Chapter 31
Thirty-One
Mo paused with his hands on his keyboard. “I could ask you the same question. Why do you live at The Haven? Why haven’t you built a sprawling mansion? Why don’t you have the photography studio you wanted? Or the deck with the view for miles?”
She fiddled with the wrapper on her water bottle. “I asked first.”
He closed his laptop. “At first, I was afraid I’d be living here alone. I thought Cal and Meredith would find people to marry and then they’d live somewhere other than Gossamer Falls and the dream of living on this land and having our kids grow up together the way we did didn’t seem likely.”
“Were the tiny houses your idea?” Bronwyn looked at the three houses behind them.
“That is a matter of some debate. Meredith claims it was her idea. Cal and I both contend that she had nothing to do with it and that we came up with it one night while working in his dad’s shop and moaning that grown men need to have their own place and not live with their parents.”
“You did have your own place. So did Cal. And Meredith. You weren’t freeloaders.”
“True, but we didn’t have a place here. When we came home to visit, we stayed with our parents, and that was fine. But when Cal and Meredith moved home, it made sense for us to each have a place of our own. But we didn’t need or want to build our forever homes without our forever person.”
Bronwyn absorbed that. “What if you didn’t find your forever person?”
“We discussed that at length. We agreed if we weren’t married by the time we turned forty, we’d build the big houses.”
“So, do you have plans?” She was persistent. He’d always liked that about her.
“Not real ones. I have things I know I want. I usually walk through Cal’s houses before he turns them over to their owners, so I’ve seen things I like and things I would never do.”
“Oh, I have to know. Give me one must-have and one never-ever.”
He drummed his fingers on the closed laptop.
“Must-have . . . Master bedroom on the main floor. That’s more because of what we’ve been through with Mom and Dad than anything I’ve seen.
Mom could barely walk up and down the stairs for a while.
Sickness and illness are part of life. I want my room on the same level as the living areas of the home. ”
“Good point. My home is all one level at the moment. I don’t think I’ve considered what would happen if I broke my leg and my bedroom was upstairs.”
“Exactly.”
“Okay. What’s a never-ever?”
“A single-car garage.”
“Is there a story there?”
Mo nodded. “One of Cal’s builds. The lot was fairly small and the guy wanted to maximize his house space.
Understandable. But Cal told him not to skimp on the garage.
He told him he would want more space, not less.
The guy insisted. Said the house was great, decorated beautifully, all that good stuff.
But that tiny garage was a mistake. A year later, the guy was back in Cal’s office trying to figure out how to add on to it. ”
“Mo.”
“Yeah?”
“I started talking, and you stopped working.”
She was right, but he wouldn’t tell her that. He opened his laptop. “Fine. I’ll work. But that isn’t getting you out of answering my questions.”
She scrunched up her nose at him.
He laughed at her antics. “You didn’t think I’d forget, did you?”
“I hoped.”
“Come on. Let’s hear it.”
She blew out a dramatic sigh. “Fine. I live at The Haven for two reasons. One, I wanted to be closer to work. I’m a workaholic.
And a control freak. I wanted to be sure everything was done and that I could be on-site whenever needed.
I don’t think it was a bad idea for a while, but that phase is over.
If I don’t lose my job, I’ll make changes. ”
He didn’t make eye contact but waited for her to continue.
“You already know the second reason. There was no way I could build a house here, right across from you, when we weren’t speaking to each other.”
She’d been brave enough to say it. He’d be brave enough to ask the next question. “And now?”
“Now? This has been the most intense week of my entire life, and it’s only Thursday. I have a home. It’s lovely and comfortable. So while I’ll be moving off the property sooner rather than later, it’s not a priority. My current future planning is limited to tomorrow.”
“What’s tomorrow?”
“Finding the bylaws and figuring out what Grandmother was talking about.”
He gave himself an internal pat on the back. “Do you want to wait until tomorrow?”
“No, but . . .” She looked at the laptop. “Do you have them?”
“I do. I can print them now.” A few keystrokes and a notification on his screen told him that the printer was at work. “I’ll keep going through the files I downloaded. You can search the bylaws. And we’ll enjoy the peace and quiet until Eliza arrives.”
