A Spotlight for Harry (3 page)

“Thank you, Miss Purdy,” Harry said.

“You’re welcome, Harry and Dash.” As
Miss Purdy turned to go, Harry suddenly asked, “Miss Purdy, do you like the circus?”

“Of course! Doesn’t everybody?” she said.

“Dash and I were thinking about starting a circus of our own,” Harry told her. “Just for our friends. But we need a place to practice. We don’t want anybody to see us before we get really good. Can you think of anyplace we could use?”

Miss Purdy thought for a moment. “What about the old barn behind my aunt’s house? Would that do? It’s mostly empty. If you promise to put everything back the way you found it when you’re done, I’m sure my aunt wouldn’t mind.”

“We promise, Miss Purdy!” Harry and Dash said together.

“Then go ahead,” said Miss Purdy. “I believe the barn door is open, but if it isn’t,
you’ll find the key hanging from a nail at the back of the garden shed.”

Harry and Dash remembered their manners. “Thanks, Miss Purdy!” They took off their hats and bowed again. Then they turned on their heels and ran off down the street as fast as they could go.

T
he old barn had stood at the edge of town since the days of the first settlers. Its beams had been cut from massive trees well over a hundred years old. Nearby was an old white house with a wide porch and a three-gabled roof. Here Miss Purdy lived with her aunt.

The barn and the house had once been part of a large dairy farm. The cows were long gone. As Appleton grew from a village into a town, most of the pasture was sold
to people who wanted to build houses.

Nobody knew what to do with the old barn. Nobody cared much about it, either. It couldn’t exactly be described as a ruin. Not yet, but it was heading that way.

Large flecks of red paint peeled from its boards. Rain and snow came through the holes in the roof where the wind had blown away some of the wooden shingles. Swallows nested in the eaves. Mice built homes in musty bales of straw and hay. Where mice gather, so do cats. Every cat in Appleton, wild or tame, knew the way to the barn.

Cats had no trouble getting into the barn. It was a different story for Harry and Dash. The barn door was locked, and a heavy padlock hung from the hand-forged iron hasp.

Miss Purdy had told them that the key would be hanging from a nail on the garden shed. Harry and Dash looked all around
the shed, but they couldn’t find it.

“Darn!” said Dash. “What’ll we do now? We’ll have to wait for Miss Purdy to get back. Who knows how long that’ll take? I can’t see why anybody would want to lock up an old barn anyway. It’s not like there’s stuff in there that someone would want to steal.”

“Miss Purdy’s aunt might have gotten tired of kids coming into her yard to fool around in her barn,” Harry suggested. “Mama and Papa would do the same if we had a barn.”

Dash laughed. “If we had a barn, we’d be there and not here. What are we going to do? Maybe I should run back to town to tell Miss Purdy we can’t find the key. She might have another one somewhere. It could be in her purse. Maybe she put it in there the last time she came out to the barn and forgot about it.”

Harry lifted the lock in his hand. He turned it over, studying it front and back.

“I don’t think so,” he told Dash. “This lock is really old. It must have been here when there were still cows living inside the barn. The key’s probably just as big and heavy as the lock is. I can’t see Miss Purdy carrying it in her purse. Somebody might have dropped it near the barn. If we look, maybe we can find it.”

Harry and Dash walked around the barn together. Harry scanned the walls, looking for a nail holding a large iron key. Dash kept his eyes on the ground. Maybe the key was hidden beneath a rock. Maybe it was inside a metal box or fruit jar. They walked slowly around the barn three times. No luck.

“If it’s hidden here, it’s hidden good,” Dash finally said. “I’ll go and find Miss Purdy. Do you remember where she was going?”

“Don’t go yet,” said Harry. “There’s something I want to try first.”

He dug in his pocket and pulled out two oddly shaped lengths of metal. The first was a long piece of wire turned up at the end like the corner of a square. The second was also long and thin, but straight. It looked like a clock spring that someone had unrolled and flattened.

“What are those?” Dash asked.

“Tools,” said Harry.

“Tools for what?” asked Dash.

“You’ll see,” Harry said.

Harry kneeled down in front of the barn door. He slipped the flat strip of metal into the keyhole. Then he worked the bent wire in after it.

“What are you doing?” Dash asked. “Are you trying to pick the lock?”

“I’m not trying,” Harry replied. “I did it.”

The lock popped open.

Dash stood with his mouth open. “Harry, you picked the lock! How did you learn to do that?”

