Black Star Canyon: The Mystery Novel (Black Star Canyon Mystery Novel Series Book 1)
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Contents
Copyright
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1 - An Unfortunate Phone Call
2 - A Brisk Morning Walk
3 - A Rough Morning After a Rough Night
4 - Meet Jane Doe
5 - The Kensingtons - An Introduction
6 - The Old Couple On Top of the Hill
7 - The Long Way to Town
8 - The Knocking Door
9 - Henry's Handy Shop
10 - The Freebie
11 - Gus vs Lukas's Face
12 - The Morgue
13 - The Rifle
14 - An Unexpected Visitor
15 - The Dingiest Motel in Black Star Canyon
16 - Bekka's Visit
17 - Jack's Big Break
18 - Fishtail
19 - Here's Mud In Your Eye
20 - O'Fortuna
21 - Truely Blessed
22 - A Long Walk In A Small Building
23 - The Burger Stand
24 - It's In His Kiss
25 - Tossing Salad
26 - The Pastel Portrait
27 - The Red Door
28 - This Looks Familiar
29 - Coyote Ugly
30 - Wakey Wakey, Eggs and Bakey
31 - Crime Scene Take 2
32 - Bombshell
33 - Stuffed Sausage
34 - Out of Our League
35 - Parking Lot Cam
36 - Dropping Eves
37 - Hard Boiled
38 - How To Make A Fire
39 - Sucker Punch At The Burger Stand
40 - A Modest Echo
41 - ...Again
42 - Losers
43 - More Yellow
44 - Four Reasons
45 - Things Go Missing
46 - Jimmy Kent
47 - I Love Watching You Leave
48 - Sadness of What If's
49 - Knocked
50 - Row of Ducks
51 - A Silhouette Is Most Dangerous At Dusk
52 - Connection
53 - Opinions
54 - Covering Bases
55 - Hondo
56 - Hometown Support
57 - The End of Deputy Sue Callahan
58 - Smile
59 - Beer and Aspirin
60 - With No Sight
61 - The Road You Are On
Find out what happens next!
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Black Star Canyon
by C.C. Wall
Cover by Zoe Wall
Edited by Jeff Yates
Copyright © 2013, 2017 C.C. Wall. All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, businesses, events, or locations, is purely coincidental. Reproduction in whole prohibited.
This book was originally released in a slightly different form as Black Star Canyon: The Complete First Season.
Get Welcome to Black Star Canyon FREE!
This tour guide to the town has history, local legends, a map, clues and so much more!
Plus, it’s written by town historian Ernest Wilson.
And it’s free.
1 - An Unfortunate Phone Call
This was where our story started. The small domino that was pushed over, causing a series of events that were to unfold, that would utterly destroy the good people of Black Star Canyon. That one, little, seemingly insignificant event, would create a ripple effect so large, so uncontrollable, that nothing would be able to stop it. The townspeople of Black Star Canyon would try to think back on what it was that solidified their doom, but the problem was, no one would actually know about this one, little, seemingly insignificant event; no one but one person. That one person, made a choice just minutes before that event. It didn’t take the person long to do. They sat. They thought. Then...
The living room in the home was nice. Nice in a way that everything in the room would have been top of the line when it was purchased, but that was obviously a very long time ago. Sitting there in a chair; a nice comfy chair, though full of dust embedded into the fabric, was an old man. The old man was wearing long pants, layered socks, and thick slippers. The top half of the old man was layered with different shirts and topped with a thick, knitted, sweater whose sleeves were a bit too long, so the old man had them rolled up into giant puffs around his wrists. He sat there, like he did every evening, reading the newspaper. He would slowly go over each article, word by word, squinting his eyes every so often, then tilting his head back to look down his nose through his bifocals to make sure he was reading what he was reading. He would mouth things like, “What the…” and, “Oh, Hell…” without making a sound as he was either horrified by the state of the world or just disgusted with where it was going.
The phone that sat next to him on the small table and then screamed at him. “RIIIIIIINGGGGGGG!” said the phone.
The old man sighed. He tried to wet his mouth and his lips by licking them with his dry tongue. The more he tried, the more saliva built up in his mouth.
“RIIIIINGGGGGGGGG!” The phone said again echoing through the hollow home.
The old man seemed frustrated. He looked over at the phone as if giving it the “stink eye” would shut it up. He licked his lips again.
“RIIIIIIIINNGGGGGGGG!” The phone seemed to be getting angry.
The old man slowly moved his woolen wrist over to the telephone. He picked it up in mid-ring. “Hello?” He said it so quietly, that almost he, himself, didn’t hear it. He pulled the phone away from his head. He licked his lips again, moistening his mouth. In a very normal tone he spoke, “It’s for you.” There was silence. The crinkling of his newspaper broke the quiet. Again he tried, “It’s for you.”
A voice from upstairs that was filled with glee yelled back, “Is that for me?” followed by what sounded like a stampede coming down the hard wood staircase.
“Yes. It’s for you,” the old man said quietly as he held the phone up and she grabbed it out of his hand.
