I peeled the tape, lifted the lid, and the breath went straight out of me.
Gold. Coins — old ones, heavy ones — and silver dollars stacked in paper rolls, and down in the corner a little velvet sleeve of what turned out to be collectible currency, crisp bills older than my grandfather. The whole cigar box was packed solid with it, a careful collection built over what must have been decades. The fast-talking stranger who’d taken my four grand and peeled out of that parking lot had hidden his own little fortune under the dinette of the junker he was dumping — and in his hurry to fleece me and run, he’d driven off and left it sitting right there.
I sat down in that dead motorhome and just stared. My brother-in-law’s voice was still ringing in my ears: you got took, plain and simple, that’s a lawn ornament. I started laughing, the kind of laugh that’s half disbelief, because the “lawn ornament” was sitting on a stack of coins worth many times what I’d paid for the whole rig.
Now, I’ll tell you the honest part. I tried to give it back. A man’s nest egg is a man’s nest egg, even a crook’s. But the phone number on the listing was dead, the name he’d given me was fake, and the Marketplace account had vanished the same day he did. He’d covered his tracks so well swindling me that he’d made himself impossible to pay back. Whatever he was running from, he ran right past his own savings to do it.
I had the collection appraised by a proper dealer two towns over, and the number he gave me made me sit down again. Even after the busted motorhome, even after the tow, even after every dollar I thought I’d wasted, I was thousands and thousands ahead.
My brother-in-law doesn’t bring up the parking lot anymore. The last time he tried, I just smiled and asked if he wanted to see my “lawn ornament” — then I showed him a single gold coin and watched his jaw come unhinged.
I kept one of the coins out and had it made into a money clip, and I carry it as a reminder. Sometimes the worst deal of your life is just a good one wearing a disguise. The man thought he robbed me. He robbed himself, and tipped me besides — and never even knew it.