Ryan had to check the attic.
He slipped out of bed and pulled on his jeans, sneakers and a polo shirt. The floorboards creaked beneath his feet. He stepped lightly. His mother was surely awake already, downstairs, at Dad’s bedside. The morning vigil was their time alone. No one was going to deprive her of being with her husband of forty-five years at the moment of his death.
The door creaked open. Ryan peered into the hall. Not a sound. The attic, he recalled, was accessed through a ceiling panel at the end of the upstairs hallway. Ryan skulked like a prowler past the bathroom and guest bedroom, stopping beneath the two-foot length of chain hanging from the ceiling. He pulled. The hatch fell open like a crocodile’s lower jaw. The big springs popped as the ladder unfolded. Ryan cringed at the noise, anticipating his mother’s voice. But he heard nothing. Slowly, making not another sound, he extended the ladder to the floor and locked it into place. He drew a deep breath and began his ascent.
He was sweating almost immediately, besieged by yesterday’s heat. Musty odors tickled his nostrils. A predawn glow seeped through the small east window, creating long shadows, illuminating cobwebs. Ryan tugged the string that dangled from the light socket, but the bare bulb was burned out. He waited, knowing that when his eyes adjusted, the morning light from the window would be sufficient.
Slowly, the past came into view. Ryan and his friends used to play up here, twenty-five years ago. Sarah, his older sister, always used to spy on them. She was the one who had discovered their coveted Playboy magazine. Ryan wasn’t sure if Sarah liked being a good do-bee or if she just liked to see him punished. He wondered what Miss Goody Two-shoes would think now.
Each step across the attic triggered more memories. His first stereo, complete with vinyl records that had long ago melted in the attic’s hundred-plus-degree heat. His sister’s clarinet from the high school band. Seeing all this junk reminded him that soon he would begin his task as executor of the estate, taking inventory of his father’s possessions — the simple belongings of a lifelong wage earner. A rusty set of tools. Extra fishing gear. Stacks of old clothes. Furniture his dad had never gotten around to fixing. And if this was no joke, two million dollars in tainted funds.
It had to be a joke.
Ryan stopped at the old chest of drawers his father had described to him last night. He swallowed hard; its existence confirmed that his father wasn’t completely delusional. But that didn’t mean there was actually money beneath it.
He shoved the chest once. It wouldn’t budge. He shoved harder. It moved an inch, then another. With all his strength, Ryan slid it a good two feet. He glanced at the floor. The boards it had once covered were not nailed down. Ryan knelt down and lifted the loose planks, exposing a layer of fiberglass insulation. He peeled it away. A suitcase was in plain view. Not the typical vacation suitcase. This one was metal, presumably fireproof, like the ones sold in spy shops. Ryan lifted it from the hole and laid it on the floor in front of him. It had a combination lock, but the latches weren’t fixed. Dad had apparently left the tumblers set to the combination, making it easy for his son. Ryan popped the latch and lifted the lid, his eyes bulging at the sight.
“Ho-lee shit.”
It was all there, just as his father had promised. Ryan had never seen two million dollars, but the neat stacks of hundred-dollar bills could easily total up to that much.
Lightly, Ryan raked his fingers over the bills. Although he’d never been driven by money, seeing and touching this much cash sent tingles down his spine. Last night, while lying in bed, he had tried to make himself fall asleep by pretending the money might actually be there and asking himself what he might do with it. In the realm of the hypothetical and highly unlikely, he had resolved to give it all away to charity. He wouldn’t want the fruits of a crime — even if, as Dad had said, the man deserved to be blackmailed. But with all this green staring him in the face, the issues weren’t so black and white. Had he not dedicated his career to a low-income community, he might easily have earned this much cash in a normal-paying medical practice. Maybe this was God’s way of making him whole for a life of good deeds.
Get over yourself, Duffy.
He closed up the suitcase and put it back in the hole, covering it with the insulation and loose planks, just the way he had found it. He slid the heavy chest back in place. Quickly, he retraced his steps to the ladder. He’d deal with the money later. After the funeral.
