Nine
J arold, I don’t know what to tell you. Therapy was part of the condition of the team not suspending you. You have to go.”
“You’re my agent. Can you get me out of it?”
The urge to bang his head against the steering wheel until Scott knocked himself unconscious was huge. Except since he was driving, he’d end up crashing into someone else. So instead, he lost himself in thoughts of Lauren while Jarold droned on about how unfair his punishment was.
Scott played out the what if he had come back anytime during college. Would they be married now? How many kids would they have? Would she have found another project to champion in Chicago? He was just about to go through the ideal locations of their honeymoon when Jarold’s angry voice broke through his daydreams.
“A better agent would get me out of this!”
“No, they wouldn’t. You would have been suspended and that would have been the end of it. I got them to agree to therapy instead of suspension, for which I am reminding you once again, would have meant you wouldn’t have been paid for any of those missed games. You’re a grown-up, Jarold. No one can make you go to therapy. But if you don’t go, they will suspend you for half a season without pay. Do what you want.” Scott ended the call.
Oh shit!
What did he just do?
Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit.
His finger angrily pushed at the screen in his car until his phone connected a call to Georgia.
“I screwed up.”
“What did you do?” Georgia’s voice lacked any hint of surprise.
“Jarold.” He didn’t explain. He didn’t need too. Jarold was their problem client and flip-flopped from their frustrating not-quite but never-would be favorite to agency enemy number one on a weekly basis.
“Ah. I’ll take care of it. Is he complaining about going to therapy again?”
“Yep.” Scott disconnected the call before Georgia could ask about the trip.
Scott turned down the street that led to his childhood home and pulled into the driveway. Except now that he was there, he couldn’t get out of the car. He didn’t want to. He wanted to drive back to the bakery and spend more time with Lauren. Except Lauren and thinking about her was bad for business. He needed to get focused and get out of town.
Fast.
His fingers wrapped around the steering wheel, and he stared at the house in front of him.
The house hadn’t gotten any larger since he’d left Iron Creek, but it was somehow nicer than all the other houses on the block. The windows and shutters were clean. The siding didn’t have any of the usual signs of age, and the gutters looked new. Someone driving by wouldn’t notice anything, but if they stopped and stared at the house long enough, they’d notice something was off. It wasn’t like any of the other houses on the block that weren’t at the point of disrepair, but somehow looked a little worse for wear.
Scott leaned back until his head hit the headrest and closed his eyes. He did his best to ignore the number of unclean heads that had likely done the same before him and promised himself a long, hot shower once he checked in at the hotel.
Going into the house was the last thing Scott wanted to do. It was just below getting a root canal without any anesthesia. But Scott was used to doing a lot of things he didn’t want to do. Like telling players that the team that drafted them had no interest in re-signing them and while other teams were interested, none wanted to pay what the player wanted.
The best way to approach these situations was to break them down into individual steps.
Turn off the car.
Open the car door.
Get out of the car.
Walk to the house.
Unlock the house door.
Enter the house.
Resist every urge to turn into an arsonist and burn the house down.
His mom wasn’t kidding when she threatened to burn down the house as the most likely result of her coming back to Iron Creek.
From the outside, it looked as though Scott just didn’t want to enter his childhood home because he didn’t want to face the memories of his dead father. Except that couldn’t be further from the truth. Scott didn’t want anything to do with the house, his father, or his father’s estate.
He planned on leaving everything in the house except for the few items he wanted to keep, like his mom’s pottery pieces. As he got older and spent less time at home, his mom took up pottery as a hobby. During the four years he was in high school, the house slowly filled with vases and bowls his mom had made. She still worked with pottery, but the hobby stopped being an escape from a neglectful husband and turned into a career. Scott’s mom was an artist in her own right and he wanted her first pieces.
Scott didn’t care what happened to the rest of the contents. He’d briefly considered leaving the front door unlocked and putting a sign out front, telling anyone who happened by that everything inside was up for grabs, and hadn’t yet ruled it out.
Scott flipped the light on in the front hall and looked around the house.
There wasn’t a single speck of dust anywhere.
Someone had bothered to come in and clean the house knowing Scott was coming home. He planned on it being the last and only time, but no one in town knew that. They hoped he’d keep his childhood home and come back with all the other invaders during the summer months.
As he walked through the first floor of the house, he couldn’t find any of his mom’s pottery, which surprised Scott. As far as he knew, his dad had maintained the lie that his mom was helping a sick aunt. Scott assumed it was because his dad hoped his mom would give up her protest and come home, but he knew better. Once his mom left, she wouldn’t ever come back. Not even when the man who caused her to run away died.
Opening the closet that held all the serving dishes, he expected to find his mom’s pottery shoved on the top shelf, but he found nothing other than the same dishes that came out during the holidays.
After searching all the storage areas on the first floor without finding anything he wanted, Scott headed up the stairs. In stark contrast to the downstairs, nothing had changed since the day he left.
His dad’s room was locked in the same year both Scott and his mom left.
His mom’s clothes were gone, but the drawers that once held her things remained empty. In all that time, his father never found another use for them. Or maybe he never realized they were empty and chose to continue to believe the lie of where his mom had gone.
For over a decade.