She only made it through half a page before she requested highlighters and Post-it flags so she could mark problematic areas.
Every now and then, she’d mutter something about “control freaks” and “morons,” and once she looked to the sky and said, “Lord, you are testing me.” An hour later, Bronwyn was only halfway through the pages he’d printed for her.
For his part, Mo had brought out a second laptop and had moved away from the firepit to a shady area where he could see his screen.
And what he was seeing was not making him happy. He’d had a few programs running in the background since he first accessed the files. These programs were designed to look for anomalies indicating money laundering, embezzlement, or other forms of criminal financial conduct.
He hadn’t been surprised that while a few red flags popped up immediately, they’d been nothing more than smoke screens.
The best financial criminals knew how to hide the actions that could send them to prison behind sketchy behavior that was more likely to earn them nothing more than a slap on the wrist or maybe a note in their file, along with a reminder about professional ethics.
Catching those red flags left most accountants satisfied that the accounts were otherwise clean.
Not that he was slamming accountants. It wasn’t their job to dig deeper.
They had their hands full and weren’t equipped or expected to find the devious machinations a skilled and motivated individual could put in place to hide their thievery.
Mo had been careful not to do anything that could get Bronwyn in trouble. The programs running now were running in the background on The Haven’s system.
But they were sending him reports, and those reports were problematic on many levels.
It would take him another day or two to hunt it all down, but if what he was seeing was correct, someone in the Pierce family had been blackmailing a politician and had used The Haven to launder the payments.
Mo could track three payments a year going back at least four years.
And another annual payment that went back a decade.
And there was one alarming payment from thirteen years ago that could be unrelated to anything else. Or it could be a sign of a very deep rot.
Based on the track record, the second payment due this year should have been made sometime in the last two weeks, but Mo couldn’t find any record of it.
Had the politician decided they were done? Had the person behind the blackmail made a different financial arrangement?
Mo had suspicions, but before he could approach anyone with them, he had to resolve one glaring issue.
Everything in the records indicated that the Pierce family member behind the most recent blackmail scheme was Bronwyn.
Bronwyn stared at the stack of paper in front of her. She’d tabbed it, highlighted it, and considered burning it in the firepit to cleanse her brain from the gobbledygook she’d poured through.
“I want to find the lawyer who put this together and ask if they read any of this.” Bronwyn expected Mo to laugh, chuckle, grunt . . . something . . . anything.
But she got no response. He was laser focused on the screens in front of him, and he did not look happy.
She stood, raised her hands above her head, touched her toes, repeated the process three times, and still, no reaction.
Maybe she’d been reading the situation wrong, but she’d rather gotten used to having Mo’s undivided attention. Even when he was working, he was aware of her. She liked it.
But right now, he was in a land far, far away. And he wasn’t having a good time.
She had good news to share. And she wanted to share it with him first. Should she interrupt him? Go inside and wait to see when he noticed she was gone?
She did neither. Instead, she set the bylaws on the rim of the firepit—where, if the wind blew them in and they burned, she would not be sad at all—and strolled down the path toward the river.
Fifteen minutes later, he joined her. He didn’t say anything. He simply fell into step beside her as they followed the meandering path to a small bridge that crossed the river to the property Bronwyn had sold to Landry.
A bench that hadn’t been there the last time she’d walked this path now graced the bank. “When did this happen?” She took a seat on one end. Mo took a seat as far away from her as possible.
The scene was peaceful. Idyllic. The river gurgled. The summer mountain air was warm but with a breeze that kept it from being oppressive. Everything was green, and there was the faintest hint of honeysuckle in the air.
But Mo keeping his distance left her cold and disturbed.
Maybe if she talked to him, he’d relax. “I found the clause in the bylaws that Grandmother wanted me to find.”
No response.
“There’s a provision for the CEO to no longer be subject to the whims of random family members on the board after a certain period.
It’s set up so the family gets a two-year window to be difficult, to essentially micromanage everything, and to insist on changes as they see fit.
But after that, the CEO has sweeping powers.
Too many powers if you ask me. I’ll be making some modifications to that. ”