Wanted Wed or Alive: Thyme's Wedding Page 10

  “Good.”

  Dora sits up a bit straighter, and I get the sense she’s girding her loins, preparing to face down something or someone that’s tormented her for a long time. That might sound presumptuous of me, but I’m good at reading people and discerning their internal reactions to external stimuli. In fact, this is the exact area of study I’m focusing on for my master’s degree … and maybe, someday, my doctorate. Even so, I have the feeling that Dora’s story is going to blow my mind.

  She doesn’t disappoint.

  “Most people don’t get rich from signing up to sell an MLM line.”

  She says this as though it’s a revelation and not common knowledge. Rosemary coughs, and I narrow my eyes. She’s covering up a laugh.

  “Right,” I agree, hoping to prod her along.

  “But some people do. Mainly, they make money from their downlines.”

  “Downlines?” Dave asks.

  “The way it works is you sign up sellers under you, so you get credit for all their sales … and for all the sales of the people they sign up, who become their downlines. And so on,” Rosemary breaks it down for him.

  He taps the knife against his boot as he considers this. “So, it’s a pyramid scheme?”

  “Yes,” my sisters say in unison.

  At the same time, Dora says, “No.”

  Awkward.

  Mainly to break the silence, I nod toward the kitchen knife in Dave’s hand. “What’s with the knife?”

  Everyone in the room except for Victor shifts their gaze toward Dora. She grimaces. “Sorry about that.” She turns to me. “I thought your sisters and their husbands were here to expose us. I panicked.”

  “Expose what?”

  “I’m getting to that. But I am sorry that I grabbed the knife.” She gnaws her lip, agitated and embarrassed.

  “It’s okay,” Roman tells her kindly. “Nobody was hurt, and Dave’s probably disarmed loads of people, right, Dave?”

  “Definitely. Go ahead and tell your story, Dora.”

  She breathes out. “Right, thanks. Well, first, MLM businesses aren’t pyramid schemes. They really aren’t. The technical definition of a pyramid scheme is a business that doesn’t actually involve distributing and selling a product. In a pyramid scheme, you make money by recruiting new members, and that’s the only way you make money. As you can see from all the jam-packed garages, the people who live here sold—or tried to sell—products.”

  I think back to the display in the dentist’s office and the signs Victor and I saw during our walk through the development. “So, now, you all sell this stuff to each other? But not for real money, for snowflakes?”

  “Sort of, yeah. Everyone here is a refugee from a well-established MLM company.”

  “Refugee?” I can feel my mouth turning down. The word seems a bit dramatic for the situation.

  But Dora’s eyes are wide and earnest. “Oh, yes. We’re refugees. Snow City is the last resort for most of us. It was supposed to be a fresh start.”

  “Supposed to be—but wasn’t?” Sage asks.

  Dora nods. “I don’t include myself in this. Like I said before, I’m only here because of my parents. They’re in deep, but I’m not. Once they pass on, my older brother’s going to get me out. I’ll take my birth name back and start over. But most of these folks … they’ll die here under assumed names.”

  “What is your real name?” I ask, curiosity getting the better of me.

  “Carlie.”

  “Do you want us to call you Carlie instead?”

  “No, no. That’s sloppy. That could lead to mistakes. Exposure.”

  “I think that horse has already left the barn,” Rosemary points out, not unkindly.

  “Yeah, this is a disaster,” Dora says glumly.

  I pull her back to the conversation at hand. “So, refugees is a pretty loaded word. What are these people running from?”

  “Their debt?” Sage guesses. “Did they overextend themselves financially buying products they weren’t able to sell?”

  “Yes and no. I mean, sure, anybody who’s made their way to Snow City has disastrous personal finances. It’s one of the reasons we don’t deal in U.S. currency. Money is essentially worthless here. But, if a person wanted to get out from a bad financial situation, there are easier ways. You could take out a personal loan, declare bankruptcy, hit up a relative for a gift. No, the only people making their way to Snow City are in hiding from their MLM overlords.”

