“Looks that way.” I remembered something Kip had said. “Did Kip call you to work on his computer?”
“I was at Kip’s office when he got a call about a property on Gaston,” she said. “Sterling Webster was there too.”
“You knew what they did?”
“I knew Sterling said he’d meet with Kip’s client. I just didn’t know that client was you. You already owned a building on Gaston. Why are you looking at another one?”
“Remember yesterday I told you I submitted an entry but needed a property? Jane and I were supposed to collaborate on a design. She had a building in mind. You already saw the email she sent me, so you know we weren’t on the best of terms when she was murdered. I had enough invested in the competition that I wasn’t going to just walk away. After I ran into her that morning, I spent the day at the library putting together my own concept. My proposal wasn’t as pretty as Sterling’s, but the contents were solid.”
“How’d you know it paled in comparison to pretty boy Webster?”
“The designs didn’t—I mean, I don’t know what his designs were, but mine were inspired.” I ignored her doubtful expression. “I meant his application. It was professionally bound, brushed steel cover, colored tabs probably breaking his concept down into categories like ‘organic urban design’ and ‘seamless neighborhood integration’.”
“Is that stuff for real? Sounds like PR mumbo jumbo.”
“It’s the kind of stuff that gets people’s attention because it sounds like a thing that isn’t a thing. If Sterling Webster cared about organic design, he wouldn’t use so much polished chrome in his buildings. And if he cared about seamless neighborhood integration, he wouldn’t knock down vacant buildings to make way for new ones.”
“You really don’t like this guy, do you?”
“I never paid much attention to him until I got involved with the design community,” I said. “Until the DIDI appraised the pajama factory I converted into a shared workspace, I flew under everybody’s radar.”
Back in February, a few weeks before Valentine’s day, I’d learned of the death of a friend. There’d been nothing suspicious about her passing. Alice Sweet had been eighty-six years old and in declining health, despite her good habits of swimming laps with other seniors each morning, but there’s only so much you can do to slow down the clock. Shortly after her death, I’d learned that she left me a vacant pajama factory.
The interior of the building had been left untouched for forty years, which presented unique challenges and opportunities. It would have been easy enough to maintain seventy-five percent of the original design integrity of the building after restoring the hardwood floors, repairing the deteriorated window casings, and removing the abandoned bins of fabric, thread, and buttons that had sat untouched while the factory had closed. But my idea had been to convert the existing sewing stations into workstations in a shared office. The key was using fixtures I’d accumulated in storage over the years I’d been in business. Using pendant lamps, Danish modern desks, colorfully reupholstered diner chairs, and storage hutches, all items that were doing little more than taking up space in my garage, my storage locker, and my studio and could easily be installed. I implemented a variating color palette that matched the pastel conversation hearts in the company’s signature pajamas to define each workspace, yet keep the entire floor cohesive. I’d even moved the sewing machines to the upstairs level, along with a painting studio, so creatives would have their own space to work.
The pajama factory had been called Sweet Dreams, and I’d left the name and logo mounted on the outside of the building. Lots of people had dreams they wanted to pursue. I’d taken what Alice had left me and done what I could to give entrepreneurs a helping hand.
“I’ve got storage lockers filled with furniture. I can’t park in my garage because that’s full too. I love mid-century design. I have no intention of branching out to the masses and taking a bite out of Sterling Webster’s pie, but if I don’t step things up a little, I’m going to drown in atomic fixtures.”
“What’s your growth factor?” Nasty asked.
“You’re kidding me, right?”
“Your plan. Your projected profit. How much you plan to recoup of what you’re putting into this.”
“I know the definition of ‘growth factor’.”
“Good. You told me once you’re a business woman just like me. I don’t make a move without knowing what it means to my bottom line, what the potential immediate benefits are, and what the long-term impact will be. If you really are serious about leveraging the outcome of this competition into a platform for bigger jobs, then you darn well better know your growth factor.”
The conversation had taken a weird turn, but like almost every other conversation I’d had with Nasty, this one was a verbal wrestling match, and there was no way she was pinning me to the floor. I crossed my arms. “Considering a sizeable portion of my inventory came from the street corners of Dallas on trash day, I’ve got low overhead. My twenty-thousand-dollar investment will go toward materials and installation: floors, counters, and paint. Five thousand in reserve for equipment rentals on my interior remodel and five for the exterior component.”
“What’s your concept?”
“Fully furnished short-term apartment rentals. Once the project is complete, I’ll be able to keep the twelve units in constant rotation. One month of rentals will pay off the investment. From there, it’s general maintenance.”
Nasty stood up. “I want in.”
“In on what?”
“Your entry. Sterling Webster has a private investor, now you do too.”
Joanie stirred from the floor and sat up. Rocky did too. All eyes were on me to make what amounted to the most unpredictable decision I’d made in the past six months—and it didn’t even involve Hudson or Tex or the decision-free zone I’d requested for my birthday.
“Silent partner, right?” I asked, with emphasis on the silent.
“You think I have an opinion on pink bathrooms?”
