Laina Turner - Presley Thurman 09 - Romance & Revenge (12 page)

”To stop being so helpful if I knew what was good for me. Funny thing is, I don’t feel at all helpful.

”Well obviously you are getting close to figuring something out or someone wouldn’t have just threatened you,” Jared said.

”But what is it,” Katy said.

“Exactly,” I added. “What is it?”
 

Chapter 16

I walked into Red Dune Creative and Allison was at the front waiting for me.  By the look on her face, whatever she wanted to tell me looked important.

“Presley, thank you for coming over here so quickly. She’s in the conference room, follow me.”

Allison had called me about an hour ago and said one of her interns had something I might find interesting and did I have time to stop by the office. Of course I rushed over to find out, hoping it would be good news or at least information that would help. I left Katy and Jared anxiously waiting back home with the bottle of wine we had just opened, excited to know if this would be the information we needed to know who was stealing Sleeping Bear Designs. They promised they would save me some, but I wasn’t holding my breath. I should probably pick more up on my way home if I planned on having any.

When I walked into the conference room there was a young girl, college-aged, who looked really nervous. I hoped whatever she had to tell me wasn’t going to cost the girl her job because that’s the look she had on her face. Though depending on what she had to tell me, maybe I would change my mind.

“Presley, this is Colleen. Colleen, tell her what you told me,” Allison said sharply. Whatever Colleen had to say, I could tell Allison was angry.

“I received these in the mail a couple months ago.” She pushed a few pieces of paper across the table to me. They seemed to be colored print outs of logos, taglines, and assorted artwork, but I didn’t really know what I was looking at and I glanced at Allison in confusion.

“This was Colleen’s…” Allison paused as if looking for the right word “inspiration for the work she did on the project for Smith Architecture.” With the emphasis on inspiration that sounded very sarcastic and Allison not looking too happy, I could only assume she wasn’t thrilled with Colleen’s source of inspiration. “This was our final pitch,” she said and put some more print outs in front of me.

I looked at both sets and they were very similar.
Uncannily similar. I probably wouldn’t have been able to tell them apart if I didn’t know they were different.

“Do you think?” I said
, looking at Allison, wondering if this was indeed proof that Red Dune had somehow got their hands on Sleeping Bear designs.

She nodded knowing what I was getting at. “Someone sent these with the hopes she would use them. I can’t believe for a minute there wasn’t a purpose behind these or whoever sent them wouldn’t have wanted us to have them and wouldn’t have sent them in the first place. Unfortunately, she chose to use them rather than use her own original creative work and that brings us to this unfortunately dilemma.”

“Do you have the envelope it came in?” I asked, and Colleen shook her head.

“I just threw it away.”

“Did it have a return address?”

“No.
Just a typed label. It wasn’t even addressed to me,” she said a little defensively and glanced at Alison, as if that made what she did better. But the look on Allison’s face said that probably wasn’t going to help. “I just happened to be the one to open the mail that day. Our receptionist was off and I was filling in.”

I looked at Allison. “You think whoever sent this was just hoping that someone would open it and use it?”

“It does seem strange and a long shot for someone trying to pass these along.  To just send them to a company without being addressed to anyone in particular meant there wasn’t a guarantee that they would be used, which is what anyone else at this company would have done. Most companies would have thrown them away which is what I would have done,” she said, looking at Colleen. “It doesn’t make any sense from the standpoint of someone’s intent to hurt Sleeping Bear. Sending these on the hopes someone would use them does leave quite a large margin for error.” She frowned. “They could have just as easily ended up in the trash.”

I turned back to Colleen. “What did you think this was when you opened it?”

She shrugged and looked so upset. She was young and made a bad decision and we all made a bad decision or two when we were young. “I don’t know. I guess I didn’t think about it much.” Naïve. That much was obvious.

“You didn’t at all think it was odd that we would get this in the mail? Did you think it’s common practice to randomly get already completed artwork and ideas in the mail? Is that a concept they’re teaching in school these days?” Allison said angrily. She was obviously pissed over the whole situation and I didn’t blame her. I would be too in her shoes. This was a bad reflection on her company.

“I’m sorry, I just didn’t think,” cried Colleen.

“I’m sorry, too,”
Allison said more to me than Colleen. “I don’t know if this information helps at all, Presley. But please know I’m sorry this has happened and I’ll be calling everyone else at Sleeping Bear to apologize as well. This is not how we operate. None of this was intentional on our part. I hope you believe that.”

“We do and it does. Clearly, someone sent these to you to try and hurt Sleeping Bear Design’s pitch. At least we know how it happened.”

