Whatever it is, it's pretty large.  You clear away the top layer of mulch, and revealed is the top of some kind of chest.

    "Could somebody have buried a treasure in Poppy's mulch pile?" you wonder.

    Several minutes of digging clears away enough mulch so that you can grasp the handles on either side of the chest.

    You pull up on them, but it's heavy, and still pretty well stuck in the mulch.

    Rather than pull it up, you work on digging away at the front of the chest so that perhaps you can open it right where it rests.

    There's lock on the front, but you pull out a skeleton key from the back of your underpants.  A moment later, you lift the top of the unlocked chest...

    Good Lord above!

    Hundreds... no, perhaps thousands of photographs... arranged haphazardly... of people you know... in varying amounts of dress... doing... very private things!

    And then it dawns on you.  After years and years of hearing rumors of its existence -- which you never believed to be true -- you have, unwittingly, here amongst all this mulch, discovered what many Powells have long feared might actually exist:

    Danny's secret archive of family photos.

    A lifetime's compilation of secret, undercover photography -- never spoken of directly by Danny himself, but on some extremely rare occasions, ever-so-subtly made reference to.

    And now here it is before your very eyes.

    Your eyes are bulging, and your jaw hangs slack as your visual senses are overloaded with countless images of family and friends as you've never seen them before.

    Nannie and Poppy... Pam and Mark... Lucia and Bob... Stephen and Deborah... BOOG and Deborah... Sarah and Toomey... Ross and Katie... you with Sandy... Sarah with Milty... Katie with Shven... Toomey with Ricardo's monkey... Merv with Sandy  ...Merv with Pam  ...Uncle Bud with Nannie  ...BOOG and Milty  ...Sandy with Uncle Billy's pig!  ...You with Pam!  ...And more, too much more to go through all at once.

    Every single holy and unholy union of Powells and friends has been somehow secretly photo-documented and collected here -- not to mention Danny's impressively large archive of nude self-portraits.

    Deeply affected, you close the chest for a moment to think.

    <<Wham!>>  <<Wham!>>  <<Wham!>>

    Just at that moment, you are clobbered over the head repeatedly with a hoe.

    Then just as suddenly as it began, the beating halts.

    "Shit, Brad, is that you?" says Poppy.

    You fall over, unconscious.

    ...

    When you come-to, you're lying on the couch in the living room of Poppy's house.  On the TV is golf.  Poppy sits in his chair smoking his pipe.  There's an ice pack on your head.

    "Dad?" you say.

    "Dammit, Brad," says Poppy.  "I've been telling you since you were a kid not to go digging around that mulch pile...  You know my vision's not what it used to be.  ...Thought you were that damn woodchuck again.  I jumped out the second-story bathroom window and grabbed my hoe just so I could clobber 'im."

    "Sorry, Dad," you say.

    Suddenly remembering the buried treasure you unearthed, you sit up straight.

    "Where are you going?" asks Poppy.  "Better leave that ice on there a while longer and just rest if you--"

    Though your head is throbbing, you walk out of the living room with Poppy still talking.  You head through the kitchen, and out the back door.

    Holding the ice-pack against your head, you painfully make your way across the backyard and over to the mulch pile.  No sign of any unearthed photo chest.  You pick up Poppy's hoe and poke through the mulch for a while, but it's no use.

    It's gone.

    And all evidence you had of its existence is now vanished.

    Dismayed, you walk back to the house and enter the basement.

    You lie down in the cold floor and rest your aching head.

    Could it all have been just your imagination?

    No.  You know what you saw.  The worst thing you could do is to doubt yourself now.  That'd be playing into the hands of The Man.

    You believe.

    ...The pictures are out there.