Secrets of Harmony Grove (20 page)

During our interview Floyd seemed nice enough, but he wasn’t exactly the wonder boy Troy had described. More than anything he seemed tired to me, and I had a feeling he wanted this job primarily so that he could leave the city and its frenetic pace and settle down out here in the country in a cushy job he could perform without much effort. Still, when it came down to numbers, Floyd talked a good game, explaining that he had so many contacts in the industry that he could begin filling the inn immediately, showing a profit by the end of the first quarter. I wasn’t sure how atypical those claims were until I interviewed two other highly qualified candidates and listened to each of them go on and on about building a customer base and generating word of mouth, etc., saying that they couldn’t promise a full house for the first year, possibly two. Needless to say, I hired Floyd.

Until yesterday, that had seemed to be one of the smartest decisions of my life.

As an advertising specialist, I had always planned to throw my full energies into promoting this place once we were open, spreading the news via marketing, public relations, advertising, and other avenues. But as it turned out, Floyd was as good as his word and had begun raking in the dough almost right away. Every time I called from the city to see how things were going, he told me the B and B was booked solid, the customers were delighted, the gifts were selling like hotcakes, and all was well. Much to
my relief, this place was so full, so fast that I never had to spend any time or money on promotions for it. After having focused on the renovation for so long, my work at Biddle & Sons was beginning to suffer, so as soon as I was sure Harmony Grove Bed & Breakfast was in good hands and would continue to thrive without any help from me, I put it on the back burner and focused on my job in the city.

The first year this place was open, I had come back and stayed several times just to check on things, see how Floyd was doing, and visit with family in the area. My last such visit had been in December for a lovely, relaxing post-Christmas vacation. Now here it was the following October, and I couldn’t believe that since that holiday visit ten months ago I hadn’t returned even once.

Obviously, my absence had been a huge mistake. Why had I trusted Floyd so implicitly? Why hadn’t I smelled a rat? My parents couldn’t understand how a brand-new bed-and-breakfast in an area filled with many others just as nice or even nicer could generate such an instant and thriving customer base. I should have questioned that as well.

Back then I figured it was about location, location, location. This was a fantastic place for an inn, right in the heart of Amish country, on beautiful grounds with a pool, next to a grove and a covered bridge, and surrounded by Amish farms. I had told my parents that Floyd knew what he was doing and that he was probably having the guests funneled here through a specific travel agent or Realtor. Again, I should have asked for more specifics from Floyd himself.

In light of what Troy had said on the phone yesterday, I saw now that other things about this place didn’t quite add up, either. When my parents had paid a surprise visit here last spring, the bed-and-breakfast had been devoid of other guests and generally untended. The breakfast Floyd prepared for them—breakfast being a key element to any B and B’s success—had been skimpy and bland and left a lot to be desired.

Where were last night’s guests, for that matter, and why didn’t any of their phone numbers work?

These questions and more were rolling around in my head when my cell phone rang.

It was Liz.

Before I launched into an explanation of what had happened since last we spoke, I let her update me on what she had managed to accomplish thus far on her end. The news wasn’t great, but it wasn’t surprising either—not yet, anyway. She said the attorney general’s office confirmed that I was a “person of interest” in an ongoing investigation, but they were not willing to divulge further details at this time.

“I made it very clear that if they want to talk to you, they have to go through me,” she said. “So if anything happens at all, do not say a word to anyone. Just tell them, ‘Speak to my lawyer.’ That’s your mantra, Sienna:
Speak to my lawyer
. Okay?”

Knowing she was going to kill me when she learned of the hours I had spent in the company of the police last night, I mumbled an assent and listened as she continued.

“I also spoke to the Bobbsey Twins at Buzz, and they are standing firm on their ‘wait and see’ position. Until this matter is resolved, it definitely looks as though you’re not going to have an income. Right now, there isn’t anything else I can do to force the issue. At least they’re aware that I have an eye on them and that I’m watching out for your interests.”

“I wish I could afford to walk away from Buzz completely.”

She was quiet for a moment, probably deciding whether to chide me yet again about the car and condo or not.

“I understand how you feel,” she said finally. “But what’s done is done. Let’s just let things play out for now. We don’t really have much choice otherwise. At least I get the feeling that something big is going to happen soon.”

“Maybe it already has,” I replied. Taking a deep breath, I launched into my tale, probably giving it far too quickly but afraid that if I even paused for a moment she might start yelling at me. When I was finished, the line was silent as Liz processed all she had learned. When she spoke, the gentleness in her voice surprised me.

“Oh, hon, I’m so sorry. Are you okay? Any anxiety attacks?”

Leave it to Liz to be sweet just when she had the right to be mean. I told her about the one in the middle of the night, of how I had handled it, of the
way I was feeling this morning. She seemed more concerned for my emotional well-being than anything else, and I was so touched that, again, my eyes filled with tears. It wasn’t even 10:00 a.m. and already this was turning out to be a very weepy day.

