Over the years I’ve suspected probably eight different people. I’m not going to list them all because most of them are still members and some of them are dead. The first person I suspected was Harold Birch, because he was the kind of man who would do something quietly generous and never say a word about it, and he always sat in the same pew near the back.

I was pretty sure it was Harold for about three years. Then Harold had a stroke and moved to his daughter’s place in Tucson, and the envelope kept coming. So not Harold.

For a while I thought it might be someone who didn’t even attend regularly, maybe someone who had some connection to the building or the congregation from a long time ago. I thought about that a lot. The building has been here since 1962. There are people who were baptized here, married here, buried their parents here, and then moved away and never came back. Any one of them could have been slipping an envelope into the plate for decades and I’d have no way of knowing.

I told my husband, Ray, about it once, maybe ten years ago. He said it sounded like something from a movie and asked if I was sure it wasn’t counterfeit. It wasn’t counterfeit. I checked. Every time.

The total, as of last Sunday, is sixty-four thousand eight hundred dollars. I have a spreadsheet now, the official one, and then my personal notebook at home that I’ve kept updated separately since the beginning. I have never told another soul about the notebook. I don’t know why. It just felt like it belonged to whoever was leaving the envelopes, not to the church, not yet.

So. This past Monday.

I got there at my usual time, maybe eight-fifteen. Made myself a coffee from home because the machine there is still broken and I’ve stopped hoping.

Sat down, opened the lock box, started sorting. The envelope was in there like always, same white, same pencil lettering on the front. But it was thicker than usual. I noticed right away. I set it aside and finished counting everything else first, which I realize sounds methodical to the point of being strange, but I think I needed a minute. I think some part of me already felt like something was different.

When I finally opened it, there was the cash, same as always, two hundred dollars. And there was the letter, one page, folded in half and then in half again. The handwriting was the same pencil print I recognized but more labored, like it had taken more effort than usual to get the letters down. It started with those two lines.

“It’s time. Before you spend it, you need to know about the bell.”