“And that means we really shouldn’t sell the currently excess energy from our dam. Let’s now review the research I’ve quoted in my assessment to ensure…”
“Thank you, Twilight, that’s more than enough,” said Mayor Mare hastily. “I think I can say for everypony gathered here, your presentation was splendid!”
Twilight frowned a little. This time she put great care into making sure everypony could follow her lecture. All these smiley faces, formulas typed in a comic font approved by Spike… But even Granny Smith was clapping, so it wasn’t all in vain.
“Oh, well,” said Twilight to herself, “I’ll reuse it in the probability theory textbook that Princess Celestia asked me to write.”
She smiled, semi-graciously bowed to the applauding ponies and started to disassemble her slide projector.
This time Hay Committee held its meeting in the small garden of the Town Hall overlooking the town square. A small decorative fence was hardly an obstacle for happy cries of playing foals trying to squeeze everything they could from a pleasant autumn evening. Soon their parents will come and start the usual song-and-dance about homework, dinner and going to bed.
Most of the committee members would’ve paid a lot to hear their parents call them home just one more time. However, they didn’t want to go anywhere either. Mayor’s secretary felt the mood and was already heating a new kettle of water for the tea.
Mayor looked around the table. Twilight Sparkle was busy putting her slides into a special saddle-bag. Granny Smith looked half-asleep in her rocking chair after the recent burst of activity. Red Heart was whispering something to Filthy Rich. Cheerilee was simply sipping her tea.
“Well, this finishes our agenda for this week,” said Mayor, tapping her saucer by a teaspoon, “however, as I understand, nopony wants to leave yet, right?”
A humming agreement was the answer. Mayor always detested unneeded formalities and her advisors, except Mister (as he liked to be called) Rich, disliked them even more.
“Good. Twilight, dearie,” she asked the lone magic user at the table, “would you be so kind to refill tea for us all? Thank you. If we have some time, I’d like to share an interesting story. It happened about twenty years ago, when I worked in one of Vanhoover districts, but I got the key for it just the day before yesterday. I got a letter from…”
“The key?” interrupted her Cheerilee.
“Oh, yes, the key. It was a very unusual theft, but no culprit was found then. I hope it will entertain you.”
Twilight looked at Cheerilee and said: “Miss Mayor, maybe you’ll tell us how it happened and we’ll try to find the thief ourselves?”
“Like in detective novels!” Cheerilee added.
“Well, who’s for it?” asked Mayor.
Even Granny Smith raised her hoof, surprising the younger mares a little.
No, not Mister Rich and not even Mayor Mare have caught the glory days of the rodeo star Fiery Smith, but they were old enough to know Granny in the time before her daring spirit was shackled in her aging body.
“But let’s make it clear,” said Filthy Rich. “Everypony thinks independently. One pony, one version.”
“Accepted,” said Red Heart curtly.
Mayor Mare leaned back in her chair, accepting the unexpected interest to her story with pleasure. Then she took a deep breath and started speaking, punctuating each paragraph by sips from her cup.
“I have a silly name. One could say it defined all my life as with a name like this you can’t be anything but a civil servant. I tried painting and I wasn’t bad at it, but it felt just… wrong? Amateurish?
“On the other hoof, it could’ve been worse. If my name was Major, my life in the Guard would’ve been awkward for a long time. Not to mention that we haven’t had a single major or a colonel in a century.
“Anyway, if I had a bit for each joke that boiled down to ‘Mayor, why aren’t you a mayor yet?’, this town hall would’ve had a swimming pool on the ground floor and up there would’ve been a mooring for my own air clipper.
"I was working in the Street sub-department. We were partially responsible for park development, we hired workers to tend the lawns, we set up and maintained the mana lamps, we handled sweeping streets, made sure that storm water drains are kept clean... Well, we did everything for streets to be pleasant to walk on.
“Everything except the pavement and actual construction of the streets. For some reason it was the responsibility of the Post sub-department.
