Silas Vance had not slept past five-thirty in the morning in forty-seven years, and he was not about to start now. He dressed in the dark by feel—denim shirt, canvas work pants, suspenders that his late wife had called "the architecture of an older generation"—and made his way down the creaking staircase of Willow Farm's two-story farmhouse, through the front hall that smelled of cedar and old journals, and into the kitchen to put on his coffee.
The morning of September 14th was a Monday. The Willow Creek Annual Harvest Fair was on Thursday. And Silas's prize Honeycrisp apples—twelve months of careful growing, precise fertilization, and the particular combination of afternoon shade and volcanic mineral soil that his grandfather had first cultivated in 1923—were sitting in their cedar presentation boxes in the locked cellar, ready to claim the Blue Ribbon for the seventeenth time.
Or they were supposed to be. Silas took his coffee mug and his morning habit of opening the cellar door first thing to check on temperature and humidity—a ritual so automatic it happened before his eyes had fully adjusted to the kitchen light—and put his hand on the cellar door handle. The door swung open before he touched the latch.
Silas stood very still. The cellar door had a deadbolt that required a specific combination of left-pressure and upward-lift to engage, a quirk of the mechanism that had developed over thirty years of use. It did not swing open by accident. It did not swing open in the wind.
It swung open when someone had opened it from the inside. He looked down the cellar stairs. The cedar presentation boxes—twelve of them, each holding six of his finest Honeycrisp apples, wrapped individually in blue tissue paper—were scattered across the stone floor. Three of the boxes had been knocked completely off their shelving.
The tissue paper lay in crumpled drifts. The cellar's single overhead bulb cast pale light over a scene of thorough, efficient destruction. Every single apple was gone.
Silas descended the stairs slowly, his coffee cooling in his hand. He examined the lock—no damage to the mechanism. The small cellar window: still latched from inside. The air in the cellar had the faint warm-sweet smell of disturbed ripe fruit and something else, musky and unfamiliar, like the inside of an old canvas bag.
He stood in the center of the cellar floor for three minutes. Then he climbed back up the stairs, crossed the kitchen, opened the back door, stepped out onto the porch in the still-dark September morning, and looked across the yard. Barnaby was standing on the fence post nearest the house.
Silas's pygmy goat—eleven kilograms of white and brown spotted stubbornness, currently regarding Silas with the unblinking lateral-pupil gaze that goats had deployed against human beings since the Neolithic—was standing upright on his hind legs, his front hooves on the top fence rail, and his small curved horns were at approximately the height of the porch light switch. Barnaby had been Silas's goat for six years.
He had arrived as a half-kilo floppy-eared kid purchased at the Cloverfield livestock sale for thirty dollars—a purchase that Silas had made at a moment of post-retirement sentimentality that he had never fully explained to himself.
Six years later, Barnaby had dismantled every fence gate on the property at least twice, unlocked the barn door using his horns as a lever on four separate occasions, and once—memorably—opened the farmhouse back door and walked into the kitchen, where he ate the better half of a lemon meringue pie before Silas caught him. Silas looked at his goat. His goat looked at Silas.
The cellar, Silas remembered, had a deadbolt requiring a specific combination of left-pressure and upward-lift. He narrowed his eyes.
"No," he said aloud.
Barnaby flicked one ear and looked away with the serene dignity of a creature who had done absolutely nothing wrong.
Silas Vance stood in the doorway of his root cellar for a long, silent moment before he trusted himself to speak. Forty-three Honeycrisp apples — his finest crop in seven years — simply gone.
The cellar door had been bolted from the outside with his own padlock. No broken window, no pried-apart boards, no scratch marks on the hinge plates.
A professional burglar could not have done it more cleanly. Silas turned to look at Barnaby, who had positioned himself at the edge of the garden with his black chin resting on his front hooves and his amber eyes fixed on the lane beyond the fence.
The goat was already working.