Found Money (3 page)

It was still dark when Amy woke. The drapes were drawn, but lights from the parking lot made them glow around the edges, the room’s only illumination. Her eyes adjusted slowly. The twin bed beside hers was empty, already made. The usual morning noises emerged from the kitchen. Gram was always the first to rise, earlier and earlier with each passing year. Amy checked her alarm clock on the nightstand. Five-sixteen
A.M
.

She’s probably fixing lunch by now
.

Amy lay still, staring at the ceiling. She had done the right thing, she knew, by telling her. Gram would have wormed it out of her eventually. Amy had an incredibly expressive face, one that Gram had learned to read with ease. Truthfully, Amy wanted to tell her. She needed help with this one. Gram was old-fashioned, but few things were more reliable than old-fashioned common sense.

Amy slipped on her flannel robe and shuffled toward the kitchen, following the aroma of fresh strong coffee.

“Morning, dear,” said Gram. She was already dressed. Overdressed, by her own historical standards. For almost half a century, Gram had lived in blue jeans in the winter, Bermuda shorts in the summer. Lately, she’d taken to pressed slacks and silk blouses, even for routine trips to the grocery
store. Amy suspected a man was in the picture, though Gram vehemently denied it.

“Morning,” said Amy. She pulled up a chair at the dining room table. Gram brought her a cup, no cream and two sugars, the way she liked it.

“I’ve made a decision,” she said, taking the seat across from Amy. “We’ll keep the money, right here.”

“I thought you said you wanted to sleep on it, and that we’d discuss it in the morning.”

“That’s right.”

“Well, this is hardly a discussion. You just announced a decision.”

“Trust me, darling. Your grandmother knows best on these things.”

The coffee was suddenly bitter. Amy measured her words, but there was resentment in her tone. “That’s exactly what you said when you talked me into quitting astronomy for this computer job.”

“And that has worked out beautifully. The law firm loves you so much they’re willing to help send you to law school.”

“It’s not the law firm that loves me. It’s Marilyn Gaslow. And the only reason she got the firm to cough up this partial scholarship is because she and Mom were old friends.”

“Don’t be cynical, Amy. Be realistic. With a degree in astronomy you would have been lucky to get a job teaching high school. You’ll earn ten times more as a lawyer.”

“Sure. And with spiked heels and a G-string I could make fifty times more than—”

“Stop,” said Gram, covering her ears. “Don’t be talking like that.”

“I’m kidding, okay? Just making a point.”

“There’s no point in sass.” Gram went to the kitchen and refilled her coffee cup.

Amy sighed, backing down, as usual. “I’m sorry, all right? It’s not every day a box full of money comes in an unmarked package. I’d just like to talk it out.”

Gram returned to her chair, then looked across the table, eye to eye. “What do
you
think we should do with it?”

“I don’t know. Should we call the police?”

“What for? No crime has been committed.”

“None that we know of, you mean.”

“Amy, I’m surprised at you. How did you get so negative? Something good happens, and you immediately figure it has to be connected to something bad.”

“I’m just considering all the possibilities. I’m assuming we don’t have any rich relatives you’ve forgotten to tell me about.”

Gram laughed. “Honey, in our family tree, not even the leaves are green.”

“None of your friends have this kind of money to give away, do they?”

“You know the answer to that.”

“So, if this is a gift, it came from someone we don’t know, someone who’s not even related to us.”

“It could happen. Things like that do happen.”

“When?”

“All the time.”

“Name one.”

“I can’t think of one, but it happens. Somebody you met, somewhere along the line. You’re a sweet person, Amy. Maybe some rich old man had a crush on you and you didn’t even know it.”

Amy shook her head. “This is just too strange. We should call the police.”

“For
what
? We’ll never see it again.”

“If nobody claims it, I would think the police will give it back to us.”

“That’s not the way it works,” said Gram. “A few years ago, I read in the newspaper about a minister who found over a million dollars in a suitcase on the side of the road. He turned it in to the police, thinking that if nobody claimed it, the cops would give it back to him, since he was the guy who found it. Sure enough, nobody claimed it. But you know what? The police said it was drug money, and they confiscated it under these drug laws they have now. They kept every penny of it. That’s what will happen to us.”

“I’m just worried. If it were just the two of us, maybe I’d be braver about this. But with Taylor living here, I’d feel better if we had a little protection.”

“Protection from what?”

“Well, maybe it
is
drug money. Someone could have sent it to me by mistake, thinking I’m part of their distribution chain or something.”

“That’s preposterous.”

