Chapter Nineteen
Taylor
Eric came to the door on Tuesday absolutely exhausted. But I was up waiting for him, sitting on the stairs. It was 3 a.m. but I was not going to have this any longer.
He came through the door and saw me sitting there. He rolled his eyes, but at least he didn’t try to get around me. “I do not want to be doing this right now, sis.”
“I get that. I really do. I understand. However, as your sister, you need to understand a few things.”
Eric shook his head. “I get it. You like Dalton. We’re talking. It’s all good.”
“I’m not talking about Dalton. He’s our partner, and we’re together, so what you like or don’t like needs to find a place to sit down and get out of my way. I’m talking about Kris.” I stood up to my full five-foot-four. “It makes me sick that you hadn’t even noticed her or had the slightest idea. Have you even bother to call her since Saturday?”
At the mention of Kris’ name, Eric smiled a goofy little grin. “No, I haven’t. I don’t know what I’m feeling right now, Taylor. I never really thought of her like that before the other day.”
“If you have no experience since Courtney with relationship issues, don't you come here and give me a hard time about my relationship with Dalton. I want you to be a part of our lives, Eric. Dalton is a part of our lives and so is Kris. As fucked up as that may get at times, and it will get royally messed up, you need to get on board and clear out some of the debris and hubris going around in that head of yours and get things going right.”
He kicked at the bottom step. “So, you mean I have to listen to the thumping and shaking in the middle of the night.”
I looked up at him. “Eric, that’s just gross.”
“Where are you all going to live if not here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you going back to California with him?”
“I don’t know.”
“There’s a lot of ‘I don’t knows’ in there, sis. Before you start knocking me, maybe figure those out as well.”
I took a deep breath. “That’s a good point. It really is. I will get those answers for you. I may not know what the future may hold but let us understand that there is something between all of us.”
I walked over to my brother and wrapped my arms around his waist. “You’re my big brother, and I love you dearly.”
I felt him kiss the top of my head. “Love you, too, sis. But can I please get some rest?”
I laughed. “Yes, but it’s not over.”
“It is for now. Rhonda gets back into town on Friday, and we need to talk with her before her shift. So, let’s just get everyone together for some drinks after the bar closes tomorrow night.”
I agreed and put the issue, and myself, to bed.
The next night found us all in the bar. Peggy, Kris, Dalton, Eric, and myself pulled tables together. We needed to hash out what the duties were going to be for all of us.
Dalton set the pace and from the corner of my eye, I watched Eric and Kris. They still seemed really uncomfortable with each other. Kris maybe even a little bit subdued, if that was even possible.
Our meeting lasted until about four in the morning, where we all called a halt and needed to get some rest. Dalton was going to have some of his assets liquidated so he could at least take care of the taxes while we dug deeper into Courtney, George, and whatever Rhonda was doing. Were they all connected or were we blinded by the fact that we had no idea what was going on with Rhonda?
I heard Eric ask Kris if she could stay and talk. I hoped they worked it out. Kris’ outgoing fun nature was exactly what I think my brother needed in order to get going in his life.
As I walked out to my truck, I heard the steps behind me that I recognized as Dalton’s.
“Would you like me to escort you home?”
I turned toward him. “I would love to have you escort me home, just so I don't drive off the road in extreme exhaustion. However, if you are expecting any reward at the end of your trip, I will just as likely fall asleep as anything else.”
He grinned. “I can live with that. I think my question to you, my dear Taylor, is do you want to wake up in the morning alone or would you like to wake up in the morning with a man who loves you?”
“You love me?”
“I thought I was clear about that. If I wasn’t, Taylor Price, I’m very much in love with you.” He strode forward to me and kissed my trembling lips. “What’s your answer, babe?”
I woke up the next morning, happily snuggled next to Dalton, smelling the coffee brewing downstairs. I looked over at the clock, which I had not set the alarm on. I had once again way overslept my alarm. Sometimes, change was good. It could be scary, freeing, and give you the feeling you were running off the cliff, but once it had occurred, it was also exhilarating.
