My tenant left a deposit envelope taped inside the medicine cabinet with two thousand dollars in it. He moved out clean in May, left a key and a note that said thank you, and nothing else. The envelope had a date on it from 2017 and was addressed to the man who owned this house before me. He died in 2019, his family sold the house to me in 2020, and my tenant moved in that same year without ever meeting him. I tracked the tenant down at his new place and asked him about it, and he went white before saying he’d been leaving one every year.
He told me the first envelope had been given to him by the previous owner himself. He said the man knocked on the door one evening in 2020 and asked him to put an envelope in the medicine cabinet every May. The strange part was that the previous owner had already been dead for almost a year when my tenant moved in. I asked what the man looked like, and my tenant described him without hesitation. Then he said there had always been one rule: never open the envelope, and never leave it anywhere except that cabinet.
I asked him why he had kept doing it, and he said because every year another envelope appeared before he could leave the new one. He had assumed someone from the man’s family was coming into the house, but he never saw anyone enter. He showed me photographs he’d taken of the cabinet over the years, and there was an envelope in every picture. I asked whether he still had the old ones, and he said he had thrown them away after each year because they weren’t his. Then he stopped and said there was one exception.
He had kept the envelope from 2019 because it had his name written on the back. I opened it carefully, and inside was a single sheet of paper with a list of dates and names. The final line was dated 2026, with my name beside it, even though the envelope had been written years before I bought the house. Underneath was one sentence: “When the new owner finds this, tell him to check beneath the cabinet.” I removed the medicine cabinet from the wall that evening, and behind it was a narrow compartment containing seven envelopes. The oldest one was addressed to the previous owner, and the newest was addressed to me.