“It was a good job, an important job, a fulfilling job, but, as you understand, your tongue gets dry from licking envelopes for all the correspondence needed to install a single trash can on the corner of Apples Avenue and Intertwined Hearts.
"So, my coworkers were an earth pony called Soft Ray and a pegasus Moonlight Cast.
I was twenty eight or twenty seven at that time and my mane, and stop snickering, just started to become gray from the burden of responsibility.
“Soft was a bit older than me and she wanted to quit the job for a long time. But her mother was seriously ill, so she had to stay put. Sometimes she came to work with her mane combed down over her eyes… but it was a poor disguise. White hair just highlights eyes bloodshot from crying. She could sing pretty well when she was emboldened by a drink or two, but she preferred sad songs nopony knew. ‘Coat of night, pearls of gold, I do what I do and what has been told…’ - do you recognize this one? Me neither.
"Moonlight wasn’t even twenty five years old and she was, Celestia forgive me, pegasus to the core. She worked hard, she worked good, but only when she took her head out of the clouds. To be honest, if I had such a gorgeous dark blue mane and a pair of strong wings, I too would’ve had better things to think about than work orders for repainting old flower beds. She had a lot of friends and, as far as I can tell, real friends. I envied her a little. Much.
"The head of our sub-department was Golden Pattern. He was a calm, even-tempered earth pony with a light-brown coat and a golden mane. He was a bit older than forty and headed this sub-department for eleven or, maybe, twelve years. I wouldn’t say he was wise, but he was level-headed and very organized. It looked like that he had all our workflow predicted and calculated for three years ahead. He had no family, but it didn’t look like he was married on his job either.”
Mayor noticed that Cheerilee and Red Heart were fidgeting a little and waved a hoof at them, as if reassuring: “Don’t worry, the interesting part will begin now.”
“As is already clear to you, we handled quite a lot of money, but usually money went through a direct transfer, from one of the municipal accounts to the vendor’s account. Of course, each transaction was vetted by the internal review and embezzling or stealing money was quite hard. However, it made a lot of operations painfully, unacceptably slow.
“So, we had a ‘fund of small expenses’. Well, ‘fund’ is too generous. It was a strongbox with a bag of bits in it and we reported what we spent and why in the end of each month. This or that way all of us had access to it and during coffee breaks we often joked what we would do with these money.
“Alas, that day I opened the strongbox for a monthly review with a senior accountant present. By the records there should’ve been about six thousand two hundred bits there. In reality the strongbox was empty.
“The investigation started immediately. Only us had both keys and an unfettered access to the strongbox, so we all were separated in different rooms for interrogation. According to all of us or even any three of us the money were there two or three days ago. However, the investigators could rely only on the last month’s review and our verified reports to estimate the sum stolen.
“We all had a lot of plausible motives. During these coffee breaks each of us invented at least a dozen. Even Golden dreamed about obtaining some rare blue roses, as he became an avid gardener a couple of years before. Each of these motives sounded like a joke, but, apparently, somepony was serious.
“We were asked a lot if something was out of normal these days, but even the most uneventful day becomes very suspicious if you look at it through a looking glass. Moonlight called in sick for two days before the theft. Police found out that she flew to the Wonderbolt Spring Derby with her gang. Soft was unusually cheerful, but she told that the new publications in some peer-reviewed medical journals she was reading avidly gave her some hope. I was suspicious as well. I was dating somepony, so I… expanded my lunch breaks a lot. We were dating for some time, and you’re all adults, so you understand why there were no reliable witnesses to confirm my innocence.
“Also, Golden was mad at Moonlight. It was because she didn’t pay a bill for some reason and the contractor left a ponyhole open for two days. You’re laughing, but that’s a real problem in a big city. If somepony fell into it, we’d be in for a big fine and hefty compensations, and if some upstanding citizen would’ve closed it, we’d have to report an unauthorized involvement to the police.
