"Then why is the drill still here?"
Earl gave her a crooked look. "Because Hank borrowed a set of seed plates and the tongue pin before he decided he needed the whole drill. Now he's got the key and the parts, and nobody can move the thing without him. Walter was supposed to straighten it out before he closed. Hank's been promising to bring them back since last autumn."
Rachel looked at the drill more carefully. Without the plates and tongue pin, it was a broad, useless arrangement of openers, wheels, and seed boxes. A mechanic would have noticed the missing pieces immediately if she'd bothered to inspect the machine. Earl followed her gaze and seemed to understand the calculation forming in her head.
"Don't go after Hank yet," he said. "He's not the mystery. The rest of it is."
He led her to a fertilizer spreader whose paint had once been green. The hopper sat above a worn chain conveyor, and the rear wheels were so badly cracked that the sidewalls looked like dried earth. A padlock looped through the hitch eye, with a six hammered into a strip of metal beside it. Rachel remembered the first farmer, his green pickup, and the ease with which he'd left the key by the register.
"Mr. Pruitt," she said.
"Frank Pruitt," Earl confirmed. "Old Frank used it last fall. It sat at his place longer than it should have because he hurt his back. The day he heard you had the doors open again, he brought six back."
Rachel felt a small, unexpected warmth at that. The elderly farmer hadn't been careless or eccentric. He'd been returning something he'd kept safe through a season when the place that normally held it had been closed. She went closer and examined the chain, the hopper, and the wheel hubs. A dozen parts could fail just from standing still that long.
The portable grain auger rested on two narrow tires against the opposite wall. A heavy padlock marked eleven secured its towing eye, and an oil-stained card wired to the frame listed dates from the previous harvest. Beside it stood a post-hole driver on a weathered mounting frame marked with a painted two. The driver had a split hydraulic hose, and one of its support legs had been tied up with cord to keep it from collapsing.
"Those three still circulate?" Rachel asked.
"Sometimes four. Depends who needs them and which one's willing to start."
"And the other fourteen?"
Earl looked around the shed. "Some got sold. Some got worn out. Some belong to people who aren't farming anymore. Walter used to keep the dead ones together until the owners could decide whether to scrap them. Then the store closed and everybody got busy with something else."
Rachel walked to a grain cleaner covered in a heavy canvas tarp. The machine beneath it was carefully blocked off the ground, but its drive belt had become brittle. Nearby, a brush mower had one blade missing and a gearbox whose casing was cracked. She had spent enough years repairing farm equipment to know the difference between a machine that needed attention and one that could hurt somebody simply because they trusted it. The shed held examples of both.
"These were rentals?" she asked.