Something small.
Something that made the safe impossible for him to dismiss as scrap.
Three hours earlier, the Mercer family had not come to Harland Feed and Machine Works looking for mysteries.
They had come looking for a hydraulic pump.
The old feed mill stood near the edge of a narrow agricultural valley surrounded by cornfields, dairy farms, pastureland, and low Pennsylvania hills already beginning to fade from summer green into the first tired colors of September.
Harland Feed and Machine Works had served farmers for nearly half a century.
There had been a time when tractors lined up outside before sunrise.
The machine shop repaired broken shafts, rebuilt pumps, sharpened blades, welded cracked frames, fabricated replacement parts, and sold feed to farmers who often paid after harvest rather than at the counter.
But agriculture had changed.
Bigger suppliers had opened closer to the highway.
Younger farmers ordered standardized parts from catalogs.
The machine shop's old equipment became expensive to maintain.
Then Samuel Harland's son became ill, debts accumulated, and the business finally closed.
For almost a year, the buildings had sat empty.
Dust settled over the milling room.
Weeds pushed through the gravel.
Rain stained the corrugated roofs.
Yet the machinery shed still smelled faintly of diesel, grain, old grease, and cutting oil, as if decades of work had seeped permanently into the wood.
The estate auction began before sunrise.
By seven in the morning, pickup trucks lined both sides of the road.
Farmers from three townships wandered among rows of equipment drinking coffee from thermoses and discussing everything from soybean prices to tractor engines.
Eli had arrived beside Ellis in their faded Ford pickup.
The truck's passenger door only opened from the outside.
The heater worked when it felt like it.
The right front fender had been repaired twice with sheet metal Ellis shaped himself.
But it was paid for.
That mattered to Ellis.
Nearly everything the Mercers owned had been bought used, repaired, rebuilt, or kept alive several years longer than anyone sensible would recommend.
Their sixty-acre farm had belonged to the Mercer family since Ellis's father purchased it shortly after the First World War.
It was not large enough to make them wealthy.
It was large enough to keep them working.
That year had been particularly difficult.
Spring rain arrived at the wrong time and refused to leave.
Corn planting fell weeks behind schedule.