Found Money (2 page)

Amy wished she could go back in time. Not
way
back. It wasn’t as if she wanted to sip ouzo with Aristotle or tell Lincoln to duck. Less than a fortnight would suffice. Just far enough to avert the computer nightmare she’d been living.

Amy was the computer information systems director at Bailey, Gaslow & Heinz, the premier law firm in the Rocky Mountains. It was her job to keep confidential information flowing freely and securely between the firm’s offices in Boulder, Denver, Salt Lake City, Washington, London, and Moscow. Day in and day out, she had the power to bring two hundred attorneys groveling to their knees. And she had the privilege of hearing them scream. Simultaneously. At her.

As if
I
created the virus
, she thought, thinking of what she wished she had said to one accusatory partner. He was miles behind her now, but she was still thinking about it. Driving alone on the highway was a great place to put things exactly as they should have been.

It had taken almost a week to purge the entire system, working eighteen-hour days, traveling to six different offices. She had everyone up and running in some capacity within the first twenty-four hours, and she ultimately salvaged over 95 percent of the stored data. Still, it wasn’t a pleasant experi
ence to have to tell a half-dozen unlucky lawyers that, like Humpty Dumpty, their computers and everything on them were DOA.

It was a little-known fact, but Amy had witnessed it firsthand: Lawyers
do
cry.

A sudden rattle in the dashboard snagged Amy’s attention. Her old Ford pickup truck had plenty of squeaks and pings. Each was different, and she knew them all, like a mother who could sense whether her baby’s cry meant feed me, change me, or please get Grandma out of my face. This particular noise was more of a clunk—an easy problem to diagnose, since torrid hot air was suddenly blowing out of the air conditioning vents. Amy switched off the A-C and tried rolling down the window. It jammed. Perfect. Ninety-two degrees outside, her truck was spewing dragon’s breath, and the damn window refused to budge. It was an old saw in Colorado that people visited for the winters but moved there for the summers. They obviously didn’t mean
this
.

I’m melting,
she thought, borrowing from
The Wizard of Oz
.

She grabbed the
Rocky Mountain News
from the floor and fanned herself for relief. The week-old paper marked the day she had sent her daughter off to visit her ex-husband for the week, so that she could devote all her energy to the computer crisis. Six straight days away from Taylor was a new record, one she hoped would never be broken. Even dead tired, she couldn’t wait to see her.

Amy was driving an oven on wheels by the time she reached the Clover Leaf Apartments, a boring collection of old two-story red brick buildings. It was a far cry from the cachet Boulder addresses that pushed the average price of a home to more
than a quarter-million dollars. The Clover Leaf was government-subsidized housing, an eyesore to anyone but penurious students and the fixed-income elderly. Landscaping was minimal. Baked asphalt was plentiful. Amy had seen warehouse districts with more architectural flair. It was as if the builder had decided that nothing man-made could ever be as beautiful as the jagged mountaintops in the distance, so why bother even trying? Even so, there was a four-year waiting list just to get in.

A jolt from a speed bump launched her to the roof. The truck skidded to a halt in the first available parking space, and Amy jumped out. After a minute or two, the redness in her face faded to pink. She was looking like herself again. Amy wasn’t one to flaunt it, but she could easily turn heads. Her ex-husband used to say it was the long legs and full lips. But it was much more than that. Amy gave off a certain energy whenever she moved, whenever she smiled, whenever she looked through those big gray-blue eyes. Her grandmother had always said she had her mother’s boundless energy—and Gram would know.

Amy’s mother had died tragically twenty years ago, when Amy was just eight. Her father had passed away even earlier. Gram had essentially raised her. She
knew
Amy; she’d even seen the warning signs in her ex-husband before Amy had. Four years ago, Amy was a young mother trying to balance a marriage, a newborn, and graduate studies in astronomy. Her daughter and coursework left little time for Ted—meaning too little time to keep an eye on him. He found another woman. After the divorce, she moved in with Gram, who helped with Taylor. Good jobs weren’t easy to find
in Boulder, a haven for talented and educated young professionals who wanted the quintessential Colorado lifestyle. Amy would have loved to stick with astronomy, but money was tight, and a graduate degree in astronomy wouldn’t change that. Even her computer job hadn’t changed that. Her paycheck barely covered the basic living expenses for the three of them. Anything left over was stashed away for law school, which was coming in September.

For Amy, a career in law was an economic decision, not an emotional one. She was certain she’d meet plenty of classmates just like her—art historians, English literature majors, and dozens more who had abandoned all hope of finding work in the field they loved.

