Read Open and Shut for Free Online Page B

rolled-up socks don't really bounce, and I create fantasy games to play in.
    Right now I'm in the middle of an intense game, made all the more difficult by the fact that I also serve as commentator.
    “Carpenter fakes left, the shot clock is off, the game clock is down to ten, his teammates have cleared out, giving him room … Carpenter loves to take the final shot … a two will tie, a three will win. The crowd is on its feet.”
    Edna watches this with no apparent emotion, unimpressed by my prowess, since she has previously told me that sock basketball was invented by her Uncle Irwin. The door opens and Laurie comes in, carrying a huge watermelon. Even this isn't enough to hurt my concentration.
    “Carpenter backs in, three on the clock. He turns, jumps, shoots … and hits!” The shot has actually gone in, but I'm not finished. I wait a few moments for effect.
    “And a foul!”
    I go up to my nonexistent opponent and get right up in his nonexistent face.
    “In your face, sucker! In your face!” I snarl.
    Laurie has finally managed to put the watermelon on a table, and she turns to me and my imaginary opponent. “I think you've got him intimidated.”
    “Her. I've got her intimidated,” I say. “I combine my sports and sexual fantasies. It saves time.”
    Laurie looks around the office, as she always does, her face reflecting her displeasure at the mess I've made.
    “This is a dump,” she says with some accuracy.
    “So is that why you brought in a four-hundred-pound watermelon? To class up the place?”
    We both know that Sofý, the owner of the fruit stand downstairs, has given us the watermelon as partial payment for defending her son. I would have preferred peaches, but they're not really in season.
    “Someday you might want to take payment in actual money. Although as rich as you are, you don't need to.”
    This interests me enough to put down the sock basketball. I walk toward her, throwing out questions along the way.
    “Did you check out the money? Where did he get it? Is it really mine?”
    “Yes. I don't know. Yes.”
    I focus in on the negative. “You don't know where he got it?”
    Laurie takes a diet soda out of the small refrigerator and pops the top before she answers. “Correct. But I do know
when
he got it. Thirty-five years ago. It started as two million.”
    This has now moved smoothly from the very strange to the totally bizarre. Thirty-five years ago my father was in his mid-twenties and in law school. How the hell could he have gotten hold of two million dollars?
    Laurie continues. “It gets even stranger. He never touched the bonds, not once in all these years. The principal just grew from interest.”
    “But he loved to play the stock market. When he retired he used to sit by the television all day and watch that stupid ticker go across the screen.”
    She shakes her head. “Not with this money. The brokerage was instructed never to suggest new investments … they were told never even to call him … to pretend the money didn't exist.”
    “You spoke to them?”
    She nods. “Not the same people who were there back then, but the instructions were passed down, and nobody ever questioned them. Not a single person in the place had ever spoken to your father about the money.”
    “I've got to find out where he got it in the first place.”
    Laurie has an annoying habit of dribbling out information, and she is dribbling away now. “The plot thickens. The brokerage records show it was a single cashier's check … so there's no way to trace it from this end.”
    This is incredibly frustrating, so I spend the next ten minutes brainstorming ideas with Laurie about how to go about getting more information. We collectively come to the conclusion that she already had come to: The only way to find out more is to look back into my father's life.
    Laurie thinks I should drop it, that there's nothing to be gained by going further. The unspoken concern is that there's something to be lost,