Five hundred and forty thousand dollars. That’s what was in the duffel bag. Five hundred and forty thousand dollars, which according to the ledger represented the lives of 151 kidnapped women and children. Len had been paid five thousand dollars per person but had spent the rest on living expenses over the years before his capture.

I couldn’t get over the number of lives that one man could ruin without anyone taking any notice. He must have been kidnapping 20 to 30 people a year. I’d been a victim myself and I’d read the statistics, but the reality in the pictures of those women and children chained to the wall was overwhelming. So many lives were being crushed every day and there was no outcry. This is what I wanted my foundation for. These people needed help and people like Len Johnson needed to be stopped.

From a practical perspective, I needed to find a hiding place for the duffel bag and pictures. The ledger I placed in my R1 backpack, along with ten thousand dollars. I vowed to myself to only use the money to achieve the foundation goals. Seeing as how I couldn’t explain how I got the money; I couldn’t put in the Hannah Foundation. There was also the small matter of the Hannah Foundation not existing yet and having no bank accounts to put the money into.

I thought about just leaving the money in R1 or R2. I pictured just shifting the money into R1 and leaving it in the corner of my room. The problem was that I didn’t know how long the field around the duffel bag would last or if it would fade away while I slept or if I got too far away from it or if I got too tired from holding my shield. If any of those things happened and the field faded away, then the bag would be sitting there for anyone, maybe a certain dad for instance, to see. Holding the field around the bag would also be a constant drain on my resources. I needed a place that only I could get to.

I spent a long time walking through my house and thinking of hiding places, but nothing felt secure enough. I kept imagining some obscure reason for dad to all of a sudden need to check for something in the attic or the garage and finding the money behind a box that he hasn’t touched in years. The truth was that I could just leave the money in my closet and even if he had to go in there, he would never even consider opening up the duffel. He’d always been considerate and never invaded my privacy.

In the end, I decided to take a page out of Len’s playbook and hide the money in the walls of my room. All I had to do was go into R3, take the money with me and place it between the wooden wall slats. That way, only I could access it, and no one would ever find it, unless they were demolishing the house. Hopefully, I’d have some notice on the demolition and I’d move it out before then.

Ever since I’d first gotten into the R1, the new one without people, I knew that I could go into R3, where buildings didn’t exist. I just didn’t have a reason to go there. I was also too excited about the possibilities of R1 to bother. At the time, R3 didn’t seem to offer many benefits. Now that I had a reason to get there, I reversed the process of getting into R1 and instead of dialing back the power from R2, I dialed up the power by an equal amount.

Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

For the second time in two days, I found myself falling through the floor. Fortunately, I didn’t have nearly as much distance to fall this time. Eighteen inches isn’t far, but it did startle me, and I ended up falling on my ass, again. I’d failed to consider that the floor of my room, while on the ground level, still had a concrete slab foundation that didn’t exist in R3.

I stood up and started walking around through the insides of my house. It was so weird. Like the people and the cars, I could see the ghosted shape of the house and walk right through it. It gave me a whole new perspective on the house. There was also that strange effect of being able to see through a wall, but as I walked through it, I’d see the inside of it. This was similar to when I’d play in traffic and seeing the messy interior of cars that passed through me.

With my new perspective, I looked around the house for a better hiding spot. It would be much easier to find some closed off area that I could just stuff the bag into, instead of putting the bundles of money into the walls one by one. After a few minutes of searching, I found a small area in the main-floor bathroom, between the end of the bathtub and a beam. This small area had been sealed off because it was too awkward to make into a usable nook. However, it was big enough to stuff the bag into and I went to get it. I wrapped the bag in a field and brought it into R3. I caught it as it fell and brought it to the bathroom where I held the bag up into the space and then turned off the field surrounding it. The field was still surrounding the bag, so it kept a few areas from reforming inside the walls or the beam.

Once the bag was settled in, I removed the field from it and stood there looking at my handiwork. Damn! This power was awesome. I made a mental note to add ‘foundation inspector’ to the list of jobs that my ability could lead me to excel at. If I could only find a way to inspect upper floors while in R3, then I could be a whole home inspector.

I walked to the edge of the house and stepped up to the ground. I downshifted back to R2 and re-entered the house through the front door and returned to my room in R1. With everything now squared away, I could turn my attention to the ledger.

The ledger was a fancier version of an 8.5” x 11” notebook, in landscape format, with a red cover and a fake leather black spine along the short side. The word ‘LEDGER’ was written in large gold letters across the center. Inside, each page had columns and rows that would be useful for accountants or bookkeepers. Len had used these pages to make entries for each person that he kidnapped. In very neat, small script, he had labelled his columns by date and time of “Pickup”, the city and state, place, and name of pickup. He also had columns for Pickup number, delivery date, delivery time, delivery number, delivery location, amount. One entry read as follows:

Mar. 21, 2006/9:37pm/Charlotte, NC/Felder Street/Susy Warner/#93/Mar. 23, 2006/6:34am/14872/SLS/5000.

He had pages and pages of these notations. Most entries took up several lines, as he added notes about the pickup. It was all fairly straight forward, except for the delivery location. He alternated between three different locations: SLS, MTC, and PDC, with the majority going to SLS. I had not idea what or who any of those initials stood for and a quick internet search brought me too many hits to bother with, even when I tried restricting it to North Carolina. Although, with almost a day and a half from pickup to delivery, he could have taken his kidnap victims to several other surrounding states.