She wiped a corner with her sleeve. A column labeled FIELD READY appeared beneath the dust, followed by names and small arrows pointing from one to another. There were no dollar amounts in sight, no quantities of feed, and no references to accounts. Rachel looked toward the rear door and imagined a line of farmers checking out numbered bins or lockers. It was the best theory she had, and she didn't believe it herself.
She asked a man at the hardware store whether Walter had rented storage space. He said not that he knew of. She asked a neighbor who remembered buying feed from Walter in the 1960s, and the woman said the old store had always kept odd hours during planting season. When Rachel mentioned the keys, the neighbor shrugged and talked about how small towns used to do business before everything required a form and a credit card.
By Friday Rachel was ready to call Walter and admit she had missed something obvious. But before she could reach for the telephone, the screen door opened and Earl Dawson walked in, carrying the damp cold of a passing shower on his jacket. He was a little past seventy, wiry as a fence wire, with a face shaped by sun and years of squinting at weather. He farmed fifty acres northwest of town, including a low patch that held water long after the neighboring hills were dry.
Earl took one look at the pegboard. "Four back yet?" he asked.
Rachel laid down her wrench. "You're the third person to ask about those numbers. If you tell me that four depends on eleven, I may start charging for riddles."
Earl looked at her, then at the board, then back at her. His frown was not unkind; it was the bafflement of a man who had just learned that a grown mechanic didn't know where the oil dipstick was kept. "Walter never explained it?" he asked.
"Explained what?"
Earl set his cap on the counter. "Come on," he said. "We'd better start in the shed."
The shed behind the feed store was almost fifty feet long, with a corrugated roof and a pair of sliding doors that had sagged toward the ground over time. Rachel had opened it twice since taking possession of the property, once to see whether the roof leaked and once to count how many truckloads of scrap she might eventually haul away. In the dim light, the machines had seemed unrelated to one another, a collection of rusting implements left behind by people who no longer needed them. Earl walked through the doorway as if he could still see them in their working years.
He passed an old manure spreader, stepped around a stack of spare wheels, and stopped beside a narrow seed drill with faded red paint. A chain ran through its drawbar and around a steel post anchored in the floor. The padlock was newer than the machine but old enough to have lost its shine, and a four had been scratched into its face. Earl tapped the padlock with one finger.
"There's your four," he said.
Rachel studied it. "The number is the lock?"
"The number is the machine. The key stays with whoever has it checked out until the implement comes back. Hank Miller has four right now, or ought to."