Chapter 12

Patty sent Becky and Lilly to the kitchen to start on breakfast and told them she’d be there in a minute to supervise. “We didn’t discuss a collar,” she said to me pointedly.

“You’ll approve,” I assured her. “I have one in mind. No one will be able to tell. It looks like jewellery She’ll be able to show it off and the only way someone would know is if they knew what it was already.”

She looked skeptical and I nodded. “Why don’t you come downstairs and I’ll show you,” I suggested. “I have the link saved.”

I took them down to my room, the five of us crowding around my laptop while I brought up the store page I’d seen it on and navigated to the collar. It had options for blackened carbon steel, chrome, brushed steel, silver or titanium, but the cost of that was out of this world. It was hinged at the sides of the collar and had a lock-clasp in the back.

“Unless she cut her hair short, she’d have to actually be trying to show someone the clasp for them to know it locked. The hinges are really hard to see and the front is stylized and has gemstones set so it looks like an ornamental choker. If anyone knows what it is, they’ve been to this site already and should know not to out someone. We can get it in the style that she wants with her birthstone or whatever she feels comfortable wearing. They won’t be real gems, at least not yet. A collar we get now will have to be replaced in a few years even if we get it sized loose since her neck’s not likely to be the same size when she’s 22. I’m sure we’ll revisit the arrangement before then, but if we’re both happy with it, I see no reason not to get her one to replace it that has real ones and maybe in the silver or titanium or see if they can order one in platinum.”

“I have to admit I don’t think anyone in her school is going to know what it is unless they’re told,” Patty said and nodded her agreement to the collar. “I’ve got to go up to the kitchen to supervise the girls. I’ll be back and we’ll look at the prices.”

She left the room and Lana started browsing at the styles and combinations of gems and metal, picking out what she liked and checking the price. She finally settled on one that would fit her style. It was made to look like roses and was in black with enameled red roses. We sized her neck quickly and decided to get one a little larger to give her room to grow with it. All told with delivery, it was less than $150 and it made her eyes light up when her mother approved of it when she returned to the room.

Dan passed me his credit card to order it and Patty snapped at me not to memorize the number and we all laughed. I punched in the numbers and handed back the card with thanks and I finalized the order. “Seven to ten days for delivery. Should be here next week some time.” I turned in the chair and decided that I was going to start spending some of my ill-gotten gains.

“I’ll be able to give you the money for the collar by the end of the week,” I said simply. “I appreciate the use of the card.”

Patty gave me a searching look and I returned it calmly and smiled a small smile.

“Where did you get that kind of money?” my mother asked me suddenly, knowing that my normal allowance hasn’t been enough to cover that much of a purchase unless I’d been hoarding it.

I sighed and figured that I should have expected that. “This is one of the things I’d promised to tell you after the divorce was settled,” I said simply before looking at Patty. “Can you keep Lilly and Beck occupied upstairs while I explain?”

She nodded turned for the door.

“You remember when Patty and I searched the office?” I asked my mother. “Well we found something. There’s a space under the floor that he was using as a safe. It wasn’t locked, just covered with a false carpet tile secured to a plug. Inside was cash. A lot of it. More than all of us put together have ever seen.”

“How much money?” my mother didn’t look happy at this point. She’d crossed her arms and was tapping her foot. I knew she wasn’t mad at me. I hadn’t done anything wrong.

“Ten million dollars in $10,000 bricks,” I told her to stunned silence. “That’s what’s been keeping me awake at night. How did he get that much? It couldn’t have been legal. Was it stolen? Was he the real Walt White? Was he somehow kingpin of his own criminal empire? None of it made sense. I couldn’t tell anyone without knowing the details. If we spent it and he stole it from a bigger criminal, then we’d be dead. If he’d stolen it from work and we spent it, the FBI would come down on us for some obscure law that lets them take everything we had. I wouldn’t have told Patty, but she was with me when I found it. Hard to explain more than a cubic foot of $100 bills under your carpet.”

The three of them were stunned and no one spoke into the pause I’d left so I continued. “That’s why I didn’t want Lilly to come to the mall the day I met him. That’s why I was so upset when you came to pick me up afterwards. I got the answers, but they only led to more questions. It turns out he didn’t steal it from anyone. His new girlfriend did. Or at least she gave it to him to hide. There was more hidden in other parts of the house. There was a hollow behind the furnace and there was a suitcase hidden in the rafters of the garage. In the end, there was so much money that if the trail ever led to the house, we were all dead. I’m still trying to get a handle on what to do with it, but I’m going to find a way for us to keep it. Our family deserves it for how much danger we’ve been in without knowing anything. Right now she doesn’t think I know about the money, but I pinned Donald to the floor and told him how much danger he put us in by stashing her money here.”

“You said there was more money than just the floor safe,” Dan said. “How much are we talking about exactly?”

