The probe hit something solid about three feet down. The county man stopped, moved a little farther over, and tried again. Solid again. He scraped away the wet soil with his boot and told me the dimensions matched the structure on the old survey almost exactly. I asked what could possibly still be under there after fifty years, and he said the survey had a notation beside the number that he’d never noticed before.
We dug carefully until we found the corner of a concrete slab. There was no foundation above it, no pipes leading anywhere, and no reason for a structure that size to have been built in that particular spot. The county man pulled the old survey from his folder again and compared the measurements. Then he pointed to a small handwritten mark near the structure number. It looked like an abbreviation, but he said it was actually a notation used for something that wasn’t supposed to be visible from the road.
I went home and searched through the papers I inherited when I bought the property. Buried inside an old envelope was a 1975 tax document that listed an improvement on the land even though the property had supposedly been vacant at the time. The amount was small, but the description matched the dimensions on the survey. I called the county office, and after several transfers, an older clerk found the original permit record. She went quiet when she read the name attached to it.
It was my father’s name. The strange part was that my father never owned this property, and according to every family record I had, he’d never even lived in this county. The clerk told me the permit had been closed the following year, but the structure itself had never been recorded as removed. I went back outside with a shovel and cleared another section of the slab. Near the edge was a rusted metal plate with four numbers stamped into it, and when I showed them to the county man, he immediately said, “Don’t dig any deeper until I call my supervisor.”