“Oh, and some rich old man with the hots for me is perfectly logical.”

“Look,” said Gram, “I don’t know who sent you this or why. All I know is that it couldn’t have happened to a nicer person. So we keep the money, and we wait a couple weeks. Don’t spend any of it, at least for a little while. Maybe in a few days a letter will come in the mail from someone that explains everything.”

“Maybe the Mafia will come pounding on our door.”

“Maybe. That’s why we’re keeping the money right here in our apartment.”

“That’s crazy, Gram. We should at least put it in a safe deposit box for safekeeping.”

“Bad idea. Don’t you watch the news? The quickest way to get shot in a robbery is not to have any money on you. It makes robbers very angry.”

“What does that have to do with this?”

“Let’s say it was criminals who sent you this money by mistake. Let’s say they come looking for it. We tell them we don’t have it. They think we’re lying. They go berserk. Somebody gets hurt.”

“But if the money is here, then what?”

“We just give it back to them. They leave happy, and we go on living the way we’ve always lived. The chances of anything bad like that happening are probably zilch. But in the worst-case scenario, I don’t want any angry thugs accusing me of playing games. It’s best if we can just hand over the money right on the spot and be done with it.”

Amy finished her coffee. She looked away nervously, then back. “I don’t know.”

“There’s no downside, Amy. If it’s a gift, we’re rich. If some creeps come to claim it, we just give it back. Just wait a couple weeks, that’s all.” Gram leaned forward and touched her granddaughter’s hand. “And if things work out the way I think they will, you can go back to grad school.”

“You certainly know how to push a girl’s buttons.”

“So, you’re with me on this?”

Amy smiled with her eyes, peering over her cup. “Where do you want to stash our loot?”

“It’s already in the perfect hiding spot. The freezer.”

“The freezer?”

Gram smirked. “Where else would a crazy old woman keep a box of cold hard cash?”

Ryan spent the night in his old room, fading in and out of sleep. Mostly out.

As the only physician in town, Ryan hadn’t taken a vacation in three years. For this, however, he’d managed to clear his calendar, referring all but the most pressing emergencies to clinics in neighboring towns.

Actually, he’d spent the last seven weeks living with his folks. He and his wife were legally separated, just the crack of a judge’s gavel away from an official divorce after eight years of marriage. It was a classic case of unrealized expectations. Liz had worked as a waitress to help put him through medical school, thinking it would pay off after graduation. His friends from medical school had all moved on to mountainside homes and his-and-hers BMWs. Ryan had completed his surgery residency at Denver General Hospital and could have gone on to an equally lucrative career. He’d never been interested in pursuing the profits of “managed care,” however, where HMOs and utilization review boards rewarded doctors for
not
treating patients. Over Liz’s objection, he went back to his hometown to practice family medicine, the only doctor in town. Most of his patients were the real crisis in today’s health care—children of lower-income workers or self-employed farmers who
earned too much to qualify for Medicaid but who still couldn’t afford health insurance. Liz eventually posted a sign in the office that said “P
AYMENT
D
UE AT
T
IME OF
S
ERVICE
,” but Ryan always looked the other way whenever someone needed credit. When the uncollected accounts receivable reached well into six figures, Liz couldn’t stand it anymore. Ryan was running a charity. She filed for divorce.

So now he was home. His father dying. His wife moving to Denver. His boyhood memories staring down from the walls. With the end so near, he hadn’t the time or inclination to redecorate and dissolve the past. Posters of quarterback Roger Staubach and the Super Bowl Champion Cowboys still covered the walls, abandoned by the kid who used to dream there almost three decades ago. He wondered what had happened to the famous one of Farrah Fawcett with her feathered hair and thin red swimsuit. Gone, but not forgotten.

Innocent times
, he thought. Things didn’t seem so innocent anymore.

Six
A.M
., and Ryan had hardly slept. He kept wondering, was it really the combination of booze and painkillers? Talk of blackmail and hordes of cash sounded like hallucination. But Dad was so damn serious.

Ryan had to check the attic.

He slipped out of bed and pulled on his jeans, sneakers and a polo shirt. The floorboards creaked beneath his feet. He stepped lightly. His mother was surely awake already, downstairs, at Dad’s bedside. The morning vigil was their time alone. No one was going to deprive her of being with her husband of forty-five years at the moment of his death.

