James Grippando: Found money

It was dying. No way to save it. And Amy Parkens watched with a child’s fascination.

The night was perfect. No city lights, not even a moon to brighten the cloudless sky outside her bedroom window. Billions of stars blanketed the vast blackness of space. Her six-inch Newtonian reflector telescope was aimed at the Ring Nebula, a dying star in the constellation of Lyra. Amy liked that one best. It reminded her of the smoke rings her grand father used to blow with his cigar — a faint, grayish-green ring puffed into outer space. Death was slow in coming, over many millennia. It was irreversible. Astronomically speaking, the Ring Nebula was light-years beyond Geritol.

Amy peered through the eyepiece, pushing her hair aside. She was a tall and skinny eight-year-old with sandy-blonde bangs that dangled in her eyes. She’d often heard grown-ups say she was destined to be the Twiggy of the eighties, but that didn’t interest her. Her interests were unlike those of most third graders. Television and video games bored her. She was used to spending time alone in the evenings, entertaining herself with books, celestial maps, her telescope — things her friends would have considered homework. She had never known her father. He’d been killed in Vietnam before Amy could even walk. She lived with her mom, a busy physics professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder. A passion for the stars was an inherited fascination. Long before her first telescope, Amy would look into the night sky and see much more than twinkling lights. By the time she was seven she could name every stellar constellation. Since then, she’d even made some up and named them herself — distant constellations, beyond the reach of even the world’s most powerful instruments but not beyond her imagination. Other kids might stare through telescopes all night long and never see Orion or Sirius, because the stars didn’t line up exactly right for them. For Amy, it all made perfect sense.

Amy switched on her flashlight, the only light she needed in her small pink bedroom. With colored pencils she sketched out the Ring Nebula on her notepad, her own makeshift coloring book. She was the only kid in her class with no fear of the dark — so long as her telescope was nearby.

“Lights out, sweetie,” her mother called from the hallway.

“Lights are out, Mom.”

“You know what I mean.”

The door opened, and her mother entered. She switched on the little lamp beside Amy’s bed. Amy squinted as her eyes adjusted to the faint yellow glow. Her mother’s smile was warm but weak. Her eyes showed fatigue. She’d looked tired a lot lately. And worried. Over the last few days, Amy had noticed the change, had even asked what was wrong. Her mother would say only that it was “nothing.”

Amy had gotten ready for bed hours ago, well before the celestial sidetrack. She was dressed in her yellow summer pajamas, her face washed and teeth brushed. She climbed down from the chair and gave her mom a hug. “Can’t I stay up a little longer? Please?”

“No, honey. It’s way past your bedtime.”

Her face showed disappointment, but she was too tired to argue. She slid into bed. Her mother tucked her in beneath the sheets.

“Tell me a story, then?”

“Mommy’s really tired tonight. I’ll tell you one tomorrow.”

Amy frowned, but it didn’t last. “A good one?”

“I promise. It’ll be the best story you ever heard.”

“Okay.”

Her mother kissed her on the forehead, then switched off the lamp. “Sweet dreams, baby.”

“’Night, Mom.”

Amy watched her mother cross the dark room. The door opened. Her mother turned as if to bid a silent goodbye, then closed the door.

Amy rolled on her side and gazed out the window. No more telescope tonight, but this was one of those incredibly clear nights when the heavens were awesome even with the naked eye. She watched for several minutes until her vision blurred and the stars began to swirl. She was getting drowsy. Twenty minutes passed. Maybe longer. Her eyes closed, then opened. Her head sank deeper into the pillow. The strip of light from the hallway disappeared beneath her bedroom door. Mom was apparently going to bed. It comforted Amy to know that. The last few nights, her mother hadn’t been sleeping.

She glanced out the window again. Beyond the trees, she saw the lights go out in the house next door. With eyes closed, she imagined the lights going out in house after house as the neighborhood, the city, the entire country went to sleep. The lights were off all around the world. But the stars burned bright. Amy was nearly asleep.

A loud crack pierced the night — like thunder, but it wasn’t thunder. Amy jackknifed in her bed, as if kicked in the belly.

The noise had come from inside the house.

Her heart raced. She listened for it again, but there was only silence. She was too frightened to scream. She wanted to call for her mother, but words wouldn’t come. It had been an awful sound, enough to make her fear the dark forever. Yet it took only a second to pinpoint the source. She knew the sound. There was no mistaking it. She’d heard it before, far from the house, the time her mother had driven her out to the woods and Amy had watched her practice.

It was the echoing clap of her mother’s loaded handgun.

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 experience 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.