Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
HARMONY
After her success at town hall and strike two with Tweed on Wheels, Harmony asked Alice to do her magic and take another look at the county records.
“It’s his land,” Alice confirmed when she called back the next day. “Bequeathed to him five years ago. Seventy-six acres. Along with a house in town.”
So that was how he afforded the place. “Grandparents?”
“Mother.”
Harmony’s hand fell away from where she was applying mascara. She felt a sudden affinity with the man she’d harassed all the way home, and an ache in her gut. Losing a parent was a rotten deal. In the hotel’s hinged vanity mirror, her hazel eyes were enormous and welled with the hurt no amount of time or confident bluster could completely erase. Harmony hadn’t been left a house, though. She’d faked the paperwork to stay out of the foster system and in the latest shitty apartment her dad had rented for the last years of high school. After graduation she’d slept on friends’ couches while she tried to be an actress in L.A., taking terrible roles until someone recognized her talent (for both acting and smaller-time theft) and invited her to put it to use grifting for his cons. The gold ring on her pinky, an impulsive sweet sixteen gift, was the only thing she had left from her dad.
Alice was rattling off more details. “He tried to get it rezoned for residential development a few years back, but town hall rejected his application. Why would he say it’s not his?”
“Dunno.” Harmony finished up her lashes and capped the wand. “I need more to go on. What else you got?”
“Uh …” Lots of typing sounds, little info.
Harmony sat on her bed to slip on some nude sandals. “And how’s Evan today?”
“Sorry, Harm,” Alice said, but Harmony could hear the smile in her voice. “Jones is only a side mark. You don’t usually have any trouble with these guys, I was focused on Weaver. I got the latest of the public tax records on him, by the way.”
“Thanks.” Her gaze fell on the novel on her nightstand that she’d unofficially borrowed from a county library in Santa Barbara and would drop at whatever branch was nearest when she finished. They at least knew something was going on with the Brookville library and upset parents—something Harmony could maybe use. “Can you get me in with his wife’s friends?” Official records weren’t getting her anywhere. She needed some personal insight. The inside scoop. Gossip.
“Piece of cake,” Alice confirmed. “I’ve got one who comes in for a latte every day after yoga.”
So the next morning, Harmony stopped by the coffee shop, making her way up to Alice under the soft glow of the dozens of mismatched, upside-down lampshades covering the ceiling that cast the tables and sofas in a cozy ambiance.
“So where’s this Evan? Already off saving souls?”
Alice shrugged, eyes on her steam wand. “He’s part of the early crowd.”
“How very virtuous. Early to bed, early to rise and all that.”
“Maybe he just can’t wait to see me.” At Harmony’s smirk, she added, “Should I date someone from the biz instead?”
Harmony stuffed her change back into her wallet. “Ugh, no. Tried that with Zach.”
Alice stuck out her tongue and made a gagging sound.
“Yeah.” She sighed. Better to stick to anonymous one-nighters. The only person Harmony would never leave behind was right here pretending to vomit into someone’s cappuccino. Alice had left her own troubled past in the rearview, getting out of her small town in central California with a guy passing through, someone Harmony knew in the business but avoided working with. Alice was too sweet for him but had clearly had no way out or anywhere else to go, stuck doing tech for his jobs, until Harmony swiped her for her own assistant.
The door’s chain of bells clattered. Alice’s brows shot up, and she jutted her chin toward a customer who’d just entered, a middle-aged blonde woman in Lululemon with a rolled mat slung over one shoulder.
Harmony moved off to wait beside a wall papered over with clippings from the Brookville Bee , until Alice gave the signal and she grabbed a tall steaming latte from the counter.
A moment later, Harmony tapped on the shoulder of the woman heading for the counter with creamer and cinnamon shakers, littered with emptied sugar packets and wooden stirrers. “Excuse me? I think we’ve mixed up our drinks.”
“What? I thought the girl said—” The woman peered at the black scribble on her cup. “This is regular milk.”
Harmony held out hers. “And this says oat.”
“Oh, gosh.” The woman’s eyes widened. “You’ve saved me. One sip of cow’s milk, and my stomach—wait, aren’t you the lady who’s putting on the music concert around here?”
