The chimney sweep came down off my roof and told me not to light another fire until we’d talked. Ours is a 1903 farmhouse with a straight brick flue—no offsets, no bends, the kind you can drop a brush down and feel it go all the way. I’ve burned in that fireplace every winter for twenty-two years and had it swept every one of them. He said his brush had stopped about halfway. Not on a creosote buildup. Something had been set into the brickwork.
I figured it was a repair, because that’s what a shelf in a chimney usually is. But you don’t brick a ledge into a working flue—you’d smoke the house out inside a week, and this house has never smoked. He ran the camera up. About halfway up was a narrow ledge built directly into the chimney wall. And sitting on that ledge, dry as the day somebody put it there, was a small metal tin wrapped in oilcloth.
We couldn’t reach it from the fireplace, so he went up through the roof and lowered a retrieval tool. The tin came down covered in soot but completely sealed. Inside were four photographs, a brass key, and a folded piece of paper dated 1911. The photographs showed the farmhouse before the porch was added. In every one, the same chimney appeared—but in one photograph, there was a small wooden door beside the fireplace that doesn’t exist anymore.
The note was written by the original owner. It said he’d hidden the tin because someone had been coming into the house at night without permission. He didn’t know who, but he’d found footprints leading to the chimney every morning. The last line made me stop reading: “If they come back, they will look where a sensible man would hide something. They won’t look inside the fire.” Then I turned the brass key over. Engraved on it was a number—and that same number was carved into the stone beneath my fireplace.
