“Anyway, I’m going to climb in through the shed window,” I said, “and see if maybe Jimmy is sick or dead.” I could see that Pee-wee was—not exactly scared but sort of anxious, and I was too, I have to admit it.
Westy and I got the shed window open, all right, because Jimmy wasn’t careful about it, on account of not having anything worth stealing, I suppose. I was kind of shaky when we went into the first room, because that was where he slept and I thought maybe he’d be lying there dead. But he wasn’t there at all. Just the same we stood there looking at each other, and we were both kind of nervous, because Jimmy’s clothes were lying all around on the bed and on the floor, and a chair was knocked over, and it looked just as if somebody had been rummaging in the room in a big hurry. The door into the other room was closed and, I have to admit, I didn’t feel like opening it.
“I bet somebody’s robbed him and killed him,” Westy said, kind of low.
“That’s just what I’m thinking,” I said, “and when we open that door we’ll see him lying on the floor dead, hey?”
“Anyway, we have to open it,” he said.
“I’ll open it if you don’t want to,” I told him.
But, anyway, neither of us opened it. We just stood there and I felt awful funny. It was all still and spooky and I could hear the clock ticking, and I counted the ticks. It sounded spooky, going tick, tick, tick.
Then Westy said, “Shall I open it?”
“Sure,” I said, “we’ve got to sometime.”
So he opened it just a little bit and then, all of a sudden, he pushed it wide open and we looked into that other room.