“Harmony Hale.” She beamed. “Festival promoter and averter of dairy disasters.”
The woman laughed as they swapped cups. “I’m Bonnie Kelton. I’m on the Brookville PTA.” She popped the lid off her latte and dumped three Sweet’N Lows into its foam. “Thanks again.”
“Happy to help, I’m just fueling up before I drive out to Cranton.”
Bonnie’s fingers stilled where they’d plucked a stirrer from a cup. “Oh?”
Harmony sipped her latte and nodded, eyes flicking to the door. “Checking out one of the potential sites.”
“You must be so busy with all of that!” Bonnie gave her latte a stir. “But, gosh, it would be so great if you settled on Brookville. We’ve all been talking about it. If you could hear how excited everyone is—” Harmony swung her attention back to Bonnie, crafting a warm, open, expectant smile. So often the gentlest influence was all that was required, at least with people who weren’t obstinate librarians. “Oh, you know, some of the other ladies and I do a little mimosa morning—you should totally come!”
Harmony hid her sharpening smile behind another frothy sip.
A few days later, as Harmony walked into a big house in a newish development on the west side of town, she knew she’d come to the right place for gossip. Bonnie ushered her to the kitchen where chattering women, all in their forties or fifties, swarmed around a massive granite island covered in platters of fruit and cheese and long-stemmed glassware.
“And here’s Harmony!” Bonnie sang out to the group, oversized cardigan trailing behind her. “Such a funny story! We ran into each other at Buzzed when they mixed up our orders.”
Harmony smiled through the chorus of “No way!” and “How funny!” and one “Oh, Bonnie, you’re not back on caffeine again?”
Bonnie handed Harmony a glass. “I told her she just had to come along and share more about this festival of hers with us.” She introduced her to the half dozen women who were on the PTA with her, or the school board, or seemed to be there just for the mimosas.
Harmony mentally scrambled to remember each one. She set her drink down, leaned in against the granite counter, and beamed at them all. Digging up dirt on Preston Jones aside, these women were just where she needed to apply pressure next, to keep the idea of the festival alive through Brookville. Their goodwill would carry her plan forward with all the efficiency of a mother getting six children fed and shuttled to school and extracurriculars and into top colleges while she was at it. “You’re all too sweet to let me crash your party.”
One of the ladies from the school board said, “We can’t wait to hear all your plans.”
“It sounds very cool,” a dark-skinned woman in a cute dress murmured, fiddling with the wine charm on her glass.
“It sounds,” Cheryl Weaver said, “like something for sure.” Harmony didn’t miss how Cheryl left whatever that something was perfectly vague. “But I suppose we’ll see.” The mayor’s wife took a tiny sip of her mimosa and puckered her mouth. Her friend beside her, the one from the town hall meeting with all the bracelets, immediately nodded, schooling her face to cool indifference. A couple of others dropped their gazes from Harmony to their glasses.
Fair enough. Harmony had tanked her husband’s arcade to launch her festival pitch, not that either had likely figured out she’d been the true instigator at the meeting. And before they’d get on board, these women needed to see what the festival could do for them, for all their supposed civic-mindedness. People like this with more than enough were often the stingiest underneath it all. When she’d waited tables between gigs in L.A., Harmony had endured plenty of skimpy tips from these women’s counterparts after long brunches. She had to hook them with something they cared about deep down. She’d used fear at the town hall meeting, but appealing to something they loved could be even more powerful.
Cheryl plucked a grape from one of the platters. “Bonnie, you got way too much food!”
“Yeah,” her friend agreed. “I’m being so bad . Two pieces of cheese. On crackers ,” she added with a little moan.
“Oh,” Bonnie said with a little wave, “Garret and his friends will finish this all off. Teenagers! Bottomless pits.”
Of course with the moralistic food talk. While Bonnie was refilling someone’s glass—with a blend of a decent sparkling white from Napa and fresh-squeezed juice, by the looks of the bottle and the orange peels on the counter behind her—Harmony popped a morsel of Parmesan into her mouth. “When I had aperitivo with Gaga in Amalfi, she said you should always have something salty with your wine—unless the gossip is already salty enough.” She threw the woman beside her a wink.
