Found Money - James Grippando [12]
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