The girl, I should say woman; she looked to be in that gray area, had shoulder length, blonde hair, tiny little shorts and a pink t-shirt that was cut off to expose her tight stomach. When she grabbed the phone from him and ran around the corner into the kitchen, the spiral phone cord stretched around it after her. Each loop along the corner made a loud “CLACK” sound. The “CLACK” repeated in quick succession until she felt comfortable with where she was in relation to the old man, due to the privacy of the call and the ability of the old man’s hearing.
“Hello?” she said. She smiled a huge smile, bit her thumb nail, and turned red as an apple. “No. No one can hear.”
And that was true. No one outside of that call could hear what went on during the short conversation. The problem was, was that the only people who would benefit from knowing who was on the other end of that call, the good people of Black Star Canyon, would never, ever, find out who that was.
2 - A Brisk Morning Walk
Jonathan Kensington left his rustic, slightly secluded home, with a smile on his face. He looked down at Prince Harry, his Yorkshire Terrier, who by the way, was wearing a green and red sweater that just so coincidently matched Jonathan’s green and red scarf. Jonathan said, “Let’s go for that morning walk ‘ol chap!”
The funny thing about Jonathan is that he spoke in a proper British English accent, yet Jonathan had never been to England, nor were his parent’s from there. Nobody in Black Star Canyon knew this though. Jonathan just loved watching shows o
n BBC and thought that it made him sound fancier, which it did, and he also thought that people in town would find him more charming, which they also did.
Jonathan whistled while he and Prince Harry walked along the side of the road near the woods and the mouth of the canyon. “Do your business, Harry,” Jonathan said while rubbing his hands together to keep warm. His hands were clad in brown leather driving gloves. He also had on a big, gray coat and matching fedora. Another funny thing, was that it really wasn’t even chilly. This was just the look that Jonathan liked to have. In fact, Prince Harry was panting up a storm and they hadn’t even walked more than a couple hundred feet.
Harry did his business. “Aren’t you a clever little lad?” Jonathan said while walking away from the pile of dog excrement left off the road. Jonathan never picked up after his dog. He figured he didn’t have to since it was all open land and none of the other neighbors ever came through that part of the road. There were two other houses within eyesight from Jonathan’s. One was an old, dilapidated little shack down the road a bit and the other was a nicer, much bigger home, on the road above Jonathan’s. The couple that lived there were old and never really came out to socialize. Jonathan was always jealous of them though, because even though they were all living in the woods, this couple still managed to have a lustrous front yard with a well-manicured lawn and beautiful flower beds, like one you would see on the cover of some magazine.
Their walk continued, like it did every morning, with nothing more unusual than any other morning. “What a beautiful day, chap!” Jonathan said with glee through a stupid smile. He would often wish that the people of Black Star Canyon could see him in the mornings, walking and smiling and whistling. Jonathan always thought that if people did see him like this, they would think or say things like, “Wow! Look at him go!” or “I do believe that is the happiest person in all of Black Star Canyon!” In these fantasies, he would also pretend that he hadn’t heard them and just go about his morning as usual but be smiling on the inside that they noticed.
Prince Harry suddenly grabbed the scent of something and walked faster. Jonathan’s arm extended as Harry pulled harder on the leash. Harry started kicking up tiny rocks and dust onto Jonathan’s nice leather loafers. “Harry, you must calm yourself, right away,” Jonathan said sternly. “You will make us both a mess.”
And that’s when he saw her. Well, that’s when he saw her bare, naked ass, looking him right in the face. She was bent over a large rock, next to the dead trunk of a tree that had fallen over many years ago. Her legs were bruised and bloody. Her limbs seemed to be stiff and placed oddly, somewhat defying gravity. There was a large pool of muddy blood under where her feet hung.
Jonathan, being the gentleman that he was, tried to cover his mouth before the vomit exited the orifice, but the attempt was in vain as yellowy chunks and liquid projected out of his mouth through the fingers of his expensive, brown, leather driving gloves. “Bloody hell!” Jonathan tried to cry out in place of the vomit, but it just gurgled out. In the excitement of the moment, he dropped Prince Harry’s leash and Harry ran over to the girl, growling the whole way, sniffed her feet and licked them. This made Jonathan vomit again, through his disgusting, brown, leather driving gloves. Harry looked back at Jonathan with a look that said, “What a pussy,” before sniffing the pool of muddy blood and lapping it up.
“No Harry!” Jonathan yelled again through the third round of losing last night’s dinner through his fancy gloves. Harry didn’t even respond. Jonathan’s nice scarf was now also covered in bile and chunks of unidentifiable edibles.
3 - A Rough Morning After A Rougher Night
David Lukas slowly opened his eyes in a painful squint, noticing that he forgot to draw his blinds closed when he came home last night in a drunken stupor. It wasn’t the light that had woken him though. He could’ve slept another couple of hours before his studio apartment got so hot from the sun, he would’ve felt like he was being cooked alive. No, he woke up this morning because he put his cell phone on vibrate and purposefully left it on top of a pile of change on his night stand in order to wake him up, if he needed to be woken up for any reason. This was his alarm clock.
