Bud Crevasse shows the pendant he found. Its rightful owner was found and the pendant was returned. It contains cremation ashes of the owner’s husband. 
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Joye Wessells, a Signal Mountain widow, was reading the Times Free Press at her kitchen table last Thursday morning when she got a startling surprise.
In this space was a photograph of a gold-plated pendant someone had found in the Wal-Mart parking lot at the foot of Signal Mountain.
“That’s got to be mine,” Wessells thought to herself. She immediately left a message on my work phone.
Days earlier, Wessells had lost a locket that contained cremated ashes from her husband of 55 years, Jack Wessells, who died July 2 after an extended illness.
Not only was Wessells sure it was her locket, she even recognized the newspaper photo of the man who found it, 87-year-old Bud Crevasse, who lives at Alexian Village on Signal Mountain.
Crevasse had contacted the newspaper in hopes publicity about his discovery would help identify the pendant’s owner.
I met with Crevasse last week and later took the pendant to a local jeweler, who confirmed Crevasse’s suspicion that it contained someone’s ashes.
But whose?
Here’s how the mystery unfolded.
One day in late October, Joye Wessells said, she returned to her car at the Wal-Mart on Signal Mountain Road and noticed the gold chain around her neck felt awry.
At first she thought the locket, which had slipped off the broken chain, might be stuck in her clothes.
“I undressed myself looking for it – as much as you can undress in a Wal-Mart parking lot,” she explained.
Then, she said, she retraced her steps back into the store.
“When I lost it, I was sick,” she said. “I never expected to get it back.”
Earlier that day she had visited a friend who lives in the Highway 58 area. Alerted about the loss, her friend got out his metal detector and searched for the pendant in his front yard.
Nothing.
When I returned the locket to Wessells at her house on Signal Mountain last Thursday, she agreed to talk to me about her husband.
“My husband would have gotten the biggest kick out of this,” Wessells said. “He would have said, ‘Why did you put it on such a cheap chain?'”
As we sat at her kitchen table, she told me about her marriage.
John H. Wessells, also known as Jack, was a retired salesman and administrator, she said. Jack and Joye were married in 1964 and moved to Chattanooga from Delaware in 1969 for Jack’s job as a salesman for Du Pont.
The Wessellses became avid motorcycle riders. After Jack’s retirement, they took extended vacations to Florida each year. Sometimes they attended classic car auctions, where Jack built his collection of vintage automobiles.
“There wasn’t anything he wanted to do that he didn’t get to do,” said Joye, tearing up a little. “Sorry, I’m still a little raw around the edges.”
When Jack died, Joye said, she learned about cremation jewelry at the funeral home, and later ordered the piece online.
After she lost the first locket, she replaced it with another from the same company, she said.
When she saw the story in the newspaper, Joye said, she immediately called Bud Crevasse. Years ago, she had taken a real estate class with Crevasse’s late wife.
When we first talked on the phone, Joye identified the piece by telling me the inscription on the side, which I had not revealed in the column last week.
“It says ‘LVU Jack,'” she said. “‘Love You Jack’ wouldn’t fit.”
For his part, Crevasse was joyful about the piece finding its way back to its rightful owner.
“Makes me happy,” he said.
Me, too, Bud. Me, too.
Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 423-645-8937.