The Strawberry Thief

Part One · The Red Chin

Tess had been waiting for these strawberries since April. She had planted them herself, twelve small bare plants in a raised bed by the back fence, and she had watered them every evening and picked off the slugs with a stick. Now, in the second week of June, the first berries were finally turning red. Every morning she went out before breakfast to see how far they had gotten. On Tuesday, three were ripe. On Wednesday morning, all three were gone.

Not gone, exactly. She found them under the leaves, each one with a single neat bite taken out of its reddest side, and then dropped, as if whoever it was had only wanted the best part. It was not birds. Birds pecked holes, and birds did not drop things carefully under leaves. It was not slugs, either, because slugs left a shiny trail, and there was none. Tess stood in the wet grass in her pajamas and felt something that was half sadness and half, she noticed, a kind of interest.

The new neighbors had moved in two weeks earlier. There was a mother, a father, a baby that cried at night, and a boy about nine years old named Milo. Tess had not spoken to him yet. But she had seen him, more than once, standing at the fence between the two yards with his arms folded on top of it, staring into her garden. He never waved or said anything; he just looked, for an uncomfortably long time, and then went back inside. On Wednesday morning he was there again.

Tess looked at Milo, and Milo looked back, and then she noticed it. There was a red smear across his chin, the exact red of a ripe strawberry. He wiped it with the back of his hand, which only made it worse, and disappeared inside. Tess stood completely still. She was not the kind of person who decided things without evidence. But she had a half-eaten berry in each hand, and a boy with a suspicious red chin had just walked away from her fence, and it was difficult not to add those up.

She did not tell anyone. Telling her mother would mean her mother talking to his mother, and that felt too big for something she was only mostly sure about. Instead she decided to be certain. That evening she counted the ripe berries, seven, and wrote the number on her hand. Then she took the big bag of flour from the kitchen and shook a thin white layer over the path between the fence and the strawberry bed. Anybody who walked to the berries would leave footprints. She went to bed feeling clever.

In the morning there were four berries left, and three more bitten ones under the leaves. There were marks in the flour, but they were not footprints. Tess crouched down and examined them carefully for a long time. There was a wide, smooth drag mark, as if somebody had pulled a heavy clay pot along the path, and on both sides of it were little scratches in pairs, like the marks of tiny rakes. The trail came from the gap under the fence, traveled to the berries, and returned the same way.

The gap under the fence led directly into Milo's yard. Tess considered that. A person could crawl through a gap like that if he was small enough and did not mind getting dirty, and a person could drag a sack behind him to carry the berries in. It was not a very good explanation, and she knew it was not. But it was the only explanation she had that ended with a boy with a red chin, so she held on to it stubbornly, and went to find him.

Milo was at the fence already, as if he had been expecting her. Up close he was smaller than she had imagined, with scraped knees and an ice pop in one hand, orange this time. Tess had a speech prepared. It started with the word somebody and got sharper from there. But before she could begin, Milo pointed past her at the strawberry bed and asked, quite politely, whether the turtle belonged to her. Tess said, what turtle. Milo said, the one that visits at six every morning, the one with the orange spots.

Part Two · Six in the Morning

The red chin, it turned out, had been a cherry ice pop. Milo ate one every morning on the back step, because the baby woke everybody at five and there was nothing else to do. From the back step he could see her whole garden. For four mornings in a row, he said, he had watched a turtle come out from under the fence, walk very slowly to the strawberry bed, and eat. He had thought it was a pet. He had been wondering why she let it.

Tess felt her face go hot. She put the speech away, all of it, and was extremely glad she had never delivered it. Then she asked Milo whether he wanted to see the turtle up close, and he said yes before she had even finished asking. They agreed to meet at the fence at a quarter to six. Tess set her alarm, and then lay awake anyway, thinking about the marks in the flour: a wide drag, and little scratches in pairs. A shell, she realized, and four short legs. Of course.

At a quarter to six the grass was gray with dew and the sky was just beginning to turn pink. Milo was already waiting at the fence, without an ice pop. They lay down on their stomachs behind the compost bin, where they could see the gap under the fence and the strawberry bed both, and they waited. A robin landed, examined them, and left. Her knees got wet through her pajamas. At exactly four minutes past six, something moved in the shadow under the fence.

It was a box turtle, and it was old. Its shell was high and rounded like a bowl turned over, dark brown with yellow and orange marks scattered all over it, as if someone had dripped paint. Its legs were thick and its face was wrinkled and calm. It came up the path exactly the way the flour had said it would: slow, steady, dragging its shell, its claws leaving little scratches on both sides. It did not look left or right, because it knew precisely where it was going.

The turtle reached the strawberry bed, stretched its neck out long, and took one bite out of the reddest berry it could reach. Then it dropped the berry and moved on to the next one. Milo made a small, delighted sound. Tess discovered that she was not angry at all. She had been robbed, carefully and politely, by something that had probably been visiting this yard since before the house was built. A box turtle could live for a hundred years, and her strawberries were two months old.

When Tess stood up, the turtle saw her and shut itself. That was the only word for it. Its head and legs went in, and the bottom of the shell closed up against the top like the lid of a box, and the whole animal became a stone with paint on it. Milo laughed out loud. They waited patiently, and after a minute a wrinkled face emerged again and blinked at them, its chin dripping red. It looked, Tess thought, exactly like a boy with a cherry ice pop.

They worked it out that afternoon, the two of them, with a pencil. The lowest row of berries, the ones a turtle could reach, would be the turtle's. Everything higher was hers to share. Milo thought the turtle should have a name, and after some argument they settled on Lid. Tess picked the first bowl of strawberries on Friday, nine of them, warm from the sun. She ate them on the back step next door, where you could see the whole garden, and where, at six the next morning, Lid came up the path again.