Total pages in book: 157
Estimated words: 161899 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 809(@200wpm)___ 648(@250wpm)___ 540(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 161899 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 809(@200wpm)___ 648(@250wpm)___ 540(@300wpm)
“Has Birch done documents for you?” I asked.
She nodded. “Jon has the properties in his name. But Mom and I have new IDs now so if he looks, Dad can’t find us. And the quitclaims are being processed today. Once that’s done, the properties will be transferred, and we’ll be good.”
“Not if they find out Jon owned the properties before you switched the titles over.”
“He kinda…” her gaze slid side to side before coming back to me, “…has that covered. The property was all in Clyde’s name. His real one. The one he was born with. So now, it looks like Clyde deeded over the properties to his grandson. And we should be good with that, even when the Feds get involved. Because that was all done with Clyde’s money. Jon has an old power of attorney his grandma had and was able to…finesse things. But those places were bought from old accounts Clyde was sitting on. They weren’t bought with church money the Feds could go after. Or the mail-order-bride money.”
Hang the fuck on.
My eyelids went down, and my eyebrows shot up.
I lifted those lids and asked, “The…what?”
“You heard me, and I know. It’s sick,” she said.
“Explain fully anyway, please,” I requested.
Saff nodded.
And when she spoke, she did it with a lot of verbal quotation marks.
“That was the long con. Clyde would talk schleps like Dad into joining the church with a substantial ‘donation,’ so they could eventually ‘order’ the members who would join their ‘flock.’ Those who truly believed, like Dad, thought Clyde, along with God, were bringing the women into the True Light. Saving their souls. Showing them the way. Those who were just assholes who wanted to get off with as many as possible of the poor women who found themselves on this website Clyde showed them didn’t care about True Light outside the specter of the ‘religious freedom’ it gave them to ‘practice their faith.’ Which meant bang as many chicks as possible while having someone cook their meals and massage their feet.”
I made a face. “Holy hell, it’s a thousand times grosser than I thought.”
She nodded. “That said, except getting some for the deacons, including Dad, he never actually ordered any of the brides. Therein lay the big score. There was the membership fee and the men had to reach the potential of the True Light. Like Dad and the other deacons spent years, and a lot of money, doing. Clyde had set them up, he was grooming them to be the hook. They’d reached their ‘potential,’ that was why they got their wives. And he could show them to new members. But every level you pass to reach that potential has a price tag. That’s where Clyde was really packing it in. Five hundred here, seven hundred and fifty there. It’s non-refundable if people fall out of the program, and a lot did. But bottom line, it adds up.”
“And you recruited for this?”
She shrugged. “I was in with Jon and we had to keep up appearances. I mean, it wasn’t exactly fun to do that, but honestly, mostly they’re either morons, but not nice ones, like Dad, or leches, like Clyde.”
It appeared my sister was kind of badass.
I could have done without the kidnapping portion of her demonstrating her badassery.
But still, it was cool.
“If the church goes down, Dad might be up to his neck in debt,” I told her. “He’s cosigned on some of the loans.”
“That isn’t our problem,” she stated firmly. “Mom will be fine. You and me and Birch will be fine. Juno will be fine. That’s all that matters.”
“But what about our other brothers and sister?”
“Okay,” she pushed out, like she didn’t want to say it, “really, you and your guys can’t get involved. It’s all sorted, and you can’t fuck it up.”
“Saff,” I said warningly.
She blew out a sigh and shared, “We skimmed some more money. And all of the women who’d been forced by circumstances to marry these jerks, and have their kids, are gonna disappear too. And do it with enough money to get them where they want to go and take care of them for a while so they can get set up. Including Dad’s women and our brothers and sister. And before you say anything,” she said the last quickly. “They have to go tomorrow. Everything has to happen tomorrow. Or it might all fall apart. So no one can say anything, or do anything, to fuck it up. Including you meeting them. I’ll know where they are, and later, when it’s safe, maybe that can happen. Now, the goal is to get them out so they can get safe.”
“Did Birch do their documents too?” I asked.
She nodded.
Yep, things had gotten hectic for Birch.
And my sister and Jon (and feloniously, Birch) weren’t just badass, they were kind of masterminds.