One of our neighbors is a good ol’ boy in his middle sixties named Sonny. He didn’t talk much when we first moved in, he just waved when we’d see him out in the backyard sweeping the ground with a metal detector. This spring Sonny started talking to me more when he’d see me working in the yard early in the morning. We talk about the neighborhood, the history of our properties, and what he’s found in our yards with his metal detector. Last weekend he and Jackie, his wife, insisted I come over and have breakfast with them and he showed me a half-dime that was produced in 1853.

Well tonight he called me over to the chain link fence and told me he’d found a real treasure. Seems that Sonny is redoing someone’s floor and while he was working in the crawlspace, a Crown Royal bag fell out from between the floor joists. He opened it and found a knot of $100 bills held together loosely by rotten rubber bands. He asked the owner of the house how long she’d been in the house and she told him eight years. He took the wad home and counted the bills – all 140 of them – and fretted about what to with the $14,000 find. In the end he decided that he had to hand it over to the house owner even if the money was stashed away by a previous resident.

When he got to the job site this morning the homeowner’s brother approached him and demanded to know if he’d found anything in the floor. Turns out he’d gone to check on his stash and found that Sonny had replaced the loose board with new flooring and he was hell bent on recovering his loot. Sonny handed him the bag, and the guy asked him to keep the find to himself because it’s “secret money.”

“I’ve been dyin’ to tell somebody,” Sonny said. “I found real treasure. I swear it’s the truth.” Sonny shook his head and laughed. “I spent that money already in my head. I thought, ‘I’ma gonna git me a new metal detector,” he said.