“We also hadn’t any abnormal expenses. I was wearing beautiful new earrings from enchanted silver, but it was a present from my… date. Well, he was really troubled by the police visit. It coincided with some… difficulties and we broke up soon afterwards…
“I’m sorry, I trailed off a bit. So, Soft Ray has paid for a very experimental and very expensive treatment course for her mother, but she was saving every bit for last three months and had a lot of instant noodles wrappers to show for it.
“Moonlight lost a crushing amount of money on the Derby. Some thousands, I think. But her friends testified it was their combined pool and Moonlight bet for them because she had a “lucky wing”. I still don’t know if they were telling the truth. Police investigators grilled them individually and in pairs and altogether, but they were adamant.
“And I don’t know what to say about Golden. Golden was so entrenched in his routine, that I just don’t know if anything could throw him off. If he was in Canterlot when changelings came, I’d imagine that immediately after being freed from a cocoon, he’d checked his pocket watch, said ‘Well, Two-Humped Shisha should still be open,’ and went there to smoke hookah. I forgot to mention that he liked that camel invention, but didn’t buy it for home. ‘These things are too messy,’ he said.
“I can’t say we were friends. We weren’t quarreling, we helped each other out in work-related things, but it’s natural when you expect to coexist with the same ponies for two or three years. Promotions in a governmental bureaucracy are quite slow.
“But in this case somepony had to go to prison. Also that somepony cast a shadow of suspicion on everypony else. And, unfortunately, we let our worst sides loose.
“Moonlight thoroughly explained to me that I can’t conceivably be that pretty to warrant such expensive presents. Soft accused Golden that because of him our pay raise will be postponed, and she had a lot of plans depending on it. I inquired from Soft how would her mother feel to owe her very life to a crime. Half of our floor heard how Golden was screaming at Moonlight: ‘If only you came at work at time for once!’
“I don’t remember our picnics anymore. I don’t remember our Hearth’s Warming parties together. But I remember every word in every insult we hurled at each other. I’m dying my hair now partly because of Moonlight’s expert opinion.
“I do think now, after meeting Twilight, that because we weren’t friends, because we treated it all just like a job, this whole ordeal has left us lesser ponies than before.
If we were friends and it all turned out the same way, I’d still be sad about our friendship. But we maybe would have had a chance to restore it.
“But we weren’t friends and I just… lost, exchanged whole two years of my life on mere bits, the years that I spent working and laughing and pulling all-nighters and doing a really good and important job with these ponies I could’ve called my friends. But I didn’t call them friends. And neither of us did.
“Anyway, the next day brought a new twist. At morning the money bag without a single bit missing was found lying on the now-locked strongbox. The seals on the door were broken, but no hairs were found on the bag.
“Even now aura traces are not accepted in courts as evidence, but back then they were unheard of. After the crime scene was thoroughly searched, it was not guarded, so it could be anypony. The police half-heartedly chewed us for the following week, but without any results, it seems.
Then they closed the case as no money was lost and a dead-end case threatened to impact their statistics. To be fair, they were very nice, they just hadn’t anything to work with. No harm, no foul, right?
“Of course, not.
Things didn’t return to normal. From the operations standpoint we were limited by a thousand of bits for urgent payouts and that really complicated our lives. Also, now we were reviewed weekly, not monthly. And, naturally, we all remained suspects, because one of us did steal the money.
“The most important thing is that we didn’t want to work together anymore. Excuse me if I’m stating the obvious, but you can forgive such vile words to a friend. It is possible.
But you can’t forgive them to somepony you just work with. Even if the sting is out, the poison is still there. So, in a couple of months, our sub-department as we knew it ceased to exist.
“Golden managed to get an early retirement somehow. I think, he worked in mines during his youth. Moonlight just quit and disappeared in the skies, never to return. Soft Ray transferred her mother to Baltimare General and moved herself along. There was some special clinic… I don’t know the details, Soft didn’t talk to me other than on work-related topics ever since.
