On one quiet Thursday in the bookshop, I was flicking through a donated book of poetry (I forget which poetry it was exactly, which is a shame) whilst deciding a price for it. To my excitement, I found an American $20 bill inside... followed by another one... and another... It turned out that hidden between the pages of the book was a total of $300!
From this VERY exciting discovery I deduced that the money was either:
1) Stashed inside the book as a hiding place by a drug dealer, spy on the run, or desperate housewife saving for her escape. In this instance, the book must have accidentally been donated by the drug dealer himself, wondering why he had a book of poetry on his shelf which he has never read; or the spy's enemies after having raided and cleared his house for clues (perhaps said enemies felt a jolt of guilt after said raiding of house and tried to regain some good karma by donating the spy's belongings to charity). If the book did however belong to a desperate housewife (the sad, abused kind rather than the sexy sit-com kind), chances are her abusive husband donated the book, along with the secret stash of money in his furious bid to remove all poetic escape from his wife's life so that she can concentrate purely on making his dinner on time.
2) A secret code! I realise now, all to late, that rather than hastily and giddily grab the dollars from their hiding places in order to create a wad of cash to throw up into the air and dance around in, laughing manically as they fell back down to earth, I should have written down the exact page numbers each note was found between, before adding these numbers up, dividing them by 300 and using this result to count out however many words down the selected pages to eventually spell out a sentence. This sentence would most probably contain some vital information which I would then use to solve a mystery, or find the original owner of the poetry book who would probably be locked up in a cellar somewhere by an evil man who spends his days burning poetry books in front of his prisoner.
3- and the most probable option) A sneaky donation from an American traveller or scholar, who most probably knew that hiding money in a book for an unsuspecting volunteer to find was a much more fun and exciting way to donate money to a charity than to just hand over a cheque to a more expectant shop manager or postal service.
Whatever the source of my discovery, it certainly made my week. I would also like to point out that as tempting as it may have been to stuff the cash down my bra and run off to catch the next flight to New York, I did obviously hand the money in for charity.
*Disclaimer: I may have written this blog after a few glasses of wine. This certainly does not mean that what I have written is untrue or overly fanatical.
