The gray tabby dropped the soggy paper on my kitchen tile with a wet “slap.” I looked down, expecting a dead mouse, but saw the green face of Benjamin Franklin staring back at me. It was a crisp hundred-dollar bill, soaked to the core.
I picked it up with two fingers, the paper feeling slimy and smelling faintly of chemicals. Max just meowed, swishing his tail before heading back toward the cat door. Where on earth did a house cat find a hundred dollars in the middle of rural Ohio?
The next morning, it happened again, but this time he brought two. I sat at my wooden table, watching the water drip from the bills onto my morning paper. By the end of the week, I had $800 in damp cash drying on my radiator.
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The mystery was eating me alive, and the silence of the surrounding farmland felt heavier than usual. My neighbors were miles away, and the only thing nearby was an abandoned stretch of the old highway. I knew I couldn’t just keep the money without knowing its origin.
I went to the local hardware store and bought the smallest GPS tracker they had in stock. I clipped it to Max’s collar, my hands shaking slightly as I tightened the latch. “Show me where you’re going, buddy,” I whispered as he vanished into the tall grass.
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I pulled up the app on my phone and watched the little blue dot move steadily away from my porch. It bypassed the woods and headed straight for the concrete culverts near the interstate. I grabbed my flashlight and a heavy wrench, just in case.
The dot stopped moving about two miles out, right near a drainage pipe that ran under the main road. I could see Max’s silhouette in the distance, a small gray shadow against the gray concrete. My heart hammered against my ribs as I approached.
