I set my drill down real slow, because the beam of my light fell on something I had not expected to find. Not cash, not jewelry, not bones, thank the Lord. It was an old tin coffee can, red and white, wrapped in yellow oilcloth and tied twice with butcher twine, tucked in the dark of that cavity like a baby in a cradle. Somebody had fitted a little shelf for it, cut from a piece of pine, and sanded smooth. I lifted it out with both hands. It was heavier than it looked. When I pried the lid, a smell of old paper and mothballs floated up, and I knew it was money before I saw it.
The couple who owned the house, Marcus and Tina Delaney, stood on the patio watching me with their hands clasped. They had bought the place two months earlier from an estate sale, and they were the kind of people who say please to a contractor. I carried the can to the picnic table and set it down in the sun. Inside, rubber banded in neat bricks, were old twenties, hundreds of them. I counted aloud with Marcus, and we stopped at twenty three thousand six hundred dollars. At the bottom lay a folded sheet of lined paper, and it was written in the handwriting of an old woman, shaky but proud.
I read it aloud, because Tina asked me to. “To whoever finds this. My name is Edna Mae Whitlock. I have lived in this house for fifty one years. My son Dale has taken everything else from me. The car, the savings, the deed. He thinks I do not know. I am hiding this behind the awning bar in the spring of 2009, because he never looks at things he did not break. It is for my granddaughter, Brianna. She wants to be a nurse. If you are a good person, please find her. If you are not, God sees you.” Tina put her hand over her mouth.
A coffee can hidden behind an awning bar gave one contractor the weekend to bring a grandmother hidden savings back to her granddaughter in Parkersburg.
My decision came as quickly as hers. I told Marcus and Tina that the can was theirs by law, probably, because they owned the wall, but that I would not take a dime of it, and that I did not think they would either. Marcus laughed, a short, breathless laugh. “Ed, we were about to ask you what to do,” he said. “We cannot keep money that a grandmother hid for her granddaughter.” Tina nodded and wiped her cheeks. “Where is Edna Mae now?” she asked. I took out my phone. In a town the size of Parkersburg, an old woman with a name like that does not stay lost for long.
The county clerk helped, and so did the sister of a friend who worked at a care home on Murdoch Avenue. By evening, I had my answer. Edna Mae Whitlock, eighty six years old, was living at Riverview Gardens, in a room with a window facing a maple tree. Her memory came and went, the nurse told me, but on good days she remembered everything about her house. I drove there the next morning with the Delaneys, who brought a pot of mums and a pound cake. We found her in the sun room, in a pink robe, with her white hair brushed and a crossword in her lap.
She looked up at the three of us and frowned. For a moment, I was afraid. Then Marcus knelt in front of her chair and said, “Mrs. Whitlock, we bought your house.” Her face opened like a window. “The one on Seventh Street?” she asked. “With the patio?” They nodded. “Did you find the can?” she asked, and Tina burst into tears. Edna Mae chuckled in the dry, pleased way of a woman who has outsmarted an entire family. “I knew I put it somewhere safe,” she said. “I told myself nobody would look behind that old awning. And here you are. What took you so long?”
The trouble came on Wednesday. I was back on the job, packing my tools in the truck, when a pickup roared into the driveway of the Delaneys and a heavy man in a leather jacket jumped out. He was sixty or so, with a red face and a voice built for shouting. “I am Dale Whitlock,” he said. “That is the house of my mother. You people are trespassing.” I stepped down off the tailgate with a lug wrench in my hand, not raised, just there. “Sir, the house was sold at a legal estate sale,” I said. “The deed is on file at the courthouse. Your mother would like a word with you.”
He glared at me, but he stopped. Behind me, I heard the screen door open, and Marcus came down the steps with his phone to his ear. “Sheriff, this is Marcus Delaney,” he said. “There is a man in my driveway who has been identified in an elder financial abuse case.” Dale went white, then red, then white again. I think he understood in that second that the woman he had been robbing for fifteen years had a few people on her side after all. He climbed into his truck without another word, backed out over the mailbox, and left a trail of gravel behind him.
The money consequences were happy ones. The Delaneys contacted Brianna, a twenty three year old nursing student at a community college, and drove her to Riverview Gardens to meet her grandmother. She hugged the old woman for a full minute. They put the twenty three thousand six hundred dollars into a trust for her tuition, her books and her first car. The sheriff opened an investigation into Dale, and the state attorney took over the case. Edna Mae moved into a better room, paid for by the money her son had been forced to return, with a window on the sunny side and a bird feeder outside.
In June, the Delaneys asked me back to hang a new awning, a bright green one, and they asked me to hang it on the same bar. I did it with a smile. When I finished, Marcus handed me an envelope. Inside was a photograph of Brianna in her blue nursing scrubs on graduation day, standing on the patio with her arm around Edna Mae in a wheelchair. On the back, in the same shaky old hand, someone had written, Thank you for looking behind the awning. I keep it in the visor of my truck, above the sun block and the tape measure, and I look at it before every job.