There were enough suspects in the present to keep me busy, sure, but I wasn’t digging up Grandma Shaw’s garden just to find for Caroline the truths buried in her family’s history. Something strange was at work here, something old, something hidden deep within the story of the Reddmans. Everything seemed to center around that crazed relic, Grammy Shaw, with her twisted face and one good eye, controlling the destiny of her entire dysfunctional family. Grammy had brought Nat and Selma and Harrington into the clutches of the Reddman family; Grammy had diverted great sums of money into a secret trust for some unknown purpose; Grammy had decreed that the garden was to grow wild and be left untouched. I couldn’t shake the feeling that whatever secret Grammy had been trying to hide she had buried in this garden. I could have respected her wishes, sure, the rich old hag with half a face, but protecting her secrets wasn’t going to get me any closer to my hard-earned share of her fortune. “No good can come from digging up the dead,” had said Nat, the gardener. But it wasn’t my dead.

I was three feet down when I heard the clang of my shovel against something hard and metallic. Behind me was a heap of dirt and ripped-out plants. The air was filled with the smell of old earth being turned. I had been digging out the heart of the little oval garden for almost an hour now, digging an area about eight feet long and four feet wide, trying to keep the floor of the pit level, like an archaeologist searching for pottery shards through strata of time. It was hard going, all except for one patch. I had stripped down to my tee shirt in the warm night. My hands slipped along the shiny surface of the new shovel’s handle and had started to blister, forcing me to grip the wooden shaft awkwardly, so as to keep the tender portions from continuing to rub. My muscles ached and my back was only a few strains from spasm. In my few breaks, Caroline had dug a bit, but without much enthusiasm or progress, so it was mainly up to me. Without a pickax, I was forced to chop at the dirt with the shovel to loosen the packed earth before I could scoop it up, all except for the one patch I mentioned before. It was a small area roughly in the middle of the garden where the dirt was softer. I thought about just digging there, but I didn’t want to miss anything, so I kept at the whole of the pit. Still, it was no surprise that, when I heard the clang of metal against metal, it came from the loosely packed center.

When I first heard the clang I wasn’t sure what it was, my blade had already sparked against a few rocks, but then I clanged again and Caroline let out a small gasp, and then another, one for each time I wracked my shovel against the metal. It didn’t take me long to figure out the rough rectangular dimensions of the object and to dig around it until my shovel could slip beneath and then to leverage it up out of the earth.

It was a box, a metal strongbox, dark, with rusted edges. There was a handle on the top, which I pulled, but it broke away quickly, weakened by rust and decay. I grabbed the box from beneath the sides and lifted. It was heavy and it smelled richly of old iron. When I gave it a tender shake I could feel its insides shift. The primary weight was the box itself, I could tell, for what had shifted inside had been relatively light. There was a lock integrated into the body of the metal and then another lock, an old rusted padlock, holding together two bars welded onto the top and the bottom. With the box in my arms, I stepped out of the pit and brought it to Caroline.

“You ever see this before?” I asked.

“No,” she said, backing away from it as if it were a cat. “Never.”

“I can’t believe there was something actually here.”

Staring, as if transfixed by the sight of that box, she said, “My grandmother put that there.”

“Looks like it.”

“Open it,” she said.

“I don’t think I can.”

“Knock it open,” she said. “Now.”

As I carefully laid the box on the ground I glanced up at her. She stared down at the box as if it were something alive that needed killing. I took a breath, raised the shovel, and slammed the edge into the lock. It held. I raised the shovel again and slammed it again, and then again, and each time the padlock jumped in its frame and then sat back again, whole and tightly shut. I went at it a few times more, waiting for the padlock to explode, but they don’t make things like they used to because they used to make them pretty damn well. The padlock held.

I swore as I swung futilely, the clangs of the shovel against the metal rising above the night calls of the crickets.

“You’re making too much noise,” she said.

I stopped, leaned over to gasp for air, turned my face to her. “You wanted me to open it. I don’t think asking it nicely to unlock itself is going to work.”

“You don’t have to be nasty.”

“We’ll take it with us,” I said. “You want me to fill in the hole?”

“Not yet,” she said. “There might be something else down there.”

“What else would be down there?”

“I don’t know, but we’ve gone this far.”

She took the shovel from me and hopped into the hole. She was trying harder now than before, as if some weakness of resolve had been strengthened by the sight of that box, by the knowledge that there were indeed secrets to be unearthed, but even so she was still making little progress. This far down the earth was hard-packed. I didn’t expect she’d find anything else, but it was boring just to watch.

“Let me try,” I said.

I stepped in the hole and took the shovel and ignored the pain in my hands as I went at it. A half an hour later my hair was wet with sweat, my tee shirt was soaked through, my hands were bleeding where the blisters had rubbed off. I was just about to give up when I jabbed the shovel into the earth and the ringing of the metal blade was strangely muffled. I tried it again and again heard the same soft sound.

“What’s that?” I said.

I cleared as much dirt as I could and saw a piece of something rising from the packed earth, something folded and soft. I looked up at her as she stood over me and I shrugged.

“It’s a piece of canvas or something,” she said. “It almost looks like a sail.”

“What’s it doing there?”

“Who knows,” she said.

I scraped some more around it and cleared the dirt away. A long ridge of a darkened fabric was rising from the floor of the pit.

“I’m going to pull it to see what it is,” I said.

The fabric was thick and still strong within my fingers. Pulling at it was like pulling at time itself. Nothing moved, nothing budged. I jerked and pulled and made no progress. I moved around to get a better grip and started yanking again. Nothing, no shift, no budge, nothing. Caroline jumped down and took hold and helped me pull, but there was still no movement, still nothing – and then something. The ridge of cloth lengthened, dirt started shifting. A dark smell, ancient and foul, slipped from the ground.

“It’s coming,” I said. We pulled hard and yanked again and more of the cloth started coming free.

“On the count of three,” I said as we both tightened our grips. “One, two, three.”

I put my weight into it and yanked back, pressing with my legs against the dirt, and Caroline did the same and suddenly the cloth gave and there was a cracking sound and we both fell flat onto our backs and that ancient ugly scent covered us like a noisome blanket.

Caroline was the first to scamper up and so I was still on my back when I heard her breath stop as if blocked by a chunk of half-chewed meat. I looked up at her. Her hands were pressed against her face and her eyes were screaming even though her throat was making not a sound.

I pulled myself to my feet and took hold of her and shook her until she started breathing once again. While she was gasping for air she pointed to the other side of the pit and I looked to where she was pointing and there I saw it, lit by the white light of the lantern, and my breath caught too.