All Thursday was spent with all of us working our little angles. Henry may have found a lawsuit being filed against the Harris family. He was heading into the courts to see what that was all about. I had the new marketing campaign for The Boar and Brew.
Most interesting was Dalton had me contact Mabel, and I started doing marketing for the other D&E nightclubs around the country. It was fascinating all the pies that Dalton had been working on. Mabel had a grandmotherly sort of voice, and it made me feel immediately comfortable with her. I’m sure she was solid iron under all the sugar and spice and no one got through that gate keeper.
The next day, Friday, we all met at the house. Kris rode up on her bike, and we all took the Viper over to Rhonda’s. Feeling Dalton’s hand in mine as we drove made me tingly in all the right places. I squeezed his hand, and he grinned over at me.
We quickly found out that she lived in an area of town that she should never have been able to afford on her own. As Dalton pulled up to the gated community guard house, he asked the guard about her, but he said she kept to herself and had few visitors.
I thought Dalton was going to show his hand there for a second, but I was sure that whatever we were going to need answered was going to happen shortly.
We pulled up in front of her townhome. Very swanky. We all got out but stayed by the car while Eric went up to the door and rang the bell and then knocked. Rhonda opened the door in a robe.
“Eric? What are you doing here?” She saw all of us over by the car. “What’s going on?”
“Rhonda, I went over to the county clerk’s tax office this week. I’m sure you heard about the issue at the bar this week.”
She shrugged in her robe. “So? What’s that have to do with me?”
I could feel Dalton tense next to me. I put a hand on his arm and he relaxed.
“Eric’s got this,” I whispered.
“Since you were supposed to run the money over there and it appears it never made it.”
“Who said I was supposed to?”
“Pops and me. I saw him give you the check and you bring back the receipt. You know that’s fraud, don’t you, Rhonda?” Eric asked.
A voice came from the back of the house. “Don’t tell him anything, Rhonda.”
Rhonda stood up to her full height and behind her appeared George Harris in a pair of whitie tighties. That wasn’t something I’d be able to scrub from my mind anytime soon.
“I didn’t say anything.”
He pushed around her. “You can’t prove anything, Eric. It’s your word against hers, and she has influential people who want to see her do well.”
She pouted her lips. “Oh, George.”
“Quiet, Rhonda,” he replied harshly.
She kept the pout.
“Now, I have a business appointment in a few minutes and if you don’t leave this property, I will have to call the cops. And that will be the second time you’ll be in jail this week, Eric.”
He caught sight of Dalton by my side. “I really don’t see why my wife was ever interested in either of you two,” he said, nodding to Dalton.
Dalton leaned down to me. “Seriously. He must think pretty highly of himself with a young twenty-something on his arm.”
I giggled, and Dalton nudged me with his hip.
Eric leaned in closer. George and Rhonda must have seen something in his eyes because they both stepped back. “If I have my way, you’ll both be in jail by the end of the week.”
Eric turned to walk away and then turned back to Rhonda. “By the way, Rhonda. No need to come into work. You’re fired.”
On the way back home, all four of us came up with ideas as to what was going on.
“Rhonda stole the money, but why?” Kris asked.
“It couldn’t have been for rent because we are talking about thousands and though that townhouse is nice, I’m sure the bill is being paid by George,” Dalton responded.
“How did she get involved with George in the first place?” I asked.
Eric piped up from the back. “Shortly after she started working for me, George seemed to be coming in more often and spending time at the bar. I didn’t think anything of it because I knew he was married to Courtney, and I felt really sorry for him. Figured he needed someone to talk to. Guess it went far beyond that.”
“True,” I answered, “And that also explains why Courtney is stuck in a marriage she can’t get out of. But why not separate and get another home to live in? It would be a lot easier than seeing a young woman shoved in your face every time you go down to the bar.”
“Do you think she knows?” Kris asked.
“Damn right she knows. Hence her trying to play for Eric and Dalton.” I stopped for a second. “No, that doesn’t make sense. Courtney knew how both of them felt about her. I still think she was digging for information on the will. Probably about the ownership of the bar, since we had just found out and Henry keeps everything locked down like a vault in his office.”