After one more talk with Dad.
Ryan climbed down the ladder, into the hall. His shirt was dirty and soaked with sweat. He ducked into the bathroom and splashed cold water on his face. He threw his shirt in the hamper, then started toward his room for a clean one. He stopped as he passed the stairwell. It sounded like his mother sobbing in the living room. He hurried down the stairs. She was alone on the couch, shoulders slumped, still wearing her robe and slippers.
“What is it, Mom?”
She looked up, and he knew.
He came to her side, took her in his arms. She’d always been petite, but never so frail.
Her body shook, her voice was quaking. “It was so… peaceful. His touch. His breath. His presence. It all just faded away.”
“It’s okay, Mom.”
“It’s like he was ready,” she said, sniffling. “As if he’d just decided it was time.”
Ryan bristled. As if he’d rather die than face his son again.
His mother shook harder in his arms, the tears flowing freely. He held her close, rocking gently. “Don’t worry,” he whispered, almost speaking to himself. “I’ll take care of everything.”
5
Amy took Monday morning off, arriving at the office during the lunch hour. After six straight days of nonstop work, three thousand travel miles among the firm’s U.S. offices, and immeasurable abuse and aggravation from frantic attorneys, she felt entitled to a few hours with her daughter.
The Boulder office of Bailey, Gaslow & Heinz was on Walnut Street, filling the top three floors of a five-story building. Boulder was the firm’s second-largest office, though with 33 lawyers it was a distant second behind Denver, which had 140. The office prided itself on doing the same quality work and generating the same billable hours per lawyer as Denver. That was the minimum standard set by the new managing-partner-in-residence, a certified workaholic who had moved from Denver to Boulder to whip the satellite office into shape.
“Morning,” said Amy as she breezed by a coworker in the hall. She got a cup of coffee from the lounge, then headed back to her office. The thought of a week’s worth of work piled up on her desk made her dread opening the door.
Her office was small, but she was the only non-lawyer in the firm who had a window and a view. Marilyn Gaslow had pulled strings to get it for her. Marilyn was an influential partner who worked out of Denver. Her grandfather was the “Gaslow” in Bailey, Gaslow & Heinz, one of the founding partners over a century ago. She and Amy’s mother had been friends since high school — best friends until her death. It was Marilyn who had gotten Amy hired as the computer expert, and it was Marilyn who had committed the firm to pay half of Amy’s tuition if she went to law school. The only condition was that Amy had to come back to work at the firm as an associate, putting her valuable law and science background to use in the firm’s nationally recognized environmental law practice. At least, that was supposed to be the only condition. Ever since Amy had accepted the deal, the firm had treated her like slave labor.
She sat down behind her desk and switched on the computer. She had been checking her e-mail from outside the office for the past week, but she had some new messages. One was from Marilyn, just this morning. It read, “Atta girl, Amy. One hell of a job!”
Amy smiled. At least one of the firm’s two hundred lawyers knew how to say thank you for salvaging the computer system. Somehow, however, it didn’t mean quite as much coming from Marilyn, her mother’s old buddy. She scrolled down to the next virtual envelope on her screen. It was from Jason Phelps, head of the
litigation department in the Boulder office. Now, kudos from him would definitely be a breakthrough. She opened it eagerly.
SEE ME! was all it said.
She looked up from her screen and nearly jumped. He was standing in the doorway, scowling. “Mr. Phelps — good morning, sir. Afternoon, I mean.”
“Yes. It is after noon. A big T-ball game for Timmy this morning, I presume?”
Her gut wrenched. It didn’t matter how many nights and weekends she worked. It didn’t matter if she was away on firm business. For a single mother, temporary unavailability always gave rise to the same negative inference.
“Her name is Taylor,” she said coolly. “And she doesn’t play T-ball. Her mother doesn’t have time to take her.”
“I need that joint defense network for the Wilson superfund litigation operable by three o’clock. No later.”
“I have to work through the MIS directors of six different law firms. You want it in two hours?”
