The fire had come up the back stairs of the old Renner place a little before three in the morning, off a space heater somebody'd left running in the sewing room, and it had eaten the top of the north wall and a good part of the roof before the Pleasant Hill volunteers got a truck up the gravel and knocked it down, so that by the time Harlan come out to gut what was left there was that smell in the house that fire always leaves, wet char and scorched horsehair plaster and under it the sweetish tar of old newspaper somebody had packed in the walls for insulation back before there was any other kind.
He'd been doing fire and water restoration close to thirty years, ever since his back quit letting him frame, and there was a particular loneliness to the work he had made his peace with — coming in after, always after, cutting the ruined bones out of a house while the family stood down in the yard in borrowed coats and looked up at it. He worked alone that week. Pulled the scorched lath by the armful and carried it out to the roll-off, ran the Sawzall down the studs where the char had gone too deep to save, and about the third stud in from the chimney his blade stopped a quarter inch shy of the cut, because there was writing on the wood.
Red carpenter's pencil, faded to the color of dried blood but plain enough. A date. Oct 12 '73. And under it an arrow, drawn careful, pointing down and to the left at a notch cut into the face of the stud — a clean rectangular pocket, chiseled out the way you'd mortise for a hinge, and set down in the pocket, snug, a green glass pop bottle with a wad of paper rolled up inside it and the mouth stopped with candle wax gone amber and hard.
Harlan set the saw down. He was fifty-nine years old and he sat on an overturned mud bucket in a house that had most of its roof open to the sky and he worked the bottle out of the notch with two fingers like a man drawing a splinter, and it come free with a little dry sound, and it was cool in his hand. That was the thing he'd go back to later. Everything around it he could put his palm flat against and feel the fire still in it, the studs warm and greasy with soot a foot on either side, and the bottle in its pocket was cool as a creek stone.
He dug the wax out with his pocketknife and shook the paper loose. Two sheets, folded small, lined paper torn out of a school tablet, and the writing on it was a girl's — that careful looping cursive they used to make them practice, the letters all leaned the same way like grass laid down by wind.
She'd signed it Loretta. She was fourteen, she wrote, and her daddy was framing the house and had let her put the note in the wall where the plaster would cover it, and she wanted whoever tore the wall down someday to know she had stood right here. She listed things. That she had a dog named Chief and a horse she was only allowed to ride on Sundays. That she did not want to marry Dwight Pooler no matter what her mother said. That the man reading this was probably not even born yet and she thought that was the strangest thing she had ever thought about, that she was real and standing here writing and he was nothing yet, not anywhere, and that someday it would be turned the other way around.
Harlan read it twice, sitting on the bucket. Then he rolled it back up the way it had been and he did not put it back in the wall.
He carried it down to the yard. The people who owned the place now were named Renner, and none of them had ever heard of a Loretta, and the oldest of them, a man about Harlan's age, turned the two sheets over in his hands a long time in the cold and said his folks had bought the house out of a bank sale in the eighties, and he'd always been told the family that built it had lost it, but he didn't rightly know how, or where they'd gone off to.
They never did find her. A girl of fourteen in the fall of 1973 would be near seventy now, if she was anywhere, and the county had no record that fit, and the note gave no last name, because a girl writing to the future does not think she will need one.
The wall Harlan cut out that week went in the roll-off with the rest. But the stud with the notch he set aside and did not saw, and the last of it, the part he never did find a good way to say, was this: the fire had run right up both sides of that pocket and stopped at the lip of it, the char ending clean as a shoreline, and down in the little chiseled dark where the girl's daddy had made a place for her the wood was the pale raw color of the day it was cut, and the paper had stayed dry, and that was all it did.