He smiled and sauntered over to the door, opened it, and closed himself outside.
“Okay, lock it,” he called. The smile in his voice had me biting my lip in anticipation. I was eager to hear the sound of his voice again.
I followed his directions and heard the little latch clasp against the wooden door frame. Immediately I knelt down and tried to see through the keyhole, but it appeared to be barreled by the lock. If he was trying to trick me, he was doing a very good job.
From outside the door I could hear Charlie breathing—a fantastic sound all by itself. Then I heard a kind of jingling and within an instant of that, the unlatching of the door.
“See?” he said from the doorway. “Easy.”
A horrifying thought came over me. Reading my expression, Charlie’s own smile receded and his smugness vanished.
“What?”
“If-if you can do that,” I looked at him, “then why didn’t you just go ahead and open the door that first day I was here?”
He let out a deep sigh. “I guess I coulda easy ’nough, but you seemed scared enough; I didn’t want to spook you anymore than I had to.”
“Oh.” I tried to appear indifferent. Truthfully, I didn’t quite know how to feel about that.
“Will you teach me how to pick a lock?”
He laughed. “Why would someone like you need to know somethin’ like that?”
“What does it matter?” I shrugged. “It’s interesting, and anything that’s interesting is worth learning.”
For a moment I thought he might laugh in my face, but instead he took something out of his back pocket and sat on the floor next to me.
“All right then.” He locked the door with the two of us in between it so it couldn’t latch. “This is a tumbler lock. It’s the most common lock ‘round…” He watched my face while he spoke, as if waiting for me to interrupt or become bored with the process, but when I didn’t, he continued. “To get one of these open, you need a pick and a tension wrench—”
I raised my hand like a good student. “What’s a tension wrench?”
He smiled again. If that was all I had to do to make him smile then I had to start thinking of more questions.
“One of these.” He held out the tool he had removed from his pocket. “You use it to put pressure on the inside of the lock so you can hold any picked pins in place while the others are bein’ moved.”
I tried to peer inside the keyhole once more. “This is one of those things that requires a lot of practice, isn’t it?”
He laughed, “Yeah, generally.”
“Okay, then what?”
“The tension wrench goes in first and you turn it the same direction you do the key.” He demonstrated on the door as I hovered over his shoulder. “You’ll feel it give way on the plug. Then you use the pick…”
His face was all concentration again. I was glad I was good at multitasking so I could both admire him and observe the refined motions he made with his wrists.
“…try and listen for when the pins fall back into place. If you get real good at it, you can just feel it and it becomes easy.” With a final move of the pin, the door unlocked. He grinned, looking more smug than usual.
“I want to try.” I felt like a child again. It had been a long time since I had been challenged with a skilled task.
“Go for it.” He handed over the pick and wrench, but he kept his smirk. I bit the inside of my cheek, feeling quite nervous to see him move from my front to behind me—now he was hovering over my shoulder.
I locked the door then inserted the tension wrench. I was sure I had screwed up already until I felt the end of the lock plug just as Charlie had said.
“You got it?” He pushed up closer against me, trying to get a better look.
I coughed, cleared my throat, and hesitated. “Um—yeah, I think so.”
I told myself to focus, to pretend it was for a mark of some kind, but the illusion did little for me and in actuality only made it more difficult to concentrate.
The pick went in easily enough, but I had difficultly pushing the pins up into their positions. It was only after several minutes of hard work and eventual frustration that I finally heard the click of