“Anything from Pops and Dalton’s letters?”
“Family stuff mostly.”
Dalton coughed. “My letters to Pops were mostly about dreams about the bar. Where I saw it going. There were several letters from him to me about different types of craft beers.”
“Really. I got him interested in starting to serve them. I didn’t know you had a hand in it.”
“Pops was really old fashioned. But as the old regime was getting older, he had to figure out something to bring in the millennial crowd. He told me marketing had gone really well.”
Dalton beamed over to me, and I blushed at the compliment.
Kris halted the whole dream scenario we had going on. “Time out, everyone. That’s great and all, but if we can’t stop what is happening with the bar, we are going to lose it and all the dreams outside of working for Dalton himself… not to say that’s a bad thing, Dalton.”
“No offense taken, Kris,” he replied.
“However,” she continued, “all plans will be null and void.”
“Agreed. But how…” I started to reply but Dalton’s phone rang, and he took it on speaker.
“Henry?”
“Afternoon, Dalton. Is everyone with you?”
“Yes.”
“Come on by the office. I have something interesting here for you.”
About fifteen minutes later, we found ourselves at Henry’s office. As a group, we were escorted by the birdlike Betty to the same conference room where all the drama had ensued just a couple of weeks earlier. A lot had come to light and much more had blown away, leaving us stronger as people and as couples.
Henri immediately saw the easier relationship between all of us. “Nice to see some good come of a good spring cleaning.”
Betty tittered over in the corner. She really did sound like a bird.
Dalton spoke for all of us. “Henry, let us know. Did you find something out?”
“I did,” he responded. “Do you know what a Ponzi scheme is?”
Kris shook her head. “Not really. I thought it had to do with investments of some sort like Madoff in New York.”
“Not legitimate investments. I went looking through recent lawsuits that had been filed over the last couple of years. It appears that George has been a very naughty boy.” Henry sat down on one of the seats to give his old bones a rest. “It appeared he may have married Courtney, believing that she had the money for his debauched lifestyle. She figured the same thing, so it looks like they both got the short end of the stick.”
“No, I think that’s Rhonda,” I said.
Kris laughed.
“I’m sorry. He showed up at the door in a pair of white underwear. Didn’t leave a whole lot to the imagination.”
Henry cleared his throat. “To answer your question, Kris, a Ponzi scheme is when someone says they have something of value, get people to invest in it, pay the original people with money from the secondary people and basically they lose out. The person running the scheme will say the investment folded or something, leaving them with the money and their investors fleeced.”
Eric pitched in, “What does that have to do with our bar?”
“That’s where it becomes pretty tricky. According to the many people I wined and dined over the last week, and you will get my bill for that, Dalton, by the way, the way it worked in your case is that Courtney would woo the investors and get them to meet up with George. He would tell them about a getting in early on this great deal. That lasted a good four years. I guess his lifestyle started to make things harder for the people he was getting money from.
“Two years ago, from what I can gather, he started to go broke. He came up with a new scheme that he began pitching that a prominent local business was going broke. One of the investors got antsy and sued him, saying he thought he was being scammed. The lawsuit was pulled after I believe George’s father bailed him out.
“I believe he began another scheme using the property The Boar and Brew is built on. From what I heard, it was a historic piece of land in the downtown area that he had already gotten townhome deals on. The real clincher is that I can find no mention of any townhome deals, so I think that it is just another way to get the investors’ money.”
“So, he used Rhonda to sabotage from the inside and used his connections to show that he had inside information about what going on with the bar,” Dalton surmised. “That’s just so wrong. All the stress that probably put on Pops. He wouldn’t have seen it either, since it was being done so underhandedly, and he never thought like that. He always hired college students, so he could help them out.”
I could see the rage in both Dalton and Eric. I could feel the heat creeping up into my own face. “So those two little… shitheads… thought of this scheme to ruin our family so they could have a lifestyle of what? Black tie balls and Botox.” My voice screeched a little bit on the end of my little outburst.
