Mr. Kunkel and I went down to the basement of Albrecht Hardware on Sunday afternoon, when the store was closed and the shades were pulled. I carried a flashlight and the skeleton key of Otto. He carried his cane and a thermos of coffee, and he went down the old wooden stairs one step at a time, with his hand on the rail, like a man descending into a church. At the bottom, behind the water heater, I found the little door under the stairs that my husband had always called a crawlspace. The lock was black with age. The key turned on the first try.
The door opened onto a brick wall, with a square hole knocked through the center, filled with darkness. I put my flashlight into it. Beyond lay a low stone room perhaps ten feet across, with a dirt floor and an arched ceiling, the kind of cellar German settlers dug in 1860 to keep potatoes cold. In the middle sat a trunk of black leather with brass corners. It looked as if it had been waiting a long time. Mr. Kunkel stood behind me and whispered, in a voice I had never heard from him, “Peggy, that is exactly how I remember it.”
We opened the trunk together. On top lay an Army blanket, moth eaten and gray. Under the blanket lay the badge of a sheriff, tarnished almost black, with the words GILLESPIE COUNTY around its edge. Beneath the badge was a pistol in a leather holster, a bundle of keys on a brass ring, and a small notebook with a green cover. Under the notebook, wrapped in oilcloth, lay a canvas bank bag, heavy as a stone. I untied the string and tipped it toward the light. Gold coins poured into my palm, bright as butter, with the dates 1904 and 1911.
The truth buried under the floor of a family store will wait for a widow with a key and a friend.
I read the notebook aloud to Mr. Kunkel on the cellar floor, by flashlight. It had belonged to Sheriff Hollis Wade, who had disappeared in the fall of 1958 and was never found. In his plain hand, he wrote that a cousin of the Hartmann family had been using the cellar to hide stolen goods, and that a robbery at the Fredericksburg bank in September had put twelve thousand dollars in gold coins in this very room. He had come to take it. The last entry said: Hartmann is on the stairs. If I do not come home, look under the floor. My wife is Ellen. Tell her I tried.
Mr. Kunkel lowered himself onto an upturned crate. He was crying quietly, wiping his eyes with a cotton handkerchief. “I was thirteen,” he said. “the father of Otto brought me down here in 1961 to help carry out a sack of onions, and we found the wall. He broke through it. We saw the trunk. We saw the badge. He sat on the stairs and told me to say nothing, because the Hartmanns owned the county then, and he was afraid for his family. He bricked it up that night. He carried it his whole life.” His voice broke. “I should have said something, Peggy. I was only a boy.”
We did not touch another thing. I climbed the stairs, telephoned the Texas Rangers in Austin, and sat on the porch step in the afternoon sun waiting for them to arrive. A lieutenant named Cruz and a forensic team came from San Antonio that night, with floodlights and a van full of brushes. By morning, they had dug up the floor of the cellar, and under two feet of packed earth they found the thing the sheriff had warned us about. A set of human remains, wrapped in canvas, with a wedding ring on the left hand and a bullet hole in the skull.
Ellen Wade was ninety four years old and living in a nursing home in Kerrville. The lieutenant drove there himself and sat beside her wheelchair and told her, as gently as he could, what we had found. She did not speak for a very long time. Then she asked him to describe the ring. He did. She nodded slowly. She said, “All those years I told people he ran off with another woman. All those years they laughed at me.” And she asked, in a small voice, whether somebody could please bring her husband home to be buried in the churchyard.
They did. The funeral was held in the old Vereins Kirche on a bright October morning with the American flag and the county color guard and four hundred people in the pews, all the town of Fredericksburg, standing room only. Ellen Wade sat in the front row in a wheelchair, with a lace shawl over her white hair. I handed her the badge myself. She held it against her chest for the entire service. The pastor read from Psalm 121, and when the bugler played Taps, I heard Mr. Kunkel sobbing into his handkerchief, and I took his hand.
The Hartmann family fought it in court, but the notebook and the remains were too strong. Bryce, who had wanted the building to get the trunk, was charged with attempted fraud and conspiracy to conceal a crime, and settled for a heavy fine and a public apology in the Fredericksburg newspaper. The old bank, which had merged and been bought and sold three times over, agreed to pay a reward for the gold. I took the whole of it and gave it to the Gillespie County fund for the widows of sheriffs, in the name of Ellen Wade.
The cellar is a museum now. The county built a small glass door on the basement stairs, and children come on field trips from Austin and San Antonio to see the trunk. Albrecht Hardware is still open, every day but Sunday, with its creaking wooden floors and its brass bell, and I still sell nails by the pound. On the wall behind the register hangs a framed photograph of two men, one in a hardware apron and one wearing the hat of a sheriff. Under it is a plaque that reads, simply: They kept the door.