Beatty & The Beast

TWELVE: Where the Beast Gains an Entourage

February

Things got hectic that month.

Keefe wasn't quite sure what happened, but a full moon must have risen or a planet was misaligned or something. It seemed as if everything and everyone was going crazy – his teachers especially.

He had never had so much homework in his life. They just kept stacking it on and on and on as if they realized the seniors were on their way out and there were still a million and a half things they wanted to shove into their brains.

Luckily, he and Andie had tweaked his debt-paying arrangement to conform to this unfortunate rise in homework. In the weeks before the tsunami hit, Keefe was coming over to the Whistlebeck mansion every weekday after school and on Saturday mornings. He would then spend his Saturday afternoons and all of Sundays at the fix-it shop, repairing things that were dropped off instead of going on site.

It wasn't his favorite arrangement. Not only did he lose his weekends but he also missed out on other nice things: sleep, spare time to breathe, spare time to just daze out and stare at a wall . . .

It wasn't ideal, but at least he was still making somewhat of an income. At that moment it worked.

But when the homework wave hit, Keefe was released from Whistlebeck duty on Saturdays, giving him a few hours to study and do other academic grunt work. Sometimes he still went into the shop Saturday mornings, but he took his assignments with him so if he ever got a spare moment, he'd work on that.

He didn't want to give up too much time over at Whistlebeck's, figuring that would only lengthen his sentence. He preferred to go through a rough few weeks and have the debt paid off sooner instead of dragging it out for months. Granted, he was now in his second month of debt-paying but that was beside the point.

Keefe knew damn well it wasn't just the debt driving him to remain at Whistlebeck's. In truth, he actually enjoyed himself. Now that Andie was his friend, it was like he was hanging out.

Plus, working at Whistlebeck's was an absolute adventure and every day he discovered something new, slowly uncovering the quirks of the mansion. Like the time he was refurbishing the fireplace in the library and realized it could be pulled away from the wall only to reveal an actual secret passageway.

That he could walk through and everything!

He nearly gave Mr. Brambles a heart attack when he came barreling out of the shed in the backyard, laughing hysterically. He would waste many a debt-paying minute in trying to figure out the logistics of the secret passageway. How was it possible? How had the tunnel been built? Was it original to the building or something Whistlebeck added?

To make matters even more insane, Andie said there were four more secret passageways in the house (that her uncle subsequently put in) but she refused to tell him where they were.

"You're going to have to find them yourself," she said, smirking. "That's what Uncle Donnie told me when I first got here and I spent the next month and a half scouring this damn house to find them all. So you have to too."

Which was just fine with Keefe. He'd rather find them on his own. It was more exciting that way. He had a hard time getting back to work on the fireplace that day when all he wanted to do was go hunting for more passageways, or at least run laps up and down the one he found.

This was all far more stimulating than going home to his mopey father and drunken brothers at the Beatty cave.

One day, he followed a newly revealed secret passage that led to the yet-to-be-explored-by-Keefe basement. Noises drew him down a dark hallway and to a door that was cracked open, letting out a faint streak of light.