James Grippando - Found money

She took the card, rising. “Thanks.”

There was humor in his eyes. “I would tell you to look me up if ever you’re in Piedmont Springs, but I’m sure you know dozens of people there already, and I’d be way down on your list of people to call.”

“Of course. Paris. London. Piedmont Springs. I have that problem wherever I go.”

“I figured. Maybe I can send you another thousand dollars and see you again sometime.”

She smiled, but her gut wrenched. Little did he know he had already prepaid for another 199 visits. She was suddenly flustered, not sure what to say. “You never know.”

He shrugged, as if the response were a brush-off. “Well, it was very nice meeting you.”

She stood and waited for a second, wishing it had ended on a different note. But it was hard to come back from a remark like You never know. She wasn’t sure why she’d said it, wasn’t sure how to fix it. “Nice meeting you, too, Ryan.”

They exchanged one last smile, sadder than the others. She had an empty feeling of missed opportunity as she turned away and headed for the door.

From the Mile High City to the plains of southeastern Colorado, the ride was all downhill. Appropriate enough for a guy whose marriage was in a death spiral. Ryan drove the entire way to Piedmont Springs in silence, no stops and no radio, arriving at dusk. He was so consumed by his thoughts that he automatically turned on River Street, toward the house he and Liz had shared in their final years of marriage. Two blocks away, he realized his mistake. He didn’t live there anymore. This afternoon had made it clear he never would again. He pulled a U-turn, heading back to his parents’ house. Mom’s house, actually. Dad was dead. Mom got the house.

Ryan got the headache.

Quite literally, his head was pounding. Throughout the trip home, his mind had replayed today’s clash with Liz. It was a strange coincidence, the way her lawyer had cooked up the allegation that Ryan was hoarding huge sums of cash, keeping it from Liz. If they only knew.

His pulse quickened as he pulled into the driveway. Could they know?

They couldn’t. Liz was so angry today, she surely would have said something. Her only demand was that Ryan start earning money in a high-paying practice. In no way did she lay claim to a secret stash in the attic.

He killed the engine and stepped down from his Jeep Cherokee. His thoughts turned to Amy as he headed up the sidewalk. He still couldn’t figure what had gone wrong at the end. He thought he’d sensed a connection, seen something in her smile. For a while, she had him feeling not so bad about getting divorced. She seemed like a woman he’d like to get to know. But at the mere mention of possibly seeing each other again, it had all fallen apart. He couldn’t help but wonder what was really going on. As recently as Tuesday night, Liz was still talking about his father’s deathbed promise that “Money will come soon.” Maybe this Amy was a friend of Liz, someone that sneaky lawyer had sent just to pump financial information from him. Or maybe she really did receive some money, but she was being nice just to wiggle even more cash out of the Duffy family.

Ryan fumbled for his key to the front door, thinking. Extortion money in the attic. Cash gifts to strangers. Promises to Liz. What the hell were you trying to do to me, Dad?

He glanced to the west. The afterglow of the setting sun was fading behind the mountains in the distance. He assumed there were mountains out there somewhere. He couldn’t actually see them. From the dusty plains of southeastern Colorado, even fourteen-thousand-foot peaks were well beyond view. The utterly flat horizon reminded him of a late afternoon he and his dad had shared on the porch, just the two of them. It was a long time ago, when Ryan was small and his father chain-smoked the cigarettes that would eventually kill him. The sky had been unusually clear that day. On a hunch, his dad had brought out the binoculars, thinking rather naively that perhaps Ryan could get his first glimpse of the mountains to the west. Even on the clearest of days, however, they were still too far away. Ryan was disappointed, but he listened with excitement as his father described in detail the grandeur they were missing.

“Why don’t we live there?” he had asked eagerly.

“Because we live here, son.”

“Why don’t we move?”

His father chuckled, puffing on his cigarette. “People don’t just move.”

“Why not?”

“They just don’t.”

“You mean we’re stuck here?”

He looked toward the horizon. There was sadness in his voice. “Your roots are here, Ryan. Five generations on your mother’s side. Can’t just pull up roots.”

Thirty years later, Ryan recalled the tone more than the words. Complete resignation, as if the thought of sunsets and mountains glistening to the west were a constant reminder that everything beautiful was outside the reach of tiny Piedmont Springs.

Thinking about it now, he could see why Dad and Liz had gotten on so well. He used to think it was because father and son were so alike. Maybe it was because they were different.

Ryan unlocked the front door and stepped inside. The sun was completely gone, leaving the house in darkness. He flipped on the light, then called out, “Mom, you home?”

No reply. He crossed the living room into the kitchen. A note was stuck to the refrigerator. It was the way the Duffys had always communicated. Civilization might have evolved from the beating tom-tom to e-mail, but nothing was more effective than a note on the freezer door. Ryan read it as he grabbed a beer from the refrigerator. “Went to dinner and a movie with Sarah,” it read. “Be back around ten.”

He checked the clock on the oven. Eight-thirty. It was good that Mom was getting out. Even better that she wasn’t home to ask him how things had gone with Liz. He twisted off the cap and sucked down a cold Coors on his way to the family room. He switched on the lamp, then froze.

The furniture had been moved. Not rearranged in an orderly fashion. Moved. The couch was angled strangely. The wall unit had been pulled a few inches away from the wall, several drawers hanging open. The rug was curled up at one end. Clearly someone had been here. Someone who had been searching for something.

Someone, he feared, who knew about the money.

Stupid. That was how Amy felt. After all the mental preparation for her meeting with Ryan Duffy, she hadn’t really accomplished what she’d set out to do. Her only objective had been to find out why Frank Duffy had sent her the money. She came away with no clear picture. Stupid, was all it was.

Not that it was so great to be smart all the time. She’d learned the downside of brains long ago, as a child. If you were stupid, no one blamed you. But people were suspicious of intelligence, as if you had done something wrong just by virtue of being smart. That reaction from others had bred shyness in Amy, a trait that had surely contributed to her blunder with Ryan. She didn’t especially like that about herself, which was precisely the reason she could recall the very day she had begun her transformation from an outspoken little girl to a kid who was beyond humble, almost embarrassed by her own extraordinary abilities. A couple of years before her mother’s death, she had tagged along to the doctor’s office for her mom’s annual checkup. Her mom sat on the table, so pretty, looking much like the woman Amy would become. Amy watched intently as the nurse rolled up her mother’s sleeve and checked her blood pressure.

“Very good,” said the nurse, reading from the gauge. “One-twenty over eighty.”

“One and a half,” Amy volunteered.