I taped the light to the inside of the door and opened the unit from the hallway. Everything looked exactly as it had during the auction: furniture along the back wall, boxes stacked neatly, nothing obviously valuable. Then I noticed something strange — a narrow strip of fresh tape running along the floor beneath one of the wardrobes.
I moved the wardrobe and found a small metal access panel I’d never noticed before. It wasn’t part of the unit’s original construction. The screws were newer than everything around them, and one had been recently scratched, as if someone had opened it in a hurry. I called the manager, but he told me the building plans didn’t show any access panel there.
I removed the screws and found a shallow cavity behind it. Inside was a plastic envelope containing several photographs, an old phone, and a handwritten list of dates. The dates matched the twenty-two months of rent someone had secretly paid after the previous renter stopped making payments.
The phone still had enough charge to turn on. There was only one saved contact, no name, just a number. And when I opened the last message sent from it, my stomach dropped. It had been written the day before the auction and said: “If someone else owns Unit 114 now, don’t let them open the back wall…”
