P.S. So now I want you to look under the pile of newspapers. There’s a present in here for you. I’m figuring you’re getting up into those crazy teenage years, when your curiosity gets the better of you and you dig this up. So I tried to think of what I would have wanted most when I was that age. Other than a 1942 DeSoto, that is.

Nate dug down to the bottom of the box. His hand felt a package, compact but with weight to it. Even before the paper was all the way off, he knew what his present was: binoculars. Ever since he could remember, his dad used to say how important it was to own a good pair. “A person gets a whole other perspective on life, looking through those lenses,” he always said. “Get yourself a good pair of binoculars, and you can see forever.”

“That’s so cool,” Larry said, taking a look through the binoculars. “You can see birds up close and trees in the distance and clouds and everything. I bet if we took these binocs to Wrigley Field someday, we could see the stitching on Adolfo Phillips’s glove, way out in center field.”

“I just got an idea,” Nate said. He pointed to the old windmill just beyond the boundary of their land. “Suppose we climbed up to the top. If that rifle is lying on the ground someplace, and we’re looking down with these binoculars, we might just spot it.”

Judging by the sun’s position, they figured it must be past noon by now, and Nate knew Naomi was supposed to attend Bible study, but she didn’t seem to care. With the metal time capsule box under Nate’s arm, they headed farther out across the field.

Ever since he was little, Nate had been fascinated by the windmill—the way it rose up out of nowhere on a treeless expanse of flat land. Once the Landrys had used the windmill to run an irrigation pump, but that was a long time ago.

“The county should take that thing down before some crazy kid breaks his neck trying to climb it,” Nate’s mom used to remark.

As for Nate, he’d never been tempted. Even climbing up onto the rafters inside their barn gave him an odd, queasy feeling. And that was nowhere near as high as the windmill, tall as an apartment building.

No one said anything as the three of them made their way toward the windmill, the new binoculars hanging around Nate’s neck.

Then they reached it, the rusty green metal base of the structure planted firmly in the soil, with only flat land and air all around. Up along one side, a narrow metal ladder rose so steep and high, Nate had to lean his head all the way back just to see the tiny platform at the top.