Marks the What?

It doesn't look like anything else is missing, not that it's easy to tell. It looks like the only thing missing from the shed is my whiskey. Good choice but why just that?

I am not the Great Detective. Nor am I a good detective if you really want to be picky about it. Cigar ash and tracks in mud and broken twigs are all beyond me. If I'm good at anything it's remembering things that are generally considered trivial in nature and I can guess motivations reasonably well, at least until I'm personally involved in a situation and then I'm lost. Anyway, I'm not clever enough to see if any dust is overturned because a box was moved as part of a search or anything like that. From what my eyes tell me, the shed has not been dug through as part of an intruder's search.

It almost implies that someone walked in, collected my whiskey, and made off with it. I'm starting to worry that I did this and just don't remember doing it. That would be bad.

Had I consumed all this whiskey myself in the last couple days, I would be dead, at the very least in the hospital so that wouldn't seem to be what happened.

Had I smashed them in some sort of drunken fit of emotion, I doubt I would have cleaned up the mess this well, or at all quite probably. So at least that seems unlikely.

Had I hidden them on myself... Hmm. Not sure how to disprove that to myself. Assuming again that I would have done so in some emotional or drunken state, the only reasons I can see that would prevent me from recalling this activity, where would I moved them to? Would I have done so with enough care to leave no trace?

It's not the cost of the whiskey, although that is on my mind. It's not that its gone, as I can always get more. It's the principle of the thing. Where did it go?

Yesterday I decided that, while my search continued, it was logical to restore my missing supply. While I did not purchase enough to replace every bottle that was missing, I should have been set for a few days, long enough to uncover the disposition of the earlier wave,

You may have noticed my use of the word 'should' in the paragraph previous. There is a reason behind that word choice. This morning it's all gone again. What. The. Deuce.

I left myself a 'trap'. Nothing fancy; just a couple small pieces of wood atop the bottles. My thought was that, if I was moving these in some emotional state, the status of these pieces of wood would provide me some hint as to what was going on with me when I did it. If they were gone, I was coherent enough to think the wood belonged with the bottles and I'd take them. Or they'd just be sprawled on the bottom of the wooden chest I'm using as a hideyhole.

I didn't expect them to be crossed like an 'X'. What does that mean?