I set my level down real slow, because when I lifted the loose bricks clear and looked down into the compartment framed under the hearth, it was not the cold thing my chest was bracing for. It was a dry little box, and inside sat a bundle of letters tied in faded ribbon and a small ring case.
No horror. A keepsake hidden under a hearth, capped with loose bricks where a hot stove had sat on top of it for years.
The letters were love letters, decades of them, and the ring case held a plain gold band and a photograph of a young couple.
The person who hid that box under the hearth had not been concealing anything dark, they had been keeping a whole love story warm, tucking a lifetime of letters between a husband and wife right under the warmest spot in the house so that the heart of the home sat, quite literally, over their hearts.
A note folded in with the letters told it. An old widow had lived in that farmhouse last, and these were the letters her husband wrote her through a long-ago war and all the years after. When he passed, she could not keep them in a drawer where they made her weep, and could not part with them. So she laid them under the hearth, under the fire that warmed her every winter night, so he would always be the warmest thing in the house.
She wrote: These are my Harolds letters to me. He wrote me every day he was away and never stopped when he came home. I am keeping him by the fire. If you find him here, be gentle. Our family may want him back.
The young couple who hired me held those letters carefully. There were names and a town, and we found the widows granddaughter, who had heard her grandparents were great letter-writers but had never seen a single page.
She came out to the farmhouse and read her grandfathers wartime love letters at the kitchen table, a whole courtship she never knew, and she took the bundle home and is copying them for the whole family, so Harold and his bride will be read for another hundred years.
Nineteen years setting stoves and I never found the like. A box hidden under a hearth turned out to be a widows way of keeping her husband by the fire, and I got to lift the bricks and carry their whole love story home to their granddaughter.