Harry turned and grinned. “Mr. Hanauer at the hardware store taught me. He sells all kinds of locks there. He also knows how to open them. That’s important, because
people are always losing their keys.”

“Like Mama and Papa,” said Dash.

Harry nodded. “That’s why I asked Mr. Hanauer to teach me about locks. I got tired of running to the hardware store every time Mama locked herself out.”

Harry explained how his lock-picking tools worked. “This bent wire is the pick. The flat metal strip is the tension wrench. Before you can use them, you have to understand what a key does.”

“It opens a lock,” said Dash.

“Yeah, but how does it do that? What happens inside the lock when you turn the key?” Harry asked.

Dash shrugged. “I don’t know. I can’t see inside a lock.”

“Neither can I,” said Harry. “But I took locks apart with Mr. Hanauer. Here’s what happens. A key turns a bolt. The bolt releases
a latch that lets the lock open. Inside, four or five little pins fit into the bolt. Springs hold them in place. The pins stop the bolt from turning. That’s why you need a key.”

“What does a key do?” Dash asked. “You still haven’t explained that.”

Harry went on. “Every key has grooves cut into it. The high points between the grooves push the pins against the springs. When the pins are out of the way, the lock can turn.”

“I get it!” cried Dash. “That’s why you need the right key to open a lock. The wrong key might not fit into the keyhole. Or it might not be able to get under the pins to lift them out of the way.”

“Or it might not lift them high enough so the bolt can turn,” Harry added. He felt glad that Dash understood.

“So when you were picking the lock with
that bent wire thing …,” Dash said.

Harry finished the sentence. “I was lifting the pins out of the way so the lock could turn. See how thin the pick is? I can wiggle it around inside the lock to get at the pins. The tension wrench is flat. It fits in the keyhole like a thin key. I keep trying to turn the bolt with the tension wrench. At the same time I raise the pins one by one. When I lift the last pin out of the way, the bolt turns and the lock opens.”

“Sure,” said Dash. “It’s easy when you know how.”

“That’s right,” said Harry. “Knowing how is the key.”

“I just have one question,” Dash said. “Do you remember what happened last October? In the middle of the night, someone mysteriously opened all the locks on all the doors of all the stores on College Street. You
wouldn’t know anything about that, would you, Harry?”

“Me?” Harry exclaimed. He pressed his hands to his chest and opened his eyes wide. “Do I look like a burglar?”

“No,” said Dash, “but you don’t look like a tightrope walker, either. And you never will, unless we get busy.”

“Right!” said Harry as he and Dash pulled the heavy barn doors open. “Ladies and gentlemen, step right this way. The Weiss Brothers’ Circus, the greatest show under the big top, is about to begin!”

H
arry and Dash peered into the empty barn. The warm air inside, heated by the summer sun, smelled of old wood and musty hay. Though the cows had been gone for decades, their odor remained. Dust motes danced in the beams of light that came down from the holes in the roof. Something skittered across their feet. Dash jumped.

“It’s only a mouse,” Harry said. He didn’t want to admit that he’d nearly jumped, too.

The boys looked around. Where would be the best place for a tightrope? Two long aisles ran from the front of the barn to the back, with stalls on either side. Some of the stalls were still heaped with hay and straw, as if someone had expected the cows to return.

“We can put some of that straw on the ground in case we fall,” Harry told Dash.

Dash wrinkled his nose. “Maybe, if we can’t find anything else. Let’s look in the hayloft. I’d rather land on straw that hasn’t been used.”

Harry and Dash continued exploring. They found an open space in the middle of the barn with a ladder leading up to the hayloft. The farmers stored hay there for their cows during the winter. A rope hung down from the roof. Harry gave it a tug. He heard a rusty squeak.

“It’s attached to a pulley,” Harry told Dash. “That’s how they got bales of hay and straw up to the loft.”

Dash looked up into the dusty shadows at the roof of the barn. “You’re right,” he agreed. “The ladder is the only other way up there. I can’t see carrying a bale of hay up a ladder.”

Harry grasped the ladder’s rails. He stepped onto the first rung and began to climb.

“Be careful,” Dash warned. “This ladder must be a hundred years old.”

“Don’t worry. It’s solid,” Harry said. “Those old pioneers built things to last. Like this barn. Come on up. Let’s see what’s in the loft.”

That’s where Harry and Dash found just what they needed. A length of rope hung from a nail on the wall. Harry took it down
and uncoiled it. He pulled on the rope with both hands. “This rope’s as old as the ladder, but it’s still strong. I think it can hold us.”