The Petty Cash Drawer That Kept Refilling Itself

Most people worry when money goes missing. We had the opposite problem, and I promise you it is worse.

I managed the petty cash tin in a small architecture firm, eleven people, one very serious safe that mostly held a stapler nobody trusted anyone else with. The tin was for coffee runs, stamps, the birthday cake fund. I counted it the first Monday of every month because I am the sort of person who likes a number to be a number.

The first time it was over, I assumed I had miscounted. We should have had one hundred and sixty dollars. We had two hundred. I recounted four times. Forty dollars, appeared from nowhere, in singles and one crisp twenty. I asked around. Nobody had put money in. Nobody wanted forty dollars removed either, which, fair.

I logged it and moved on. Then it happened again the next month. Exactly forty over. And the month after that. It did not matter how much we had spent on cake and stamps. Whatever the tin should have held, it held forty dollars more, always in a mix of singles and one crisp twenty, always on or before the first Monday.

I know how this sounds. I know forty free dollars a month is not a crisis. But sit with it. Someone in that office, someone I said good morning to, was secretly funding the petty cash and did not want credit for it. That is not generosity. That is a person with a secret, and the secret was leaking out forty dollars at a time.

I got obsessive. I marked the twenties with a tiny pencil dot in the corner and watched to see where they went. I came in early. I stayed late. I once hid in the supply closet with the door cracked for two hours pretending to organize toner, which is how I learned that our office is much lonelier at seven in the morning than I wanted to know.