I set my saw down real slow, because that compartment was lined in cedar, clean and dry after who knows how many winters, and inside it sat a footlocker, army green, the kind a man carries home and never opens again.
I climbed back down and got the couple who hired me, and we brought it into the light together. It was not locked. On the lid, painted careful by hand, was a name and a set of numbers, and I knew a service stencil when I saw one.
Inside was a folded flag in a triangle case, a handful of medals in a felt roll, a stack of photographs of young men who looked too young, and a bundle of letters a wife had written to a soldier a long way from home. And on top, in a plastic sleeve to keep it dry, one page in a mans careful print.
An old veteran had built a hidden room in his own roof, not to keep his war a secret, but to keep it safe, because he could not bear to have it on the wall and could not bear to throw it away either.
The letter said he had no one left who would want these things, that his wife was gone and they never had children, and that he was sealing them up where they would keep. Whoever finds this, it read, these belonged to men who did not come home. Do not let them go in a dumpster. Find someone who will hold them right.
The couple who bought that house took him at his word. They called the county veterans office, and it turned out the men in those photographs had a unit, and that unit had a reunion still, a few old fellas and a lot of grandchildren.
Those medals and that flag sit in a glass case at the county museum now, with the names read out proper every Memorial Day. The letters went to a historian who is putting them in a book so the wife who wrote them is not forgotten either.
The young husband told me he had bought the house for the light. I cut his skylights the next week, and the sun came pouring down that dark stairwell like it had been waiting years to get in. Some things a man hides high up because he trusts that whoever climbs that far will have the decency to do right by what they find.