“Let me know if there is anything else we can do on our end to help. Here, take these papers. Maybe it will give you more of a clue as to why this has happened,” she said, handing me the items that had come in the mail.

“Thanks. Maybe we can figure out who they came from.”

I left Red Dune’s office and grabbed a cab back home—it was too cold to walk—and I bought another bottle of wine from the liquor store on the corner where I got out of the cab before heading up to the condo. Just in case.

As I figured, it was a good thing I picked up more wine because Jared and Katy had not left me any like they said they would. I knew them so well, the lushes.

“Well, what happened? Don’t keep us in suspense,” he said. “Did Red Dune confess to stealing our secrets? Is my company saved?”

“You’re just going to have to wait until I get this bottle open,” I said, grabbing the corkscrew from the kitchen drawer. “Stay away!” I playfully slapped Jared’s hand as he reached for the bottle I had just opened. “You guys drank your bottle, this one’s mine and you deserve to wait for drinking all the other bottle, especially when you said you’d save me some.”

“Oh, c’mon, you knew we would be so anxious about what was happening we would have to drink the whole bottle. We couldn’t help it. We needed it to calm us down and pass the time.”

I laughed and pushed the bottle toward them after I poured mine.

I took a sip and then another before I walked back over to where I dropped my purse and pulled out the printed papers and handed them to Jared.

“These look familiar?”

“Where’d you get these?” he asked, looking at me and then again at the papers and I could tell he was very surprised at what he was seeing, which made me think they did look familiar.

“From Allison at Red Dune. Someone sent them in the mail.”

“Is that why she wanted you to go over there?”

“Yes, an intern, Colleen, opened the package. She said there was no return address. Then she proceeded to pass these off as her ideas.”

“I bet someone is out of a job,” Jared said.

“Yeah. Allison was none too happy.”

“So she didn’t find it odd something like this would come in the mail?” Katy said.

“Apparently not,” I said.

“Not a very smart intern,” Jared said.

“College kids these days, I tell you,” I said. “My assumption is that she wanted to make herself look good and therefore didn’t think too hard about the consequences. But who knows? She didn’t really say much. My gut tells me she is just an innocent bystander, but the thing that makes absolutely no sense is why someone would take the risk to randomly send this, not knowing if someone would use it or not. That seems like an awful lot of work to go through for a maybe.”

“We still have no idea who used John’s dad’s user name, either,” said Jared. 

“True and of course we can’t prove where these papers came from, but I think we can safely assume someone has it in for Sleeping Bear Design,” I said.

“Maybe the person who used John’s dad’s initials was looking for something, not related to the design thing?”

“You mean it could be related to Becky’s death?” Jared said.

I shrugged. “I’m not sure, but so far they seem to have been unrelated issues.  We need to go talk to Julie again. I want to ask her about that picture.”

“Confront her?” Katy said. “You think that’s wise?”

“I don’t know about wise, but after that call today I think necessary. I did give her my number. Maybe she called to warn me because Peter told her what he told me.”

“That sounds very convoluted,” Katy said.

“It is, but that’s all we’ve got.”

“You’re not worried?” Katy asked.

“About the phone call?”

She nodded.

“Not really. I mean I don’t have any idea who it was so I’m trying not to think about it.”

Chapter 17

I stared at the phone, after it started ringing, looking at the number on the display. If I recognized the number correctly, it was the accountant who was getting me information about Silk. I was nervous to answer it because regardless whether it was good news or bad, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to hear. It was either going to be a little disappointing or I would really have a big decision to make. Either way was a little stressful.

“Answer it, or at least hit decline and let him leave a message,” Katy said as she was sitting next to me. “You staring at it is creeping me out.”

Letting him leave a voice mail wouldn’t help anything because I would still be wondering and eventually would have to call back, so I answered it.

“I have good news and bad news,” Gary said after greetings were out of the way.

“Okay. Let’s start with the bad.” I always liked to get the depressing news out of the way and then end on a good note— like most people.

“The company isn’t doing well. Its receivables are way too high, it owes many vendors, some have cut off their credit line, because the balances are so high and past due and sales are not as high as previous years.”

“And the good?” I asked, wondering what good could overcome that bad news.
None of it surprising to me. It seemed like a lot of problems. Though then I had to stifle a giggle because that made me think of the JayZ song.

“The good news is I think the business has potential. The decline seems to be more due to neglect than the fact it’s not a viable business. There was a clear separation from when the business was doing well to when it started to tank, which when I did some research was around the time his wife died and he took it over.”

That made sense, I thought. James never really cared about Silk. I often wondered why he had bothered to keep it open. I never really bought into the ‘preserving my dead wife’s legacy’ thing. Especially because before she died they were going through a divorce and he was trying to take it from her, she had said out of spite not because he wanted it.