  “Overlords—you mean their uplines?” I want to be sure I’m understanding her.

  “Well, sure, in some cases, it’s their uplines, but it’s not just that.” She wrings her hands, struggling with how to word whatever it is she has to say. “You know how you can’t simply leave a cult or a gang?”

  “I don’t have firsthand, personal knowledge, but, sure, I’m familiar with the concept.”

  “You can’t just leave an MLM business either. Your upline will put extreme pressure on you to stay. They’ll try to convince you that you can turn it all around—win that luxury SUV or qualify for the cruise or hit the bonuses—if you buy a little more inventory to have on hand and if you hustle a bit harder, sign up a few friends. Maybe convince someone to host an in-home or social media party for you? That’s a quick way to pick up sales and potential new recruits in one fell swoop.”

  “So when a person makes noises about getting out, they’re pulled deeper into the web,” Sage observes.

  “Exactly! And at some point, you look up, and you’re in too deep to leave. The company owns you or that’s how it feels, at least. There’s no way out.”

  “So how did everyone get here?” I ask.

  “They got a ride on Santa’s Sleigh,” she says cryptically.

  “Excuse me?”

  “It’s a secret network run by escapees.”

  “So, it’s like the Underground Railroad, but for people who want to leave sales organizations?” I can’t keep the disdain out of my voice. I don’t even really try.

  “You can’t understand unless you’ve been on the inside. If you complain, say you go online and search for ‘how to quit my MLM,’ you’ll find forums, social media groups, whole communities dedicated to sharing tips and tricks for getting out, with success stories and everything.”

  “That’s good,” Sage says. “Then a person shouldn’t have to resort to identity fraud.”

  “You’d think so, but you’d be wrong. They’re fake. The support groups are a big hoax, run by a consortium of big power sellers from across a bunch of MLM companies. They want to root out the so-called bad apples, the sellers who are struggling and thinking about giving up. They coax personal information out of people, then they use it to get them even more firmly entrenched.” Her voice is shaking and she pauses to gather herself.

  Roman slips into the kitchen and pours a glass of water. He returns and presses it into her hands.

  “Thanks.” She takes a slow, small sip and resumes her story, “It doesn’t always work, of course. Some people are just done. But if someone’s really determined to leave and they can’t convince them to stay, they hit them with a lawsuit—a defamation action based on their posts and emails. Sometimes, like in my mom’s case, they fire with both barrels. The book company sued her for breach of contract and libel. And they began assessing a penalty for every month she didn’t make her quota.”

  “Good gravy,” Rosemary murmurs.

  “Yeah. My parents owed them several million dollars by the end, which, of course, they didn’t have. But it got worse. The books were in our garage and basement, right? All that inventory? I came home from school one day, and the locks had been changed. The company took possession of our house because they had a lien against the inventory. Basically any sales Mom made were earmarked to pay off the debt, and the unsold inventory was the collateral. It was something like that. So we were penniless, homeless, and being hounded by Mom’s upline. That’s when the Snow Queen stepped in and offered us a new life.”


  I’m sitting on the edge of the loveseat, spellbound, waiting to learn what happens next. “The Snow Queen?” I breathe.

  “Nobody knows her real name. Everyone protects her identity. Because she’s the only one who can connect you with Santa’s Sleigh and bring you here, to Snow City. She assigns you a new name and gives you a place to live. In return, you give up your old life and agree to bring all your crap, er, inventory with you when you resettle. The town runs off a barter system powered by everyone’s unsold products.”

  “Fascinating,” Victor whispers. I glance over at him. His eyes are shining. I know that look: reporter with a story.

  “Suspicious,” Dave proclaims.

  “Suspicious how?” Rosemary wants to know.

  “What’s in it for the Snow Queen? Are we to believe she does this out of the goodness of her heart?”

  “Yes. Well, that’s the legend, right? She clawed her way out from an iron-clad MLM agreement, started over, and rebuilt her life here, in a desolate, former ghost town.”