“I wanted it yesterday. Today, I need it. I don’t care how you get it done. Just get it done.” He raised a bushy gray eyebrow, then turned and left.
Amy sank in her chair. Things were picking up right where they had left off. I’d like to play T-ball with your head, asshole.
She would have liked to say it to his face, but he would surely pull the plug on the firm’s promise to subsidize her tuition. Then she couldn’t go to law school. And then she couldn’t come back — to this.
“I need a life,” she muttered. She wondered why she put up with it, but she knew the answer. Every two or three months, her ex-husband would remind her. He’d call with another one of his empty offers to pay half of something for Taylor if Amy would pay the other half. Sometimes he was just being disruptive, like the time he told Taylor he’d send her and Amy on a Hawaiian vacation if Mommy would just pay half. Taylor had pranced around the house in a plastic lei and sunglasses for a week before that one blew over. Other times he was just taunting Amy, like his standing offer to put ten thousand dollars into a college fund for Taylor if Amy would come up with the other ten. Things like that — things for Taylor’s future — really made her wish she were in the position to call his bluff.
Maybe she was.
Her eyes lit with a devilish smile. She picked up the phone and dialed his office. His secretary answered.
“I’m sorry,” she told Amy. “He’s in a meeting. Can I take a message?”
The message was right in her head, ready to spring. Taylor’s going to Yale. Pay half of that, you blowhard. But she realized it was premature. The money wasn’t hers. Not yet.
“No message, thank you.” She hung up and came back to reality.
She checked the clock. She’d have to clone herself to meet Mr. Phelps’s three o’clock deadline. She drew a deep breath and returned to the computer, but not for Phelps’s project. A financial planning program appeared on her screen.
She smiled thinly as the computer calculated the interest on two hundred thousand dollars.
The funeral was on Tuesday at St. Edmund’s Catholic Church. Neither Ryan nor his sister were regular churchgoers. His parents, however, had attended nearly every Sunday for the last four decades. Here, Frank and Jeanette Duffy had exchanged marriage vows. It was where their two children had been baptized and taken their First Holy Communion. Ryan’s sister, Sarah, had also been married here. In the last row of the balcony, a fellow altar boy had told Ryan where babies really come from. Behind the solid oak doors in the side chapel, Ryan used to confess his sins to an old Irish priest with a drinker’s red nose. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned…”
Ryan wondered when his father had last gone to confession. He wondered what he’d confessed.
St. Edmund’s was an old stone church built in the style of a Spanish mission. It wasn’t an authentic Spanish mission. The old Spanish explorers hadn’t bothered to go as far east as the Colorado plains in their search for the mythical Seven Cities of Gold. Places like the San Luis Valley and Sangre de Cristo Mountains in southwest and south central Colorado were filled with reminders of the legendary search for cities made of solid gold. The Spaniards seemed to have stopped, however, once the landscape turned interminably flat. Somehow, even sixteenth-century explorers must have sensed that no riches would lie in Piedmont Springs.
If only they had checked Frank Duffy’s attic.
Ryan felt a chill. The church was cold inside, even in July. Dark stained-glass windows blocked out most of the natural light. The smell of burning incense lingered over the casket in the center aisle, rising to the sweeping stone arches overhead. The service was well attended. Frank Duffy had many friends, none of whom apparently had a clue that he was a blackmailer who’d socked away two million dollars in extortion money. Dressed in black, his mourners filled thirty rows of pews on both sides of the aisle. Father Marshall presided over the service, wearing a somber expression and dark purple vestments. Ryan sat in the front row beside his mother. His sister and brother-in-law sat to his left. Liz, his estranged wife, had been “unable to attend.”
The organ music ended abruptly. An ominous silence filled the church, pierced only by the occasional squawk of an impatient child. Ryan squeezed his mother’s hand as his uncle approached the lectern to deliver a eulogy. Uncle Kevin was bald and overweight, suffering from heart disease, once the odds-on favorite to drop dead before his younger brother. He seemed the least prepared of all for Frank Duffy’s death.
