The photograph Betty Kowalski laid on the library table was seventy-four years old, and the young woman standing beside Betty's mother on the Pine Hollow depot platform had the same small, dark birthmark on the back of her left hand as Betty's granddaughter.
Ruth Ann Mercer looked at it for a long time without touching it.
"Where did you find this?" she asked.
"In Mother's cedar chest," Betty said. "In Pittsburgh. We're finally cleaning out the house." Her voice was not quite steady. "Ruth Ann, I've looked at Mother's pictures my whole life. I've never seen this one. And I've never seen that woman."
Betty and Harold Kowalski had been coming to Pine Hollow every fall for twenty years, ever since Harold first stopped at Dot's on a fishing trip and decided he liked the pie. They ate at Dot's. They bought pie. They were the kind of out-of-towners Pine Hollow liked, because they asked questions and listened to the answers.
This time, they had driven down from Pittsburgh in December, in the snow, with their granddaughter, Sophie, who was seventeen.
Sophie sat at the end of the library table now with her coat still on. On the back of her left hand, just below the knuckles, was a small dark birthmark shaped like a thumbprint.
Betty did not have one. Betty's mother had not had one.
Ruth Ann was sixty-eight. She had taught third grade at Pine Hollow Elementary for thirty-eight years and now volunteered three days a week at the Carnegie library on Elm Street, where she kept the county history files in the basement and pressed flowers in old books when the head librarian was not looking.
She had one gift that the whole town knew about, and teased her about. She remembered every student's middle name. All thirty-eight years. If you had been in her class, she could tell you your middle name at the grocery store forty years later, usually before you remembered her own.
She turned the photograph over.
On the back, in pencil, in a hand she did not know, someone had written: Irene and M., Pine Hollow, March 1952. Thank you. I will never forget.
"Betty," Ruth Ann said gently. "When were you born?"
"March of 1952." Betty looked at her. "In Pittsburgh. At least, that's what my birth certificate says."
"Was your mother ever in Pine Hollow?"
"Not that she ever told me." Betty pressed her lips together. "Ruth Ann, I'm seventy-four years old. I'm not a fool. I know what this looks like. A young woman I've never seen. A train platform. March of 1952. And my granddaughter with her hand."
Harold put his arm around his wife.
"Mother and Daddy tried for a baby for nine years," Betty said. "They told me I was their miracle. I believed them. I still believe them." She looked down at the photograph. "I just want to know who she was."
Ruth Ann started with the files, because that was what you did.
She pulled the Calder County Ledger for March of 1952 from the basement archive and read every page. Births. Deaths. Church notices. Who had visited whom from Columbus. She found nothing about a young woman named M. leaving town, or a baby, or a visitor from Pittsburgh named Irene.
She pulled the 1950 census for the county. There were forty-one women in Pine Hollow between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five whose first names began with M. Mary. Margaret. Marjorie. Mildred. Mae. She wrote them all down on a yellow legal pad.
Forty-one names. And no way to know which one had stood on a train platform in March of 1952 with a baby that was not hers to keep.
"It's like a needle in a haystack," Sophie said, reading over her shoulder.
"It's like a needle in a haystack with no barn around it," Ruth Ann said.
That night, at home, Ruth Ann could not sleep.
She sat in her kitchen with a cup of tea and the photograph propped against the sugar bowl. She looked at the young woman's face. Twenty, perhaps. Dark hair pinned up. A wool coat too thin for March. She was not smiling. She was holding Irene Novak's elbow with her right hand, as if to steady herself. Her left hand hung at her side, with the little dark mark on the back of it plain in the gray light.
Ruth Ann had seen that mark before. She was almost sure of it.
Not on a grown woman. On a child.
She closed her eyes and let the years go by the way she did when she was trying to place a face in the grocery store. Classroom after classroom. September after September. Thirty-eight years of small hands raised in the air, waiting to be called on.
And there it was.
A little girl in the second row by the window, in the fall of 1989. Freckles. Red barrettes. Very shy. Raising her hand to answer a question about the Pilgrims, with a small dark birthmark, shaped like a thumbprint, on the back of her left hand.
Ruth Ann sat up straight.
Kristen. Kristen Mae.
Kristen Mae Lutz.
And she remembered, very clearly, the day in October 1989 when the class did family trees. Kristen had stood up in front of the class and said, proudly, that her middle name came from her great-aunt Mae, who had the very same mark on her hand. Great-Aunt Mae, Kristen said, had gone away to Pittsburgh once when she was young, and had come back to Pine Hollow by herself.
Ruth Ann looked at the photograph.
Then she looked at the clock. It was ten minutes to midnight.
Mae Lutz, if she was still living, would be ninety-four years old.
And Ruth Ann was almost certain that there was a Mae Lutz on the residents' list at Maple Grove.