  “A ghost town, I knew it!” Victor crows.

  Dora blinks at him, and then continues, “And then she dedicated herself to helping other people escape from the system. One by one, at great personal risk to herself.”

  “So that’s the legend. What’s the truth?” Sage asks.

  “Most of that’s probably at least half true. But, of course, she does get something out of it. She’s the ultimate upline. Everyone she brings to town is her downline. Everyone they bring to town is also her downline. It all feeds up to the Snow Queen.”

  “What does?”

  “Everything. She owns the entire town and everything in it.”

  “How?”

  “When people agree to give up their old identities, she uses them to seed the town.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “She ran up credit cards or took out loans to set up a fund to pay for groceries, utilities, things we need from the outside. And she keeps a little for herself.”

  “Wait a minute.” Sage is doing that thing where she pinches the bridge of her nose. This is a sign that she’s thinking, and the thoughts she’s having are making her head want to explode. She stares at Dora. “You’re telling me the plan to escape the iron grip of the MLM companies is … an MLM arrangement?”

  Dora gives us a sad smile. “I think, technically, Snow City does meet the definition of a pyramid scheme. But it saved our lives, so nobody here’s going to complain. Instead, people will defend it and the Snow Queen … to the death, if it comes to that.”

  Chapter 19

  Sage

  We leave Roman, Dave, and Victor to keep an eye on Dora while we have a quick sister confab in the kitchen.

  “So what do you think of her story?” Thyme asks as we gather around the table tucked into other Thyme’s breakfast nook.

  “It sounds bananas. But it tracks with what we’ve seen in town,” Rosemary says.

  “Yeah, and the overflowing garages. I wish you could’ve been there while Victor and I were walking through the neighborhood.”

  “Believe us, we know. Come here and look at this,” I tell her.

  Thyme follows me to the garage.

  Rosemary starts rummaging through the pantry instead. “I’ve already seen it. I’m going to try to scare us up an early dinner.”

  I fling open the door and gesture at the sales floor. Thyme steps down onto the concrete floor and gazes around at the shelves, dumbstruck.

  “It’s overwhelming, isn’t it?” I say.

  “What is all this stuff?” She walks over to the counter where we’ve left the Fit-tastic Shape System materials. “Fake Thyme was a Fit-tastic Shape Sherpa?”

  “I think she did that on the side. Her main product was those leggings you like so much.”

  Thyme wrinkles her forehead at me. “What leggings?”

  I reach for the nearest bin and pop it open. I toss her a pair of deep purple leggings patterned with gold and silver stars. “These MiMiMew things.”

  She examines the leggings. “Oh, these. I do have some, but I don’t particularly care for them.”

  “Really? They’re so soft.”

  “Yeah, they are. That makes them really comfortable as loungewear or to wear while you’re running errands. But they’re not well-suited for yoga or Pilates. They’re too soft; they don’t have enough stretch.”

  I’m not going to argue with her professional yogalates trainer opinion. But I do reach back into the tub and stroke the pair on top. Like a cloud. Meanwhile, Thyme seems to be having some sort of episode. She’s staring down at the leggings in her hand like they’ve insulted her. Then she starts shaking her head from side to side and making these grunting sounds that aren’t really words.

  Maybe this is some sort of delayed shock reaction. She’s had a grueling thirty-six hours.

  I drop the bin and run to her side. “Thyme? Are you okay?”

  She blows out a long breath. “Yeah, I … I think I know how these people got my name and Social Security Number.”

  I don’t know what I expected her to say, but this isn’t it.

  “How?”

  She lowers herself to the counter and sits on it, lotus-style, while she explains. “Right after I left school and started working with Cate Whittier-Clay, I was also picking up some hours at a yoga studio in Dumbo. Do you remember?”

