Black & White & Dead All Over: A Lost Hat, Texas, Mystery (The Lost Hat, Texas, Mystery Series Book 1)

by Anna Castle

  “That’s impossible!” Scanning takes minutes per page, especially if you can’t wreck the bindings. I’d be lucky to get through four books in an average workday. “I’m serious, Greg. It can’t be done.”

  “Hire Tillie to help you out.”

  “Hire Tillie. How will I pay her? What will I tell her?”

  “They’ll pay you something for that museum exhibit. Pay her out of that. And tell her whatever you want.” He grinned nastily. “Tell her whatever you dare.”

  I sat back in my chair. I felt like I’d been Tasered. My thoughts raced around in tight circles. Tillie would know something was up, whether I told her or not. I couldn’t sit at my workstation scanning yearbooks for the rest of the week without her wondering what I was doing. I’d have to put her off, tell her not to come in.

  Marion would notice, too, and she would know the school wasn’t paying me. She taught 4-H classes over there every week. She was probably best pals with the president of the damned alumni club.

  Panic welled into my throat. I swallowed hard and tasted something bitter. How was I going to get out of this mess? Krystle had warned me that he would up the ante. How much further would he go? How much more could I take? “You’re going to push me too far.” My voice sounded thick.

  Greg regarded me with a small smile, obviously enjoying my misery. He scratched his soul patch with one index finger. “No,” he said. “Just far enough.”

  Chapter 17

  It took three trips to lug the yearbooks out to my truck and three to lug them into the studio and stack them on the worktable. I sorted them by year, numbly, not knowing why I bothered. There were eighty-three books, going back to 1935. The early ones were under twenty pages, but the ones from this decade had a good seventy-five each. Guesstimate: Two-thousand, six-hundred pages, at two minutes a page. I popped up the calculator on my Mac: it would take me eighty-seven hours to scan them all.

  I couldn’t possibly do it by Friday. I shouldn’t even try to do it.

  Dammit, I wouldn’t do it!

  But I had to do it.

  I had planned to spend the winter months working on black-and-white studies of the Hill Country. When spring sprung in March, I would tour the regional Saturday markets selling photographs. May would bring graduation portraits and summer would bring weddings and family reunions. Then more time for art in the fall before the Christmas portrait season rolled back around. That made a full year. A good year, revolving around photography. Nowhere in my master plan did it say Make yourself a slave to an evil toad with a soul patch crusted with pink icing.

  Was my relationship with Ty really worth the misery? Yes, he was gorgeous and smart and loving and fun to hang out with. But there were other guys. Cute guys, guys who could cook. Guys that weren’t workaholics living Umpteen-hundred miles away.

  But this thing with Ty wasn’t just about the food and the fun. We had a real connection going. We talked about everything from rangeland ecology to sci-fi movies. We shared a passionate concern for the natural world. I could see a future with this man, something I hadn’t seen with any of my old flames, who had mostly flickered out in under a year. This could be the real deal. Was I going to risk the best relationship of my life to get out of a little scanning?

  I slumped into my chair and stared bleakly at the yearbooks. Three and a half days of work; how hard was that? Surely Ty was worth a measly three and a half days.

  Fine. I would scan the damn yearbooks from now until Friday evening. I’d host my own private Scan-A-Thon. I’d scan like a maniac. I certainly felt like a maniac. I stood up and shook myself from head to toe, raising my arms over my head. “Bleaaahhhh!” I shouted at the ceiling fans.

  I was not by nature a moody gal, but this situation was making me bipolar. Only for me the two poles were lunacy and despair.

  * * *

  I settled into the scanning with the resignation of a factory worker with a heavy burden of debt. The work was hypnotic. You get into a rhythm: turn the page, align the corners on the glass, close the cover, listen to the hum and the little chortle at the end, enter the filename on the computer with a clickety-click; repeat; repeat; repeat.

  I started with the most recent volume and worked my way backward in time. The surprise was how many faces I recognized. The most recent book had pix of Marion’s son Robbie and his pal Skip, both on the football team. The two girls from the grocery store were in that volume, too. They must be in Robbie’s class. In a few volumes I found Burrie at the top of the faculty page. She looked exactly the same, gazing at the camera with the serenity of Queen Elizabeth the First. Another year back and Mr. Muelenbach appeared as one of the two English teachers. His hair only came down to his collar and he didn’t have the earring, but the moustache and the John Lennon specs were there.

  I worked until well past midnight.

  Wednesday morning I came in at seven. I left the front blinds closed and hung a sign saying Work in Progress: Please Do Not Disturb on the front door. I called Tillie and told her I was working on a project and would she mind switching her hours to Saturday afternoon, to help me set up for the wake. She sniffed and said she would have helped me anyway, I didn’t have to pay her for that. She sounded hurt and I felt like a brute.

  Marion called and said she had put the word out about the wake. People were happy to bring covered dishes and bottles of something to share. I wouldn’t have to do anything but clean the studio and set up some tables, which she hoped would be within my scope.

