I set my bar down real slow, because a fresh-dug patch in a driveway nobody admitted to touching, in the one stretch you cannot see from the house or the road, is a thing you do not go clawing into with your bare hands. Twenty-three years laying asphalt had taught me that when a job turns strange, you stop, you back off, and you call somebody with a badge.
So I did. I told the homeowner to stay back, and I called the Newark police from the end of that driveway, and I waited. Whatever was a foot down under that soft patch, it was not mine to uncover.
The police came and did the digging themselves, careful and proper. And what they lifted out of that hole was no horror, though my heart had been in my throat for an hour.
It was a strongbox, watertight, and inside it was cash, old bonds, and a bundle of deeds and papers, buried by the previous owner of that house before he passed suddenly, a suspicious old man who never trusted a bank in his life.
The man who owned the place before my customer had been a known eccentric, the kind who kept his money in the ground. He had died without a will and without telling a soul where his savings were, and the house had sold at estate auction with the money still buried in the driveway. The fresh patch was the work of a nephew who had gotten wind of the old mans habit and crept back to dig for it in the dead of night, filling the hole when a passing car spooked him, meaning to return.
Because I called the police instead of digging it up myself, that nephew did not get away with quietly robbing the estate. The law sorted out who the money truly belonged to.
And here is the good of it. The old man, it turned out, had heirs he had lost touch with, a daughter and two grandchildren he had quarreled with decades back and never reconciled with. The buried savings, once the courts traced it, went to them.
That daughter came to the house to thank the new owner, and me, the asphalt man who called it in. She had thought her father died with nothing but bitterness. Instead he left her a nest egg he had been burying for her, dollar by dollar, all the angry years he could not bring himself to call.
I sealed that driveway smooth and black the next week. The new owner paid me double and would not hear otherwise.