A book sale volunteer in Arizona who found thousands of dollars hidden inside a hollowed-out book tracked down the owner and returned the money.
Cathy McAllister, a retired schoolteacher and bibliophile, said she was “speechless” after she discovered stacks of cash worth $4,000 hidden inside a tattered copy of The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire.
“I was totally stunned,” McAllister, who has been volunteering with the Volunteer Nonprofit Service Association (VNSA) since 2012, told Fox News on Tuesday. “Truly I was unable to find words. There were people in the category next to mine talking. I just took the open book and interrupted the conversation until I was able to say, “Look what I found!'”
McAllister was leafing through the pages of the book, and was about to put it in the discard pile instead of putting it up for sale when she noticed several wads of cash containing hundred-dollar bills.
“I don’t know what that was, I was literally throwing it in the discards,” she said. “It was just a feeling.”
McAllister was so stunned at what she found that she initially did not think the money was real.
“I look down in there and I thought, ‘It’s monopoly money. Oh how fun,’ but it’s not monopoly money. It was all banded as it comes from the bank. It was four packages of $100 bills,” McAllister told Fox 10.
But the full-time volunteer also found a family letter, which listed the owner of the money, entrenched in the book’s pages. Within ten minutes of finding the letter, she was able to locate the family behind the hidden treasure.
“It was a little bit surprising because this gentleman came down with his adult daughter, and she said now you can slap him,’ and I said, ‘No, that’s your job,” McAllister joked.
McAllister said she returned the money because of her strong values and faith-based upbringing.
“My values were grounded in our faith – that the church taught us what was right and wrong. It just becomes who you are after a while,” she told Fox News.
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