Amy just wished there were another way.

“Mommy, Mommy!”

Amy whirled at the sound of her daughter’s voice. She was wearing her favorite pink dress and red tennis shoes. The left half of her very blonde hair was in a pigtail. The other flowed in the breeze, another lost barrette. She peeled down the walkway and leaped into Amy’s arms.

“I missed you so much,” said Amy, squeezing her daughter tightly.

Taylor laughed, then made a face. “Eww, you’re all wet.”

Amy wiped away the sweat she’d transferred from her cheek to Taylor’s. “Mommy’s truck has a little fever.”

“Gram says you should just sell that heap of junk.”

“Never,” said Amy. Her mother used to own that heap of junk. It was about the only thing she’d managed to come away with in the divorce. That, and
her daughter. She lowered Taylor to the ground. “So, how is your dad?”

“Fine. He promised to come visit us.”

“Us?”

“Uh-huh. He said he’ll come see you and me at the party.”

“What party?”

“
Our
party. For when you gradgy-ate law school and when I gradgy-ate high school.”

Amy blinked twice, ignoring the sting. “He actually said that?”

“Law school takes a long time, huh, Mommy?”

“Not that long, sweetheart. It’ll be over before we know it.”

Gram came up from behind them, nearly panting as she spoke. “I have
never
seen a four-year-old run that fast.”

Taylor giggled. Gram welcomed Amy back with a smile, then grimaced. “For goodness sakes, you’re an absolute stick. Have you been living on nothing but caffeine again?”

“No, I swear I tried taking a little coffee with it this time.”

“Get inside and let me fix you something to eat.”

Amy was too tired to think about food. “I’ll just throw something quick in the microwave.”

“Microwave,” Gram scoffed. “I may be old, but it’s not like I have to rub two sticks together to heat up a late lunch. By the time you’re out of the shower, I’ll have a nice hot meal waiting for you.”

Along with a month’s supply of fat and calories
, thought Amy. Gram was from the old school of everything, including diet. “Okay,” she said as she grabbed her suitcase from the back of the truck. “Let’s go inside.”

The threesome walked hand in hand across the
parking lot, with Taylor swinging like a monkey between them.

“Home again, Mommy’s home again!” said Taylor in a singsong voice.

Amy inserted the key and opened the door. Home was a simple two-bedroom, one-bath apartment. The main living area was a combination living room, dining room, and playroom. Gram sometimes said “the girls” had turned it into one big storage room. Bicycles and Rollerblades cluttered the small entrance; the small ones were Taylor’s, the big ones were Amy’s. There was an old couch and matching armchair, typical renter’s furniture. An old pine wall unit held books, a few plants, and a small television. To the right was a closet-size kitchen, more of a kitchenette.

Amy dropped her suitcase at the door.

“Let me get started in the kitchen,” said Gram.

“I help!” Taylor shouted.

“Wash your hands first,” said Amy.

Taylor dashed toward the bathroom. Gram followed. “Your mail’s on the table, Amy. Along with your phone messages.” She disappeared down the hall, right on Taylor’s heels.

Amy crossed the room to the table. A week’s worth of mail was stacked neatly in piles: personal, bills, and junk. The biggest stack was bills, some of them second notices. The personal mail wasn’t personal at all—mostly that computer-generated junk written in preprinted script to make it look like a letter from an old friend. In the bona fide junk pile, a package caught her eye. There was no return address on it. No postage or postmark, either. It appeared to have been hand-delivered, possibly by a private courier service. For its size, it seemed heavy.

Curious, she tore away the brown paper wrapping, revealing a box bearing a picture of a Crock-Pot. She shook it. It didn’t feel like a Crock-Pot. It felt like something more solid was inside, as if the box had been filled with cement. The ends had been retaped, too, suggesting the Crock-Pot had been replaced with something else. She slit the duct tape with her key and opened the flaps. A thick plastic lining encased the contents, some kind of waterproof bag with a zipper. There was no note or card, nothing to reveal the identity of the sender. She unzipped the bag, then froze.

“Oh my God.”

Benjamin Franklin was staring back at her, many times over. Hundred-dollar bills.
Stacks
of them. She removed one bundle, then another, laying them side by side on the table. Her hands shook as she counted the bills in one stack. Fifty per stack. Forty stacks.

She lowered herself into the chair, staring at the money in quiet disbelief. Someone—an anonymous someone—had sent her two hundred thousand dollars.

And she had no idea why.

