The note was written in pencil on a scrap of brown butcher paper, and it said, My name is Sarah Lind. I am 19. I live on Jefferson Street. If anybody finds this, please tell my mother I am under the house. I read it in the glare of the flashlight of the detective, and the strength went out of my legs. The cellar of that old Duluth house smelled of cold earth and kerosene. The beam of the light shook slightly in the hand of Detective Arneson, and I do not think he knew it. He said, quietly, “Mr. Lindgren, are you all right?”
I said that I was. I was not. I was an old plumber of sixty seven who had broken open a hundred walls, and I had never in my life met a wall that frightened me. I sat on the bottom step beside the young husband, who had his arm around his wife. The detective said, “She went missing in October of 1957. She was a nineteen year old typist for a shipping company. She walked home from work one evening and never arrived.” He paused. “I know the name because I grew up three blocks from her mother.”
He explained it slowly, in the damp cellar, with the other officers working behind him. The house had been built in 1921 by a lumber merchant, and in 1957 it had been occupied by a man named Walter Gunnar, a widower with a son of eleven. Walter had worked as a night watchman at the docks. After the disappearance of the girl, no one had thought to look at the house of a quiet widower on a hill. The room was dug into the hillside behind the furnace. It had been there since the war, said Arneson, and was used, so far as anyone could ever tell, for nothing at all.
The truth that a frightened child seals up in the dark will wait for sixty years if it must, but it will come out in the end through some stranger with a chisel.
The detective turned over the red canvas sneaker in his gloved hands. “We found what remains of her,” he said, “under the cot. She was there a long time, Mr. Lindgren, and I think she did not suffer in the end. There is evidence she was cared for. There are blankets, and a lamp, and food.” His face twisted. “But she was kept there against her will for something like three months. And then the old man died, I think, or fell ill, and nobody came with the food.” He swallowed. “She wrote that note on the last day.”
I asked what had become of the boy. Arneson said, “The son? Henry Gunnar. He lived in this house for sixty six years, until he died in April.” He looked at the green door in the wall. “I think I know why he sealed it. I think he found the room one day when he was twelve, after his father had gone. I think he opened it, and he saw. And he was a child, and he was terrified, and he took a bucket of cement, and he closed it.” His voice softened. “And then he lived above it for the rest of his life, with the guilt of having been a frightened boy.”
They found his letter in a lockbox at the bank the following week. It was addressed to the police of Duluth, dated six months before his death. It was written in the careful hand of a man who had been rehearsing it since childhood. “I found a girl in the cellar in the autumn of 1958. She had been dead some months. I was twelve. I told no one. My father said nothing, and I said nothing, and we lived above her for two more years until he died. After that I could not leave. I could not sell. I put on a lock and a door and a wall.”
The letter ended, “I have asked my children to sell the house after I am gone, so that someone will find her. I do not have the courage to tell them why. I am sorry, Sarah. I am sorry for everything my father did. I am sorry I was too small. Please let her mother know that I thought of her every day.” The detective read it to us standing in the yard. The young wife was crying. The husband had his head down. And I stood with my hat in my hands, a plain old plumber, and wept without shame.
The younger sister of Sarah, Joan, was eighty four years old. She lived in an apartment above a bakery on Superior Street, with a canary and a stack of old photographs, and she had waited sixty seven years for a knock on her door. When Arneson told her, she sat very still. Then she asked to see the sneaker. He brought it. She held it in her lap and ran her thumb over the faded stitching. She said, “She bought these with her first paycheck.” She smiled at the shoe like a girl. “She was so proud.”
The funeral was held in November at the Lutheran church on Third Street where the Lind family had worshiped. The church was full. Half of Duluth came, and the mayor, and the newspapers, and a long line of old people who had remembered the poster in the window of the drugstore. I sat in the third pew with the young couple. When the pastor read the note, the one in pencil, the one that had been hidden for so many years, the whole congregation stood. Joan sat in the front row, in her best black coat, and held the shoe of her sister.
They buried Sarah beside her mother in the cemetery on the hill. On the stone they carved her name and the years, and below them, at the request of her sister, a single line from the note. Please tell my mother I am here. The young couple kept the old house, and they restored the cellar room with the green door and turned it into a small, quiet chapel, with a bench and a candle. Joan comes on the anniversary, and lights the candle, and sits for an hour in the room where her sister waited.
