The metal was cold and solid under my fingers as I brushed the dirt away. At first I thought it was an old pipe, or maybe some junk buried by a previous owner. But the more I dug, the clearer it became that this was no pipe. It was a corner, a hard, riveted corner, of something rectangular. A box. A large metal box, sealed and heavy, wedged deep in the clay where no plumbing had any business being.

My tenant had come out to the edge of the hole by then, and his easy smile had disappeared. “What is that?” he asked, and I could tell from his voice that he genuinely didn’t know either. My anger about the pool suddenly felt very far away. I kept scraping until I found a latch, rusted shut, and beside it, stamped faintly into the metal, a set of initials and a date. The date was 1961. I looked up at my tenant, then down at the box, and I realized my hands were shaking, because whatever this was, it had been buried on my property decades before I ever owned it, and someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to make sure no one found it.