He grabbed the phone and looked at it. Lawrence Chaney was calling. Once the call went to voicemail, he saw that he had forty-seven missed calls from Lawrence Chaney that morning. David Lukas sighed. He knew this couldn’t be good. Lawrence Chaney called again. He didn’t want to answer it because he knew it would be bad news and he also knew, if the news was really bad enough, Lawrence Chaney would be pounding on his door in a matter of minutes. This meant that he didn’t have much time.
He sat up on his messy twin bed, looked down at himself and noticed that he still had on his clothes from yesterday; shirt, tie, slacks, dark gray trench coat. He had managed to get one shoe off though. The black sock with a hole in the big toe was the canary that sang that tune. His eyes slowly moved across the small room, trying to locate the missing article.
His studio apartment was very small. Besides his bed, he only had a nightstand, a small desk and a dresser. His walls were a muted depression that held the same hue as his trench coat. There was though, a small pastel portrait hanging above his dresser that looked as if a child had drawn it. His tiny desk sat under the only window in the room, and had on top of it, the room’s only light; a small fifteen watt desk lamp. His apartment was horribly tidy for a man who obviously didn’t care about his environment. The only thing on the floor was the empty bottle of vodka, that looked as though he had tried to place it on the dresser, and then missed. One explanation for the cleanliness of his dwelling was that there was a good possibility that he was wearing all the clothes he owned. There was also a strong possibility that the food David Lukas would eat, came in a bottle and was either from Poland or Russia.
His phone was still rattling on the change. He rubbed the crust from his eyes then almost cut his hand open as he slid his fingers down his cheek over the two day growth of his dark stubble. His chiseled face was hidden behind long greasy hair that hung down past his chin. He stood up and almost fell right back over once he found out that the one shoe on his right foot made him about an inch taller. Trying to regain his balance also showed him that he hadn’t managed to sleep it off and he was, in fact, still a little drunk. He found the heel of the missing shoe poking out from its hiding place under the bed as he stumbled. Once he got it on, he stood up straight and stretched. His back and shoulders were in knots due to the fact that he had passed out with his gun holster on again. He hated doing that.
Once he’d got his bearings, he opened his front door then turned to the even smaller bathroom to release all the vodka that he had been holding onto all night. Like clockwork, a shorter man in a nicer and cleaner version of what David Lukas had on, entered the room with great urgency. The man was holding his cell phone to his ear and spoke loudly through a neatly trimmed red beard.
“No it’s okay. You don’t have to answer your phone; I’m already in your apartment,” Lawrence Chaney said full of sarcasm.
“You forgot, shithole,” David Lukas added as he zipped up his pants and flushed the toilet.
“I told you, I’m trying to not use as much foul language,” Chaney said.
“You haven’t used any yet today. I think you’re due,” Lukas said.
“You obviously haven’t listened to your voicemails,” Chaney said.
“You got me there,” Lukas said as he exited the bathroom. He grabbed a cigarette off the dresser and put it in his mouth.
“You’re not going to wash your hands?” Chaney asked in disbelief.
“Bite me, Chaney,” he said through his teeth while he lit up. “What the hell do you need so early?”
“It’s not early Lukas. It’s eight in the morning.”
“Morning being the operative word in that sentence,” Lukas pointed out.
“We have big trouble. Get ready,” Chaney insisted.
“I am ready,” Lukas said.
&
nbsp; “For detox?” Chaney said, “I can see that. But we have to work now.”
4 - Meet Jane Doe
Detective Lukas and Detective Chaney exited their vehicle on the quiet road near the mouth of the canyon. There were already other deputies rolling out the yellow tape, taking pictures, swabbing for samples and scraping under the girl’s nails.
“I know you think vodka doesn’t have a scent, but the inside of my car smells like the dumpster behind Cook’s now,” Chaney said.
“That’s just because I puked in my mouth a little when the acid reflux kicked in,” Lukas said as he swallowed hard to get the taste out of his mouth.
“Either way; next time, brush your teeth and if you insist on wearing clothes more than once between washings. Can you at least pick up an iron?” Chaney said.
“I’m sorry I’m embarrassing you, Chaney,” Lukas said, “I’m not married to a maid I can fuck.”
Chaney became even more irritated, “Excuse me?”
“That’s right,” Lukas said, “I forgot that you still happen to be a virgin despite all that.”
They saw Jonathan in a blanket, sitting on a large rock by the crime scene. Prince Harry sat on Jonathan’s lap, giving him moral support.
“Good morning, Mayor,” Chaney said to Jonathan. “How are you holding up?”
“Oh, fine,” Jonathan said in a far off distant tone. “I just can’t believe this happened so close to my home. She can’t be much older than my Elizabeth.”
“Hello, mayor,” Lukas said.
“And you are?” Jonathan asked.
Bewildered, Lukas replied, “I am Detective Lukas. I’ve been…”
Jonathan cut him off immediately. “Nice to meet you.” Jonathan extended his hand for Lukas to shake it, even though he was still staring at the dead girl.
“We’ve met,” Lukas said.
“Oh. Sorry,” Jonathan said.