“The paperwork James sent over to me was disorganized, basically one step up from receipts in a shoe box, and there isn’t a business plan, financial forecast or anything, so I think it’s just been left to flounder. Of course, I can’t be sure on such a basic overview, but there’s not anything that points to the business having a huge gap in one area. It’s more an overall lack of attention in all areas.
Even things as simple as paying bills and ordering. But I have to add that as willing as James was to send me over what I needed is a good sign.”

“How?”

“Because I doubt he would be so willing to hand the information he had over if he had something to hide with this business.”

That was interesting and I guess not completely unexpected, knowing how little attention James had paid to
Silk when I had worked there. He treated it like some silly little hobby of Solange’s. Getting him to spend money on anything was a challenge and it had been making good money. At least right after Solange died. As he refused to let us order what we needed, sales did start to slip and then I quit, so it’s no surprise it just fell further and further in the red. I just would have thought as a businessman he would have done what he was supposed to do and not let it be a money drain. But then, he was being investigated for fraud. So clearly he made a lot of bad decisions in his business dealings. 

“You really don’t think it has any ties to James’s current legal issues?”

That was the real stickler for me. I wouldn’t even consider taking the place over if it was at all connected to him in such a way that would bring potential trouble down the road. The business itself would be hard enough to run without these type of complications and I had no desire to be part of whatever James had gotten himself into. If this was something I decided to do, it would be without any ties to James.

“No, I don’t. Not through financial matters anyway. You will still want to have an attorney check out whatever contract he draws up for the transfer, but I think he’s just ignored this business so I would be surprised if it’s at all connected to what is going on with his other businesses. And truthfully, his other businesses are multimillion-dollar ventures. This store is less than a million, so to someone like James it’s not really important. Even at a loss. It doesn’t make a dent in his overall portfolio. He probably doesn’t even notice it. Which is probably a reason his accounting firm wasn’t handling the books, he didn’t want to pay the two hundred an hour fee.”

“Well, thanks for doing this so quickly,” I said, thinking it must be nice to have so much money that a failing million-dollar business wasn’t even worth noticing.  “And speaking of fee what do I owe you for this?” I said, almost afraid to ask.

“Don’t worry about it. This was a favor to
Willie, I enjoy this kind of work.  Just keep me in mind as your accountant if you decide to move forward.”

“That you so much and I promise I will.”

“Not a problem. Let me know if you need anything else. For what it’s worth I think someone who knew what they were doing, along with a lot of hard work and actually caring about the business, could make it viable. Businesses need a lot of attention to thrive. This one did thrive at one point which tells me it probably has the potential to do so again.”

“Don’t keep me waiting. What did he say?” asked Katy the minute I hung up.

“He said it’s been poorly managed and losing significant amounts of money, but he doesn’t think it’s involved in James’s other business problems and with a lot of work could be successful.”

“That’s exciting, Presley. Why don’t you look excited? I’m excited; you should be excited. This is good news and could be a fantastic opportunity for you,” Katy said, bouncing around like a puppy. It made me smile that she was so happy for me.

I went and made myself another cup of coffee before sitting back down at the table and answering.             

“I don’t know how I feel. Taking over a business is a big responsibility. I have to really want this, not think it’s OK for now. It’s not like I can change my mind and easily get out of it if I decide it’s not for me. It’s like marriage or a baby. Once you’re committed you’re in it for the long haul.

“You’re right, it is a big one, but this is so you! It’s a commitment that’s worth it. Like Cooper,” she added and I looked at her begrudgingly proud of how she slipped that into conversation. “What do you think you wouldn’t like about it? What are you hesitations?” Katy asked.

“I’ve never owned a business, for one.”

“Neither had I until I opened one. Neither have any of the other millions of business owners until they opened their first one. You have to start somewhere.  Next?”

“I know, but it’s such a scary thing to think about all responsibility.”

“I agree it is, but you have talked about wanting a clear direction for your life, the professional side anyways, and this could be it. This is a golden opportunity and you love fashion. Plus, since when have you been worried about a little responsibility? You had a ton of responsibility when you were in HR. How is this any different?”

“I’m just not sure that being handed a business that’s in the red and has a bunch of issues that have no idea how to fix is something I can handle. What if it’s all above my head and I fail?”

