I got down on my knees at the bottom of that empty pool and set my bar down real slow, because what had gone into the space cut under the fresh patch was not what my gut had screamed. It was a strongbox, watertight, sealed in plastic, and beside it a note in a childs careful hand that read: our time capsule, do not open till 2044.
I sat back on my heels and let out a breath I did not know I was holding.
Twenty years around pools had taught my gut to fear the worst, and the worst had not come. The fresh patch, the disturbed leaves, the something placed there in the last few days, it was all the work of a family, and a happy one.
The family who hired me had a grandfather who had grown up in that very house decades ago, and before they filled the pool and started their new life, the children had buried a time capsule in the old dry deep end, sealing it under fresh plaster, to be dug up by their own children one day.
I had jumped to a dark conclusion because that is where twenty years of strange jobs sends your mind. But the truth was tender. The homeowner explained it when I called him over. His kids had gotten the idea from a school project, and he had helped them patch the floor over their treasures, meaning to reveal it as a surprise once the pool was running.
Inside that box, he told me, were the childrens letters to their future selves, drawings, a newspaper, small toys, a photograph of the whole family on the day they moved in.
I had nearly cracked their time capsule open with my pry bar. I was glad I had stopped, glad I had set the bar down slow instead of swinging it.
I helped them re-seal the space properly, so their capsule would keep for the twenty years they intended. I did it carefully, like it was my own childrens treasure, and I patched the pool floor around it so well you would never know it was there.
Then I brought that dead pool all the way back to life, blue and gleaming, the way I have brought back more pools than I can count.
The kids swam in it that same weekend, laughing, with no idea their electrician, so to speak, had nearly ruined their surprise. Their father winked at me over their heads.
He asked me to come back in 2044, if we were both still around, to help dig it up. I told him I would do my best, and I meant it. Twenty years around pools, and that is the only one I ever sealed back up more carefully than I opened it. Some things under the surface are exactly as sweet as they look, once you have the nerve to check.