Ryan got the headache.
Quite literally, his head was pounding. Throughout the trip home, his mind had replayed today’s clash with Liz. It was a strange coincidence, the way her lawyer had cooked up the allegation that Ryan was hoarding huge sums of cash, keeping it from Liz. If they only knew.
His pulse quickened as he pulled into the driveway. Could they know?
They couldn’t. Liz was so angry today, she surely would have said something. Her only demand was that Ryan start earning money in a high-paying practice. In no way did she lay claim to a secret stash in the attic.
He killed the engine and stepped down from his Jeep Cherokee. His thoughts turned to Amy as he headed up the sidewalk. He still couldn’t figure what had gone wrong at the end. He thought he’d sensed a connection, seen something in her smile. For a while, she had him feeling not so bad about getting divorced. She seemed like a woman he’d like to get to know. But at the mere mention of possibly seeing each other again, it had all fallen apart. He couldn’t help but wonder what was really going on. As recently as Tuesday night, Liz was still talking about his father’s deathbed promise that “Money will come soon.” Maybe this Amy was a friend of Liz, someone that sneaky lawyer had sent just to pump financial information from him. Or maybe she really did receive some money, but she was being nice just to wiggle even more cash out of the Duffy family.
Ryan fumbled for his key to the front door, thinking. Extortion money in the attic. Cash gifts to strangers. Promises to Liz. What the hell were you trying to do to me, Dad?
He glanced to the west. The afterglow of the setting sun was fading behind the mountains in the distance. He assumed there were mountains out there somewhere. He couldn’t actually see them. From the dusty plains of southeastern Colorado, even fourteen-thousand-foot peaks were well beyond view. The utterly flat horizon reminded him of a late afternoon he and his dad had shared on the porch, just the two of them. It was a long time ago, when Ryan was small and his father chain-smoked the cigarettes that would eventually kill him. The sky had been unusually clear that day. On a hunch, his dad had brought out the binoculars, thinking rather naively that perhaps Ryan could get his first glimpse of the mountains to the west. Even on the clearest of days, however, they were still too far away. Ryan was disappointed, but he listened with excitement as his father described in detail the grandeur they were missing.
“Why don’t we live there?” he had asked eagerly.
“Because we live here, son.”
“Why don’t we move?”
His father chuckled, puffing on his cigarette. “People don’t just move.”
“Why not?”
“They just don’t.”
“You mean we’re stuck here?”
He looked toward the horizon. There was sadness in his voice. “Your roots are here, Ryan. Five generations on your mother’s side. Can’t just pull up roots.”
Thirty years later, Ryan recalled the tone more than the words. Complete resignation, as if the thought of sunsets and mountains glistening to the west were a constant reminder that everything beautiful was outside the reach of tiny Piedmont Springs.
Thinking about it now, he could see why Dad and Liz had gotten on so well. He used to think it was because father and son were so alike. Maybe it was because they were different.
Ryan unlocked the front door and stepped inside. The sun was completely gone, leaving the house in darkness. He flipped on the light, then called out, “Mom, you home?”
No reply. He crossed the living room into the kitchen. A note was stuck to the refrigerator. It was the way the Duffys had always communicated. Civilization might have evolved from the beating tom-tom to e-mail, but nothing was more effective than a note on the freezer door. Ryan read it as he grabbed a beer from the refrigerator. “Went to dinner and a movie with Sarah,” it read. “Be back around ten.”
He checked the clock on the oven. Eight-thirty. It was good that Mom was getting out. Even better that she wasn’t home to ask him how things had gone with Liz. He twisted off the cap and sucked down a cold Coors on his way to the family room. He switched on the lamp, then froze.
The furniture had been moved. Not rearranged in an orderly fashion. Moved. The couch was angled strangely. The wall unit had been pulled a few inches away from the wall, several drawers hanging open. The rug was curled up at one end. Clearly someone had been here. Someone who had been searching for something.
Someone, he feared, who knew about the money.
14
Stupid. That was how Amy felt. After all the mental preparation for her meeting with Ryan Duffy, she hadn’t really accomplished what she’d set out to do. Her only objective had been to find out why Frank Duffy had sent her the money. She came away with no clear picture. Stupid, was all it was.
Not that it was so great to be smart all the time. She’d learned the downside of brains long ago, as a child. If you were stupid, no one blamed you. But people were suspicious of intelligence, as if you had done something wrong just by virtue of being smart. That reaction from others had bred shyness in Amy, a trait that had surely contributed to her blunder with Ryan. She didn’t especially like that about herself, which was precisely the reason she could recall the very day she had begun her transformation from an outspoken little girl to a kid who was beyond humble, almost embarrassed by her own extraordinary abilities. A couple of years before her mother’s death, she had tagged along to the doctor’s office for her mom’s annual checkup. Her mom sat on the table, so pretty, looking much like the woman Amy would become. Amy watched intently as the nurse rolled up her mother’s sleeve and checked her blood pressure.
“Very good,” said the nurse, reading from the gauge. “One-twenty over eighty.”
“One and a half,” Amy volunteered.
“One and a half what?” her mother asked.
“One-twenty over eighty. That equals one and a half.”
The nurse looked up from her chart, almost dropped her pen. “How old is that child?”
“Six,” said her mother. “Well, almost six.”
More than twenty years later, the look on that old nurse’s face was still unforgettable. Over and over, throughout her childhood, Amy would see that same spooked expression. Hearing the amazing things that came out of her mouth, people would think she was just small for her age. Then they’d find out how young she really was and look at her like some kind of walking gray-matter freak.
“You’re special,” her mother would tell her, and she had always made Amy feel that way. Until she was gone, and then things really got difficult. Amy learned to be tough, both physically and emotionally. Especially with boys. In elementary school, they would pick fights with her on the playground, just to show her the limits of being so smart. As pretty as she was, she had plenty of dates in high school, but not many second dates. Brains were a scary thing to some people, from that nurse in the doctor’s office, to the boys on the playground, to her jerk of an ex-husband.
Somehow, it didn’t seem like that would ever be an issue for a guy like Ryan Duffy.
Admittedly, the meeting with Ryan wasn’t the smartest thing she’d ever done. Even her own mother would have told her that, had she been alive. Yet dismissing the whole thing as stupid rang hollow in her heart. She had a good feeling about Ryan. He’d made her smile, put her at ease in a situation that could have been far from easy. To her surprise, she found herself wishing they had met under different circumstances, another time in their lives. She wasn’t sure what was percolating inside of her, but ever since she’d left the restaurant, she’d thought more about him than the money.
If that was what it felt like to finally feel stupid, stupid wasn’t such a horrible thing.
What was really stupid was her remark right before she’d left, when he’d asked to see her again. You never know. Three little words that, to any reasonable human being, translated roughly to “In your dreams, buddy.”