He wanted to bust down the door and tell them that they are all about to be scammed, but he resisted. From his dad’s many schemes over the years, Mitch knew how George would respond; he’d just find each individual later and convince them that Mitch was some sort of a jealous foe.
Instead, Mitch took out his phone and recorded parts of the presentation. He needed to come up with a plan to debunk whatever George was telling these people.
The presentation wrapped up after about twenty minutes and Mitch made a hasty exit to prevent being seen. He waited upstairs until he saw John and some of the other members of the audience filtering back upstairs.
“John, I need to talk to you,” said Mitch.
“Is everything okay?” John put a hand on his shoulder.
“I’m not sure,” said Mitch. “Please tell me that you didn’t sign any money away to George Walters.”
“Not yet,” he said. “He won’t accept applicants for two weeks, and there’s only a limited number he can take. I want to talk to Vera first, of course.”
Mitch frowned. “I heard the presentation, it sounds a bit like – well, how about you, me, and Kayla talk it over together later.”
John nodded. “Sure, I don’t mind if you want to throw your hat in the ring.”
That was not Mitch’s intention, but at least George didn’t take any money yet – it was a clever move for him to say there were a limited amount of spots. Definitely something old Marty would’ve done.
Mitch turned around to see if he could grab Kayla, but she was talking to George, laughing and fiddling with her hair. He felt a knot in his stomach.
He decided that he needed some fresh air and went outside, taking a seat on a bench. It’d be difficult to convince Kayla that George was up to no good. He needed to get more information. And he needed to protect the Singers, along with all of the other people in this town, until he figured it out.
Mitch went back inside once he gathered his thoughts. He was disappointed to find that Kayla was still chatting with George. For some reason, he couldn’t wait a second longer to tell her.
“Kayla, do you have a second? I need to talk to you.”
“What’s up Mitch?”
He shifted uncomfortably. He didn’t know how to get her away from George without telling her some sort of a lie. So he came up with a white lie. “I think I saw a dog running around outside unattended.”
Her eyes widened. “Really? Where?”
“Can’t handle a little dog by yourself?” asked George with a smirk.
Mitch ignored him. “Out back, I’ll show you.”
George didn’t follow, and when they got outside, Mitch shut the door behind them.
“Where is he?” said Kayla.
“There is no dog, I just needed to talk to you.”
Kayla crossed her arms. “Did you just use a dog against me?”
“Listen, this is important. I saw something really weird going on with George.”
Kayla stared at him. “What?”
“He had some sort of…presentation going on. Downstairs. I saw John go in there with him, and a bunch of other older folks.”
“And?”
Mitch could see that he was losing. “Well, I couldn’t hear exactly what was going on, but it seemed a bit shady. I wanted to talk to John about it.”
“Don’t tell me that you think George is spying on us.”
“No, that’s not what it seemed like. It just seemed like whatever he was doing, he didn’t want anyone to know.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Right, which is why he did it at a busy square dance. You automatically assume that he’s up to no good?”
“It’s not that I assume, it’s that –”
Kayla rolled her eyes. “I’m going back to the dance. I don’t know what you have against George, but you need to get over it.”
She turned and walked back to the building. Mitch felt the frustration rising in his chest. It reminded him of when he was younger and he knew that his dad was up to no good, but he didn’t know exactly what.
Except he wasn’t a kid anymore. He had resources, he could figure things out. He would find out what George was up to and he would expose him, even if it meant turning Kayla against him.
Maybe it’d be better that way. If she despised him, it’d be easier to say goodbye to her when her time in Cody was done.
George would be of some use after all.
Chapter 14
Without thinking, Kayla stormed back inside to find Isabelle.
“Have you seen George?”
Isabelle turned around. She seemed a bit startled. “No, why?”
Kayla opened her mouth to talk again before realizing why Isabelle seemed a bit off. The guy she liked, Corey, was standing next to her.
“Oh, no reason! I’m actually headed home, I’ll see you tomorrow?”
“Sure!” Isabelle replied. “I’ll see you then.”
Kayla said goodbye to the Singers, and after looking around one last time for George, she headed out to her car. As she drove, she grew a bit nervous about what she might find when she got home. Hopefully, Oliver wasn’t able to escape or cause any damage. She learned her lesson to not leave his bed or his bowl of water inside the crate; everything was fair game to be destroyed when he felt anxious.
She opened the front door of the cabin and called out to him. “Ollie, I’m home!”
He whimpered from the other room and she hurriedly made her way back to him. She found him in his crate, with nothing destroyed, and his tail wagging. As soon as she opened the crate door, he ran out, licked her, and bowed into a play pose before running off to grab a toy to drop at her feet.
“Aren’t you just a little angel? Yes you are! You are such a good boy!”
This went on for the next few minutes – Oliver running and jumping around Kayla as she told him what a good boy he was.
Kayla was truly impressed that he behaved so well while she was gone. Plus, he was the only boy in her life that made any sense. George asked her to go to the dance and after spending five minutes talking to her, he disappeared. He didn’t even ask her to dance, not even once!
