Why would a man let a fortune like this burn? Why had it sat untouched in a county shed for 16 years while the whole town swore there was nothing in it worth the haul? The second thing answered the first. Tucked up right against the side of the safe where it had been placed to be found was an envelope, and the fire had browned its edges but not destroyed it.
And across the front, in a careful hand, was written to be opened in the event of my death. Arthur opened it with fingers that had stopped feeling their own pain. Inside was a single letter in the same careful hand signed at the bottom by Harold Beaumont, the man who had owned the hotel, the man who had also died the night it burned. Arthur read it once fast and once slow, and the second reading changed the shape of the world.
The letter did one thing, but it did it completely. It said that Harold Beaumont, having no family left and no love at all for the man who ran Harlan County, had decided what was to become of everything he owned. He had put it in writing and he had locked it in this safe so that no man could alter it before the law could read it. His hotel, his land, his money, all of it was to go to the town itself, to be held in trust for the building of a library and a place of learning that any child in the county might use, regardless, the letter said, of who their people were.
He had named the men he did not trust to carry out his wishes, and he had named them plainly, and he had written that he expected they would try to bury this document the moment they laid hands on it, and that he was locking it away precisely so they could not. Arthur sat with the letter, and the money no longer looked like money. It looked like evidence. But, the letter was not the last thing in the safe, and the last thing was not for the town or the law.
It was small, and it had slid down beside the bonds where a hasty hand might have missed it, and Arthur's fingers found it when he reached in to be sure he had taken everything. It was a roll of dark cloth soft with age, and when he opened it across his knee in the lamplight, he was looking at a locksmith's tools. Picks and tension wrenches and a small brass-handled driver. A workingman's kit well-used.