Down in the bottom of that wall cavity, wedged between the studs, wrapped in plastic gone brittle with age, was not a rat and not a body and not one single thing I had braced myself for. I peeled the plastic back and I walked out of that bedroom into the yard stripping my gloves off, not from horror, but because my eyes had filled up and I did not want that sweet old widow to see a grown pest-control man cry in her house.
It was letters. Hundreds of them. And dried flowers, dozens of little bundles of them, each tied with ribbon, gone black and soft with the damp of the years. That was the smell. Not death. Just fifty years of love, slowly turning inside a wall.
The letters were hers. Every letter she had ever written her husband, across a whole marriage. And the flowers, I worked out later, were from every anniversary, every wedding, every Sunday he ever brought her a bloom. He had kept them. All of them. And at some point, an old man now, he had wrapped his whole treasure in plastic and hidden it in the wall of their bedroom, lowered down from the attic, where it would be safe, and close, and his alone.
He passed a few years back, the widow told me, when I brought it to her. She had never known. She thought he was a good but ordinary man, not a sentimental one, a man who did not say much. She had no idea that for fifty years he had been secretly saving every word she wrote him and every flower he gave her, and that near the end he had sealed the whole of it into the wall of the room where they slept, so that a lifetime of their love would stay in the house forever, tucked in the very bones of it.
He never told me he kept a single one, she whispered, holding a ruined, blackened bundle of fifty-year-old flowers like it was made of gold. All those years I thought I was the soft one. He was softer. He just hid it in the wall.
The letters were too far gone to save, most of them, the ink run, the paper rotted. But it did not matter. What mattered was that she knew now. She knew that the quiet man she buried had loved her so much, and so secretly, that he built a shrine to her out of her own letters and hid it in their bedroom wall to keep her close for the rest of time.
She did not want me to haul it away. She had me set the whole ruined, sweet-smelling bundle in a box, and she keeps it in her closet now, moldy flowers and all. She told me it is the most precious thing she owns.
Eighteen years I have cut open walls and pulled out the things that crawled in and died. That was the first time I ever opened a wall and found, instead, a marriage, hidden and rotting and more alive than anything I ever pulled out of a house. Sometimes the worst smell in the house is just an old man love, kept too long in the dark.