Sal looked toward the nearest stool, where Arthur Harrison had turned at the sound of the boy's voice. Everybody called him Bones, partly for his lean face and partly for an old injury that had left a white scar stretching from his ear toward his jaw. He was a large man whose arms were crowded with tattoos, but his eyes were unexpectedly alert. He looked Toby over, then glanced at the door as if expecting a parent to come in after him.
"Antiques," Bones repeated, smiling without warmth. "What have you got, little man, a dinosaur tooth?" Several men laughed, and Toby felt his face grow hot. "This isn't a place where you sell things you found under your grandmother's sofa," Bones added. "You ought to get home before somebody starts asking why you came here."
Toby did not move. He felt the pouch knocking against his leg and imagined the stack of notices on the kitchen table. "They're not stolen," he said. "My father died, and Mom's sick. I don't need anybody to give me anything. I just need somebody to look."
For a moment, Bones's grin loosened, but he covered the change with another dismissive gesture. "Everybody needs money, kid. That doesn't turn a bar into an antique shop." He held out his palm anyway, perhaps intending to prove how worthless the objects were. Toby took that small opening before the man could change his mind.
He tipped the pouch onto the bar. The compass landed first, its brass housing clicking against the wood, followed by the pocket watch and the ring. The lighter came last, heavier than Toby expected, and struck the bar with a dull silver knock. Someone behind him made a joke about treasure hunters, but the words faded when Bones picked up the lighter and turned it toward the light.
At first, Bones seemed merely curious about the craftsmanship. Then his thumb brushed the outline of the broken chain, and his face went rigid. He rotated the lighter, checking the skull's missing jaw and the letters at the base. He opened it just far enough to see the hinge and inner markings, then closed it again with a soft metallic snap that sounded unnaturally loud.
"Sal," he said, "kill the music." Sal unplugged the jukebox, and the guitar cut off in the middle of a note. One by one the other men stopped talking, some rising from their stools because they recognized the tone in Bones's voice. Toby looked around and realized that whatever he had brought into this building, it was not ordinary junk.
"Where did you get this?" Bones asked. Toby swallowed and repeated that it had been in his father's box in the attic. Bones seemed not to hear him, examining the lighter again as though the answer might be engraved somewhere beneath the tarnish. "Who was your father?" he demanded.
"Richard Harris," Toby said. "He was a mechanic. He died in a car accident when I was little." Bones looked up so sharply that the boy flinched. For an instant there was something like disbelief in the man's face, but it was tangled with suspicion.