The Board That Wouldn’t Lie Flat

The third board from the wall would not lie flat, and Marisol Ortega had been pulling barns apart long enough to know that a board that would not lie flat usually had a reason. She knelt on the floor of the old tack room with her pry bar in one hand and a flashlight clamped between her teeth, the October wind whistling through the gaps in the siding behind her. Outside, the Nebraska sky was the hard, clean blue it turned only in fall, and the cottonwoods along the creek had gone the color of old brass.

The barn had been built in 1911, according to the date someone had carved into a beam above the main doors. It was a beautiful structure, two stories of hand-hewn oak and long-leaf pine, pegged together without a single nail in the frame. It was also leaning eleven degrees to the east, and the young couple from Omaha who had bought the farm in the spring wanted it gone before winter. They had hired Ortega Reclaimed, which was to say they had hired Marisol, because Marisol was the whole company: one woman, one truck, one flatbed trailer, and the tools her father had left her four years ago.

She did not demolish barns. She took them apart, board by board, the way they had been put together, and sold the lumber to builders in Lincoln and Denver who paid good money for wood that had been seasoning for a century. It was slow work. Her father used to say that a barn told you everything if you were patient enough to listen, and she had found that to be true. Barns told you where the horses had stood by the wear on the floor, where the farmer had sharpened his tools by the grooves in the sill, where the children had played by the initials scratched into the loft beams.

The tack room had been mostly empty when she started that morning, just a rusted saddle rack bolted to the wall and a few horseshoes nailed above the door for luck. She had pulled the shoes and the rack first. Then she started on the floor, and that was when she noticed the third board.

It sat slightly proud of the boards around it, maybe an eighth of an inch. Someone had nailed it down, but the nails were newer than the others, round wire nails instead of old square-cut ones, and they had been driven in at an angle as though in a hurry. Underneath the saddle rack, where no one would ever step on it.

Marisol worked the flat end of her bar under the edge and leaned on it gently. The board came up with a dry squeal. She set it aside and shined the flashlight into the space beneath.

There was a tobacco tin in the dirt between the floor joists. It was the flat kind, red and gold, its lid rusted at the corners but still sealed. Next to it lay a small bundle of something wrapped in waxed paper and tied with baling twine that had gone gray and brittle with age.

She sat back on her heels. In fourteen years of taking barns apart, she had found plenty of things under floors. Marbles. Bottles. A rusty revolver once, which she had turned over to the sheriff without asking any questions. A coffee can of silver dimes, which she had returned to the farmer’s grandson, who had cried. She had learned that what people hid under barn floors usually mattered to someone, even when the someone was long gone.

She lifted out the tin first and opened it. Inside were a dozen small folded notes on lined paper, the kind torn from a school composition book. The top one was written in a girl’s round, careful handwriting, and it said only: Meet me at the creek after chores. Bring the radio. L.

Then she picked up the bundle in the waxed paper. The twine broke as she touched it. Inside was a single envelope, never sealed, with one name written across the front in pencil.

Lorrie.

Marisol turned it over in her hands. She knew she should put it back in the paper and give it to the owners and get back to work. Instead she found herself carrying it out to the tailgate of her truck, where the light was better, and sitting down, and opening it.