Mitch showed up in his cowboy hat and was more than willing to dance, which was totally out of character for him. It seemed like he was being nice to her, but then it seemed like he just had a bone to pick with George. What was that even about? Was he jealous?
None of it made any sense. She decided to avoid both of them for the next few days and instead focus on hanging out with Isabelle and Oliver.
It worked until Monday. By then she was anxious to see if she’d gotten any responses about the fundraiser. She couldn’t log into email on her phone, because the Marshals made sure it was blocked. That was smart of them – because she’d probably end up getting tracked somehow – but also inconvenient.
In the beginning, she thought it was freeing to not have a computer of her own to waste time on. Now it was annoying. She had to go talk to Mitch anytime she needed to check her email, and it was getting old.
Nevertheless, Monday after lunch she got Oliver in the car and drove over to see Mitch. On the way there, she told herself that she was not going to talk to him about George or anything unrelated to the fundraiser.
She got to his front door and knocked. Oliver was excited. For some reason, he really enjoyed going to other people’s homes. He was always more relaxed when visiting others; Kayla thought that it might be because he didn’t think of it as his territory, so he didn’t have to guard it as fiercely.
She looked down at him, obediently sitting at her side, butt wiggling wildly from his wagging tail, and she felt her heart gush.
“Stop being so stinking cute,” she whispered.
He gazed back at her, tongue hanging out of his mouth, eyes full of adoration.
Kayla was surprised when John opened the door. “Hey!” she said.
“Hi Kayla, it’s good to see you. Come on in. Mitch was just showing me some of the people who donated
to the fundraiser.”
She felt her heart leap; what if the whole thing was funded over the weekend?
“We raised some money?”
“You bet we did!” He stepped aside to let her in.
Oliver gave him a sniff before darting away to run up and down the stairs after a tennis ball that Mitch bought for him.
“We raised almost two hundred dollars!”
“Oh,” Kayla said, trying to hide her disappointment. That was nice of course, but she wanted to raise enough to get these people a new house. Two hundred dollars would buy them a nice dollhouse, but not much more.
“Hi Kayla,” said Mitch. He wasn’t wearing his cowboy hat, but he was wearing a distracting shirt. Maybe he’d worn it before and she hadn’t noticed. It was a black button down shirt, nothing fancy, but it really suited him. It made his green eyes stand out, and Kayla hated that she noticed that.
“Hey Mitch. Do you mind if I check my email?”
“Of course, go ahead.”
She got onto the computer and logged into her email account. She was excited when she saw that she had seven responses to the emails she’d sent out on Friday.
The first six were rejections – they all thanked her for the information, but said they couldn’t run the story. No room in the schedule, they all claimed.
“What do they mean they don’t have room for it?” she said. “What else are they covering? This is local news – well, it’s fairly local. All within a three hour radius. This is a real story! They run stories all the time that aren’t even related to the people living here. And who tells them to do that, some executive? Are they just broadcasting whatever some rich guy in a suit tells them to broadcast?”
“Unfortunately, a lot of us spend most of our time doing what rich guys in suits tell us to do,” Mitch commented.
She shot him a dirty look. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
He put his hands up. “Nothing! I was agreeing with you.”
John walked into the room and Kayla felt her anger subsiding. She opened the last email. The first line said, “Thank you for sharing this amazing story. We would love to feature this next week on our evening programming.”
She let out a squeal.
John leaned in to look at the screen. “Did you get some good news?”
“Yes! The station over in Jackson Hole is going to run your story!”
John’s eyes grew wide. “Really? We’re going to be on the news?”
Kayla grabbed his hands and nodded excitedly. “Yes!”
“I need to call Vera,” said John. “Mitch – do you have a phone that I can use?”
Mitch pulled out his cell phone. “Sure, take your time.”
John left the room, leaving them alone. Kayla was determined to not say anything. She turned around to read the email again.
Mitch, for once, broke the silence. “That’s amazing Kayla. What you’ve done is – well, I’m just so impressed.”
Kayla’s grudge was quickly fading. She turned around to see Mitch standing there, a sincere look in his eyes.
“Thanks Mitch.”
John came back into the room. “She didn’t have much time to talk, but she was very excited when I told her. And she’s very impressed with the two hundred dollars that you’ve already raised! That might be enough for us to get to the investment minimum.”
Kayla tilted her head to the side. “What investment minimum?”
John handed the cell phone back to Mitch. “Well George was telling us – if we could bring three thousand dollars to the table, he has a company that we can invest in so we could double the money in just a few weeks.”
Kayla shot Mitch an uneasy look. “Really? That seems a bit too good to be true.”
John shrugged. “It might be. I planned to talk to Mitch about it today.”
“Well,” Mitch said, crossing his arms, “I would say hold off on that for now. I want to look into it.”
John nodded. “That’s good enough for me. I better get going, we have some friends coming over and Vera needs some help getting everything ready.”
He gave Kayla a hug before he left, thanking her again for all that she was doing for them. A little pang of panic ran through her – she still hadn’t raised very much money. Luckily, the worry of disappointing them was enough to spark some new ideas.
