Bill held the light and I leaned down into that space to see, and I grabbed his sleeve, because it was not the awful thing your mind runs to. It was a wooden box, painted like a little treasure chest, the kind a person makes for a child, and taped to the lid was an envelope that said, in careful block letters, CLUE NUMBER ONE.
I about laughed and cried at the same time. Inside the box was a smaller box, and a bag of chocolate coins gone white with age, and a stack of index cards, each one numbered, each one a riddle in an old man shaky hand. And a letter, laid on top, that explained the whole thing and undid me completely.
The man who built this house before us, the one we bought it from after he passed, had been a grandfather. And the last summer of his life he had built his grandkids a treasure hunt. A real one, all through this old house, riddle leading to riddle, the way you would for the children who came up every summer to Marquette to stay with Grandpa on the lake. The hollow at the head of the stairs was the last stop. The final clue. The X on the map. He built it right into the bones of the house so it would keep, and he hid the treasure at the end of it, and then, the letter said, he took sick that fall, faster than anybody figured, and he passed before the grandkids came up. The hunt never got run. It sat sealed under that top step for years, waiting on children who never got called down to play it.
To whoever finds this before my grandbabies do. If they are grown now, and I am gone, please see that they get it. Tell them Grandpa made them one last adventure. Tell them the treasure was always going to be finding out how much I love them.
Bill and I sat right down on the torn-up stairs and cried like two fools. Then we set about finding those grandchildren. It took some doing, but the letter had their names, and names are a thread you can pull. They are grown now, of course, three of them, with kids of their own, scattered down into Wisconsin. And near as they had ever known, their grandpa just ran out of time that fall with nothing left over. They never knew a thing about a hunt.
They came back up to Marquette last month, all three, and brought their own little ones along. We handed them clue number one, and we stood back, and we watched grown men and women in their forties run their dead grandfather treasure hunt through our house, room to room, reading his riddles out loud in cracking voices while their own kids raced on ahead. It ended where he built it to end, at the head of the stairs, with his letter. There was not a dry eye in the place. A man reached his grandbabies from the far side of the grave with a game and a bag of chocolate coins, and got to tell them, one more time, exactly how much they were loved.