Ruth Ann Mercer had found three hundred and twelve of them, and she was pretty sure there were more.
Little rocking chairs. Child-sized, just big enough for a toddler. Made of cherry or walnut or white oak, with smooth curved rockers and a back of five thin spindles. No nails. No screws. Every joint pegged by hand.
They showed up on porches. Always the same way. A new baby came home from the hospital, and within a week or two, sometime in the night, a little rocking chair would appear on the front porch with a red ribbon tied around the top rail.
No note. No name. Nothing.
It had been going on since 1981.
Ruth Ann had been working on a history of Pine Hollow for six years. *Pine Hollow: A Town Remembered.* She had chapters on the railroad, the 1937 flood, the glass works, the Panthers' state championship. She had interviewed a hundred people and filled eleven notebooks.
The rocking chairs were going to be the last chapter.
She had started by asking around at church. Then at the diner. Then she put a notice in the church bulletin: *If you have one of the little rocking chairs, please call Ruth Ann.*
Her phone rang for three weeks.
The Hersh family had four, one for each grandchild. The Yoders had two. Dot Kessler had one in her upstairs hallway that had been left for Tyler, twenty-four years ago. Jess and Luke Miller didn't have children yet, but Jess said her mother-in-law did, from 1993, the year Luke was born, and it was the most beautiful thing in the house.
Even Earl Whitaker had one. It sat in his living room next to June's old sewing basket. His daughter had rocked in it.
Nobody knew who made them. Everybody had a theory.
Some people said it was an old Amish woodworker from Holmes County who had a cousin in town. Some said it was the ghost of Reverend Combs. Dot said she'd always assumed it was some lonely old bachelor with too much time on his hands, and she said it with a funny look that Ruth Ann noticed and filed away for later.
Ruth Ann did what she always did. She looked closer.
She went to every house that would let her in. She photographed every chair. She measured them with a tape measure. She wrote down the wood, the year, the family.
The chairs had changed a little over the years. The early ones from the 1980s were simpler, with straight spindles. By the 1990s the spindles were turned on a lathe. In the 2000s the rockers got a little curl at the back, like a smile.
But the pegs were always the same. Square pegs driven into round holes, the old way, so they'd lock tight and never come loose. Hardly anybody did it that way anymore.
And on the bottom of every seat, there was something.
Ruth Ann didn't see it at first. It was tiny. Carved with the point of a knife, no bigger than a grain of rice, in the corner where the seat met the back leg. You'd only find it if you turned the chair upside down and looked with a flashlight.
She found it on the Yoder chair first. Then she went back to all the others.
Every single one. Three hundred and twelve chairs. Forty-five years.
The same two pairs of initials.
*B.H.* and *E.S.*
Ruth Ann spread the photographs out on her dining room table that night and stared at them.
B.H. and E.S. They weren't initials of any family who had received the chairs. They weren't the initials of anybody she could find in the county records who did woodwork.
She thought about it until midnight. She went to bed and didn't sleep. At three in the morning she got up and made tea.
And at 3:20, standing in her kitchen in her bathrobe, she remembered.
Veterans Day. A few weeks ago. The parking lot of VFW Post 4417, cold and crowded. Walt Brenner standing up front with his cap in his hands, saying five names out loud for the first time in fifty-five years.
And afterward, inside, hanging next to the door at eye level, a photograph of two young men in Army uniforms, grinning like they'd just gotten away with something.
*Pvt. Robert Hersh. 1950 to 1969.*
*Pvt. Edward Sorensen. 1950 to 1970.*
B.H. E.S.
Ruth Ann sat down slowly at her kitchen table.
She knew who made the chairs.
What she didn't know was whether she was supposed to.