“Better off buying tools.”
He was probably right.
Ethan looked toward the front of the auction grounds.
He could hear the auctioneer selling a cultivator.
Eight hundred.
Nine hundred.
One thousand.
Money moved easily out there.
Here, $180 felt enormous.
He pictured the tool catalog on his bedroom desk.
A new socket set.
Combination wrenches.
Maybe even a decent torque wrench.
Useful things.
Predictable things.
Then he looked at the numbers again.
Why had Whitford kept these plates for decades?
Why so many different ones?
Why sort some into crates instead of melting them years ago?
Ethan asked the auction employee:
“Can I look through them before I decide?”
“Long as you don’t make a mess.”
For twenty minutes, Ethan dug carefully through the first two crates.
He did not understand most of what he saw.
But he found repeated numbers.
Then numbers that appeared only once.
John Deere markings.
International Harvester.
Oliver.
Allis-Chalmers.
Case.
Several smaller manufacturers.
Some names Raymond had mentioned only in stories about machines that had disappeared from dealerships years earlier.
Ethan’s uncertainty did not decrease.
It got worse.
The scrap dealer laughed.
“Kid, you planning on opening a museum?”
Ethan ignored him.
At the bottom of the second crate, he found a plate wrapped in old newspaper.
The newspaper date was April 1963.
The plate itself looked almost new beneath the grease.
He wiped the center.
A number appeared.
The exact meaning remained unknown.
But somebody had thought enough of it to wrap it before storage.
Ethan stood.
“I’ll take them.”
The auction employee blinked.
“All?”
“Yes.”
“One-eighty.”
Ethan reached inside his coat.
His money was folded inside an envelope.
He counted nine twenty-dollar bills.
The scrap dealer watched.
“You’re really doing it.”
Ethan handed over the cash.
The auction employee wrote a receipt.
LOT: MISC. OBSOLETE PLANTER PLATES.
QUANTITY: APPROX. 900.
PRICE: $180.
PAID CASH.
The paper looked official enough to make the stupidity feel permanent.
The scrap dealer shook his head.
“You’re paying by the piece while I’m paying by the pound.”
Ethan folded the receipt carefully.
“Maybe.”
The man smiled.
“You’ll learn.”
Ethan would remember those words for years.
Not because the scrap dealer was cruel.
Because the man was completely reasonable.
At that moment, nobody had evidence Ethan had purchased anything except obsolete iron.
Ethan did not have evidence either.
He only had a question.
Raymond Bell found him twenty minutes later.
The mechanic had purchased a used drill press and two boxes of bearings.
He saw Ethan standing beside the crates.
“What’d you buy?”
Ethan pointed.
Raymond looked.
Then looked again.
“How much?”
“One-eighty.”
Raymond said nothing.
That silence terrified Ethan more than laughter would have.
“Bad?”
Raymond picked up a plate.
Turned it.
Read the number.
Then another.
Then a third.
“You know what these are?”