  “Sure.” I do, vaguely. We were scrambling to come up with the first payment on the debt our parents had tossed in our lap, and we were all taking every job that came our way. We were pretty desperate. Even so, Thyme’s job in Brooklyn didn’t last long. The commute was long and expensive, given the pittance she was earning, and it was hard to juggle her teaching schedule with the demands of her far more lucrative gig with Cate.

  “So I only worked there for a few weeks, but one of the other instructors found out I was training Cate, and she became obsessed with getting me to give Cate a pair of these MiMiMew leggings.” She waves a hand at the laden shelves.

  “She was selling them?”

  “Yeah, you know, that place didn’t pay squat. Everyone there had a side hustle or two. And this woman—her name was Naomi Something or Other—she sold MiMiMew. She was relentless, too. Always inviting people to parties, but, when you got to her place, it would turn out to be a MiMiMew trunk show. The receptionist warned me about her on my very first day, so I tried to keep my distance. But she got it into her head that if Cate would wear MiMiMew leggings on the air, even just once, the sales would roll in, and she’d be set for life.”

  “Is that remotely true? Cate’s an influencer like that?”

  Thyme laughs. “No. She’s a power broker. She deals in news, not this season’s colors. Nobody follows her to see the latest trends. But Naomi was convinced all she had to do was get a pair of leggings into Cate’s hands … er, or onto her legs, to be precise.”

  “Did you give Cate a pair?”

  She shoots me a look of sheer disbelief. “You’ve met her? What do you think?”

  I know I wouldn’t have the nerve to try it. “Um, I’m guessing not.”

  “Yeah, not a chance. I mean, I’m still kind of intimidated by Cate, but back then? Forget it. I was terrified of her. And I told Naomi that.”

  “She didn’t accept it?”

  “No, she didn’t. First she gave me a pair, told me they were a gift from her to me.”

  “Awkward.”

  “I didn’t really want them, but I also didn’t want it to turn into a thing, so I took them, thanked her, and tossed them in my gym bag. I thought that would be the end of it, but it wasn’t. Next, I found a pair in my locker at the studio. I gave them back to her, and they turned up in my locker again. I got a new lock, new combination, and started scheduling my classes to avoid her.”

  “Ugh.”

  “Right? And then, I got this package delivered to my apartment. It was a MiMiMew Consultant Starter Kit.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me?”


  “I wish. It was enormous. Mr. Doolittle had to help me carry it to my apartment. When I opened it, I just about died. There were dozens of pairs of leggings, branded bags with stickers and colorful tissue paper, all kinds of promotional items, and a bunch of MiMiMew brochures. And the log-in information for ‘my’ MiMiMew seller account. Oh, and an invoice for four thousand dollars, which showed that I’d prepaid by credit card.”

  She’s pale and clammy from the memory. I can’t imagine how she must’ve felt in the moment. There’s no chance she had an extra four grand lying around.

  “Oh, Thyme, what did you do?”

  “First, I barfed. I mean that literally. Then I called the business headquarters and explained there’d been a mistake. It didn’t go well, whoever signed me up knew my address, my social, they had a copy of my driver’s license. MiMiMew corporate insisted I had to honor the agreement.”

  “Why didn’t you ever tell us?”

  “We’d just learned we had a half-million dollar debt to pay off, Sage. Everyone was sacrificing their dreams. Rosemary started working for that abysmal starlet, you’d left the accounting firm to be a glorified mother’s helper to a stay-at-home mom—”

  I interrupt to correct her, “Attachment parenting consultant. And going to work for Muffy turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me. And I’ll bet Rosemary would say the same thing about working for Amber.”

  “Sure, maybe in hindsight. But at the time, we were in full-blown crisis mode. I couldn’t add another drama to the pot, so I was determined to resolve it myself. And I did … or, at least, I thought I did until today.”

  “Did you finally get them to rescind the contract?”

  “Not right away. I disputed the charge on my card. The credit card company did an investigation and determined that my card number was keyed in manually by someone at a MiMiMew corporate office and not inputted through the signup portal online. That wasn’t good enough for the company, but my bank did reverse the charges.”