Lazy swirls of orange, pink and purple hovered on the horizon in the afterglow of another southern Colorado sunset. From the covered wood porch of his boyhood home, thirty-five-year-old Ryan Duffy stared pensively at what seemed like nature’s daily reminder that endings could be beautiful. The spectacle slowly faded into darkness, a lonely black sky with no moon or stars. The brief burst of color had nearly fooled him. He felt guilty now for having thought even for a moment that his father might be better off dead.

Ryan’s old man had lived his sixty-two years by one simple rule: “last” was the most vulgar of four-letter words. For Frank Duffy, there was no such thing as second place, no ranking of priorities. Everything was first. God, family, job—he devoted unflagging energy to each. A tireless working slug who never missed a Sunday service, never let his family down, never left a job site before someone had said, “That man Duffy is the best damn electrician in the business.” Only in the most important battle of his life did he seemingly
avoid
being first.

He was the last to admit that his cancer would kill him.

Not until the pain was unbearable did he finally concede he couldn’t beat it on his own. Ryan was furious with him for shunning medicine. Being a
doctor had only seemed to make his incessant pleas
less
credible, as if Ryan were just another one of those test-crazy physicians Frank Duffy had never trusted. As it turned out, treatment would only have prolonged the inevitable—two months, maybe three, tops. Ryan would have welcomed any extra time. Had the tables been turned, however, he knew he might well have displayed the same stubborn denial. Ryan enjoyed it when people said he was just like his father, and they looked so much alike that comparisons were inevitable. Both were handsome, with warm brown eyes. His father had long ago gone completely gray, and Ryan was on his way, with distinguished flecks of gray in his thick dark mane. At six-one he was the taller of the two, though he would have been the last to point out that his proud father was shrinking in his old age.

The sun was completely gone now, dipping below the flat horizon. After dark, the plains of southeastern Colorado were like a big ocean. Flat and peaceful, not a city light in sight. A good place to raise a family. No crime to speak of. The nearest shopping mall was in Pueblo, a blue-collar city a hundred miles to the west. The closest fancy restaurant was in Garden City, Kansas, even farther to the east. Some said Piedmont Springs was in the middle of nowhere. For Ryan, it was right where it ought to be.

Ryan had supported his father’s decision to spend his few remaining days at home. Frank Duffy was well liked among the town’s twelve hundred residents, but the two-hour trek to the hospital was making it hard for his oldest friends to say their final goodbyes. Ryan had set his father up in the rear of the house, in his favorite sitting room. A
rented hospital bed with chrome railings and adjustable mattress replaced the rustic pine sofa with forest-green cushions. Beyond the big bay window was a vegetable garden with knee-high corn and bushy green tomato plants. Ash-oak floors and beamed cedar ceilings completed the cabin feeling. It used to be the cheeriest room in the house.

“Did you get it?” his father asked eagerly as Ryan entered the room.

Ryan smirked as he took the bottle from the paper sack in his hand: a fifth of Jameson Irish Whiskey.

His face beamed. “Good boy. Set ’em up.”

He put two glasses on the bed tray in his father’s lap, then poured two fingers into each.

“You know the really good thing about Irish whiskey, Ryan?” He raised his glass in a toast, smiling wryly. “It’s
Irish.
To your health, laddie,” he said in an exaggerated brogue.

The hand was shaking, Ryan noticed, not from drinking but from his illness. He was even more pale today than yesterday, and his weakened body seemed shapeless, almost lifeless, beneath the wrinkled white sheets. In silence, they belted back one last round together. His father finished with a crooked smile of satisfaction.

“I still remember the first drink you ever took,” he said with nostalgia in his eyes. “You were a spunky little eleven-year-old, pestering my old man for a sip. Your grandmother said go ahead and give it to him, thinking you’d spit it out like medicine and learn your lesson. You threw your head back, guzzled it right down and slammed the glass on the table, like some cowboy in the movies. You wanted to cough so bad your eyes were nearly popping out of your head. But you just dragged your
sleeve across your lips, looked your grandma in the eye and said, ‘Better than sex.’”

They shared a weak laugh. Then his father gave him a searching look. “That’s the first time I’ve seen you smile in I don’t know how long.”

“Guess I haven’t felt much like smiling. Didn’t feel much like drinking tonight, either.”

“What do you propose we do? Make a few phone calls, cancel the disease? Look,” he said warmly, “the way I see it, we can either laugh in the face of death, or we can die trying not to. So be a sport and pour your old man another drink.”

