Fog City Key

Terrence Hall is eleven years old, and he stops on the sidewalk because the sound is wrong.

Mrs. Pace is eighty-one and locked inside her own house, working a key that will not turn. A grown man in a truck would swap the whole lock and be gone in twenty minutes and not cheat anybody.

Terrence sits down on that cold porch and takes the lock apart onto a dish towel, fourteen pieces in a row, and looks at it for forty minutes.

"Baby, you all right?"
"Yes ma'am. I'm figuring out which one's lying."

It is not the lock. It never is.

In a loud house on Forty-First Avenue, Terrence is the quiet one - the boy who puts things back. His father can fix anything on this earth and never finishes one thing he starts, and Terrence has been quietly finishing behind him in the dark since he was twelve, and has never told him.

So when a girl with a red toolbox watches him lay those pieces out in order and says the thing nobody has ever said out loud about him, his mother says no.

And she is not wrong. Because everybody finds out sooner or later who the one is that finishes, and then they never let you put it down.

Then a space heater catches fire in the flat above theirs, with a window painted shut forty years ago and a baby on the wrong side of it - and a boy who does not talk finds out what his whole quiet life has been for.

A big-hearted San Francisco story about a quiet kid, a loud house, and the work of making sure everybody can get out.

Readers 12 and up. Includes a Reader's Guide, a door-and-window safety page every family should read, and a real look at how a person becomes a locksmith.