I set my screwdriver down real slow because the beam of my flashlight had landed on a cassette tape. It sat in the compartment on a small wooden shelf, upright in a clear plastic case, with a paper label that had yellowed to the color of weak tea. Beside it stood a stack of children drawings, a pocket Bible, and a coffee can with a plastic lid. No bodies. No weapons. A little hidden room, the size of a loaf of bread, in the wall of a hallway where people had walked for fifty years, and every inch of it arranged with tenderness.
The couple stood behind me in the hall, Marcy and Jeff, both in their forties, with a toddler asleep on the sofa in the next room. They had been warning me all morning about the house in Parkersburg. It had belonged to a retired schoolteacher named Mr. Alvin Dunn, they said, who died at ninety one. His niece had sold it to them as is. Now Marcy looked over my shoulder, and she put her hand over her mouth. “Oh, my goodness,” she said. “It is a time capsule.” I carefully lifted out the case and turned it over. In neat block capitals, it read, TO WHOEVER LIVES HERE NEXT. 1974.
We had nothing to play it on. I do not own a cassette deck. But Jeff remembered that his father kept one in the garage, and he went to fetch it. While he was gone, Marcy and I sat on the hall floor, and she sorted the drawings in her lap. They were crayon sketches of a house with a red door, a tree with a swing, a smiling family. Each one was signed in careful letters, Debbie, age six. Tommy, age four. In the coffee can were two silver dollars, a lock of baby hair in tissue, and a handwritten note that read, For luck.
A family that leaves a message for strangers in a wall is saying the oldest thing there is: we were here, and we were happy.
When Jeff came back, he set the deck on the hallway floor, plugged it in, and blew the dust off the buttons. The little machine whirred. The tape was brittle, but it held. There was a crackle of static, then the voice of a woman, young and cheerful, and a man laughing in the background. “Hello,” the woman said. “If you are listening to this, then you must be living in our house. We are the Dunns. This is the year 1974, and we are leaving this tape in the wall for you.” Marcy took a quick breath. The voice laughed. “Say hello, children.” Two small voices chorused, “Hello, whoever you are!”
They talked for twenty minutes. The mother described the house and its quirks, the hot water that took ten minutes to arrive, the third stair that creaked, the way the kitchen window faced the sunrise. The father told a joke about the intercom, that it was the only way he could find out what his wife was cooking. The children sang a song about a duck. At the end, the mother said, more quietly, “We hope you will be as happy here as we have been. Love the house, and it will love you back. And if you ever feel lonely, press the button on the speaker, and say hello. We will hear you.”
Nobody in that hallway spoke for a long time. Jeff had turned his face to the wall. Marcy was crying quietly, her arm around her knees. I think I was too, though I pretended to look for a stud. It is a strange thing, to hear the voices of the dead. They did not seem dead. They seemed three feet away, bright and warm, in the pocket of time inside that wall. When the tape ended with a click, we sat in the silence, and from the next room came the sleepy babble of the toddler waking up, as if she had heard it all.
Marcy asked her next question the way you ask a hard one. “What happened to them?” We found out within the week. The tapes, the drawings, and a dated photograph in the Bible led to the name of the family. Alvin Dunn had been the schoolteacher. His wife, Louise, had died in 1991. The children, Debbie and Tommy, were grown, in their fifties, living in Ohio and North Carolina. Through the niece, Marcy got a number for Debbie, and she dialed with her fingers shaking, standing in the kitchen with her phone against her ear. A warm voice answered. Marcy said, “Hello, whoever you are.”
There was a long pause on the line. Then a gasp, and then a wail of laughter and tears. Debbie remembered everything. She had been six, and she had helped her father cut the hole in the wall, standing on a chair, holding the screws. She said that they had meant to retrieve it when the children were grown, but life had intervened, and her father had never been able to bring himself to go back. “I forgot all about it,” she said. “And now you have found it. Oh, I could just die.” She drove down that weekend with her brother, both of them nearly speechless in the hall.
Tommy stood in front of the speaker with his hand on the grille. He was a big man with a salt and pepper beard, and he said very little. After a while, he pressed the old button, the one that had not worked since 1983, and said, in a voice thick with memory, “Hello, Mom.” Then he laughed at himself, and wiped his face with his sleeve. Marcy took his arm. She told him the tape was his, and the drawings, and the coins, if he wanted them. He shook his head and said, “Please keep the tape. It belongs to the house.”
That fall, Marcy and Jeff made a new tape. They sat in the hallway with the kids, with a borrowed recorder, and they said hello to whoever would live there next. Their toddler sang a song about a dog. They left it in the compartment, beside the old one, along with a new coffee can and a photograph, and they screwed the speaker back on. I came by to check the wiring in October, and on the way out I paused in the hall. I pressed the button. There was a click, and then a faint sound of a family laughing. I said hello.