I bought the rental property on Clover Street in 2019, which was the year I also stopped pretending I was going to retire on my teacher’s salary alone and started doing something concrete about the gap between what I had and what I would eventually need.
The decision to buy a rental property was not impulsive, though it looked that way to a few people who knew me. I had been thinking about it for three years, reading the books and the forums and talking to my friend Patricia who had owned rentals for fifteen years and who had the specific pragmatic knowledge of someone who had learned everything through direct experience rather than theory.
Patricia said: the property will teach you things school cannot.
She was right about this in ways I did not fully understand until later.
The house on Clover Street was a two-bedroom ranch, built in 1961, on a lot that was larger than the house required, which was one of the things I found attractive about it. The previous owner had maintained it adequately rather than lovingly, which meant there were things to address but nothing that was structurally compromised. The bones were good, which is the phrase everyone in real estate uses and which is also simply true, the way certain true things become clichés because they are useful.
The backyard was large.
I want to establish this specifically because the backyard becomes the whole of the story, and to understand what happened I need you to understand what was there before.
The lot was approximately eighty feet deep behind the house, which is more backyard than most people in this part of town had, and the previous owner had done nothing particular with it except maintain a lawn. There were two old oak trees in the back left corner that were significant enough to have their own presence, the kind of trees that have been in a place for so long that they seem to have preceded everything else and will outlast everything that comes after.
I kept the lawn maintained.
I added a small garden shed in the right corner in my second year owning the property, for tenant storage, which my tenants at the time had appreciated.
The property went through three sets of tenants in the five years I owned it before Joel and Cass moved in.
The first set were an older couple who treated the house with the specific care of people who understood what it meant to live somewhere someone else owned, the deep cleanliness and the immediate reporting of anything that needed attention and the general consciousness of their status as stewards rather than owners.
The second set were a young man and his college roommate who were less careful but not irresponsible, the ordinary carelessness of people in their early twenties who have not yet internalized that other people’s things require consideration.
The third set were a family of four who were there for three years and who were the kind of tenants every landlord wants, reliable and communicative and genuinely invested in the house as a home rather than as a temporary arrangement.
Joel and Cass moved in six months before the Saturday I almost ran off the road.
They were in their early thirties, both working in the kind of remote tech-adjacent jobs that had become common, and they had seemed at signing the way most people seem at signing, which is to say that the formal context of a lease agreement produces a version of people that is more measured and professional than the version that actually inhabits a property.
They had good references.
They had stable income documentation.
They had seemed reasonable.
I use the past tense with a specific intention.
The Saturday was in September, a warm September Saturday with the light that September produces in the afternoon, the particular gold of it, and I was driving by to drop off a maintenance notice about some gutter work I had scheduled for the following week.
I was going slowly enough that when I looked through the side yard toward the back, I saw enough to make me stop the car.
I stopped the car.
I looked.
The backyard had a hole in it.
Not a small hole.
A large hole.
Approximately fifteen feet across, which I estimated by comparing it to the width of my car, and at least five feet deep, with the excavated dirt piled in mounds along the fence line in the manner of something that had required sustained and significant effort.
There were piles of disturbed root matter from whatever was in the soil at that depth.
There was a rented excavator visible through the fence, which told me they had hired equipment.
There were, noticeably and significantly, no permits visible anywhere.
I parked.
I am a patient person by training, forty-one years of teaching middle school will produce this in a person, the specific ability to receive surprising information without immediately reacting to it in the way that the immediate reaction suggests.
I went to the door.
I knocked.
Joel answered.
He answered with the specific ease of someone who has not yet understood that the situation he has created is one that requires a different posture, the ease of someone who genuinely believes that the explanation he has prepared is going to be adequate.
He said: hey Linda, what’s up?
I said: what is in my backyard?
He said: oh! Yeah, we’ve been meaning to call about that. We got started on the pool project. We figured we’d get the hard part done first and then clear it officially.
He said: you’d probably say yes anyway, eventually, so we figured.
He stopped, apparently hearing the pause in my expression.
He said: we’re happy to pay for the permit and everything.
I said: Joel.
He said: yeah?
I said: you have excavated my property. Without permission. Without a permit. Without even a phone call.
He said: we’re going to tell you about it.
I said: after you dug a fifteen-foot hole.
He said: we thought if we had it started you’d be more likely to.
He stopped again.
I said: I’m going to take some photographs for the city inspector. I’ll be calling the permit office on Monday.
