Found Money Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 sidechapel, 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 been “unable to attend.”
    The organ music ended abruptly. An ominoussilence filled the church, pierced only by the occasional squawk of an impatient child. Ryan squeezed his mother’s hand as his uncle approached the lectern to deliver a eulogy. Uncle Kevin was bald and overweight, suffering from heart disease, once the odds-on favorite to drop dead before his younger brother. He seemed the least prepared of all for Frank Duffy’s death.
    He adjusted the microphone, cleared his throat. “I loved Frank Duffy,” he said in a shaky voice. “We all loved him.”
    Ryan wanted to listen, but his mind wandered. Months in advance, they knew this day was coming. It had started with a cough, which he’d dismissed as the same old chronic emphysema. Then they found the lesion on the larynx. Their initial fear was that Dad might lose his voice. Frank Duffy had the gift of gab. He was always the one telling jokes at the bar, the guy laughing loudest at parties. It would have been a cruel irony, taking away his ability to speak—like an artist gone blind, or a musician turned deaf. The throat lesion, however, had only been the proverbial tip of the iceberg. The cancer had already metastasized. Doctors gave him three to four months. He never did lose his voice—at least not until the very end, silenced by his own sense of shame. His death brought its own irony.
    The eulogy continued. “My brother was a workingman all his life, the kind of guy who’d get nervous whenever the poker ante rose above fifty cents.” His smile faded, his expression more serious. “But Frank was rich in spirit and blessed with a loving family.”
    Ryan’s heart felt hollow. His uncle’s fond memories no longer seemed relevant. In light of the money, they didn’t even ring true.
    He heard his aunt sobbing in the second row. Several other mourners were moved to tears. He glanced at his mother. No tears behind the black veil, he noted with curiosity. She sat stone-faced, expressionless. No sign of sadness or distress of any kind. Of course, the illness had been prolonged. She must have cried it out by now, no emotion left.
    Or , he wondered, was