I set my pry bar down real slow because the first thing my light found in that hollow was not what I feared. It was a tin box, the old kind that once held butter cookies, with a rusted lid and a faded picture of a Scottish castle on top. It sat on a little plank shelf someone had nailed between the studs, and beside it stood a stack of paper, tied with a blue ribbon that had gone gray. No money. No weapon. No bones, thank God, which is where a man like me goes in the first two seconds. Just a tin and a bundle, hidden behind a mirror in a bathroom in Bellaire.
I stood there a while with my light on it. The young couple, Marcus and Ellie Brandt, were waiting in the hallway, and they could hear me breathing. Ellie was seven months along and holding the small of her back. I called them in and showed them. Marcus asked whether I thought it was safe. I said, in twenty years on bathrooms, the dangerous things come in the walls with the wires. This looked more like a heart than a hazard. Ellie put out her hand, and I nodded, and she lifted the tin.
The lid came off with a squeak. Inside lay a small velvet box, dark blue and worn at the corners, and a folded flag. Not a big one. The kind that comes in a triangle for a soldier. On top lay a photograph of a young man in uniform, grinning, with his cap pushed back, and on the back was written in the hand of a woman. Harlan, 1944. Ellie opened the velvet box. Inside was a ring, a plain gold band with a tiny diamond, bright as the day it was bought, with a ribbon tied through it and a card.
We untied the bundle together, on the edge of the tub. They were letters. Dozens of them, in two different hands, the light, looping handwriting of a woman and the square print of a soldier. The first was dated 1943. Dearest Evelyn, it began. I think about the creek behind the house of your mother. I think about your laugh. The last ones came from a hospital in France and were written in pencil by a shaking hand. Ellie started to cry before we reached the end of the first page. She said, “They were engaged.”
A mirror can hide a wall, and a wall can hide a love story, and sometimes the only person who will ever find it is the stranger with the pry bar.
We pieced it together from the letters. Harlan Pruitt had grown up two streets from Evelyn. He shipped to Europe in 1944 and wrote her every week. In the last letter, he told her he was coming home on the first boat in the spring, and that he had bought her a ring with the last of his pay. The ring never reached her. He came home, but Evelyn had died of influenza in the winter of 1945, a month before the boat. Nobody had written to tell him. He walked into the house of her mother and learned it on the doorstep.
The flag, Ellie said, would have been given to him when he left the service. The card on the ring was in his hand, and it said only, For Evelyn, when I can. He had never married. The county records, which Marcus looked up that night on his laptop, showed that Harlan had owned the house for sixty one years and died there at eighty seven. The tin had been hidden behind the mirror in the very bathroom where he shaved every morning. He had looked at his own face above the shelf of his heart for sixty years.
I could have packed up and gone home. The job was done. But I had a feeling about that ring. I asked whether Harlan had any family. Marcus said that the previous sale had gone through a lawyer for a niece in Beaumont. I got the name from the closing papers. Her name was Dorothy Lund, seventy nine, a retired schoolteacher. Ellie called her that evening. When Dorothy picked up, Ellie said, “Mrs. Lund, I think we found something that belonged to your uncle.” There was a long silence on the line.
Dorothy drove to Bellaire the next Saturday in a green Buick, with a daughter at the wheel. She sat on the edge of that very tub in a church dress, with the tin on her knees, and read the letters for an hour while the rest of us waited in the kitchen. When she came out, her eyes were red and she was smiling. She said her uncle had been the gentlest man she ever knew, and that he had never once spoken of the war, or of a girl. “He used to say the mirror was lucky,” she said. “Now I know why.”
She asked whether she could keep the letters. We said of course. She asked whether the young couple would like to keep the ring, because she was too old to wear it and had no one to give it to, and it seemed a shame to put it in a drawer. Ellie shook her head. She said it belonged with Evelyn. In the end, the four of us drove to a small cemetery on the edge of town, where the mother of Evelyn lay buried beside a modest white stone, and we laid the ring at its base for a day.
Dorothy kept the flag and the photograph. The ring she gave back to Ellie that evening, after all. “Wear it,” she told her, “for a girl who never could.” Ellie slipped it on her right hand, where it fit perfectly. The baby came a month later, a daughter. They named her Evelyn. Marcus sent me a picture of the three of them in the new bathroom, by the new mirror, which he installed himself, at the same height as the old one, so that anyone could see their own face and remember who stood behind it.
I did not charge for the extra day. Marcus insisted on paying, and I took a pie. When I drive home through Bellaire in the evening light, I sometimes pass that little house and think of Harlan with his razor, looking in the mirror, humming to himself, the boy from the creek. And I tell myself that the cold feeling I had in the first second, kneeling on that tile with my light, was not fear at all. It was only the cool breath of an old promise that had waited a very long time.