocketry as a kid. He played spaceflight simulator games and built models of NASA launch vehicles, some with motors. With Dad’s help he’d sent the rockets aloft from a field near their home. The thrill of those launches had been amplified by fantasizing that he was aboard the spaceship, piloting the craft into the unknown.
One summer, in the pre-chunkie era, Dad had taken him on a memorable camping trip upstate. They’d stopped in Warren, a town even smaller than Exeter, whose claim to fame was a seventy-foot-high Redstone rocket in the village green.
The Redstone was America’s first large ballistic missile. Warren’s had been donated to the town in the name of a longtime New Hampshire senator. It served to honor another Granite Stater, Alan Shepard, who in 1961 boarded a capsule atop a Redstone ascent vehicle and became the first American in space.
That missile became engraved in Aiden’s memory for what had occurred the day of their visit. A local daredevil – a man with obvious mental health issues – had somehow lassoed the conical apex of the Redstone and climbed to the top. Aiden and Dad had witnessed numerous attempts by the police, the man’s family, and a psychologist to talk him down. All had failed. Finally, two burly firemen had wrestled the man onto the extended ladder of their fire truck and whisked him away to some unknown fate.
The man’s nickname had been Blackie. From that day on, Dad had adopted the phrase “Blackie Redstone” as a gentle means of castigating Aiden for behavior he deemed wild or foolish.
“Don’t pull a Blackie Redstone,” his father would utter. “Always think smart. That’s the only way to stay ahead of your troubles.”
To outsiders, a connection between the safe and his father’s use of the “Blackie Redstone” phrase might have seemed tenuous. But to those who knew Dad well enough to have experienced his agile mind and offbeat sense of humor, the conclusion was inescapable.
Aiden dialed 2-5-2-2-5-4-3 into the upper black dial to spell out “Blackie” and 7-3-3-7-8-6-6-3 into the lower red one for “Redstone.” No sooner had he entered the final digit than a sharp click sounded. It was followed by an alarming hiss of air rushing into the safe as the door opened a crack.
He gripped the door’s edge and gingerly drew it all the way open. An odd contraption occupied the safe’s cavity. It was attached by a series of thin steel shafts to the inside of the door, with the shafts entering holes drilled through the metal to connect to the rotary dials.
A pair of glass test tubes, each half filled with an amber liquid, hung from the bottom of the contraption. A small gyroscope was attached to the test tubes, which were hinged to a complex mechanism of levers and gears that reminded Aiden of the innards of an analog wristwatch.
Glued to the floor of the safe was a plastic tray. In the bottom of the tray was a sealed white envelope. Printed on the envelope were the words Aiden Manchester: For Your Eyes Only.
Aiden studied the contraption before touching it, concerned that his father might have incorporated some unusual bit of trickery. But, after a time, he felt he had discerned its basic operation.
The yellowish liquid must be an acid corrosive to paper. Should the safe be opened by any means other than dialing “Blackie Redstone,” the mechanism would flip the test tubes 180 degrees, pouring the acid into the tray and destroying the envelope and its contents. The gyroscope served to keep the test tubes upright in case someone jarred the safe or turned it upside down.
No batteries were in view. The contraption appeared to be entirely mechanical in nature. That made sense. Batteries would go dead after a few years.
The hiss of air when the door opened suggested the safe had contained a partial vacuum. Dad must have created the vacuum before sealing the safe. A very slight change in air pressure, such as from a drill penetrating the walls, would have caused the envelope to receive an acid bath. Dialing the proper code had been the only way to neutralize the fail-safe mechanism.
Aiden marveled at the design. His father’s main field of expertise had been electronics systems. But his non-circuitry inventions, such as this contraption and the snowball rifle, had always made the deeper impression. Sadness touched him as he thought back to those hours he’d spent down in the basement workshop with Dad, watching him bring one of his unconventional devices to life.
Of course, it would have been much simpler to keep the contents of the envelope in a safe deposit box. But simple had never been Dad’s style.
Aiden withdrew the envelope but hesitated before opening it. The “Blackie Redstone” moniker’s symbolic meaning resonated. Was the very act of opening the safe an example of wild and foolish behavior?