School board lady chuckled, and the woman now on her second glass widened her eyes over its rim. “You must have so many wild stories.”
“My dad was in the music business,” Harmony said with a shrug—always cover an emotion you didn’t want to come across with a physical gesture. “I grew up around it all. That’s how I got into concert promotion.” She took another bite of cheese. “How I got my name too.” A little truth sprinkled in kept a grift smelling real.
“You should come to girls’ night!” the woman said, her expertly messy bun bobbing as she nodded. “The Moonlight Bar has half off margaritas on Fridays, and I need to hear more.”
“Of course,” Harmony said, with a quick touch of her hand to the woman’s shoulder. Physical contact turned people compliant. Using people’s names too. “Sounds fun, Ellie. I’ll be around—if Brookville turns out to be the festival’s home.” She didn’t want to come on too strong too fast. Never start by asking for something. Dangle something for the taking, or hold something back. Make them come to you.
The gathering shifted from the open kitchen to the adjacent living room, everyone settling onto oversize couches with plates of food and drinks perched on side tables or the massive glass coffee table anchoring the room, and the conversation shifted to kitchen remodels and vacations taken and planned, while Harmony listened and waited for the right chance to draw them all in.
Cheryl was in the middle of recounting an absolute nightmare with her bathroom contractor—Harmony couldn’t imagine living anywhere she was responsible for renovations, let alone staying long enough to need any—when a rumble came from somewhere farther into the house. “Sorry,” Bonnie said, hustling to close a door leading off to a hallway. “Teenagers! Garret’s band is rehearsing in the garage.”
Cheryl raised her brows. “I don’t know how you stand it. The noise!”
With a little smile, the woman with the great dress—Sarah—said, “It’s not as bad as the other night at town hall.”
Cheryl’s lips pressed together while her friend clucked, and Ellie asked, “Is that juvenile delinquent still hanging around your kid?”
“We put a stop to that,” said Cheryl. “Nina’s got a bright future, following in her father’s footsteps; she doesn’t need a bad influence like Jordan DaCosta holding her back.” Her blue eyes sharpened at Ellie. “I don’t want her to end up stuck like some people, in the service industry.” She opened her mouth wide, as if remembering herself. “Of course I don’t mean your Raymond’s lovely restaurant, only the DaCostas hauling groceries.” She waved a hand vaguely at the others. Harmony caught the hint of a smirk. “You know I just love that little pear salad he does.”
Harmony noted the swiftness and precision of Cheryl’s retribution for Ellie’s stepping even slightly out of line. Sarah had better watch her back, after bringing up Jordan’s stunt with the speakers. Harmony filed away the knowledge that Ellie’s husband ran a restaurant and might be enticed into signing up for the festival’s food service. But first—
“Speaking of bright futures—” She turned to her host. “Bonnie, your boy’s in a band?”
“Oh, you know,” Bonnie said, with an indulgent waggle of her head, “he and his friends mess around. Libby’s son plays drums. They have a battle of the bands at school every year.”
Harmony swirled her mimosa around in her glass. She hadn’t actually drunk any—she kept a straight head while working. “Hmm. Maybe they’d have a shot.”
Bonnie cocked her head to one side. “At what?”
“Well, there will be multiple stages at the festival, of course.” Harmony grabbed another chunk of cheese from her plate and chewed it slowly, letting everyone wait on her next words. “We always do a youth stage.” Another nonexistent sip of her drink. “We’ll have auditions, you understand, Libby.” School board lady perked up, shifted the tiniest bit toward her. “But supporting up and coming talent is how we cultivate the next generation of artists.”
Bonnie’s blue eyes lit up. “They could play at the festival?”
The women caught each other’s excited gazes. Harmony leaned in over the coffee table. “And once we lock everything in, location and paperwork and all that, you’re all going to die when I can share the name of the headliner we’re looking at. Sharing billing with someone like that?” She flopped back into the couch’s pile of throw pillows with a flourish of her hand.
Libby grinned. “That’s something you could put on college apps.”
Nothing more motivating than a parent’s love for their child. At least for moms who didn’t ditch their toddlers, like Harmony’s. She had them on her line—or most of them. Cheryl had her arms crossed, glass in hand. Ellie was still poking at the food on her plate after her friend’s barb. Time to cast a wider net.
