Leo nodded. He had been expecting a difficult morning, but the men appeared almost eager to make him comfortable, and that made him nervous in a different way. If they were all looking at him, they might expect him to know things he had never been taught. He raised the folder with both hands and spoke carefully. "Dad didn't say the bike was magic. He said it looked normal until you opened it, and then it was like finding a different answer hidden inside a book."
Tommy leaned on the bench. "Then show us the page that worried him most."
Leo turned to a sketch with a small letter circled in the margin. The drawing showed an arrangement of gears and a warning in Arthur's handwriting about a mismatched reference mark. It did not explain every modification, and Rusty was quick to point that out, but the photograph on Tommy's screen showed a detail that corresponded to the drawing. Somebody had made a small change to a part that should have looked ordinary.
"I thought that was an old repair stamp," Tommy said. "Didn't think anything of it."
"Neither did I," Rusty admitted.
Dave reached for the appropriate tools, then waited while Rusty checked the work plan and confirmed that the area was clear. There was nothing dramatic about the next two hours, only the unhurried rhythm of experienced mechanics returning to a machine they thought they understood. They drained and contained the fluids, protected the finished surfaces, and removed the necessary covers, stopping repeatedly to compare what they could see with the records. Leo watched from a safe position, seated on a sturdy crate behind the tape, with his father's folder open across his knees.
The shop's ordinary work continued around them. A delivery van came for parts, a customer called about a rebuilt suspension, and the front telephone rang six times before Tommy remembered to answer it. Someone turned off the radio because the music made it hard to hear each other, and the quiet seemed to sharpen everyone's attention. Leo was struck by how different the mechanics appeared when they no longer pretended to know every answer: their voices became softer, their questions more specific, and their hands more deliberate.
Near ten o'clock, Dave uncovered the unusual arrangement. He straightened slowly and called Rusty over, keeping his hand away from the exposed components. "You need to see this," he said. "There's machining here that doesn't belong on a standard assembly. Whoever did this knew what he was trying to accomplish, but he sure didn't intend a factory manual to explain it."
Rusty bent toward the engine. A small mark on the pinion gear resembled the letter V, just as Leo remembered, and other surfaces showed evidence of painstaking custom work. The shape and finish were unlike the stock arrangement Rusty had expected, though the details required more careful measurement before anyone could identify exactly which older parts had been adapted. He stepped back, rubbed his forehead, and gave Leo a look that contained no skepticism at all.
"Your father was right about the modification," he said. "This is not the configuration we were using as our reference."
Leo did not cheer. Instead, he looked down at the notebook, turning pages until he found the line he wanted. "He said the number twelve mattered, but he also wrote to measure before you believe a number," he said. "I don't know which part he meant."
"That's the smartest thing anyone's said in here today," Pete replied.