“I don’t think you’d better, Dad. Painkillers and alcohol aren’t a good mix.”

“God, you’re always so damned responsible, Ryan.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing. I admire you for that, actually. Wish I were more like you. People always said we’re exactly alike, but that’s just on the surface. Not that it wasn’t cute when you used to sit at the breakfast table and make like you were reading the sports section with me, trying to be just like Dad, even though you were two years old and didn’t know how to read yet. But all that was just pretend. On the inside, where it counts—well, let’s just say that you and I are far more different than you’d think.”

He paused and placed his glass on the tray. All humor had left his face. He was suddenly philosophical. “Do you believe that good people can turn bad?”

“Sure,” Ryan said with a shrug.

“I mean
really
bad, like criminals. Or do you think some things are so unspeakable, so heinous, that only someone who was bad from the very beginning could have done them?”

“I guess I don’t think anyone’s
born
bad. People have their own free will. They make choices.”

“So why would someone choose to be bad if they’re not bad?”

“Because they’re weak, I guess. Too weak to choose what’s good, too weak to resist what’s evil.”

“Do you think the weak can become strong?” He propped himself up on his elbow at the edge of the mattress, looking Ryan in the eye. “Or once you turn toward evil are you like rotten fruit, gone forever?”

Ryan smiled awkwardly, not sure where this was headed. “Why are you asking me this?”

He lay back and sighed. “Because dying men take stock. And I am surely dying.”

“Come on, Dad. You’re devoted to Mom. Both your children love you. You’re a good man.”

“The best you can say is that I’ve
become
a good man.”

The ominous words hung in the air. “Everybody does bad things,” Ryan said tentatively. “That doesn’t make them bad.”

“That’s the fundamental difference between you and me, son. You would never have done what I did.”

Ryan sipped nervously from his empty glass, unsure of what to say, fearing some kind of confession. The drapes moved in the warm breeze.

His father continued, “There’s an old chest of drawers in the attic. Move it. Beneath the floorboards, I’ve left something for you. Some money. A lot of it.”

“How much?”

“Two million dollars.”

Ryan froze, then burst out laughing. “That’s a good one, Dad. Two million in the attic. And hell,
all this time I thought you had it hidden in the mattress.” He was smiling, shaking his head. Then he stopped.

His father wasn’t smiling.

Ryan swallowed hard, a little nervous. “Come on. You’re joking, right?”

“There’s two million dollars in the attic, Ryan. I put it there myself.”

“Where the hell would you get two million dollars?”

“That’s what I’m trying to explain. You’re not making this easy.”

Ryan took the bottle from the tray. “Yup, I’d say that’s about enough horsing around. Whiskey on top of painkillers has you hallucinating.”

“I blackmailed a man. Someone who deserved it.”

“Dad, cut it out. You were in no position to blackmail anybody.”

“
Yes
, I was, damn it!” He spoke with such force, he started a coughing fit.

Ryan came to him and adjusted the pillows behind his back. His father was wheezing, gasping between coughs. The phlegm in his mouth was coming up bloody. Ryan pushed the emergency call button for the home care nurse in the next room. She arrived in seconds.

“Help me,” said Ryan. “Sit him up straight so he doesn’t choke.”

She did as instructed. Ryan wheeled the oxygen tank alongside the bed. He opened the valve and placed the respirator in his father’s mouth. Home oxygen supply was a drill the whole family knew well, as he’d suffered from emphysema long before the terminal cancer developed. After a few deep breaths, the wheezing subsided. Breathing slowly returned to normal.

“Dr. Duffy, I don’t mean to question your professional judgment, but I think your father should rest now. He’s had way too much activity for one night.”

He knew she was right, but his father’s eyes gave him pause. Ryan had expected the glazed, delirious look of a sedated man who was making up crazy stories about blackmail. But the dark old eyes were sharp and expressive. They not only spoke without words, they spoke intelligently. They had Ryan thinking,
Could he be serious?

“I’ll be back in the morning, Dad. We can talk then.”

His father seemed to appreciate the reprieve, as if he had said enough for one night. Ryan pulled away, forcing a meager smile. He started to say “I love you,” like he always did, fearful as he was that each conversation might be their last. This time he just turned and left the room, his mind racing. It was inconceivable, really—his father a blackmailer to the tune of two million dollars. Never, however, had Ryan seen his father more serious.

If this was a joke, it was frightfully convincing. And not the least bit funny.

Damn it, Dad,
he thought as he left the house.
Please don’t make me hate you.