Ruth Ann didn't say anything in the car on the way home. Wade drove. He kept looking over at her.
"I'm sorry," he said finally. "I should have paced it straighter."
"You were nine, honey," Ruth Ann said. "You paced it just fine. I'm the one who should have written it down better."
At the house, she didn't take off her coat. She went straight down the hall to the back bedroom, where she kept the files.
Pine Hollow had never had a historical society. It had Ruth Ann Mercer.
For thirty-eight years, she'd kept everything. Programs from every school play. Newspaper clippings from the Calder County Ledger.
Photographs of every class she'd ever taught, on the first day of school and the last. She kept them in gray archive boxes on metal shelves, labeled by year in her neat teacher's printing, and half the county called her when they needed to know when something happened.
She pulled down the box marked 1986 to 1987.
It took her twenty minutes. Wade sat on the bed and watched her go through it, folder by folder.
Then she found it. A single color snapshot, gone a little orange with age, the kind that came back from the drugstore in a paper envelope.
May 1987. The playground. Twenty-two children in rain slickers standing around a muddy hole.
A tall, skinny, big-eared boy in the middle holding a shovel. And behind them, the big oak tree on the left, and the old brick school building on the right, with its tall chimney.
Ruth Ann held it up to the lamp.
"Wade," she said slowly. "Look at the chimney."
The old school building was still there. The 1999 addition had been built onto the front and side of it, but the original brick building stood just as it always had, chimney and all.
In the photograph, the oak tree was on the left edge of the picture. The chimney was on the right. And the hole where the capsule had gone was almost exactly halfway between them, in a straight line.
"Whoever took this picture," Ruth Ann said, "was standing right behind the hole. Looking at the school. So if you stand where the oak and the chimney line up just like this," she held up the photo, "the capsule's right in front of your feet."
Wade stared at the picture.
"And then there's the twenty steps," Ruth Ann said. "We don't need to guess how long a nine-year-old's steps were. We can measure one."
The next morning, Ruth Ann stood on the playground at Pine Hollow Elementary with a faded snapshot in her hand and a third grade class lined up behind her.
Kristen Doane had brought them out. They were very excited. They'd been told it was a treasure hunt.
Ruth Ann chose a tall, skinny boy from the back of the line. His name was Elijah, and he was nine, and he had big ears.
"Elijah," she said, "go stand by that oak tree, honey. Then walk toward the school chimney. Big normal steps, the way you'd walk to lunch. Count out loud to twenty."
Elijah walked. The whole class counted with him, shouting.
At twenty, he stopped.
He was standing in the strip of grass between the edge of the basketball court and the chain-link fence. Not on the blacktop. Two feet from it.
Ruth Ann walked over and stood behind him. She held up the photograph. The oak tree was on her left.
The chimney was on her right. They lined up exactly the way they did in the picture, forty years ago.
"Right here," she said.
The maintenance man brought the backhoe around. He dug slowly, carefully, in the grass by the fence.
At two and a half feet, the bucket scraped metal.
The third graders screamed. Kristen Doane had to tell them twice to stand back. Wade got down on his knees in the dirt, in his good jacket, and pulled the rest of the mud away with his hands until he could lift it out.
A steel ammunition box, painted silver, gone mostly to rust. On the lid, in faded white paint, in a third grade teacher's careful hand: MRS.
MERCER'S CLASS. DO NOT OPEN UNTIL 2037.
Wade looked up at Ruth Ann. His eyes were wet.
"Close enough to 2037," Ruth Ann said.
They didn't open it on the playground. They took it to Marietta.
Wade had made some phone calls. By the time they got to the hospice that evening, there were eleven people waiting in the family room down the hall from Molly's. Eleven of the twenty-two, grown up now, gray and balding and older than Ruth Ann had ever imagined any of them could be.
A nurse. A truck driver.
A man who'd driven up from Nashville. They hugged Ruth Ann one at a time and called her Mrs. Mercer.
They opened the box in Molly's room.
Molly was very small in the hospital bed, very thin, with a scarf over her head. But her eyes were the same, and when she saw Ruth Ann in the doorway, she held out both hands.
The letters were damp at the edges but the envelopes had held. Wade handed them out, one by one, reading the names off the front.
Molly couldn't hold hers steady. She asked Ruth Ann to read it to her.
Ruth Ann unfolded the paper. Big careful pencil printing, on paper with dotted lines.
Dear Grown Up Molly. When you grow up I hope you are a teacher like Mrs. Mercer.
I promise to always help Wade with his spelling even when he gets mad. Your friend, Molly Ames, age 9.
Molly laughed, very softly. "I was a teacher," she said. "Twenty-four years. Fourth grade, in Columbus."
"I know you were," Ruth Ann said. "I read about you in the Ledger."
Molly turned her head on the pillow and looked at Wade.
"Read yours," she said.
Wade opened his envelope. His hands were shaking.
He looked at the letter for a long time without saying anything. Then he cleared his throat and read it to the room, out loud, slowly, in a voice that cracked on the last line.
Dear Grown Up Wade. I hope you can read this letter by yourself.