Ruth Ann called Maple Grove at seven in the morning, as soon as the front desk opened.
"Mae Lutz?" said the young woman who answered. "Yes, ma'am. Room 14. She's one of our sharpest. She does the crossword in pen."
"Is she well enough for visitors?"
"Oh, she'll love that. She doesn't get many."
Ruth Ann sat with the phone in her hand after the girl hung up. Then she called the motel on Route 9 where the Kowalskis were staying.
"Betty," she said. "I need to ask you something before I do anything else. Do you want to know? Truly? Because once you know, you can't put it back in the cedar chest."
There was a long silence on the line.
"I want to know," Betty said.
Ruth Ann went alone first. That was the right way to do it. You did not walk a stranger into a ninety-four-year-old woman's room with a seventy-four-year-old secret.
Maple Grove smelled of coffee and floor wax and the cinnamon rolls they baked on Fridays. Room 14 was at the end of the east hall, with a window that looked out on the bird feeders. Mae Lutz sat in a blue armchair by the window with the Calder County Ledger crossword folded on her knee and a pen in her right hand.
Her hair was white and very thin. Her eyes were sharp and gray. And on the back of her left hand, faded with age but still there, was a small dark mark shaped like a thumbprint.
"You're Ruth Ann Mercer," Mae said, before Ruth Ann could speak. "You taught my great-niece Kristen. She still talks about you."
"I taught her in 1989," Ruth Ann said. "Kristen Mae."
Something flickered in the old woman's face.
"She was named for me," Mae said.
"I know," Ruth Ann said. "She told the whole class. In October. When we did family trees."
Ruth Ann sat down in the chair across from her. She took the photograph out of her bag. She did not hand it over. She just held it in her lap for a moment.
"Miss Lutz," she said. "A woman from Pittsburgh came to the library this week. Her name is Betty Kowalski. Her mother's name was Irene Novak. She found a photograph in her mother's cedar chest, and she asked me to help her find out who was in it."
She held out the photograph.
Mae Lutz took it with her left hand. The hand with the mark.
She looked at it for a long time. Her face did not change at all. Then her fingers began to tremble, very slightly, and the photograph trembled with them.
"Irene," she whispered. "Irene Novak."
She turned it over and read the back. Thank you. I will never forget.
"I wrote that," Mae said. "On the platform. Before the train came." She looked up at Ruth Ann, and her gray eyes were full. "Is she alive? The baby? Is she all right?"
"She's seventy-four," Ruth Ann said gently. "She's a retired school secretary. She's been married fifty-one years to a man named Harold who drives four hours for Dot's pie. She has two sons and four grandchildren. And she's sitting in a motel on Route 9, about two miles from here, waiting to hear if she should come."
Mae Lutz put her hand over her mouth.
It came out slowly, the way old things do.
In 1951, Mae was nineteen and worked in the packing room at the glass works. She fell in love with a boy from Marietta who drove a delivery truck. He went into the Army that fall and was killed in a training accident in Georgia before he knew there would be a baby.
Her brother Emil, who had set the cornerstone at the glass works, did not throw her out. But in 1952, in a town like Pine Hollow, a girl alone did not keep a baby.
A nurse at the hospital in Marietta knew a couple in Pittsburgh. Stan and Irene Novak. Nine years married, no children, kind people. Irene came down on the train in March. Mae met her at the depot with the baby, and Irene held Mae's elbow on the platform so she would not fall, and a porter took a picture with Irene's Brownie camera.
"I asked her to send me one picture a year," Mae said. "Just one. So I'd know. She did, every Christmas, until 1970. Then the pictures stopped." Her voice cracked. "I always thought something happened. I never had the courage to write and ask."
"Irene died in 1971," Ruth Ann said quietly. "Betty told me. A stroke."
Mae closed her eyes.
"So that was it," she said. "All these years. That was it."
Betty came at two o'clock that afternoon, with Harold on one side of her and Sophie on the other.
Ruth Ann waited in the hall. That was the right way to do it too. She sat on the bench outside Room 14 with her coat folded on her lap and listened to nothing at all for a long time through the half-open door.
Then she heard Betty's voice, very soft.
"Look," Betty said. "Sophie has your hand."
And she heard Mae Lutz, who was ninety-four and did the crossword in pen, begin to cry, a thin, high, broken sound, like something that had been held inside a cedar chest for seventy-four years.
Ruth Ann got up and walked to the end of the hall and stood by the window, looking at the bird feeders, until the cardinals blurred.
The Kowalskis stayed in Pine Hollow through Christmas. They had never done that before.
They came to Maple Grove every day. Betty brought her mother's other photographs from the cedar chest, and Mae showed her the nineteen Christmas pictures Irene had sent, which she had kept in a candy tin in her dresser drawer for fifty-six years. They laid them out side by side on the bed. The same little girl, growing up, in two sets of hands.
On Christmas Eve, Dot sent over a sour cream raisin pie. Kristen Mae Lutz drove up from Athens with her own two children. Sophie sat on the floor of Room 14 and compared hands with her new cousins.
There were five of them now with the mark. Mae, Kristen, Sophie, and Kristen's two little boys. Five small dark thumbprints on the backs of five left hands, of five different ages, in one small room.
In January, Ruth Ann added a page to the manuscript of her book, Pine Hollow: A Town Remembered. It was the last page before the index.
She did not use any names. She did not tell the story. She only wrote one paragraph, about the old depot platform on Feed Mill Road, which had been torn down in 1967.
Then she pressed a sprig of winter holly between the pages, the way she always did, and wrote one line beneath it in her neat third-grade-teacher hand.
March 1952. Two women on a platform, holding each other up.