To find three crisp, one-hundred-dollar bills.
3
Hudson
My office overlooked the Des Moines River with a full view of the glass-bottom pedestrian bridge. The office next to mine was held by my father. I grew up here. Watched it changed from an old, small city in a mainly farming state to a thriving, booming area with all the perks of a large city with the smaller size and family feel. Over the last fifteen years, we’d help build bandshell parks and stadiums, invested in new downtown condos to help stem the brain-drain—college graduates who left Iowa for larger cities like Chicago or Minneapolis. We built outdoor skating rinks, larger parks in the downtown area for growing families. We invested in real estate from condos to row homes to single-family homes and modernizing old buildings to turn them into lofts.
Our efforts worked. Now college graduates from other states were moving to Des Moines due to the lower cost of living and variety of offerings for their new lives. Our population continued to grow.
Our small empire was thriving.
My dad was a king of a small community, and I, its prince.
My current focus was just west of downtown, an area loved for its natural lifestyle and walkability footprint. Centuries-old homes, long ago turned into apartments, were crumbling and those who could afford to do so were hightailing it out of there, leaving those left worse off with higher crime rates and fewer jobs as mom-and-pop stores closed up their doors either due to poor business, or higher break-ins and thefts.
Des Moines might be a smaller city, but it faced all the issues of larger ones, at a comparable scale.
I was desperate to fix it. To give everyone who lived there an equal beginning and the same chance at creating a safe home for their children and themselves and the ability to work at something they took pride in. Granted, I couldn’t fix people or their internal motivations, but I could give them something beautiful and affordable to desire, perhaps sparking a new goal in them.
I was scouring over the final proposal plans, analyzing a row of homes near dilapidation status we would soon raze and then rebuild when my dad walked in.
He didn’t bother knocking, but I didn’t expect him to. And when I did expect it, years ago, he didn’t do it then anyway, so I quit. Now, I showed up early in the mornings, grabbed my coffee and got to work, leaving my door open until we had our morning catch-up.
He was more tired than usual and while I could brush it off, irritation made my jaw tight. My eyes hardened.
“You saw her.” I didn’t have to ask. He never slept well on those nights, and it wasn’t due to the sugar in the damn pie.
He didn’t confirm or deny, just came in and slumped into the chair across from my desk. One elbow went to the armrest, his chin fell into his palm. “What’s this?”
He reached for the papers in front of me, and I brushed his hand away. “Did you talk to her this time?”
“Of course I talked to her.”
“About anything more than her schooling?”
An ex-con going to community college to get a degree so she could be an office administration assistant. I already knew she was too smart for that, even if I hated how I knew it.
“Gave her your card. Told her we’d love to help her find a job.”
“My card? What the hell, Dad?” This was his gig. His sudden new drive and while I understood it, it wasn’t my thing. I was all for giving people second chances and it wasn’t because she went to prison. Hell, it wasn’t even because she pled guilty to killing someone.
It was everything else about her that ate away at my generally large amount of compassion and kindness and grace.
This woman would bring trouble into our lives, a lot of it. She’d bring pain and heartache and suffering, and my dad had been through enough in the last ten years.
Dad rolled his eyes behind his recently purchased glasses. He hated wearing them. That he did so early in the morning told me how tired he was.
With a heavy sigh, he frowned. “She said no.”
“Then leave her alone.” Because why… why in the hell couldn’t he leave her alone? We owed her nothing. We didn’t even know her. Hell, he’d already helped enough.
“She needs this.”
My dad was a bleeding heart. I admired the hell out of him for it. I admired the hell out of the way I grew up. There were usually so many damn kids in and out of our house, my sister and I were sometimes forced to room together. And we never cared. New friends all the time. A lot of enemies too, frankly, because not everyone who came through our doors left a better person. Some left just as angry, hating life and being as terrified as they’d been when they walked in our doors, regardless of how much Mom and Dad loved on them.
Helping people was what the Valentines did. And hell, my dad did it so much, he started being nicknamed Saint Valentine by the local press back when I was a kid.
He wasn’t a saint. He was a man who wanted to help people because he came from poor circumstances and had vowed to do what he could to make other people’s lives easier.
He was a good man. The best kind of man.
Sitting across from me, he looked worn and weary. And that pissed me off. Everything he was doing, it was wearing him down, and I’d already seen it happen with someone else. The last thing I needed was it happening to him.
I loved the man, but he was as hardheaded as they came. Mom used to say his skull was built from a construction worker’s helmet.
“Not all who wander are lost, remember?”
He shook his head, refused to see it. Maybe she had her own plan figured out. So she got some minor help along the way. She was smart enough to get to where she wanted to go.
“This girl isn’t wandering, she’s dead. Don’t you see it?”
I saw it. I saw it every time he talked about her and in every photo he’d shown me. I saw the hardness in the press of her jaw and the tightness in her eyes. I saw pain and the complete lack of life in her expression whenever he’d snap a photo when she was staring off into nowhere.
She’d probably call the cops. Have him arrested for stalking if she knew what we did.
But more than her pain, I saw the damage it did to my dad to see her, driving twenty miles out of his way, late at night, because she’d become an obsession. All due to a promise made years ago.
“She fixed my LX last night.”
That had me sitting up. “Excuse me?”
“Made some weird sounds on the way. Temp thing didn’t seem right. Whatever, I didn’t know anything. Mentioned something to her and she didn’t hesitate. Just went right outside, checked it out, and fixed it.”
“Jesus, Dad. Why didn’t you stop somewhere safer?” Her diner was perched between two strip clubs, a truck stop, and a hotel that rented rooms by the hour. Which was only part of the reason why my dad wanted to give her a job. It wasn’t safe for anyone, especially not someone who strolled up in a six-figure car. Or the girl who couldn’t hide she was beautiful enough to win pageants, even if she covered herself in heavy makeup and an ugly uniform. “Where is it now?”
“At the dealership. Called Floyd. He had me bring it in and gave me a rental. I’ll get it back tonight.”
Relief pushed out a heavy breath through my lungs and I sat back, just in time to jolt forward again as my dad said, “I want you to go talk to her.”