James Grippando - Found money

“Mr. Jackson, this is my brother we’re talking about.”

He stepped closer, pointing out the purple bruises beneath his facial makeup. “Your brother hired someone to beat the crap out of me. And he may have gotten your husband killed.”

“We can’t be sure of that.”

“We don’t have to be sure. I’m not trying to put him in jail, and I’m not asking you to go that far, either. All we have to do is make the judge in the divorce case think Ryan could possibly have been connected to either act of violence. If the judge so much as suspects that’s true, we all come out winners.”

“I don’t know,” she said, wincing.

“Okay,” said Jackson. “You get thirty percent of whatever Liz takes from Ryan. After my fee is paid, of course.”

Sarah felt a rush of adrenaline. After years of abuse from Brent, the very act of negotiating gave her a sense of efficacy she’d never felt before. The best part was, Jackson still didn’t even seem to know about the other two million in the attic. Brent must not have told him.

“Tell you what,” she said coyly. “I will definitely think about it.” She stepped back and started to close the door.

Jackson stopped her. “When can I expect to hear from you?”

“When I’m good and ready,” she replied, then swung the door shut.

A deputy from the Prowers County Sheriff’s Department was at the Duffy homestead well before breakfast. On Norm’s advice — insistence, really — Ryan had called to report the break-in. The deputy was a high school classmate of Ryan’s, dressed in the familiar light green summer uniform with short sleeves. Ryan spoke to him alone, keeping his mother out of it as the two men walked around back to the kitchen door. The broken glass pane had the markings of typical Prowers County criminal mischief, according to the deputy. Juvenile crimes consumed three-quarters of his time.

Ryan offered no opinions as to the age of the perpetrator. The trick was simply to report the break-in without digressing into the murder, the money, or the blackmail.

“Was anything taken from the house?” asked the deputy.

“I don’t know for sure,” said Ryan. It was the truth. He had yet to check his father’s dresser drawer to confirm that the gun had actually been taken.

“When did you first notice the broken glass?”

“This morning.” Again, the truth. It had been after midnight by the time he had gone to Josh Colburn’s office, phoned Amy, and returned home to inspect the window.

The report was finished in just a few minutes. Out of sympathy for the family tragedy — meaning Brent — the deputy didn’t detain Ryan any longer than necessary. Ryan thanked him and watched him pull out of the driveway, shielding his eyes as the squad car disappeared into the low morning sun.

Ryan climbed the front stairs, stopping on the porch. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of an approaching car up the road. A truck, actually. It was coming quickly, splashing through muddy puddles of last night’s rain. A hundred yards away he could see the driver. It was Amy.

She really came.

He jogged to the end of the driveway to head her off. Having yet to tell his mother anything about Amy, he didn’t want a scene. The truck stopped at the mailbox. Amy rolled down the window. Her expression was guarded, neither friendly nor hostile. Her eyes seemed puffy from the all-night drive.

“Thanks for coming,” said Ryan.

“Please, don’t thank me. Do you have the letter?”

“I locked it in the wall safe over at my clinic. Like I said on the phone, I didn’t want to show it to anyone until you confirmed it was genuine. I haven’t even told my mother about it.”

She pushed the clutch, ready to go. “Let’s head into town, then.”

“You can ride with me, if you want.”

“I’ll follow you.”

He sensed more than a little distrust in her voice. “Okay. Follow me.”

They had never found a suicide note. That had been Amy’s first thought when Ryan had mentioned a letter from her mother. The absence of a note had been one of the precious things she had clung to all these years. It was the cornerstone of her denial that her mother had killed herself. It was what had spurred her to drive down from Boulder all night. As she took the letter from Ryan, it was the cause of the butterflies that stirred in her stomach.

Amy handled it carefully, delicately, as if the parchment were as priceless and fragile as the original Magna Carta. She unfolded it and laid it on the desktop before her. The process felt ceremonial, a sacred connection to her mother’s past. She checked the date. Ryan had been truthful. It was just two weeks before she had died.

Amy read in silence, the eyes leading her down an uncharted path. She struggled to keep her composure. She knew Ryan was studying her from the other side of his desk, though her eyes never met his, never left the pale green stationery that bore her mother’s initials.

She glanced up only once, as if suddenly aware of how stifling it was in the back office of Ryan’s clinic. The air conditioner hadn’t been run in days. The lone window was blocked by a set of floor-to-ceiling shelves jammed with patient files. The faux wood paneling was the cheap kind typically found in basements. Directly over Amy’s head was a long, bent-arm lamp that belonged over a physician’s examining table, not a desk. It threw more heat than light.

It was the emotional heat, however, that was starting to consume her, rising with each sentence, heightened by each word. Halfway through the letter, tiny beads of perspiration gathered above her lip, making her mouth dry and salty. She read to herself, allowing her mind to put the words to the tune of her mother’s voice. She tried to envision her mother actually saying such things aloud. It was a frustrating exercise. The imagined voice kept changing. Amy reached back in time for the soothing voice she remembered as a very small child, but the anxious tone of her mother’s last days was a constant interruption. It was like listening to a radio with a faulty antenna. At times, the interference was so great she couldn’t even remember what her mother had truly sounded like, happy or sad. Her confusion turned the narrator into someone altogether. She could hear Marilyn, Gram, and even herself. The distractions made her angry. It was misdirected anger, an unfocused rage she had harbored her entire life — the anger of an eight-year-old robbed of her mother.

Her hands were shaking as she neared the bottom of the page. She finally had reached a silent rhythm, reading in her mother’s voice, loud and strong. It was strange, but she finished with one overwhelming impression.

“This can’t be true.”

Ryan looked at her quizzically. “You mean everything in the letter is false? Or do you mean your mother didn’t write it?”

“Both.”

Ryan disagreed. But he tried not to sound disagreeable. “Let’s focus on the authenticity first. Did you bring something with your mother’s handwriting that we can compare to this letter, like we agreed?”

“Yes. But I don’t need to make any comparisons to tell you this letter is bogus.”

“That’s your opinion. I’d like to see for myself.”

“What are you, a handwriting expert?”

“No. But if you’re so sure it’s a phony, then what’s the downside to letting me lay the two side by side and compare?”

Amy clutched her purse. She didn’t feel threatened, but his tone had definitely challenged her. “All right.”

She unzipped her purse and removed an envelope. “This is a letter my mother wrote me when I was seven years old, at camp. As you’ll see, the handwriting is totally different.”