I shined my flashlight into the chamber, and I set my saw down real slow, because it was not a drain and it was not a grave. It was a little room, cedar lined, dry as a bone, with a single trunk sitting in the middle of it on a wooden pallet.
I backed out and got the homeowners, the young couple, and the three of us stood at the hole looking in. They had just bought the place, stretched every dollar to do it, with a baby on the way. The husband climbed through first.
The trunk was not locked. Inside, wrapped in oilcloth, was a letter, and under the letter, rows of silver dollars in paper rolls and a thick bundle of old United States savings bonds.
The letter was dated 1961, in the careful hand of a man who had built this house with his own two hands.
Whoever finds this, it read, I was a coal man all my life and I never trusted a bank after 1931. I sealed this away for hard times. If you found it, times are probably hard, or you are fixing up the place, which means you are the kind of folks who take care of what they have. It is yours. Use it well. Take care of this house. It kept us warm.
A man I never met had sealed a gift inside his own wall sixty years ago and trusted it to whoever came next.
We did it the right way. The couple called a lawyer and the county, and because the money had been placed there by the original owner and conveyed with the house, and no one came forward with a prior claim, it was theirs to keep. The bonds alone, with sixty years of interest, were enough to finish the basement and then some.
They did finish that egress window, and the bedroom down there is legal now, and bright. But they left the little cedar room, cleaned it up, and put the old mans letter in a frame on the wall.
I have cut a hundred egress windows. That is the only one that ever handed a young family exactly what they needed, left there by a stranger who hoped someone decent would find it.