“So, Ellie, you own a restaurant?”
Ellie lifted her gaze, before sliding it toward Cheryl as if for permission for this to be true. Damn, Cheryl really had this crew under her thumb.
Harmony crossed her legs to mirror Ellie’s body language. “I should talk to you and your husband about the festival. Once we get approval.” Never too early to start reminding the town that the Weavers held all their potential profit in their hands. “We’ll need to line up a bunch of vendors. Food trucks, dining tents, drink stalls.” She pincered a toothpick spearing a chunk of pineapple, then let her nose wrinkle the slightest bit and let it go. Let everyone fear that feeling of judgment. “They’ve all gotta be top quality, though. I always like to have someone local show me around. Point out the best places to start. That’s how we consistently put on a world-class event with true local flavor.”
The women all nodded along. Except Cheryl, who was still not taking the bait. She was already confident in her position in town. Harmony had been right; fear wouldn’t work on her. Only ego.
Harmony went on, “I often put together an early exploratory advisory group of key people from the community, to offer their local expertise and have input in the direction of some of these important choices.” Now she had Cheryl’s attention. A chance to boss around Harmony and lord more power over the town? Cheryl’s straightening posture and slight bite of her plumped lip both said she couldn’t pass that up. Gotcha. “Business leaders, stakeholders, people already dialed into the scene.” Harmony hadn’t forgotten Preston nor her goal of getting the scoop on him. Cheryl, with her interrupted plans to speak about the library at that town hall meeting, surely knew something about him. “Librarians,” she added. “They can be helpful because they’re used to putting on events for the community. Much smaller ones, of course, but still. They often know of good resources.”
Ellie snorted and shook her head. “Just so long as you don’t ask Preston Jones.”
“No?” Harmony wore a mask of mild curiosity while the room’s air seemed to flood with something toxic, like the Botox injections that kept a few of these women’s foreheads smooth even as they grimaced at that name. Definitely some bad blood here.
“No.” Cheryl bit off her words sharply. “You can’t trust his judgment. He insists on filling our library shelves with inappropriate reading material.”
Her other friend nodded. “Not suitable for children.”
“Oh?” Harmony widened her eyes. “Like what?”
The woman gaped and waved a hand, bracelets jangling. “Well, you know,” she said, either unwilling to say what her issue was or unsure of anything besides her support for her friend. She shifted on the boat-sized ottoman where she was perched. “Things I don’t want my youngest, Asher, reading!”
Cheryl was less reticent. “People can believe whatever they want and that’s their business, I don’t judge.” She raised both palms to the group. Some were nodding along, murmuring supportive sounds, but Bonnie only twisted a cocktail napkin in her lap and waggled her head again like Cheryl was a child to be indulged on this. Libby of the school board was stone-faced, and Sarah was staring into her drink. “But my tax dollars paid to my hometown aren’t going to support these trashy books he pushes. A library should house the classics. Books that can serve as models to our children.”
“Right, of course,” Harmony agreed. “Like Shakespeare. Titus Andronicus .”
Ellie leaned nearer to her neighbor to whisper, “What did he write again?”
“And Chaucer,” Harmony added.
“Yes.” Cheryl looked gratified.
“ The Miller’s Tale is my favorite .” Harmony swore Sarah snorted into her mimosa, and she covered for her by loudly declaring to Libby, “Oh, I love the classics. Michael Stipe once gave me his old copy of Lysistrata , when my dad and I were staying at his beach house. I’m a big reader.”
“Me too!” Bonnie said brightly, as if hoping to steer the conversation to a less controversial topic. “Libby and I have been talking about joining a book club.”
Cheryl stabbed a rhombus of cantaloupe on her plate. “Preston Jones shouldn’t be making these decisions about what our children read, let alone advising on anything important for the city.” She tore off a bite.
“Well, what do you expect?” Ellie asked. “His mother—you know she waitressed for us a bit—she was always hanging out with that artist who lives down the county route.”
Artist as Ellie used it clearly carried some extra, disparaging meaning Harmony couldn’t be sure of. “And he hasn’t backed down about the books?”
“Or clubs.” Sarah shook her head.
