The second I saw what that man had gone to all that trouble to hide before he disappeared, I forgot to breathe, because nested in the false bottom, wrapped in soft cloth, was a womans jewelry, a wedding ring, a strand of pearls, a locket, and beneath them a bundle of love letters tied with faded ribbon.
I sat down on my carport step and lifted the locket to the light. Inside was a photo of a young couple, laughing.
The man who owned the freezer had not fled from anything sinister, he had fled from grief, and the treasure he hid was all he had left of his late wife, kept safe in the one place he was sure no one would disturb it.
There was a letter with the jewelry. His name was Raymond, and his wife, Ellen, had passed after a long illness, and he had cared for her to the end. After she died, the notebook explained, he could not stay in the house they shared, could not bear the memories, and he had decided to sell everything and move away to start over where the grief did not live in every room.
But he could not sell Ellens things, and he could not risk them being lost or stolen in the move, so he had hidden them in the freezer, meaning to send for them once he was settled. Then, the boy said, he took off in a hurry, and I understood now it was grief driving him, not trouble.
The letter said: These were my Ellens. Her ring, her pearls, the locket I gave her when we were young. If you found these, then something happened and I never came back for them. Please, do not let them be sold to strangers. Find my daughter. Ellen would want her to have them. Tell her mama and daddy loved her.
I tracked down Raymonds daughter through the letters. Raymond, I learned, had passed the year before, alone in a little apartment in Arizona, having never quite outrun his grief.
But his daughter was overjoyed and weeping when I called. She had thought all her mothers things were gone, sold or lost when her grieving father disappeared into his sorrow. And here they were, her mothers wedding ring, her pearls, the locket, and a bundle of her parents love letters.
I drove them to her myself. She held her mothers ring and wept, and read her parents love letters, and got to know, through them, the young couple her mother and father had been.
She wears her mothers pearls now. Her daughter will get the ring someday. And she understood, at last, that her father had not abandoned her in his grief. He had been trying, in his broken way, to keep her mothers memory safe.
I keep those wing nuts in a coffee can. My wife tells the story and nobody believes her, but they held down a grieving mans last treasure, and I got to carry it home to his daughter. I bought a dented freezer for thirty-five dollars. I ended up reuniting a family with their mothers love. Worth every penny, and then some.