He adjusted the microphone, cleared his throat. “I loved Frank Duffy,” he said in a shaky voice. “We all loved him.”
Ryan wanted to listen, but his mind wandered. Months in advance, they knew this day was coming. It had started with a cough, which he’d dismissed as the same old chronic emphysema. Then they found the lesion on the larynx. Their initial fear was that Dad might lose his voice. Frank Duffy had the gift of gab. He was always the one telling jokes at the bar, the guy laughing loudest at parties. It would have been a cruel irony, taking away his ability to speak — like an artist gone blind, or a musician turned deaf. The throat lesion, however, had only been the proverbial tip of the iceberg. The cancer had already metastasized. Doctors gave him three to four months. He never did lose his voice — at least not until the very end, silenced by his own sense of shame. His death brought its own irony.
The eulogy continued. “My brother was a workingman all his life, the kind of guy who’d get nervous whenever the poker ante rose above fifty cents.” His smile faded, his expression more serious. “But Frank was rich in spirit and blessed with a loving family.”
Ryan’s heart felt hollow. His uncle’s fond memories no longer seemed relevant. In light of the money, they didn’t even ring true.
He heard his aunt sobbing in the second row. Several other mourners were moved to tears. He glanced at his mother. No tears behind the black veil, he noted with curiosity. She sat stone-faced, expressionless. No sign of sadness or distress of any kind. Of course, the illness had been prolonged. She must have cried it out by now, no emotion left.
Or, he wondered, was there something she knew?
6
Amy met Mr. Phelps’s unrealistic three o’clock deadline. She always met her deadlines. This time, however, she was feeling abused. She went home when she finished.
She conjured up an image as she drove — a fantasy of sorts. It had to do with the money. She wouldn’t just quietly give notice, she decided. She would drive her old truck to Bailey, Gaslow & Heinz, like any other day. She’d get her morning coffee, retreat to her office, and sit very calmly at her desk. But she wouldn’t turn on her computer. She wouldn’t even close the door. She’d leave it wide open — and just wait for someone like Phelps to come piss her off.
For the moment, however, the waiting was beginning to breed paranoia.
It had been Gram’s idea to keep the money in the house and see what happened. Amy had a nagging instinct that someone was testing her, checking whether she’d do the honorable thing. She recalled the pointed que
stions on her application to law school. Are you currently under investigation for any crime? Have you ever been convicted of a crime? Before long she would face the same probing questions in her application to the Colorado State Bar Association. What kind of dim view might they take toward a candidate who had knowingly deprived the IRS of its fair share of a mysterious cash windfall? Worse yet, someone could be setting her up — someone like her ex-husband. Maybe he’d reported the money stolen, the serial numbers registered with the FBI. The minute she tried to spend it, she’d be arrested.
Now you’re really being paranoid. Amy’s ex-husband made a stink over paying five hundred dollars a month in child support. He certainly wouldn’t risk shipping two hundred grand in a cardboard box. Still, the prudent course was to contact the police, probably even fess up to the IRS. But Gram would kill her. She’d kill herself, if she messed up her chance to beg off law school, return to her graduate studies and follow her dreams. It was time for Amy Parkens to live on the edge a little.
Amy walked to the kitchenette and opened the freezer door. She reached for the box of cash behind the frozen pot roast.
“Amy, what are you doing?”
She turned at the sound of her grandmother’s voice. She felt the urge to lie, but she could never fool Gram. “Just checking on our investment.”
Gram placed a bag of groceries on the table. She’d returned from the store sooner than Amy had expected. “It’s all there,” said Gram. “I didn’t take any.”
“I wasn’t suggesting you had.”
“Then leave it be, girl.”
Amy closed the door and helped unload the groceries. “Where’s Taylor?”
“Outside. Mrs. Bentley from three-seventeen is watching her. She owes us, all the times I’ve watched her little monsters.” Gram paused, then smiled with a thought. “Maybe we can take some of the money and get Taylor a nanny. A good one. Someone who speaks French. I’d like Taylor to speak French.”
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