Pike.
Mercer.
Doyle.
Names belonging to families who still worked land in the surrounding county.
Maggie sat down on the workshop floor.
She had grown up on this farm.
She had spent thirty-nine years knowing her father as a quiet, stubborn man who preferred work to conversation.
She knew how he repaired tractors.
She knew how he sharpened tools.
She knew how carefully he measured before cutting anything.
But she had never seen these wooden pieces before.
And she could not understand why he had hidden them.
A few days later, a neighbor stopped by.
Maggie showed him several of the shapes.
He examined them briefly.
"Probably patterns your father used when he built something."
It was a reasonable explanation.
Walter had made countless repairs over the years.
He had cut brackets, repaired implements, and fabricated small parts when replacements were unavailable.
Perhaps these were simply patterns for old projects.
But Maggie could not shake the feeling that something was missing.
Why hide them behind a false panel?
Why record so many different family names?
Why preserve them so carefully when the chest contained plenty of ordinary tools that had been left in plain sight?
She began examining the dates.
Most were from the early 1940s.
Some were marked 1942.
Others 1943.
A few 1945 and 1946.
Maggie calculated how old her father would have been.
In 1942, Walter was twenty-nine.
In 1946, he was thirty-three.
Those had been the war years.
A time when farmers across the country faced shortages of machinery, metal, and replacement parts.
Maggie understood the general history, but she still did not know what the wooden pieces represented.
She decided to ask someone who worked with farm equipment.
The young mechanic at the implement dealership in town examined one of the shapes and shrugged.
"Whatever it fit, nobody's used it in forty years."
He turned it over.
"Probably not worth keeping unless you want to hang it on a wall."
Maggie almost accepted that answer.
She was tired.
The farm needed attention.
And her corn planter was still sitting in the shed with a cracked seed boot.
The dealer no longer carried the replacement part.
A new planter would cost between two thousand and twenty-five hundred dollars.
Money she did not want to borrow.
She had enough problems without spending days trying to identify old pieces of wood.
But as she gathered the templates from the dealership counter, one of them slipped from her hand and landed beside the broken seed boot she had brought along for comparison.
Maggie stopped.
She looked at the wooden shape.
Then at the cracked metal part.
The curves were similar.
Not identical.
But close.
She picked up the template and held it against the broken seed boot.
The angle was wrong in one place.
The bolt positions did not match.
Yet the overall shape was unmistakably familiar.