I had called the plumber because the kitchen drain had been running slowly. I expected a $61 bill and maybe an hour of inconvenience. Instead, forty minutes after going under the house, he came back up holding something carefully in his gloved hand. He asked me to step onto the porch before he said anything, and he never once put the object down.
He asked how long the hatch beneath my kitchen had been screwed shut from the inside. I told him I’d lived in the house since 1998 and had never even known there was a hatch. My children had grown up playing on that kitchen floor, and none of us had ever seen anything unusual. He asked whether anyone had ever done renovations before I bought the house.
I told him the previous owner had mentioned some work had been done, but nothing about a sealed crawlspace. The plumber looked at the object again and said it appeared to have been deliberately hidden there. He asked whether I recognized the name written on a small piece of metal attached to it. I didn’t.
Then he asked me to call the county records office before touching anything underneath the house. When I did, they pulled up the original property records from before I moved in. There was something listed that wasn’t mentioned anywhere in my paperwork — a room that officially shouldn’t exist.
The plumber went back underneath with a camera, and a few minutes later he called my name. He said he’d found the hatch, but that wasn’t what made him nervous. There was writing on the inside of it, and the date beside it was from seven years before I bought the house…