The door creaked open. Ryan peered into the
hall. Not a sound. The attic, he recalled, was accessed through a ceiling panel at the end of the upstairs hallway. Ryan skulked like a prowler past the bathroom and guest bedroom, stopping beneath the two-foot length of chain hanging from the ceiling. He pulled. The hatch fell open like a crocodile’s lower jaw. The big springs popped as the ladder unfolded. Ryan cringed at the noise, anticipating his mother’s voice. But he heard nothing. Slowly, making not another sound, he extended the ladder to the floor and locked it into place. He drew a deep breath and began his ascent.

He was sweating almost immediately, besieged by yesterday’s heat. Musty odors tickled his nostrils. A predawn glow seeped through the small east window, creating long shadows, illuminating cobwebs. Ryan tugged the string that dangled from the light socket, but the bare bulb was burned out. He waited, knowing that when his eyes adjusted, the morning light from the window would be sufficient.

Slowly, the past came into view. Ryan and his friends used to play up here, twenty-five years ago. Sarah, his older sister, always used to spy on them. She was the one who had discovered their coveted
Playboy
magazine. Ryan wasn’t sure if Sarah liked being a good do-bee or if she just liked to see him punished. He wondered what Miss Goody Two-shoes would think now.

Each step across the attic triggered more memories. His first stereo, complete with vinyl records that had long ago melted in the attic’s hundred-plus-degree heat. His sister’s clarinet from the high school band. Seeing all this junk reminded him that soon he would begin his task as executor of the estate, taking inventory of his father’s posses
sions—the simple belongings of a lifelong wage earner. A rusty set of tools. Extra fishing gear. Stacks of old clothes. Furniture his dad had never gotten around to fixing. And if this was no joke, two million dollars in tainted funds.

It
had
to be a joke.

Ryan stopped at the old chest of drawers his father had described to him last night. He swallowed hard; its existence confirmed that his father wasn’t completely delusional. But that didn’t mean there was actually money beneath it.

He shoved the chest once. It wouldn’t budge. He shoved harder. It moved an inch, then another. With all his strength, Ryan slid it a good two feet. He glanced at the floor. The boards it had once covered were not nailed down. Ryan knelt down and lifted the loose planks, exposing a layer of fiberglass insulation. He peeled it away. A suitcase was in plain view. Not the typical vacation suitcase. This one was metal, presumably fireproof, like the ones sold in spy shops. Ryan lifted it from the hole and laid it on the floor in front of him. It had a combination lock, but the latches weren’t fixed. Dad had apparently left the tumblers set to the combination, making it easy for his son. Ryan popped the latch and lifted the lid, his eyes bulging at the sight.

“Ho-lee shit.”

It was all there, just as his father had promised. Ryan had never seen two million dollars, but the neat stacks of hundred-dollar bills could easily total up to that much.

Lightly, Ryan raked his fingers over the bills. Although he’d never been driven by money, seeing and touching this much cash sent tingles down his spine. Last night, while lying in bed, he had tried
to make himself fall asleep by pretending the money might actually be there and asking himself what he might do with it. In the realm of the hypothetical and highly unlikely, he had resolved to give it all away to charity. He wouldn’t want the fruits of a crime—even if, as Dad had said, the man deserved to be blackmailed. But with all this green staring him in the face, the issues weren’t so black and white. Had he not dedicated his career to a low-income community, he might easily have earned this much cash in a normal-paying medical practice. Maybe this was God’s way of making him whole for a life of good deeds.

Get over yourself, Duffy.

He closed up the suitcase and put it back in the hole, covering it with the insulation and loose planks, just the way he had found it. He slid the heavy chest back in place. Quickly, he retraced his steps to the ladder. He’d deal with the money later. After the funeral.

After one more talk with Dad.

Ryan climbed down the ladder, into the hall. His shirt was dirty and soaked with sweat. He ducked into the bathroom and splashed cold water on his face. He threw his shirt in the hamper, then started toward his room for a clean one. He stopped as he passed the stairwell. It sounded like his mother sobbing in the living room. He hurried down the stairs. She was alone on the couch, shoulders slumped, still wearing her robe and slippers.

“What is it, Mom?”

She looked up, and he knew.

He came to her side, took her in his arms. She’d always been petite, but never so frail.

Her body shook, her voice was quaking. “It was
so…peaceful. His touch. His breath. His presence. It all just faded away.”

“It’s okay, Mom.”

“It’s like he was ready,” she said, sniffling. “As if he’d just decided it was time.”

Ryan bristled.
As if he’d rather die than face his son again.

His mother shook harder in his arms, the tears flowing freely. He held her close, rocking gently. “Don’t worry,” he whispered, almost speaking to himself. “I’ll take care of everything.”