The soggy paper felt like a wet leaf against my palm until I smoothed it out on the kitchen counter. It was a crisp Benjamin Franklin, dripping with a strange, chemical-smelling residue. My gray tabby, Max, sat on the floor, purring as if he’d just brought me a prize trout.
I checked the window, wondering if a neighbor had dropped their wallet in the rain. But the nearest house was two miles away, and the sky had been bone-dry for three days. Where on earth was a farm cat finding a hundred dollars in the middle of a drought?
The next morning, it happened again, but this time it was doubled. Max trotted through the cat door at 6 AM, dropped two more wet bills at my feet, and immediately started grooming his damp fur. The bills weren’t just wet; they were slick with a translucent, oily film.
By the end of the week, my kitchen table looked like a high-stakes poker game gone wrong. I had counted $800 in total, all of it smelling like a mixture of lemon floor cleaner and diesel fuel. I looked at Max, who was staring intently at the treeline behind my barn.
Whatever was out there, it wasn’t a lost wallet; it was a fountain of cash. I knew I couldn’t just keep the money, but I also knew I couldn’t go to the authorities without knowing the source. I went to the local hardware store and bought the smallest GPS tracker they had.
The device felt heavy in my hand as I clipped it to Max’s collar that night. He didn’t seem to mind, darting out into the tall grass of the Ohio farmland the moment I opened the door. I sat by my laptop, watching the red dot on the screen move steadily away from the house.
He wasn’t headed for the neighbors or the creek where he usually hunted. The dot was moving toward the isolated stretch of Highway 42, a place where the road was hugged by deep concrete drainage culverts.
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