The entire time he catalogued the contents, or lack thereof, of the drawers and closet, he ignored the door on the west wall that led to his father’s office.
Scott had faith in science. His belief system didn’t include things that could be explained away by science. A window didn’t open on its own because of ghosts. It was because of the difference in pressure from the air outside and the air inside. Instinct wasn’t about a supernatural force. It was the brain calculating years of experience and making a split second decision.
Except every cell in his body was shouting at him to not go through the door. There wasn’t a single memory of anything bad happening in his father’s office. Sure, that was where his dad spent all his time, but he didn’t expect to find anything more than papers and files.
So why wasn’t he willing to open the door?
His hand gripped the knob tight enough for his knuckles to turn white. He had to will himself to turn his hand and push the door open. Before his body answered the call to turn and run, he stepped through the doorway.
Scott sat down at the desk and opened each of the desk drawers. At first, he found files he expected to find. Tax records, credit card statements, paid bills, and even canceled checks.
But at the bottom of the pile of file folders in one of the drawers, he found files labeled with the name Brand Mart. His dad’s role on the town council meant he’d have some files on them, but instead of one or two file folders, there were at least twenty.
After cleaning out the desk, he moved to the filing cabinets. And that was where he discovered a veritable treasure trove of unexpected documents. An entire drawer was stuffed with files labeled with the name Mancando LLC. Nothing about the details he saw in the files made any sense. Most were just records of deeds and transfers, but his dad had added notes to some of the pages. By the end of his search, he had three stacks of files, each one almost a foot tall. He hadn’t looked closely at the contents and didn’t know whether they were important, but he could look at them later, in the privacy of his hotel suite, far away from the ghosts of his past that haunted him.
He didn’t want to come back to the house once he left, and with the mountain of documents he’d already uncovered, it was probably for the best that he did a second sweep of the desk. Good thing he did too. During this second search Scott found a file folder labeled CFD Industries. They were the company that had bought the mine from the family and promptly fired everyone who worked there and brought in out-of-state contractors. Scott might not have visited Iron Creek, but Georgia kept him informed about some of the town’s happenings, like the sale of the mine.
Curious, he opened the file and skimmed through the papers inside. The more he read, the larger the pit in his stomach grew. It looked as though his father was taking bribes from them, but he didn’t know why they’d need to bribe his father if the sale of the mine was just between two greedy families. He remembered reading about the news of the sale, especially since the owner had promised to transfer the mine back to the town for them to use the land as a park or for research. Unfortunately, the promise was supposedly never in writing and the owner died before the transfer could take place. His children hadn’t cared about the promise or the town and sold it to the highest bidder, which was an acquisitions company that loved to buy businesses and sell them off for parts.
Scott reached into his pocket and pulled out his cell phone. Without looking, he slid his thumb across the screen in the well-used pattern that would result in a call to Georgia.
He needed a distraction.
“Do you remember reading anything about an LLC named Mancando in the CFD Industries clippings?”
“I’m fine thanks. It’s been busy here, but we’ve been managing just fine without your presence.” Georgia ignored Scott’s lack of greeting.
“Hello Georgia, how are you doing?”
“At the risk of repeating myself, fine thank you.” The sound of rustling papers came through the speaker on the phone. “Mancando? Nope, nothing why?”
“Was just a hunch, but it was the wrong one, I’m sure.” Taking a moment to distract his brain from the suspicions that his father had done something horrible, Scott relied on small talk with Georgia as he finished his search of the office.
“Anything big happen in the office today?”
“Got a call from the mother of a former client. She’s upset about his decision to go with another agent.”
“What did you tell her?” He flipped through a small notebook he found in the middle drawer of the desk.
“That we’d gladly take him back when he realized his mistake, but there was nothing we could do to stop him.”
“How upset is she?”
“Well, she spent twenty minutes commenting that for as smart as her son is, he sure does stupid things. I reminded her that he was young and his rookie contract was about to come to an end, I wouldn’t expect him to be anything but stupid. She just needed an ear, so I gave her one.”
“Good. Think he’ll be back?”
“If his mother has anything to do with it, yes.”
What the…
In the middle of the notebook, Scott’s father had tracked dollar amounts and listed a bank Scott didn’t recognize.
“Georgia, I need to go. Send her a gift basket or something.”
“Already done. I’ll call you tomorrow if I don’t hear from you before then.”
The call ended and Scott leaned back in the chair. His father wouldn’t keep statements somewhere else, but he also wouldn’t have left them in a drawer someone could have stumbled across. Scott pulled out the top drawer on the right-hand side of the desk first and dumped the contents on the desk. Nothing looked out of place or unusual, but instead of putting the drawer back, he set it on the floor. He did the same process with the two drawers below it. The middle drawer didn’t hold any secrets either.
The bottom left drawer, however, hid a small secret. A false bottom. It wasn’t obvious and would have passed a casual examination, but Scott had moved past casual examinations. Within the secret compartment, he found statements from the bank listed in the notebook. But this bank was two towns over.
The clock on his phone informed Scott that the bank was closed. He’d have to go first thing in the morning if he wanted to learn anything more.
The pit in his stomach grew larger.
It was all too much.
With a sweep of his arm, the papers and files landed in one of the large canvas bags from some event his father had gone to. Grabbing the bag, he hurried from his dad’s room.