"And I, I decided to try my luck in a small town to become a mayor for sure. As you see, I managed to do it! Meet Ponyville mayor Mayor Mare! It has a nice ring to it, don’t you think? And, of course, I got to meet all of you. And I’m honored that you call me your friend.”
Mayor Mare leaned on the table to emphasize that the story has ended and said: “Now, please, tell me, who stole the money. And don’t be afraid, as youth says now, to ask your answers.”
Cheerilee, just like her students, raised her foreleg.
“Yes, dearie?”
“You said, ‘according to any three of us’. Does that mean that the thief was acting alone? Also, can we rely on the time interval of these three days?”
“Yes, you can. Yes, the thief was acting alone,” answered Mayor.
Filthy Rich straightened up and asked: “Was there anything else missing except for the money?”
“Well, only pencils. However, it is irrelevant. In a couple of weeks our courier was caught stealing them. Turned out he had some mania to grind the pencils until they’re gone and his wife stopped giving him money on new ones.”
“That’s good,” said Filthy Rich and smiled to his thoughts.
All this time Twilight looked uneasy, it was as she was tip-toeing around a sensitive question. At last, the alicorn asked: “Excuse me, but can we be absolutely sure it was not you?”
“Of course you can!” answered Mayor Mare once she stopped laughing. “I know that there are detective stories where the narrator is also the culprit, but, believe me, in this case it isn’t so. Well, do you have any other questions? Let’s go on to versions then.”
The would-be detectives hesitated a bit. Nopony wanted to be the first.
“I propose going clockwise from me, so that it would be fair and impartial,” suggested the presiding mare. “Twilight first, then Red Heart, then Mister Rich, then Cheerilee and the honorable Miss Smith will conclude.”
Twilight slowly stroked her forehead with a hoof.
“O-kay-y-y,” she started cautiously, like she was testing the teacher’s mood before answering on an exam, “I’m basing my reasoning on the assumption that the police was competent and just didn’t find enough evidence to bring the case into court. However, returning the money indicates that the thief was afraid of the investigation and haven’t got the time to spend a lot from the stolen sum. As the obvious motives of all suspects were uncovered in the very beginning, it’s logical to assume some hidden agenda. From your description of your coworkers, it points primarily on Golden Pattern. He is the most calm and measured suspect, so he may have had a secret life. But why would he suddenly need a lot of money after eleven years of a content work on a not so high position? I’d cautiously suggest he’s a sleeper agent of some foreign force…”
At this point Red Heart sputtered her tea into her cup. But Twilight continued, unfazed.
“His early retirement may be explained that after his failure, probably to finance operating agents, disgraced him before his superiors. But there’s just not enough information to make any reliable conclusion! Miss Mayor, are you sure you’ve told everything we may need?”
“I am pretty sure I told everything,” Mayor said after a pause. “But I had to turn a simple story into a mystery on the go. Twilight, I apologize if I accidentally made it unsolvable. But let’s hear everypony else. Red Heart, it’s your turn.”
“I do think Soft Ray stole the money,” confidently started Red Heart. “I don’t know anything about her mother’s illness, and if I somehow did, I wouldn’t tell. But it seems that it was severe and chronic. From your description of Soft Ray’s behavior I tend to think it started when Soft was still in high school. It is commendable when a child puts her life onto a hold to support her mother, but it’s ultimately a sunk cost fallacy. Soft would’ve never forgave herself if she let her mother die and her mother probably almost wished to die so that her daughter started living her own life at last.”
“With your experience, what would you have done in her place, Red Heart?” asked Cheerilee.
“In mother’s or in daughter’s? In mother’s I wouldn’t have a lot of agency, in daughter’s, probably, the same thing. So she indeed saved a lot for the treatment, I believe it,” continued Red Heart, “but new drugs are synthesized in batches, as it’s still a hit-and-miss process. Also, one topic may attract several research teams at once. The stolen money were a reserve in case if the first treatment was ineffective.
