Horten's Miraculous Mechanisms by Lissa Evans

for the coins had been covered with a thin strip of metal. It was held tightly in place by two large screws. Desperately, uselessly, he pried at them with his fingernails. He could have yelled in frustration.
    Suddenly, he remembered the tools in the Victorian room. He ducked under the rope again and raced back there.
    It was empty of visitors. The tools were fixed to the wall in fan-shaped arrangements. He could see a display of hammers and one of chisels, and finally, with a leap of the heart, he spotted an entire array of screwdrivers of different sizes, with age-darkened blades and smooth wooden handles.
    They were just out of his reach.
    He stood on tiptoe, but they were still too high for him so he looked around for something to stand on and saw that the large fake milkmaid was seated on a three-legged stool.
    She was fixed in a sitting position, so he lifted her up (she was surprisingly heavy) and propped her headfirst against a wagon wheel. Then he grabbed the stool and climbed onto it. He could now reach the screwdrivers. Each was fastened to the wall with a pair of plastic loops. He pulled at the handle of one of the largest. The loops snapped easily—far more easily than he’d expected—and he found himself wavering backward, stepping into midair, sticking out a hand to break his fall.
    And what broke his fall was the milkmaid’s backside. She lurched forward, shoving the wagon wheel with her head, and at that exact moment the curator and Stuart’s father entered the room.
    Stuart, lying on his back, clutching the screwdriver, could see exactly what was going to happen, and he could do nothing, nothing to stop it.
    The wheel trundled across the room and hit the cow, the cow leaned on the blacksmith, the blacksmith toppled onto the horse, and the horse keeled over sideways, hitting the floor with the most enormous crash. There was another smaller crash as one of its back legs dropped off, and then a final, tiny clatter as it lost an ear.
    The silence seemed to go on and on.
    “Hello, Dad,” said Stuart.

CHAPTER 20
    Stuart and his father didn’t talk much on the way home.
    Stuart hadn’t been able to think of a believable explanation for the horse-smashing incident, so he had simply said, “I’m really, really sorry,” to the curator and, “It was an accident,” both of which statements were true.
    His father had silently written out a check.
    The curator had stood in the front entrance and watched them leave. He hadn’t actually said, “Go away, you disgusting vandal and never darken these doors again,” but he might as well have done so.
    Halfway home, it started to rain heavily.
    “I really am really, really sorry, Dad,” said Stuart, dripping, as they turned the corner onto Beech Road.
    “I know you are,” said his father. But he looked worried, as well as soaked. When they got into the house, Stuart saw him pick up the phone right away.
    Stuart went to his room and flopped on the bed. He felt exhausted. He had wrecked the museum and humiliated his father, and all he had to show for it was a bag of inedible toffee.
    He took it out of his pocket and looked at it.
    He’d been certain that each of the museum machines would provide him with a number, but what number could he extract from an unmarked paper bag containing a large brown lump—one huge toffee where there had once been a handful?
    And then, all of a sudden, he seemed to hear a chirpy voice: You put in threepence and you got a little bag full. Always exactly the same number of toffees . Lorna, the woman in the blue glasses at the bingo hall, had told him that. And then her friend, Vi, had chipped in with the precise number. A dozen. She’d said a dozen!
    So if the first number was twelve, and he had to guess at the other two, how many goes at the safe would it take before he got the combination right? He fetched his calculator, tapped out 29 × 29, and groaned. That was still far too many. And in less than a week’s time, Uncle