After he left, Kayla announced that she and Oliver had to get going, but Mitch said he had something he wanted to show her first. She followed him out to the garage, Oliver gleefully bounding behind her.
It was an organized space, with tools neatly hanging on a pegboard against the wall. There was wood dust on all of the counters, and several projects seemed to be in progress. Mitch ducked down to grab something and handed it to her.
“Oh my gosh,” she said. “Is this what I think it is?”
He nodded. “Yep. Oliver and I worked together to get you a replacement chair leg.”
She couldn’t believe it. “How is that possible? He chewed off so many pieces of it. This looks brand new.”
“That’s because it is. I ordered a piece of wood that I thought would match, and then I fashioned a new leg based off of the old one. I can come over whenever you have some time and reattach it. I don’t think anyone will be able to tell the difference.”
Awed, she turned it over in her hand. “It’s amazing. Thank you so much. I felt so bad and have been avoiding telling Isabelle about what happened.”
Oliver sat at her feet, looking up expectantly at the chair leg.
“Oh no you don’t,” she wagged a finger at him. “This one is off limits.”
Mitch laughed. “Just let me know if he gets a taste for any other wood furniture, and I’ll be happy to replace it for you.”
Now it was really hard to be mad at him. She cleared her throat. “Thank you so much, Mitch. This is awesome.”
“You’re very welcome.”
Oh, what the heck. “I was going to take Oliver on a walk – well, more of a hike. Would you want to come?”
He looked surprised. “Sure, that’d be nice. You’re saving me from learning about whole life insurance.”
Kayla made a face. “Sounds like torture. Let’s go!”
She gave him a ride back to the ranch; she preferred hiking around there because the trails were clearly defined and she felt like she knew where she was going. She waited until they were about a mile into the hike before bringing up an awkward topic. “So this investment opportunity that John mentioned?”
Mitch nodded his acknowledgment.
She continued. “This is the one that you heard George talking about at the dance?”
“It was. I didn’t hear the whole thing, but from what I heard…let’s just say that it sounded like one of my dad’s old schemes. He said that they would need to recruit at least five more people after they enrolled.”
Kayla groaned. “You think it was a pyramid scheme?”
“I’m not sure,” Mitch said with a sigh. “I don’t have enough evidence yet to know what was really going on, but it doesn’t look good.”
Kayla nodded. “That’s fair. I just can’t believe that George would do something so stupid. Like, I think if he is involved, he must just not understand.”
Mitch was silent for a beat. “Yeah, maybe.”
“So you really weren’t involved in any of your dad’s scams?”
“No,” Mitch said, looking straight ahead. “Like I said, when I was younger, I wanted to impress my dad. He wanted me to go to law school so I could be his lawyer. That didn’t work out, luckily, and by that time I understood that he was a criminal. I knew a lot of his associates, still, because I did all of his record keeping for a little while. But that was as deep as I ever went.”
“Oh, I see.”
Mitch turned towards her. “I promise that I am not a criminal. I’m a carpenter. Or at least, I was.”
Kayla smiled. “That explains the chair leg.”
Mitch laughed. “Yeah. I really miss w
oodworking. The Marshals said that it would be too suspicious if I picked it up again.”
“So you just lose that forever?”
He sighed. “Pretty much.”
“Did your dad choke on those french fries because you told him that you were going to tattle on him?”
Oliver dropped his ball at Mitch’s feet and then looked at him expectantly. Mitch bent over, grabbed the ball, and threw it far. Oliver took off like a rocket.
“No. I mean, I did tell him that day that I would be testifying against him. But he said that he knew, and that he wasn’t angry with me at all.”
“Wow,” said Kayla. “So he’s just really bad at eating french fries.”
Mitch laughed. “Not exactly. He choked on his french fries because of something else.”
Kayla looked at him. “What?”
He seemed to search her eyes for a moment. “I can’t believe I’m telling you this. I haven’t told anyone.”
Finally, something juicy! “C’mon, I won’t tell anyone.”
Mitch smiled. “He choked when I told him that I wouldn’t take his money.”
“Was he trying to pay you off?”
Mitch shook his head. “No, nothing like that. He just felt really bad about – well everything, I guess. And he said that the whole reason that he wanted to make money in the first place was so that I could have a good life. That he just got lost along the way. But he still wanted me to have all the money that he made. Er – stole. And actually, not all of it, the FBI did freeze some of it.”
Now Kayla’s interest was piqued. “Like how much? Ten thousand? Twenty thousand?”
“That they froze?” Mitch asked.
“No, that he wanted to give you.”
Mitch rubbed the back of his neck and turned to look at Oliver, who was rolling in a patch of grass ten feet away. “A lot.”
“You can’t hold out on me now!” This was fun. Mitch was finally opening up to her. She felt like she hardly knew the man until recently.
“It’s just – I haven’t talked to anyone about this before.”
Kayla playfully poked him in the shoulder. “I’m not going to tell anyone. And besides, you don’t want the money anyway, right?”
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