“Soft was happy because the initial reaction was good, but she could afford to return the money only when it became clear that the effect is not temporary. As I said, in her horseshoes I’d done the same, but I’d certainly came clean after that.
“It’s frighteningly easy to mar even the best deed by a single corner cut. And if you’re forced to, you have to pay the price to keep the deed clean. In my opinion, Soft Ray became a criminal not when she took the money, but when she sneaked them back.”
With professional nonchalance Red Heart reached for the plate with cookies and congratulated herself with half of of them.
“But couldn’t she take a loan in a bank?” asked Cheerilee.
Red Heart’s mouth was full, but Filthy answered in her stead.
“And secured it by what? By noodle wrappers? Her salary was miserable and her house may have been mortgaged and remortgaged to Tartarus already. Anyway, my take is better.”
“Let’s hear it then,” said Mayor.
“We talk about ponies here and don’t examine what has been stolen,” started Mister Rich. “However, only an intent look on the object of crime may shed the light on the perpetrator. Why coins? Coins are terrible and their value-to-weight ratio is abysmal. They were worth more back then, but not that much more. Why return them? Coins with all their disadvantages can’t be traced. So, halting the investigation was worth more than these six two zero zero bits. And there are ways to use money without expending them.
“This line of thought guides me to a single rational cause of the crime: the money were stolen to reinforce some market speculation.
“If you have reliable information beforehoof, you can quite legally and without a significant risk of insider trading investigation gain up to forty or fifty percent profit for just two or three days of trading.
“I’d like to corroborate this conclusion by Canterlot and Fillydelphia stock exchange indices for these days, but we don’t have the exact date of the theft and my archives span back only seven years anyway. Maybe the Royal Library may have something archived, but I doubt it.”
Twilight opened her mouth, probably to defend her beloved library, but said nothing.
“Now to the culprit. I don’t think any of your coworkers were interested in trading, but you haven’t described another pony who absolutely had to have both keys and access. I’m talking about your senior accountant. As an expert in all audit matters, he or she would’ve surely known how such investigations are conducted and how the police dislikes having a dead-end case on their hooves.
“A bit of courage and some good informants may lead to two and a half or even three thousand pleasantly weighing down your pocket. Not bad money for those times and nopony got hurt except for suckers on the market. That’s how fortunes are made!”
“What about Mayor Mare coworkers torturing each other?” asked Cheerilee with indignation. “How can you possibly say they didn’t get hurt?!”
“They are themselves guilty for not trusting each other,” answered Filthy. “They’d inevitably have started a fight when things got rough for this or that reason. I’ve seen how it goes.”
“Unfortunately,” said Mayor, “Mister Rich is largely correct here. Cheerilee, darling, what version do you have?”
“As strange as it may be, I agree with Filthy…”
“Mister Rich,” stressed his preference Filthy.
“Yeah, anyway, I agree with him that money were stolen to make money. But the theft is too impractical, too adventurous. It is not thought out as a proper rational crime should’ve been. Who was prone to risk? Moonlight, that’s who. Racing bets, gambling… What if her friends weren’t real friends after all? What if her ‘lucky touch’ was just knowing the dirt on the racers? And losing a big sum of someone else’s money may have made her obliged to repay it.
“After her Derby fiasco she went to the office, stole the money and went on touring casinos… or maybe even seedier joints. Unicorn croupiers are trained to sense unicorn magic, but a daring and defiant pegasus could’ve switched a card or two unnoticed. A small win here, not so big there to not to attract unwanted attention, and she paid her debt before it’s too late. Moonlight probably spent two days on this and, I think, she aimed to return the money before the audit, but slept in.”
“Indeed, that day Moonlight arrived at lunchtime,” agreed Mayor. “She told that she wasn’t feeling well in the morning.”
“I wouldn’t count on croupier specialization that much,” noted Twilight. “I’ve seen several times how cheaters are caught, and not all of them were unicorns.”
