Camber place

The Camber place is an abandoned property at the end of Town Road #3 whose ruined buildings and buried secrets make it a charged setting for two converging errands. Polly Chalmers goes there to recover material for Leland Gaunt, while Ace Merrill later arrives seeking the fortune he believes the property conceals. The barn, trailer, and disturbed earth connect their otherwise separate objectives—and leave Ace facing evidence that someone has reached the hiding place before him.

Setting and History

The property has a reputation for being haunted. Its past is marked by deaths: a boy and Sheriff George Bannerman died in the dooryard, while Gary Pervier and Joe Camber died farther down the hill. Polly parks near the place where Donna Trenton once made the fatal mistake of leaving her Ford Pinto, bringing another remembered death into the landscape she has come to cross.

The present setting is equally defined by abandonment. The barn doors hang open on rusty tracks, and an old silver-sided Air-Flow trailer lies behind the barn, nearly hidden by goldenrod and tall, late-season sunflowers. For Polly, the place is not merely a backdrop: the decayed structures and overgrown ground make a private, unpleasant task feel like entry into a space burdened by its history.

Polly’s Search in the Barn

Polly comes to the Camber place after speaking with Alan Pangborn. She does not want to revisit that conversation yet; she intends to finish her business, return home, bathe, and sleep. Her reluctance to think about what has just passed between them gives her trip its immediate emotional context, but the task itself has been arranged by Gaunt: he has told her that the tool she needs is in the barn and directed her to the area behind it.

Following his instructions, Polly finds the trailer and a large flat rock beside it. She moves the rock and digs. Within minutes, her shovel strikes a can, which she retrieves from the loose earth. The old Crisco container is rusty but intact; its decaying label has come loose, and the visible remnants include a cake recipe and a coupon that expired in 1969. These mundane traces of age frame the can as something left undisturbed for years, not as an ordinary object in present use.

Inside are the items Gaunt said she would find: Gold Bond trading stamps and fading photographs. Polly takes them and puts them in her pocket, then wipes her hands on her jeans. The discovery completes the immediate errand, but it leaves her feeling unclean. The buried container thus holds more than evidence: its physical recovery makes Polly handle the degrading material directly, even as she tries to shut out the doubts and discomfort that accompany the task.

Ace Merrill’s Arrival

At five o’clock, Ace arrives at the property with a treasure map. Gaunt has provided him with a pick and shovel, and Ace studies the map on the steps of the overgrown porch before setting out toward the barn. He hopes the site will let him put the Flying Corson Brothers behind him and get rich. The prospect of treasure itself energizes him; the journey to the hiding place has become a source of excitement as well as a hoped-for escape from his troubles.

Ace recognizes the old Air-Flow trailer as the place indicated by his search. Before he reaches it, however, he trips over a shovel. Its blade is marked with fresh dirt. The contrast between the hidden, long-buried can Polly has just recovered and the newly disturbed ground makes the object an immediate warning: the search site is not untouched, and another person has already been digging there. The account ends with Ace confronting that discovery and a growing sense of foreboding.

Narrative Significance

The Camber place gathers distinct kinds of buried history into one physical landscape. Its dooryard and hillside carry the memory of earlier deaths; the barn and trailer conceal the objects at the center of Polly’s and Ace’s separate missions; and the fresh dirt on the shovel abruptly links those missions through their shared location. The setting’s repeated movement between visible decay and hidden contents gives the errands their suspense without requiring the property to reveal everything at once.

The site also sharpens the contrast between what each visitor expects to retrieve. Polly follows Gaunt’s directions to recover photographs and trading stamps, materials that leave her troubled by the act of handling them. Ace follows a treasure map in hope of wealth and freedom from his creditors, but the newly used shovel suggests that the promised opportunity may already have been compromised. At the Camber place, what lies underground is never only a prize: it is part of a history that has been concealed, and its discovery changes what the visitor can expect next.