Marcus spent two months outside his home in county-paid temporary housing while engineers inspected the chamber and the ground around it. The house itself remained structurally sound, a fact the engineers stated plainly and more than once, as if they knew how much it mattered to hear it said that way. But the rear yard was excavated, the flower bed he had spent four months restoring was removed, and the shallow depression near the fence was widened into a controlled access site, fenced and graded and marked, a place where work happened rather than a place where anything grew. Workers dismantled the underground shelves piece by piece, cataloging what had been on them, and filled the tunnel beneath Lorraine's garage with material that would hold the ground above it. The main chamber was converted into a monitored county storage vault until cataloging finished, its entrance secured, its contents inventoried under lights that had not been there when it was a secret.
Marcus visited weekly. He would park at the end of the street and walk to the fence and stand there while the work went on, and each visit showed him a yard that looked less like his own. There was fencing where the roses had grown, protective coverings over the exposed soil, and red markers driven into the ground in a line where the flower bed had been. He learned the rhythm of the site over those weeks: the mornings when the crew arrived with their cases and clipboards, the afternoons when the cataloging slowed and the workers stood in small groups talking over the open ground, the evenings when the fencing went back up and the yard fell quiet again. He got to know the sound of the work, the scrape of shovels, the murmur of inventory being called out, the occasional clink of something metal being set aside for closer examination. None of it resembled gardening. Gardening had been slow and private, a Saturday rhythm of clearing one more section and finding one more of Celia's labels in the soil. This was methodical and public, and Marcus stood at the fence feeling like a visitor to his own property, which in a legal sense he was, until the county finished what it had started beneath it. He brought nothing on those visits, asked for nothing, and left each time with the same question turning over in his mind: whether a place could survive being saved in this way, dug open, documented, and filled, and still be a garden when the work was done. He watched the markers go in and felt, for the first time since the dumping, something close to defeat, not because he believed Lorraine would escape what she had done, but because the place itself seemed to be disappearing under the process of saving it. The garden had been Celia's, and then his, and now it was a site, and the transformation felt, in those weekly visits, like Lorraine had succeeded after all, not in keeping the chamber, but in destroying the place that had threatened it.
And then, on one of those visits, an investigator brought him a small wooden garden sign, weathered and faded, its paint worn thin by years underground. PEONIES—DO NOT MOVE. Marcus took it in both hands and stared at it, and the first thing he said, before he could think about whether it was a sensible question, was, "Why would anyone steal this?"
The investigator shrugged, a small, tired gesture, and said that perhaps it had been placed in a box with something valuable, swept up with other things during a cleanout and carried underground without anyone stopping to read it. Marcus nodded, but the answer did not satisfy him, and it stayed with him on the drive back to temporary housing and through the night that followed. The sign had no value in the way Lorraine measured value. It could not be sold. It could not be appraised. It could not be entered in a ledger beside a price. It was a piece of painted wood with his aunt's handwriting on it, telling anyone who read it to leave the peonies where they were. That someone had taken it anyway told Marcus something about the system that the files alone had not told him. The system did not distinguish between valuable and beloved. It took what was in the way, what was in the box, what was in the house, and it sorted everything later, by price, by category, by sale date, by whatever label made it manageable.