“Enough for all seven of us to take ten million dollars and have enough left over for us to pay for a mansion in California and everything to go with it,” I told him evenly. “The case in the garage was the biggest stash. There’s over a hundred million dollars put together.”

He sat down on the bed and let out a breath heavily. “I know,” I commented. “Imagine how Patty and I felt when we counted the stuff in the floor safe. The suitcase nearly made me lose my mind, but I can’t let that money sit here while we could be using it for something better than she was going to do with it. So I mined the flash drive I found in the office for information and it’s literally the paper-trail for the theft from all the 217 businesses she’s been siphoning money from. It’s got to be mob related. I looked at the accounting sheets and there was one business that had over 80 entries in a month for ‘Petty Cash Replenishment’ and they were all for just below the amount that gets money transfers flagged by the federal government. She set up a business and made bogus payments to it going back two years.”

“You were able to comb through two years of accounting records for over 200 businesses?” Dan asked, aghast at the sheer paperwork that must have been involved.

I shrugged and nodded. “I guess I’ve been speed-reading longer than I thought. I just didn’t notice it.”

“That’s still so many numbers and data entries that you actually could work on prediction models based on statistics.”

“That’s fantastic, but we’re getting a little off-topic here,” my mother said crossly. “This is something I needed to know young man.”

I nodded. “I agree. Once I found out more information, I intended to tell you. I was hoping the divorce settlement would be in place before we had to cross that bridge so that we could cut ties cleanly. I also can’t let you use this in the divorce. This is more complicated and I want to make sure that I have a safe exit strategy for all seven of us before it all blows up. I’m working on it and I need to see Donald. I need information that he has. Right now I have him stalling her with the story that the separation has me more hurt and angry than he thought so he can’t get near the house to get the stuff yet ‘til I calm down. It’s not a stalling tactic that he can sell forever, but it gave me time to think and plan and I think I have a way out of this for all of us except his precious Miranda. He may go down in flames with her depending on what strings she has tied to him.”

“Spill it,” my mother said snappishly.

“We have a couple of options. We could burn the house down. That leaves Miranda convinced that the money is gone. We could also take the cash out of the bags she knows it’s in and then fill them with junk and rent a boat for the day to drop them overboard somewhere, taking pictures of the bags going under and giving her the pics. I think the best option is to pay for a small crate to be sent somewhere else in the country, fill it with the right amount of dry ice so it’s the right weight shipping out and it dissolves to nothing if someone decides to chase down the evidence. We slap her name on the shipping details and then it looks like she moved the money out of the city.” I hesitated before continuing. “Depending on what Donald tells me on Wednesday, there may be another way to end this in a more permanent way. It’s a little underhanded and we’d have to live with the knowledge that Miranda and maybe Donald will end up dead.”

“I like it already,” Mom said and I gave her a slight smile.

“I have the paper-trail in my possession that shows where the money went. If I were to mail the drive back to one of the higher-ups and explain what Miranda had done, they’d kill her. My big fear with that is that she’d try to tell them that it was Donald and the money was here.”

“Have you thought about turning it over to the FBI and going into witness protection?” Dan asked.

“Frankly, I don’t trust that option any more than I trust the mob to be gentle,” I said and explained. “For starters, those files are never as secure as they tell you when they recruit you into the program. Second, they’d take all the money and our new identities would have mom working a shitty job to support us. Hand over a hundred million in cash and the Boston mob on a silver platter and work as a waitress for the rest of her life? Politely go fuck a steak knife Special Agent Get-The-Fuck-Out-Of-Here. If we have to send Donald to the gallows with someone named Vito, then at least he did something wrong to deserve that. We don’t deserve to suffer for it. Then there’s the fact that Witness Protection probably wouldn’t let the seven of us stay together. If, and that’s no guarantee, they decided to put you in the program, we’d never see each other again. That’s too much loss for the kind of help they’d need from us.”

He nodded thoughtfully. “It’s quite the trap. You could talk to a lawyer.”

“Only if I could find one that’s not dirty, soulless enough to sell me out or works directly for the mafia or one of the 200 businesses on the list. I’m better off going to law school and reading the whole law library to learn the system myself. Unfortunately two weeks before school starts if rehab goes well isn’t going to leave me a lot of time to do that.”

“I suppose not. I wish I knew someone that could help with something like this,” he said apologetically. “Sorry I’m not well connected with law enforcement or lawyers or the mob.”

I shrugged. “I’m sorry I got everyone involved in this. If I’d just kept my curiosity in check, Donald would have moved the money and we’d be in the clear.”

“Oh, I doubt that,” my mother told me with a bitter smile. “We’re a safe place to put the blame at least until she needs the money. Why mess with that?”

“That’s ... true,” I said, realization dawning on me. “She’s trying to get the money now. She’s planning on bolting. She’s got to have a plan, a new identity, a place picked out.” I looked at her directly. “Do you have his cellphone number?” I asked.

