Found Money Read Online Free PDF

like slave labor.
    She sat down behind her desk and switched on the computer. She had been checking her e-mail from outside the office for the past week, but she had some new messages. One was from Marilyn, just this morning. It read, “Atta girl, Amy. One hell of a job!”
    Amy smiled. At least one of the firm’s two hundred lawyers knew how to say thank you for salvaging the computer system. Somehow, however, it didn’t mean quite as much coming from Marilyn, her mother’s old buddy. She scrolled down to the next virtual envelope on her screen. It was from Jason Phelps, head of the litigation department in the Boulder office. Now, kudos from him would definitely be a breakthrough. She opened it eagerly.
    SEE ME! was all it said.
    She looked up from her screen and nearly jumped. He was standing in the doorway, scowling. “Mr. Phelps—good morning, sir. Afternoon, I mean.”
    “Yes. It is after noon. A big T-ball game for Timmy this morning, I presume?”
    Her gut wrenched. It didn’t matter how many nights and weekends she worked. It didn’t matter if she was away on firm business. For a single mother, temporary unavailability always gave rise to the same negative inference.
    “Her name is Taylor,” she said coolly. “And she doesn’t play T-ball. Her mother doesn’t have time to take her.”
    “I need that joint defense network for the Wilson superfund litigation operable by three o’clock. No later.”
    “I have to work through the MIS directors of six different law firms. You want it in two hours?”
    “I wanted it yesterday. Today, I need it. I don’t care how you get it done. Just get it done.” He raised a bushy gray eyebrow, then turned and left.
    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 tauntingAmy, 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