I have never been so angry in my life. This anger bubbled down below in my gut and made me rather sick. My father had gotten ill, and they went in like a shark for blood, ruining a good man’s peace of mind and likely his health. Pops probably felt helpless that there wasn’t anything he could do to make it right and didn’t know how.
“Kris?” I looked over into her sad eyes. “What does my dad say in the letters to Dalton?”
“When he started not feeling well, he wrote to him about not being able to help or find a way to make it work anymore. He had always been so good about the bar for almost fifty years and now he couldn’t see his way out of it. He asked Dalton for help in exchange for an ownership in the bar and that he should have it paid back shortly.”
“You know this whole thing made him sicker and made his last days worse,” Eric said.
Dalton asked Henry, “What can we do to make sure that they spend a lot of time behind bars?”
“Getting them to the bar to talk about selling it to them might help them to get greedy and say more.”
“Do you think that we can get the police involved and work it as a sting?”
Henry smiled and for the first time since I had known him, I shivered. He looked like a vengeful shark going in for the kill. “It would be my pleasure, Dalton.”
“Well, let’s just stop sitting here spinning our wheels. I want that bitch behind bars,” I said.
As one family unit, we headed down to the bar. Eric called George and Courtney and said that we wanted to talk with them tomorrow at the bar about possibly selling it to them to at least get a little bit of income instead of losing it.
When Eric got off the phone, I turned to Dalton. “He must know you have the money to pay the tax bill.”
“Maybe. He might think that I won’t have time to liquidate my assets and pay it in full, causing us to lose it. I also don’t want to pay it until George has been arrested because though we can see the main players, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t other people involved.”
I went and stayed at the hotel with Kris while the boys talked with the police to see what they could do to make this happen.
Kris walked into the penthouse. “Holy Christ, Taylor! This place is gorgeous. I would never want to leave it!”
I smiled sardonically at her. “Kris, it’s a hotel.” Pulling her over the sofa, I asked her the most important question on my mind at that time. “So, Eric and you?”
Kris’ dark Hispanic skin brightened up at his name. “He’s a work in progress, but we are having dinner after this is all over.”
“Dinner, not coffee.”
“No, I’m all in. It’s dinner, and I expect dessert.”
“I bet you do,” I replied.
“Oh, shut the front door,” she responded.
The boys came back later in the afternoon. They showed me their wires.
Eric grinned like a little boy. “I feel like I’m on one of those cop shows.” He looked over at Dalton. “Now, don’t tell me you don’t feel a little wowed right now?”
Dalton glanced up from tucking his shirt back into his jeans after showing me how it was all set up. “Okay, maybe a little. Any idea when they are coming by?”
Eric nodded as he tucked his own shirt in. “Told him after we closed tonight.” He looked up and grinned at me. “Told George to also bring Rhonda so she could pick up her check.”
“Think Courtney knows about Rhonda?” I asked.
Kris snorted. “Doubt it. Rhonda would be below her status. This could be fun. Where are Taylor and I going to be?”
“The police will be set up out in the back alley. I would suggest that you go back there with them to keep you safe,” Eric said, looking sheepishly at Kris.
“Looking out for me?” she asked.
“Maybe.” He smiled back at her.
“I like that.”
She turned on her heels and walked back to the kitchen with Eric turning his head to follow her out of the room with hungry eyes. He didn’t see me look at him, so I looked at Dalton, who had seen the same things. We smiled at each other.
Eric and Dalton headed out to the bar while Kris and I chilled at the hotel until it was almost time for the big show. We took Kris’ bike around to the alley and knocked on the van’s door parked around back.
Tommy Brice let us in.
“Tommy, what are you doing here?”
“Here to make the arrests once our detectives hear what they need. Just knowing they did this on purpose to your dad makes me sick.”
“It’s nice to hear you say that.”
A detective came over to us. “Ladies, if you will have a seat back here, we can get you all set up.”
I sat where they pointed, and Kris sat down next to me. We grabbed each other’s hands and held tight.
Never in my life had I wanted anything so bad as to make sure Courtney and George got what they deserved. Courtney had been a thorn in my side for the last nine years. It was time for the Prices to have a little payback.