“Oh, what the heck,” I said. I held out my hand and Nasty shook it. I couldn’t help wondering what she was up to, but for one of the few times since we’d met, it appeared as though we were on the same side.
“The first thing I want you to do is distance yourself from this thing about Jane Spring.”
“Strong,” I corrected. “Jane Strong.”
“Strong. Right. That visit from the detective earlier today was for one reason. You’re on his short list of people with motive. And you can’t win a contest if you don’t find a way off that list fast.”
“It’s not like I invited him here for tea,” I said.
“No, but think over the facts, Madison. A witness overheard you and Jane argue. You have no evidence that you were at the library when you say you were. The building was empty except for you and Jane—”
“It wasn’t empty. Building security was there. So was her ex-husband, Gerry Rose. He’s the head of the DIDI and the one who told me to get help while he stayed with her body. He didn’t seem surprised or upset to find Jane unconscious. Before I returned, he carried her downstairs and said she was dead. Why aren’t the police bothering him?”
“Surveillance shows Gerry Rose was in his office after you left DIDI. Your own statement lines up perfectly with when he found her. You’re in trouble, Madison.” She put her hands on my shoulders and stared directly into my face. While I was a lot soberer than I’d been when she arrived, I was exhausted, and the emotional turmoil of the day had left me feeling like I’d run a marathon. “Screw it.” She dropped her arms and turned around, grabbing her handbag from the sofa.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m making sure you don’t forget this conversation took place.” She pulled a red lipstick out of her handbag, the same shade I’d seen on the invoice on Tex’s nightstand. She uncapped the tube
and wrote across the newsprint that was spread out on the table. This document serves as a legal and binding contract between Donna Nast and Madison Night for the entry to DD competition. She glanced up at me, and then looked back at the newsprint and signed her name with a flourish. She held out her lipstick to me. I took the proffered cosmetic and inserted two lower case “i’s” between the DD and then signed my own name under hers. I handed the lipstick back.
“You’ll have a cashier’s check in the morning. If I were you, Madison, I’d keep this between us girls.”
Right. As if I wanted to advertise my pact with the devil.
I woke with a headache. Joanie was stretched out on the pink tweed sofa with Rocky by her thigh. Connie, who I hadn’t remembered joining us, was nestled in a sleeping bag between a row of coffee tables. I seemed to have slept on the bean bag chair, proving the seventies advertisement accurate: it was so comfortable I didn’t want to get up.
Outside the glass walls of my showroom, the sky looked cloudy. Dallas rain came in weekly showers, and from the looks of things, we’d only been given a temporary reprieve. Fat droplets fell, speckling the sidewalk. The reprieve was over.
I left Connie and Joanie sleeping and went to the office to make coffee. The mini fridge was stocked with food we hadn’t had the night before, and I assumed it had been Connie who’d filled it. I pulled a premade breakfast sandwich out and microwaved it and then dropped into my chair to eat while I checked my email.
Sitting between the usual Yahoo group digests and eBay ending soon notifications was an email from Kip Bledsoe. The subject line said, “preapproved.” I opened the email. He’d kept his update short and sweet: he asked the bank to prioritize my mortgage application and it had been approved, he’d contacted the property owner and made a bid on my behalf, and we should hear something this afternoon. Fingers crossed, I’d have keys in hand within twenty-four hours. A copy of the paperwork was attached to the email.
I hovered my mouse over the attachment. Did I trust Kip? Not after the Sterling Webster stunt. I called his cell.
“Kip, this is Madison Night.”
“Great! I emailed you the documents. Good thing you have a clean credit rating. We pushed that mortgage approval through in record time. Just need your signature—”
I interrupted him. “Kip, did you or did you not send Sterling Webster to meet me at the building? And to say he was you?”
“He told me he never said he was me. He said you assumed he was me and he didn’t correct you.”
“I asked you to make an anonymous bid on the property because it was for VIP. How anonymous could it be when I was talking to the competition?”
“You’re the one who told Sterling why you wanted the building. Not me. And from what he told me, he made absolutely sure you knew what you were getting.” He paused for a moment. “Does this mean you changed your mind about the building? I can keep looking, but I’m not sure we’re going to have a whole lot of luck.”
If Kip had been in front of me, it would have been awfully hard to hide my reaction. But he was right. I needed a building. And I’d already cycled through the necessary emotions to determine that the one I used to own was the right one. “I still want the building. I just don’t appreciate the way you played me.”
“It was meant to be a joke. Sterling said he’s been hearing your name in a lot of design circles and wanted to meet you. Honestly, I was busy with the computers being down, so if he hadn’t volunteered, I would have had to tell you no.”
“These documents you sent me, are you sure they’re free of viruses?”
“Scanned, scrubbed, and free as a bird. Your friend took care of our system herself.”
I grumbled my thanks for the rush job on the documents and hung up. Real estate was a game of relationships, and for a person like Kip, making Sterling—a flipper with deep pockets and high profits—happy would be far more lucrative than catering to me. I navigated the mouse to the bottom right of my screen and checked that Nasty’s firewall was still in place. The pop-up window said it was working and there were no threats detected on my computer. I clicked the attachment and scans of the paperwork opened. I sent the files to my printer, and then used the Save As function to file them to a folder on my hard drive.