Ellie scowled. “I can’t even take my youngest to storytime anymore.”
“So he’s—stubborn?” Harmony might have underestimated Preston, if he’d been standing up to overgrown mean girl Cheryl.
“He’s strange ,” Cheryl said.
“Cheryl!” Libby glanced side to side, like someone could be listening in, hiding behind Bonnie’s floor-to-ceiling drapes. “You can’t say that—”
Why not? Harmony wondered. She was losing the thread of this conversation.
“Ask Sarah!” Cheryl said with a shrug. “She sends Mason to music lessons with him, don’t you?” Cheryl had found her moment and went in for the kill. “Of course we don’t judge you,” she said reassuringly to Sarah. “There aren’t many affordable options in town.”
Sarah’s face remained placid. All she said was “Mason’s making really nice progress.”
All right. Enough. Harmony had zeroed in on Cheryl to get to Travis, but she should have guessed anyone partnered with him was a nightmare of a person too. Time to reel Cheryl in all the way. Harmony was going to make the festival grift personal to them both.
“Well,” she burst out, “it’s lovely knowing there are plenty of nice folks here to help!” She picked up her drink and sipped musingly. “The hardest part is always finding people to do merchandise. We do official festival merch, of course, and the acts have theirs, but filling the rest of the stalls is always such a headache.” She played with the gem-studded silver charm at the base of her glass and told the group, confidingly, “The best products for this kind of event are small, you know? So people don’t mind the idea of carrying whatever it is around the rest of the day. Small but high value, to maximize the profitability of the stalls.” She let her gaze fall to her glass. “Like these! This wine charm is just—” Gaudy. Garish. Something else that started with a G and meant ugly. “ Darling .”
Cheryl’s eyes widened. “But that’s mine!”
Harmony played oblivious. “Oh, no, I thought this was my glass—”
“No, I mean, I sold Bonnie all these wine charms.” She laid a hand on her heart. “It’s my business.”
Harmony dropped her jaw, like Alice hadn’t found Cheryl’s MLM scheme out for her already. “You mean Travis Weaver isn’t the only entrepreneur in the family?”
Cheryl’s mouth pulled into a pleased, humble smile, even as she drew up tall and puffed out her chest. “Travis says it’s silly, but I like to do something in my free time, outside of caring for my family, of course.” She nodded to her friends, who immediately nodded along. “To provide a little something extra for them.”
“Don’t disparage yourself,” Harmony told her, waving a hand. “You’re a business woman!” She held her glass up and gazed at the charm’s five different colors of gemstones twinkling and its embossed—owl? Fox? Whatever. “Oh, if I had something classy like this lined up, I’d feel like we were starting off on the right note.”
Cheryl raised her shoulders and held up her palms hopefully. “Would the festival like to place an order?”
“It’s a cost-sharing model.” Harmony launched into her pitch. “Vendors invest in stock and cover stall fees, but the profits all go to the merchants. They tend to exceed costs laid out by a significant percentage.” She smirked and lifted her glass. “The power of a captive audience, good music, and plenty of wine. Shared venture, nonrefundable fees, et cetera, but I can get you all the numbers on our previous events, for comparable goods.” She sipped her drink for real, the tartness and fizz matching her feeling of triumph. When she put the headliner switch-up into play in a few months, claiming the star had pulled out and the festival needed a massive infusion of funds to secure a last-minute replacement or fall apart, Travis would have to face his own wife losing everything she’d paid unless he invested even more of his money in saving the festival.
Harmony would enjoy imagining Cheryl’s ire directed at Travis when that went down. As for the other local businesses, well, they’d get their money back once she took it all from Travis, she always saw to that, and they’d learn an important lesson about whom to trust. Namely, no one.
First, she’d have to tackle getting that lease signed by Preston. Clearly she needed to up her game there. Pull out all the stops. He hadn’t folded in the face of Cheryl’s book-banning crusade, which was impressive. But Cheryl wasn’t Harmony Hale.
She said, as if she wasn’t absolutely confident, “Once I’m granted final approval to move forward, of course.”
Cheryl preened, glancing around to her friends. “We’ll have to make sure you get it.”
With a smile, Harmony drained her glass.