She nodded and I told her I wanted to talk to him after breakfast. “I don’t want the girls to know about the money just yet,” I said. “I let Lana know because she’s pledged herself to me on a deeper level and the rest of you because you can handle the secret and I honestly needed to talk about it, but they need to go about life without that worry until we need to tell them.”

They all nodded and somehow I’d gone from meting out a punishment to making wide-reaching decisions for two families, three if you counted Donald and Miranda.

We all went upstairs and had breakfast with Patty and the girls. “Did you four have a good conversation?” Patty asked discretely.

Mom looked at me and nodded. “There were some details I wasn’t prepared to hear, but I understand. We have a lot more to talk about in the near future and some decisions to make, but for now we’re on standby.”

I kept quiet through breakfast and I let my thoughts drift as the others chatted almost normally. I knew that if I made the right decision, we could go about our lives normally. If I made the wrong one, Donald was likely going to die before the week was out. I was okay with the fact that either decision I made was going to end Miranda’s life. She’d earned that by stealing from the wrong people. Earned it again by using us as human shields. I didn’t want to be the one to kill her, but I was okay with the thought of her death.

Becky could tell something was wrong and looked like she wanted to ask me about it, but after breakfast, my mother sent them off to the kitchen to take care of dishes.

She brought me the cordless and dialed the number for me. I took the handset down to my room and hit dial. It rang a few times and then he answered, surprised at hearing me on the other end.

“Everything okay?” he asked, concerned.

“Not really, but I don’t want to discuss it on the phone. What are your plans for the day?”

“Nothing of extreme interest to a fourteen year old,” he said evasively.

“Are you sanitizing your answers because she’s there?”

“Of course, son,” he said, making it sound like I’d asked him for something.

“Can you get away from her to meet me for lunch?”

“I can see if I can get away. Should I pick you up at the house?”

“Of course not. I’ll have someone drive me to meet you. Tell her I have a new girlfriend and I need to talk to you. All of which is true.”

“You have a new girlfriend?” he asked, surprised. “Do I get to meet her?”

“Maybe some day. She may drop me off or I may have Mom do it. Where?”

“The Mall food court again in an hour?”

“Make it two,” I said and we said goodbye.

I took the phone back upstairs and told them that I’d set up a meeting for two hours at the mall.

“I’ll take you,” Mom said right away. “We can leave now.”

“It’s two hours from now,” I said confused. “We don’t need that much time.”

“I want you to have a phone in case something goes wrong and you need someone in a hurry.”

I nodded. “Alright. Let’s go get the phone then.” I looked at Lana and decided it never hurt to have another insurance policy. “Lana, I want you to get Lilly to show you the pictures she has of Dad’s girlfriend and then I want you to come to the mall about noon and just keep a discrete eye out for her. I’ll call you when we get the phone so you can text me if you see her.” She nodded and Mom and I got ready and left for the mall.

We didn’t talk on the way and went right to the phone store. We got me a plan that suited me with texts and enough data to keep me connected. While the phone charged, we got the paperwork squared away and by the time we were ready to leave the store, I was already calling Lana. She promised she’d spread the number to everyone else and she’d see me in about an hour.

Mom and I sat and talked at a table and I asked if she was staying in the mall. “No,” she said. “I parked just outside the food court doors. I’ll go back to the car and you can send me texts to update me. I’ll be close though and Lana will be here. Make sure she has my number.”

I nodded. “We’re as prepared as we can be. I think you should know there’s a good chance Donald will be dead before the end of the week. If she’s getting ready to run, she’s not planning on taking him with her. He was a convenient cog in the works. She’ll kill him so the trail dead-ends at his corpse. Or she’ll hang it on him and feed him to the mob if she’s caught. If I can find a way through for all of us, I will, but if not, better him than all of us. He brought this to our home and put this on all of us. If I have to use him up to keep us safe...” I looked down at my hands and clenched them into fists. “Well, I’ll have to live with those nightmares instead of this one.”

When I could finally look up, she was looking at me like she’d never seen me before. “I’m sorry,” she said to me. “Your father and I were terribly weak, soft. I suppose that’s forced you to be hard. We should have been better parents to you. We might have kept you from having to deal with something like this.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked confused. “‘Better parents’? You stayed in a loveless marriage for years to keep us in a stable environment. You never drank or yelled at us when we didn’t deserve it, you never hit us, never molested us, there was always good food for dinner and the house was always clean. We were never spoiled, but we were never without something if we needed it. You did fine. Submissive is NOT weak. There are different kinds of strength and you’ve been strong enough to keep us together. If I’m shouldering this, it’s because I need to for our family. That includes you and Lilly and Patty and Dan and Lana and Becky. I’ll do what’s necessary to hold our family together, just like you’ve done, just like you taught me. And in the end, if there are consequences, they’re mine to bear. That’s what I can do to help you. It’s what Donald should have done.”