I stayed there on my knees over that hole in the floor because what I drew up out of the dark was a small wooden box, wrapped in oilcloth gone stiff with age, and taped to the top was a scrap of paper in a childs careful printing that said, TO WHOEVER FINDS THIS. DO NOT THROW AWAY. And a date. Nineteen fifty two.
I called the old widow over and we opened it together at her kitchen table, the two of us, a plumber and an old woman, like a couple of kids on Christmas morning. Because that is what it was. A time capsule. Some children who lived in that house seventy years ago had filled a box with their treasures and hidden it under the floorboards, in the one place they figured no grown up would ever look, and sealed it up to wait.
Inside was a whole small world. A jackknife with a bone handle. A baseball card soft at the corners. A ribbon from a county fair. A little cloth doll. A handful of marbles. And a letter, folded up, in that same careful printing, signed by three children, first names and ages. It said they were the Dawson kids, and they were burying their best things for the future, and whoever found them should know that in the summer of 1952 they were happy in this house, and they hoped whoever came after was happy too.
Three children had reached seventy years across time to tell a stranger they had been happy here.
Now, I am a plumber, not a detective, but a name and a town is a place to start. And it turned out that finding the Dawson children was not so hard, because one of them was still living, right there in Wichita, a woman of eighty now, the little girl who had printed that letter with her brothers all those years ago.
I drove her over to the old widows house myself. She walked through rooms she had not seen since she was a girl, touching the door frames, and when we set that box in front of her and she saw the jackknife and the ribbon and the little doll, she put her hand over her mouth and she cried. Her two brothers were both gone now. And here in her hands were their treasures, and their names in her own childhood printing, and a whole summer she thought was lost forever.
The widow, who had worried all week about a leak, insisted the old woman keep the box, and the two of them sat at that kitchen table the whole afternoon, one who had grown up in the house and one who would grow old in it, talking like they had known each other all their lives.
There was no leak. The damp was just old ground under an old house. But that musty smell sent me down under the floor, and under the floor was a box of childhood, and because of it a woman of eighty got to hold her brothers again. Some houses keep the strangest, sweetest secrets. You just have to lift the right board.