He said: Linda, come on.
I said: you may want to call your renter’s insurance.
I walked around the side of the house to the backyard.
The hole was larger than it had appeared from the road.
It was genuinely about fifteen feet across, more or less circular, and deep enough that standing at the edge you could not see the bottom clearly in the afternoon shadow.
The dirt piles along the fence were substantial.
The roots from the oak trees in the back left corner had been disturbed, which was a concern I would think about later.
I took photographs from the edge.
I documented the equipment, the excavator parked along the right fence.
I documented the piles.
I thought about the permit office, about the process of reporting unauthorized excavation, about what this meant for the lease and the security deposit and the conversation with a lawyer that was probably in my near future.
I climbed down into the hole.
This was both practical and impulsive.
Practical because I needed the photos from inside the excavation to show the inspector the actual depth and the nature of the excavation.
Impulsive because I was angry and when I am angry I tend to do things physically, to address the anger through action, and climbing into the hole was a form of confronting the thing directly.
The hole was about five feet deep at the edges and slightly deeper in the center, and the soil was clay-heavy in the way of soil in this part of the state, which would make the pool project more complicated than Joel and Cass had perhaps anticipated.
I was taking photographs of the wall of the excavation when I felt something under my sneaker.
A resistance.
Something that was not clay and not stone and not root.
I moved my foot.
I dragged it slowly across the soil and felt the resistance again, and this time when I looked down, something caught the afternoon light that came into the hole at its current angle.
Metal.
I looked at it.
I brushed some dirt away with my shoe.
The metallic surface was flat and had been treated or plated at some point, the finish worn but visible.
I looked around.
There was a shovel leaning against the fence, left there by the excavation work.
I took it.
I started digging.
The clay resisted the shovel in the way clay resists everything, with the specific stubbornness of compacted earth, and I dug around the metallic object rather than directly at it, the way you approach a thing you are uncertain about, giving it room to reveal itself.
What revealed itself was a box.
Metal, rectangular, approximately the size of a large suitcase.
I dug for twenty minutes.
My hands were shaking by the end of it.
Not from the physical effort.
From what I was beginning to understand I had found.
The box had a latch.
A combination latch, the kind that would have been standard on a particular kind of security container in a particular era.
The latch was locked.
But the latch was also corroded in a way that suggested significant time in the ground, and when I worked it with the end of the shovel’s handle, it gave after a few minutes of careful pressure.
I stood in the hole in the backyard of my rental property.
I stood with the shovel in my hand and the unlocked box at my feet.
I opened it.
Inside was the following.
A cloth bundle, rotted to the point where the original fabric was more suggestion than substance, but still holding its shape around what it contained.
A document, wrapped in oilcloth that had protected it considerably better than the outer cloth, sealed in some kind of wax that had partially preserved the paper within.
And beneath all of that, heavy and unmistakable, a collection of coins.
I picked one up.
I am not a historian.
I am a retired middle school English teacher who reads broadly and who has spent forty years trying to transmit the importance of understanding context to twelve-year-olds, with varying degrees of success.
But I had enough education and enough general knowledge to look at the coin in my hand and understand that what I was holding was not something from my lifetime or my parents’ lifetime or their parents’ lifetime.
The coin was heavy in the specific way of old coinage.
It had an eagle on one face and a portrait on the other, and the portrait was not anyone from the modern era.
I put the coin down carefully.
I looked at the oilcloth document.
I did not open it in the hole.
I understood, even in my confusion, that opening something that had been preserved for what might be a very long time should not happen at the bottom of an excavated hole in the backyard of a rental property.
I called my friend Patricia.
Patricia answered on the third ring.
I said: I need you to come to Clover Street.
She said: what happened?
I said: I found something.
She said: what kind of something?
I said: the kind you need to see.
She said: are you all right?
I said: I’m in a hole.
There was a brief pause.
She said: I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.
Joel appeared at the back door while I was waiting.
He looked at the box.
He looked at me.
He said: Linda, what is that?
I said: I don’t know yet.
He said: was it just sitting under there?
I said: it was in the ground.
He came into the backyard.
He came to the edge of the hole and looked down.
He said: how deep was it?
I said: about a foot below the current floor of the excavation.
He said: so.
He said: so if we hadn’t dug the pool.
I said: yes.
He said: it would still be there.
I said: presumably.
He looked at it.
He said: is that.
He said: are those coins?
I said: yes.
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