“Stop being a negative Nelly. You can do this. You can totally handle this. You’ve got the people part down with your human resources background and you can hire people for the accounting and stuff like that. It’s what I do. Outsource what you’re not good at. You know retail and you’re good at sales and marketing. It ran well before when you managed it and more importantly you loved it. Even though at the time it was temporary until you figured out what you wanted to do type job. You can do it again. You would be crazy to not take this opportunity. It’s not every day someone hands you something like this, and if you fail, so what? Nothing wrong with failure. That’s how we learn, by making mistakes. There is more wrong with not trying.”

“Have you been listening to Tony Robbins or something?” I asked her. She was usually a glass half full person,
which I loved about her, but she was really on a roll right now.

“No, I just believe in going for it. Especially when it’s a fantastic opportunity like this. People just don’t get chances like this every day.”

“I’ll do it if you move to Chicago and help me run it,” I said, having that idea just pop in my head and wondering why I hadn’t thought of it before because it was genius. I knew with Katy’s help I could do this.

Katy laughed. “You’re crazy.”

“No, I’m not. You said you wanted to sell the salon and get out of Alkon. What better than to move here and help me run Silk? You have all the business ownership knowledge I don’t have and you said you wanted a change. It makes perfect sense.”             

“I know hair, I don’t know retail.”

“Now who is being negative?” I teased. “Business is business. You would be a huge help to me in learning things I need to know about being a business owner. And it could be temporary. Give you something to do until you can figure out what you really want to do with your professional life. This is a total win-win. You can bank the money from the sale of the salon. You and Dirt can live here. I’ll just clean out that third bedroom that has all our junk and I’m sure Jared won’t mind, until you figure out what you really want to do. There is a lot of opportunity in Chicago for both you and Dirt.”

Katy looked at me thoughtfully and I could tell she was warming to the idea, which really excited me. “Maybe you’ve got something there.”

“It’s a great idea! Just tell me you’ll think about it.”

“I’ll think about it.” Katy laughed. “And I’ll have to talk to Dirt.”

The thought of working with Katy on this venture made me feel that maybe I could do this. That being a business owner wasn’t completely crazy. I had enjoyed working at Silk and there were a lot of things I’d always said I would do differently if it were my decision to make, so maybe I could do this and bring Silk back to the thriving business it once was.

“So are you going to call James back?”

I laughed. “I need to think about it for a while. At least the day. Right now I want to go see if Julie is home.”

An hour later, we were being ushered into Julie’s apartment. We got lucky and had caught her at home.

“This is a surprise,” she said. “I didn’t expect to see you again so soon.”

If she was at all worried about why we were here, she didn’t look it.

“Can I get you two anything?” she offered to me and Katy. John had called a meeting so Jared hadn’t come with us.

“No. I’m OK, thanks,” I said and Katy also declined.

“Then what can I help you with?”

Katy and I had discussed on the way over how to approach this. We decided the best course of action, and really the only way to get the information we needed, was to directly ask her. It made sense, but now faced with doing just that I was a little nervous. Maybe she had been the one to call me and I should be more careful. 
A little late now.

Katy and I looked at each other and then I looked back at Julie.

“Why did you take the picture of Peter out of Becky’s apartment?”

Julie looked at us and I could tell she was surprised and then anger clouded her face.

“You snooped through my bedroom last time you were here?” she said loudly.

“Not on purpose. I just noticed it as I walked out of the bathroom. Were you having an affair with Becky’s boyfriend?”

Julie’s face turned red, though from anger or embarrassment I couldn’t tell.  Then she sighed.

“Yes,” she said, the anger from before leaving her voice. “But before you judge me it was short-lived and a complete mistake.
I felt so guilty, I couldn’t stand it. I didn’t kill Becky for Peter, if that’s what you think. I swear it didn’t take me long to realize what an ass he was.”

I don’t know why, but I believed her. Maybe there were others Peter messed around with who weren’t so forgiving?

“Were there others? Women who Peter cheated on Becky with?” Katy said, taking the words right out of my mouth.

Julie looked down at the floor a second before looking back up at us, and nodded. “That’s when I realized what a louse he was. I believed him at first when he said he had fallen in love with me and was waiting for the right time to tell Becky. 
Until I saw text messages from other girls on his phone. I was one of several. He said there was enough of him to go around. He didn’t even care,” she said, with a look of disgust on her face and I didn’t blame her. “He said he had a certain lifestyle to uphold and women loved to give him things.”

“Did Becky know?” I asked.

“I don’t think so. If she did she gave no indication of caring.”

“Do you know who any of those other women were?”

“I don’t. As soon as I found what he was up to, I broke it off.”

“Then why take the picture?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Stupid, I know. I did really like him. So there still isn’t any lead on who killed her?”

Good attempt at changing the subject on her end. “Not on our end. Though the police might have someone. Not like they would tell us.”