Down a riverside road, in the shadow of a white-brick church on a hill, a 7-year-old girl stood along the shore with one wet shoe on her foot and a stick in her hand.

Water sloshed against the rocks; sea birds hung above like props in a play.

Lily Dutton wanted to tell a story.

"At first, I thought it was just a regular old bottle," the girl said.

But it wasn't.

Lily's parents, Mike and Sarah Dutton, had been trying to tell that same story all morning, there along the shore of the Susquehanna River near Wrightsville.

It happened earlier in the week.

Before Boston.

That morning, Mike Dutton had driven his girls over from their home in Windsor Township to a shoreside spot between a mulched playground and a lawn full of picnic tables. The girls -- Lily and her little sister, 5-year-old Abby -- like to explore and to collect river treasures.

"Like, basically varying degrees of trash," Mike joked.

But on this day, there was a bottle.

It was a green champagne bottle, actually, with a cork in the top and something inside. When Lily found it, the bottle was wedged just out of reach and stuck against a cairn of brown stones stacked along the shore. The girl ran and grabbed a stick.

Gently, slowly, she coaxed it closer, then plucked it from the water.

There was a message inside.

Monday afternoon, family gathered around the kitchen table for the official opening. They eased out the cork, and looked closely; they leaned in.

"Well," Sarah said, "it stunk."

That's the part they don't tell you in the fairytale, she said, laughing, recalling how the task was finished outside. They pulled the note out with chopsticks.

Soon enough, the letter was in-hand.

It was dated 1972 -- or 1973, much of the writing had faded. It appeared to be sent from Schenevus, N.Y., from siblings Anna and Stephen Maker.

Parts are impossible to read.

But Mike was quickly on the Internet, as they worked to decipher the words. Then, Sarah was on the phone.

Lisa Maker got the call at home, she said, just a mile down the road from Charlotte Creek, where the bottle originated. She and Stephen divorced a few years ago, she said on Friday. But having grown up in the area, she can remember summer days at the swimming hole.

The kids would gather around the rope swing, she said.

Her ex-husband would have been about 12 when he tossed that bottle into the water.

The letter Lily Dutton, 7, and her sister Abby, 5, found a letter placed in a bottle in the 1970s and sent out from New York. Their parents tracked down
The letter Lily Dutton, 7, and her sister Abby, 5, found a letter placed in a bottle in the 1970s and sent out from New York. Their parents tracked down the letter's author. (DAILY RECORD/SUNDAY NEWS--JASON PLOTKIN)

Today, Stephen, 53, lives in Bainbridge, N.Y., and the couple's kids, two boys, are 19 and 21. Both got a kick out of the story of their dad's bottle, Lisa said.

"We just find it very amazing up here," she said.

Three hundred miles south, no one involved can quite believe they received a message from 40 years ago.

A York County couple long looking to show their girls the wonders of this world said that in one morning, they found their fairytale.

And at the strangest time.

"We always wanted to show the kids the magic of life," Mike said. "We wanted to show there's still magic in the world."

After a pause: "Even more since everything has happened."

Sarah said she was putting the girls down for a nap on Monday -- that bottle still in the kitchen -- when she heard the news from Boston. She thought of her best friend, who was at the marathon.

"I basically ran out of the room," she recalled.

Turns out, everyone she knew was fine.

Still, that night two parents were left to mull the wonder long promised to their children. They thought about kids lazing by a swimming hole, and about where that world went.

And what's next?

Days later, her parents behind her, a 7-year-old girl with one wet shoe stood on the banks of a lapping river.

"I've never found anything as special as this," she said, the breeze blowing through her bangs.

She looked out across the water, an old champagne bottle in her hand.

The story inside begins thus: "Dear Bottle Finder." It ends with a name, carefully signed.

As for what's in between: some you can't make sense of it.

Yet there remains a humble instruction, from a boy who stood smiling one day along a muddy shore.

Pass it on.

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