In the backseat, Wally’s stomach did a somersault. Nicknamed for his walrus moustache, he had a hangdog look but was always pleasant company. Now his whole body was tensing up. His friend Arthur was sneaking into the loft tonight to check out the hidden safe Wally had discovered last week. A discovery he never mentioned to his boss.

It was the contractor’s ultimate fantasy—to stumble upon a hidden treasure in a home that was under renovation. There were countless stories of cash found in walls, jewels hidden under floorboards, sterling silver covered by loose insulation in the corner of the attic. Treasures that the owner of the home didn’t even know about, left behind by previous owners who had died or just plain forgotten about their valuables.

A few years back, Wally had ripped a medicine cabinet out of the wall and was stunned to find a diamond necklace in the hollowed-out space. He’d put it right in his pocket, and it was never missed by anyone. He reasoned that he wasn’t stealing because whoever owned the necklace was long gone, one way or another. Those diamonds whetted his appetite for more exciting discoveries. He’d been disappointed over and over again when they started new jobs. It seemed nothing like that would ever happen again.

Until last Friday.

Wally had started moving the heavy boxes of Italian tile into the Reillys’ front closet so they’d be out of the way. He opened a cabinet in the closet that was close to the floor, a cabinet which he thought he’d thoroughly inspected when they started the job, and slid one of the boxes to the back with greater force than he intended. A funny sound made him nervous. He was afraid he might have cracked the tile. When he pulled the box back out, a false back fell forward. A safe was staring him in the face, its key sticking out of the lock.

Adrenaline shot through his body. Frank and Rod had gone up to check something on the roof, so he was alone. This discovery was his! Knowing it was probably futile, Wally leaned forward and tried to turn the key. It wouldn’t budge. He needed the passcode or the owner of the safe’s fingerprint for the key to work. The latter was impossible and figuring out the former was about the same. But he knew someone who might be able to figure out how to open it.

Wally’s mind was racing. He reasoned that the Reillys couldn’t have known about the safe. If they had, they wouldn’t have left the key there. They’d also wanted to build new cabinets in this closet and never once mentioned the hidden safe. Conrad Spreckles couldn’t have known about it, either. He’d stripped the apartment clean of anything worth a nickel. If this safe had been his, he would have taken it with him.

Wally was sure that there were treasures lying within it, treasures with his name written all over them. He quickly replaced the cabinet’s false back and finished storing the boxes of tile. They were due to leave in a few minutes. Finally, he thought! Finally it’s paid off that I duplicated keys behind Rod’s back. Ever since he’d found the necklace he’d had keys made for every house or apartment they worked on. He thought he might discover something he couldn’t carry out in his pocket. Hopefully he had!