Polly buried a letter for Ace in the old Camborough house

Polly’s visit to the abandoned Camber property turns a concealed message for Ace Merrill into part of a larger, compromised errand. Following Leland Gaunt’s directions, she retrieves a cache of degrading photographs and trading stamps, puts a sealed envelope into the can, and buries it again. She destroys the other contents rather than keep them, but leaves the message hidden underground. The action joins Gaunt’s manipulation of Polly to her effort to retain some control over what his errand makes her handle.

The Cache at the Camber Property

At the back of a barn, Polly finds the remains of an old silver-sided trailer, partly obscured by weeds and late sunflowers. Gaunt has told her to look for a large flat rock beside it and dig below. She follows those instructions, locating a rusty Crisco can less than five minutes after she starts digging. The can’s old food label and expired coupon mark how long it has been buried; its contents, however, are not forgotten treasure in any ordinary sense.

Inside are Gold Bond trading stamps and fading photographs of a woman and a dog. Polly removes them and puts them in her pocket. She also has a sealed business envelope, typed on the front with the words “A MESSAGE FOR THE INTREPID TREASURE-HUNTER.” She puts that envelope into the can, closes the lid, and lowers the can back into the hole. The action is not simply a retrieval: the message is left at the cache, while the other material is taken away for destruction.

What Polly Keeps and Destroys

The photographs and stamps unsettle Polly, who feels unclean after touching objects that have been under the earth for so long. She does not carry them off with the envelope. Instead, she searches her car for matches and burns the bundle. The fire reduces the photographs and stamps to ash; this deliberate destruction separates the material she cannot accept from the envelope she has chosen to bury.

The distinction gives the scene its moral tension. Polly follows Gaunt’s directions closely enough to find the can and conceal the message, yet she refuses to preserve the other contents. Her hands are shaking when she tries to light the match, though the pain in them has almost disappeared. The episode therefore places a temporary easing of her hand pain alongside the strain of carrying out the errand, without making that relief erase her distress.

The Property’s Violent Past

The ground where Polly burns the bundle is associated with an earlier act of violence: a woman once beat a Saint Bernard dog to death there with a baseball bat. Polly drops the burning material into that same dirt. This detail connects the hidden cache not only to Gaunt’s present manipulation but also to cruelty already attached to the place.

After the fire dies, an unexpected gust scatters the ash. A low growling noise then rises from the barn. Polly has already heard a voice and tried to shut it out, but the renewed sound makes the location feel less like a simple hiding place than a site where the buried past presses into the present. She leaves the shovel in the weeds rather than return it, and walks away quickly.

The Message and Gaunt’s Design

The envelope’s label identifies its intended recipient only as the “treasure-hunter”; the scene does not disclose its contents. Its placement in the can links the cache to Ace Merrill, while Polly’s handling of it remains distinct from her decision to burn the photographs and stamps. She reburies the message rather than opening or destroying it, preserving Gaunt’s arranged concealment even as she rejects the other contents.

The episode also resonates with Danforth Keeton’s hidden financial records and the false appearance of ordinary paperwork around his embezzlement. Keeton keeps the correspondence in a locked filing-cabinet drawer, and the audit threat reaches across the town’s books; his gambling losses had already led him to take money from the petty-cash fund, and his concealed scheme began coming apart as he tried to recoup losses through larger bets. Those events show another form of buried evidence in the novel, but Polly’s cache is not the same case: its significance here is the way Gaunt turns a concealed object and a message into an errand that implicates Polly in his designs.