“Twilight!” exclaimed Red Heart. “You had your wild years in Canterlot and you never told us about them?!”
“No! No!” shouted Twilight, trying to get herself heard amidst laughter. “That was just an experiment! Probability theory! I had the same thing in today’s report, remember?!”
“So, how did it go?” asked Filthy with interest.
“Princess Celestia made me return all my winnings to the casino,” sighed Twilight. “And I was banned by Canterlot Gambling Association for a hundred years.”
“Anyway, Cheerilee’s version was nice,” said Mayor. “Now it’s your turn, Miss Smith.”
Startled Granny fidgeted a little and pulled up her drooping plaid.
“Stallions… They never actually grow up.” she noted as if it explained everything.
Mayor smiled and nodded: “Yes, yes. You’re correct.”
The pregnant silence was broken by Cheerilee.
“So, who’s the thief?! And why?!” almost shouted she.
“Well, about twenty years ago we had our annual Apple family reunion. Drinks, dances, barn raising... And we lost track of two foals amidst all this, of Winesap Apple, he’s a thrice detached cousin of our little Macintosh, and Calville Blanc, our distant relative from east. They were adolescent back then, so still foals in everything, but body.
“So, once we caught up on them missing, we went on searching for them. You can imagine the commotion. It was already dark, everypony adult had at least a couple of pints down, Everfree is just nearby…
“But in an hour and a half… or two hours… we found them both. They were sleeping huddled together under a tree in our Western Orchard near an empty barrel of hard cider. They looked so cute, but we had to spank them and ground for a week.”
Granny stopped and sipped her tea, maybe unconsciously, maybe deliberately taunting her audience.
“Stallions never mature, I think. Sometimes they just forget about it and try to cope with reality. They work for ten years on a dead-end office job, plant roses… But when a whirlwind of life blows by... namely, our flighty pegasus mare, they realize that their soul is still young. But the mare rejects the old-fashioned courting attempts of a dinosaur before her and with the innocent cruelty of youth sends him back to his smoking club, as Canterlot Weekly won’t read itself.
“Golden didn’t need money, he needed to break the law, boldly, daringly, for Moonlight to see. If she weren’t late for work, she’d ask him, where’s the money, and he would smile happily and say ‘I stole them.’”
“But,” Granny continued, “while stallions do not mature, mares do. We have to, because we do get older every day, except for Her High… Twilight, how do they call you correctly?”
“For you, Granny, it’s always Twilight!”
“Thank you, sweetie. New mares, sillier, but younger, so much younger and so much more beautiful step on our heels every day. So we have to grow up. And grown-ups don’t value a barrel of cider. Maybe sixty thousand or a hundred could’ve changed her opinion, but it would have ended bad anyway.”
“Golden died recently,” said Mayor in a quiet voice. “His executor, following his will, sent to us all his confession. He asked Moonlight to run away with him to southern isles and she just laughed at him. That was that loud quarrel that we heard.
“Golden was violently shaken by it all. He resigned to be an old stallion as he perceived it and... lost his spark. He didn’t have the courage to apologize personally, but this is better than nothing…”
Cheerilee licked her spoon clean of raspberry jam and dropped it into her teacup. Somepony stood up, stretching. The story was over and everypony started noticing that the air became pretty chill.
“Well, that was edifying,” summed up Red Heart. “Maybe we can do such investigations from time to time, what do you think?”
“I like it, dear,” said Mayor. “However, it all boils down to stories. I don’t have an interesting case in mind right now.”
“I have!” said Twilight. “It’s about Canterlot! And magic!”
“Ha!” interjected Red Heart. “The Case of the Missing Textbook? I have better. I have a murder!”
“But mine has Princess Celestia!”
“Murder is better!” shouted Cheerilee.
Half-listening to the cheerful, if macabre, banter of youth, Granny enjoyed last vestiges of heat before going home. She watched the setting sun without squinting. Soon it will be dark.