As we talked, Liz helped me feel better about things, reassuring me that I had handled the police’s questions correctly. She would have liked to have been here last night, she said, but given that they hadn’t charged me with a crime—and didn’t seem to suspect me of anything at all—she said it had been okay to answer their questions without her. She also reinforced my decision not to divulge the facts about my suspension or the government’s investigation.

By the time we hung up, I felt relieved and energized, eager to find some answers to the puzzles surrounding me. I decided to start with the small stack of reservation cards, call my upcoming guests to cancel their reservations, and while I had them on the phone ask how they heard of Harmony Grove Bed & Breakfast in the first place. Perhaps they could fill in some of the blanks Floyd wasn’t here to fill in for them. My plan was to start calling the phone numbers listed on the cards.

Except that none of those numbers worked.

Some people were scheduled to stay more than one night, so for the four rooms over the next five days there were nine different people with reservations.

And not one of them had a working phone number?

I went online to search for names, numbers, and addresses. Not only could I not find any of these numbers, I couldn’t find these addresses, either. Trying to pull up records using just name, city, and state, my search was fruitless for card after card. Feeling very uneasy, I typed in the last one, a couple listed as “Mr. and Mrs. Anselmo Rodriguez.”

Anselmo?

That was one of the baby names. I again went into the browser history, looking at prior baby name searches and finding several other matches there. Last month’s baby name search had given the names Mackenzie, Paige, Sara, and Zoe. One of the reservation cards was for “Sara Mackenzie”; another was for “Zoe Paige.”

As fast as my fingers could fly across the keyboard, I scanned all of the history in more detail, realizing that the phone numbers on the reservation cards had come from failed reverse phone lookups. The addresses that had been searched out via Mapquest and Google Earth matched the address on some of these cards. In every case, they were addresses that didn’t quite exist: empty lots or incorrect house numbers. In most cases these were merely a few digits beyond the highest-numbered houses on the streets, so that where an address on a card might be written as “542 Oak Street,” the satellite image on the screen would show that the last two houses on Oak were numbers 539 and 540.

Sitting back in my chair, heart in my throat, I realized that Floyd hadn’t been naming babies at all.

He had been creating fictitious guests.

To me, the obvious question now was whether there had been no guests at all (with these names merely for show) or if there had been guests, but they had stayed here under falsified records (because they wanted to hide their identities). I had no idea which of the two it was.

What about credit card records? Names had to be correct for those. Was that what this was about? Identity theft, stolen credit cards? Could that be the subject of the government’s investigation?

Tearing the file drawers apart in search of credit card receipts, I could find none. The office had a small safe mounted inside a lower cabinet, so I went to that now, thinking about the combination. When we first installed it, my father had set the numbers himself, using my mother’s birth date. I was afraid Floyd might have changed that in the past two years, but once I was able to stop my fingers from shaking long enough to rotate the dial correctly, I found that it still worked. The lock clicked free, and when I swung open the door I could see that the contents included a few hundred dollars in cash and the small, handheld credit card imprinting machine I had received when setting up our merchant account.

Pulling out the machine, I studied it closely. It looked brand new, as if it had never been used. I thought about the paper imprinting slips that had come with the machine. From what I could recall, there had been several boxes of those. Going to the cabinet of office supplies, I looked around and
finally found slips on the top shelf—several boxes’ worth—each one still taped shut and coated with dust.

Trying a different approach, I went back to the computer and opened up the spreadsheet, scanning the in-and-out flow of the money that came through Harmony Grove Bed & Breakfast. From what I could see, nearly every transaction had been in cash. I got these statements every month. Why had I never noticed that before?

Closing my eyes and pinching the bridge of my nose, I tried to think. Who in this day and age used cash for anything? Even fast-food drive-throughs took credit and debit cards. Yet here, quilts were selling for more than a thousand dollars, paid in cash. Stays at the B and B totaling hundreds of dollars a pop, paid in cash. Opening my eyes, I continued to study the data in front of me. I realized that not only had our customers paid us with cash, but much of the outgo from this place had been handled in cash as well. The largest expenditures were to the Amish families who provided the items for the gift shop: Five thousand dollars for quilts and other cloth goods just last month. Two thousand dollars for wooden toys the month before that.

Studying the spreadsheet, it looked as though our quarterly tax payments had been paid by check, as had the utilities and other miscellaneous bills. But it was as if almost everything else had been paid for with cash, from the office supplies to the groceries to the housekeeping services and more. It simply didn’t add up. I knew Floyd was a technophobe and liked to do things the old-fashioned way, but this was ridiculous. What about our tax returns? Did he have receipts to match all of these expenditures?