because I understood, hanging there on that rope, that I was not the first person meant to find it, and the ones who were meant to find it had been waiting forty years.
The thing tied to the wall of the well was a metal ammo can, sealed with wax, roped to an iron spike driven between the stones. I got it loose and climbed out and opened it on the tailgate of my truck, out there on our few acres outside Lubbock. Inside was a stack of letters, a few small wrapped things, and on top, a card that said, in a mans careful hand: THE LAST CLUE. YOU MADE IT. I KNEW YOU WOULD.
It was the end of a treasure hunt a father had built for his kids, clue leading to clue all over the property, the final prize hidden down the well, the hardest place, meant to be the grand finish of the game. And then, folded under the card, I found the letter that told me why the game was never played.
By the time you find this I will likely be gone. The doctor gave me months and I mean to spend them building you one last adventure. Follow the clues I have hidden and they will lead you here, to the things I most want you to have, and to this: I was so proud of you, every single day, and I am with you still, at the bottom of every well and the top of every hill.
He ran out of time. He built the whole hunt, hid every clue, sealed the prize down the well, and died before he could hand his children the first one. The property sold. The clues, wherever he tucked them, got painted over and torn out and lost, and his kids never knew there was a game, never knew their dying father had spent his last strength making them one more adventure.
The wrapped things in the can were a pocket watch, two rings, and a folded flag, one keepsake for each of the three names in the letter.
I could not keep that. It was the most personal thing I have ever held. So I set about finding them, three grown people now, scattered, who had grieved their father forty years as a man too sick at the end to say much.
He was not too sick to say much. He said everything. He just hid it down a well and trusted them to climb for it, and the well went dry and got boarded over before they ever knew to look.
They came out to the property, the three of them, and I walked them to the well and told them the whole story, and I handed the oldest that card, THE LAST CLUE, YOU MADE IT. They read their fathers letter standing in a circle in my back field, forty years late, and finished the treasure hunt he built them, and I have never in my life felt more glad to have pulled a chore off my to-do list.
I was going to fill that well in before summer. Instead it gave three people back their father. I am leaving it open, capped safe, with a marker. Some wells hold more than water.