Because the beam of my flashlight fell on a bundle wrapped in oilcloth and tied with kitchen twine, and nothing about it looked forgotten. It looked kept. It sat in the bottom of the lined box on a bed of dry cedar shavings, with a tin of silica packets tucked beside it, the work of someone who had taken real care to keep out the damp. I knelt there on the dirt a long while before I touched it.
The couple stood at the edge of the slab with their arms around each other. The young man, Brian, said, “Is it a body?” and I said, “No, son. It is a bundle of letters, by the look of it.” I lifted it out with both hands. The twine had been knotted by someone who knew how to tie a good knot. I handed the whole thing to the wife of Brian, Tessa, and told her that it was hers to open, because the house was hers.
She would not. She pushed it back into my hands and said it felt wrong. So I peeled back the oilcloth myself, one fold at a time. Inside, flat and ordered, lay thirty one envelopes tied in three bundles, addressed in a neat slanted hand to Mrs. Dorothy Wilkes. The return address on each was the same: Private Walter Hess, United States Marine Corps, somewhere in the Pacific. The postmarks ran from 1943 into the autumn of 1944. The last one had never been opened.
Under the letters was a small green bankbook from a savings and loan that no longer existed, and a black and white photograph of a young woman in a flowered dress standing beside a sailor with a crooked grin. On the back, in pencil, someone had written: Dot and Walt, the last Sunday. The book showed deposits of five dollars, ten dollars, twenty, made faithfully from 1944 through the spring of 1958. The balance at the end was $11,240.
What is hidden with love is never wasted, only waiting for the right hands to carry it into the light.
Tessa was crying quietly by then. Brian had gone and sat on the back steps with his head in his hands. I did what I always do when a job turns into something larger than a job: I stopped working, sat down on an upturned bucket, and let the couple think. After a while Tessa said, “We have to find her.” I told her I thought I could help, because the county kept records of who had lived in every house, and I had a cousin who worked at the courthouse in St. Clairsville.
By the end of the week we had the story. Dorothy Wilkes had lived in the house on that street from 1946 until she died in 2019, at ninety eight years old. The first husband of Dorothy, Walter Hess, had been killed on the island of Peleliu in September of 1944. She had remarried in 1948 to a good man, Frank Wilkes, who knew about the letters but never asked to read them. She had built the box under the shed floor herself, with the help of her brother, so the letters would survive a fire.
Dorothy had one grandchild, Janet, a retired school secretary who lived in Wheeling. Tessa wrote her a letter by hand, and I drove over to hand deliver it, because I did not trust a stamp with something like that. Janet came to the door in her slippers. She read the first line, turned very pale, and said, “Grandma always said Walter was still out there somewhere.” I told her that he was, and that he had been writing to her grandmother the whole time.
We sat at the kitchen table of Janet for three hours. She read the letters aloud, one at a time, her voice breaking and steadying and breaking again. Walter wrote about the heat, the food, the way the stars looked from the deck of a transport ship. He wrote about the little farm he planned to buy when he came home. In the last unopened letter, dated two days before his death, he wrote a single paragraph, and she read it three times before she could go on.
The bankbook turned out to matter too. A lawyer Janet knew traced the old savings and loan through its mergers to a bank in Columbus, and then to the unclaimed property office of the state, where the account had been sitting for sixty years with interest. The money legally belonged to the estate of Dorothy. Janet, as her heir, was able to claim it. The sum came to just over $38,000. She wept again when the check arrived.
Brian and Tessa would not take a cent of reward, though Janet insisted. Instead they asked a favor. They wanted to build the new shed over the same spot, with a small brass plate set in the floor, and a framed copy of the photograph of Dot and Walt hung on the wall. Janet agreed with tears in her eyes. I built that shed myself, no charge for the labor, and I took more care with the corners than I have with any job in thirty years.
On the afternoon we set the brass plate, Janet brought a thermos of coffee and sat on the new step with the sun on her face. The last letter of Walter lay open on her knee. She read us the final line. I will not repeat it here, because it was not written for me. But I will say that I have built a hundred sheds, and this is the only one I have ever walked into without taking off my hat.