Found Money - James Grippando [21]
Ryan walked back inside, chiding himself. After coming down hard on Sarah to keep things quiet until they sorted out the truth, there he was ready to tell all to Liz at the first sign of a possible reconciliation. Still, he couldn’t deny his feelings for Liz. What was so awful about a woman who wanted a little financial security?
He went to the living room and picked up the phone, ready to call her answering machine and tell her to call him as soon as she got in. He punched three buttons, then hung up.
Sleep on it, he told himself.
10
Two days had passed, and Amy was still working up the nerve to phone Ryan Duffy. Just one question—the two-hundred-thousand-dollar question—had her paralyzed: Did she have the right Duffys?
She had done some serious checking. Yesterday, she’d even taken a sick day from the firm and driven all the way to Piedmont Springs, looking discreetly for obvious signs of wealth, a lifestyle befitting a family that could spare an extra two hundred thousand dollars. She found nothing of the sort. The Duffys owned a simple house in a rural middleclass town. The only car in the driveway was an older Jeep Cherokee. Ryan’s clinic had the street presence of an abandoned five-and-dime store, serving patients who looked like they might barter sheep for services. And Frank Duffy had worked for wages his entire life.
Her findings had so befuddled her that last night she’d gone back to the computer to check the remaining Jeanette Duffys on her list. No one, however, seemed more promising than the Duffys of Piedmont Springs. Amy figured that whoever had sent the money didn’t just wake up one morning and decide to do it. Something had to trigger the decision—a traumatic and life-altering event, like Frank Duffy’s illness and impending death. It couldn’t be coincidence. It had to be these Duffys. For whatever reason, they just didn’t flaunt their money.
Amy had to be cautious in her approach. It simply wouldn’t be smart to phone Frank Duffy’s son and say, “Someone in your family appears to have sent me a box full of cash for no good reason.” Greedy heirs weren’t likely to explain why she’d gotten the money. They were more likely to say, “It’s mine, give it back.”
At lunchtime Thursday, Amy grabbed a Pepsi and an orange from the employee lounge and went back to her office. She peeled the orange and broke it into wedges as she glanced at the handful of snapshots she’d taken of the Duffy house. Eight of them were spread across her desk. It had seemed wise to take pictures, just in case she ever had to go to the police. Police were always taking pictures—at least that was her experience. She remembered when she was eight, when her mother died. The police were all over the house taking photographs.
Funny, but the Duffy house resembled her old house in some ways. An old two-story frame with green shutters and a big porch out front, the kind they didn’t seem to build anymore. She wondered if Frank Duffy had died in that house, as her mother had died in theirs. She wondered who had found his body, the first to realize he was gone. The thought chilled her. There was something eerie about a house in which someone had died, which was only compounded when, as in her house, that someone had died so violently. Amy hadn’t gone back to her old house since the night of the gunshot. That is, she hadn’t physically gone back there. In her mind, she’d relived that night many times. Now, alone in the silence of her office, the photographs of the Duffy house seemed to blur, drifting out of focus. Her mind, too, began to drift. The image in the photographs looked more and more like her old house, until she could see beyond the likeness, see right into her old bedroom. She saw herself on that unforgettable night, a frightened eight-year-old girl alone in her dark bedroom,