That’s when I discovered my hard drive was empty. My files, every last one of them, had been wiped from my computer.
SIXTEEN
No wonder Nasty’s firewall indicated there were no threats on my computer. There were no files on my computer. None.
My internal hard drive was empty.
My external hard drive was empty.
My cloud storage was empty.
That can’t be. I closed out of the save-as window and opened the file manager by clicking the small, beige folder icon at the bottom of my screen. Again, every place where I stored files on my computer was empty. The folders were there, but the digital contents were stripped.
No. No. No. No. No. No. It wasn’t possible.
But it was!
It was like I was staring at a brand-new, fresh from the factory computer. Only there was nothing fresh or exciting about the circumstance. My brain refused to process the magnitude of the problem. Paralyzed from doing something that would make things worse—although what could make this worse?—I reached for my donut phone, and then for my cell phone, and then for the mouse to my computer. I felt like a robot controlled by an indecisive owner. Every one of my actions felt wrong and ineffective.
What I did was scream.
Okay, that felt better. It didn’t accomplish anything, but it felt good.
Actually, the scream did produce two very specific results. It shocked me out of temporary paralysis, and it brought Joanie running to my office.
“What happened?” she asked.
“My files are missing,” I said. I grabbed the mouse and clicked folder after folder. Nothing.
“You back up to the cloud, right?”
“Right.” I opened the internet window and was met with a solid white screen. Slowly, words appeared in a reverse dissolve.
GOT YOU AGAIN! GOT YOU AGAIN! GOT YOU AGAIN!
The phrase increased in frequency until the words covered each other and blotted out the white backdrop. I slammed my hand down onto the power button and the screen went black.
I stood up and grabbed my handbag. “Can you lock up when you and Connie leave?” I asked. “I can’t just sit here and right now, I’m afraid to turn my computer back on.”
“Where are you going?”
I glanced down at my coveralls. “For starters, I’m getting a shower. Hopefully a little water therapy will help me focus on what to do after that.”
I handed Joanie a spare key, collected Rocky, and left. I’d planned to spend the day working at the studio, but there wasn’t much I could do without access to the internet. Right now, I needed to feel like I was in control of my business, not some green hat Robin Hood hacker intent to steal my files and my personality.
My first instinct was to call Nasty. Not only had she been the one to supposedly fix the computer yesterday—leaving me vulnerable and lulled into a false sense of security—but she’d wheedled her way into being my silent partner. In twenty-four hours, I’d agreed to terms I never would have agreed to under normal circumstances. Where was my common sense? As I idled at a traffic light on my way to Thelma Johnson’s house, it occurred to me that Jane’s murder had knocked me for an unexpected loop and I’d been off balance ever since. And what had Nasty said? Detective Henning was treating me like the most viable person of interest in his murder investigation, and if I had any chance of competing in the VIP competition, my top order of business was to get my name crossed off that list.
I drove home and stripped off soiled and smelly painting clothes on my way up the stairs toward my bathroom. As the water heated up, my mind raced. I climbed under the ho
t jets and scrubbed at the lilac paint stains on my hands with a loofah.
This wasn’t the first time I was confronted with a jigsaw puzzle of evidence and the absolute knowledge that the picture on the puzzle wasn’t what the police thought. More than once, I’d gone head to head with Tex when our opinions differed. I’d learned to respect him and know he had his reasons for interpreting the clues as he did, and I knew this was a time when I could benefit from talking out what I knew about Jane’s murder.
Except for one thing. Tex wasn’t just a police captain. And this had nothing to do with the six-month hiatus he’d agreed to give me for my birthday.
It had to do with the fact that he was competing directly against me in the VIP competition and hadn’t said a word.
“Oooooooh!” I yelled. The scream bounced off the puce tiled walls of the bathroom until the relentless sound of gushing water drowned it out. Even when the man agreed to stay out of my life, he was in my life. He was infuriating.
By the time my shower was over, I had a plan. It was fraught with problems and potential emotional land mines, but it was something.
I flipped through the clear plastic garment bags from the oil baron’s wife and settled for a dark brown pantsuit and ivory turtleneck. I added brown argyle socks and low heeled brown loafers with wide brushed brass buckles in the front, pulled an ivory felt hat with a chocolate brown and ivory polka dotted band over my quickly blown-dry blonde hair, and went downstairs to let Rocky out. It was warmer than the previous day, but still on the cool side. It took Rocky longer than usual to make his morning deposit on the flower beds, but when he was done, he charged right back into the warm house.
“Rocky, I have to go to work alone today. Can you be a good boy until I get back?”
He yipped. I ran my hand over his long fur and kissed him on top of his head. He nuzzled his pushed up black nose past my face toward my ear. I gave him fresh food and water, another kiss, and left.
What I didn’t tell Rocky was that I was going to Hudson’s house.
LOVER COME HACK Page 11