  I told her about the books in my garage, ready to go, in case she happened to know some elderly plumbers who would enjoy waxing nostalgic over the U-bends of their youth. She said she was sure she could find a place for them and she would let me know.

  I kept on scanning. I found Otilia ‘Tillie’ Espinoza, gazing fearfully at the camera, her dark eyes glistening with tears. Krystle Cameron was in the same volume, her cocky smile loving the camera as much as it loved her. Onward and backward. Here was a Mannix Cameron, who looked a lot like Krystle, on the football team along with Ben Jernigan, Tillie’s husband. He and Ty’s sister Diana had been homecoming king and queen. No one had ever mentioned that fascinating factoid to me. That same year, Mr. M lost his moustache.

  As time unrolled, Mr. M.’s hair got blonder and Burrie’s got blacker. Their wrinkles slowly vanished and their glasses changed shape. Mr. M. looked less and less like an interesting old hippie and more and more like an ordinary guy. Burrie looked better, kinder, with a little more flesh on her face. She looked almost Mediterranean, with her black hair and dark eyes. Perhaps there was an Apache somewhere in the family tree. I wondered if that would help her chances of winning that award from the Daughters of the Republic.

  By Thursday afternoon, I couldn’t have stopped if Greg had called the whole thing off. I was hooked on the faces and the family resemblances: Camerons, Espinozas, Jernigans. It was a strange but fitting way to get to know my new town. Plus, now I had a goal: the year Ty graduated from high school. I found him in the 4-H Club, looking young and vulnerable. His features were softer, his jawline less defined. He was skinny, like a hardworking kid who gets his own meals. Diana had told me a little about those days, but Ty always shrugged off the topic. They’d been tough years, she’d said, with their father sinking into alcoholism and their mother long gone.

  By Friday morning, the humming and the tedium had worked their magic on my stress-fueled confusion. I felt resolved. I would tell Ty everything that evening, taking full responsibility but also making it clear that I was an artist first and foremost and that my work was always potentially ready to exhibit. I couldn’t predict how he was going to take it, so I wouldn’t try. If he was half the man I thought he was, he’d forgive me. This could be the kind of little conflict that makes a relationship stronger.

  And then I’d be free of Greg. I would finish this job because that’s the way things are done in the Trigg family. But I would make it my personal mission to shut Greg down once and for all. I’d go t
o the sheriff and tell him everything I knew. Other people’s secrets might come out, sure, but how bad could they be? A little infidelity here and there, a little money ill-spent. The stuff would come out sooner or later anyway.

  By midafternoon I was weary and bleary and more than a little smelly. I needed to wrap it up and go take a hot shower to get ready to meet my beau. I decided to wait until Sunday for the Big Confession. That would give me one last Saturday night with Ty, in case he couldn’t forgive me.

  I was uploading scanned pages to the online storage vault Greg had told me to use when my cell phone sang out. It was Ty. “On your way?” I said.

  “Not exactly.” I could hear a printer cranking in the background. He was still at work. “I hate to say this, but it doesn’t look like I’m going to make it this weekend. We’ve got crisis on top of crisis over here. The demo is so broken, nobody can figure it out. I’ve got to stay here and keep everybody focused.”

  My heart sank. I needed to see him. I couldn’t hang on for another whole week. “You’ll miss Jim’s wake.” I tried to make it sound just factual, like a useful reminder.

  “Ah, dammit! I forgot about that.” He hemmed and hawed a little, then said he would try to make it, but not until Saturday and probably late.

  “I’ll take what I can get.” We disconnected.

  I stared at the monitor, my mental state bouncing between anticipation and dread. We’d have the night together, then I’d tell him Sunday morning. I hated the thought of adding trouble to his overloaded plate, but waiting would be worse. Every day felt like another lie.

  I dragged a batch of yearbook scans into Greg’s online storage vault. I watched the progress bar grow green as the files transferred and a little bell in the back of my mind went Ding.

  This was where the blackmail files were. My photos, Krystle’s email, everything. They were in a folder somewhere out there on a secure server, in some abandoned mine shaft deep in the Rockies, guarded by orcs with heavy artillery. OK, more likely a strip mall on the outskirts of Seattle with one geek and an encryption algorithm. Same difference.

  The files finished transferring. I studied the folder contents and didn’t see anything useful. No surprise there. Greg wouldn’t have given me the keys to my own dungeon. He must have a separate account for his private use. How could I get into it?

  I would need to be Greg, however loathsome that idea might be. I logged out and sat drumming my fingers lightly on the keyboard as I thought about user names. What would he call himself? The name he’d given me was plain old penny_trigg.

  I typed greg_alexander and got a new page with a message that said Your Username or Password is incorrect. Please try again. I tried everything I could think of. The page was very patient. It never lost its temper or got bored. It just kept saying Your Username or Password is incorrect. Please try again.

  I clicked a link that said Forgot your username? and got a page with a box where I was supposed to enter my email address. I opened up my email app to get Greg’s address from the last message he’d sent me and copied it into the box. I was about to click Submit when I realized that the email would be sent to him. His email, his inbox, his desk, his eyes. He would know that someone was trying to break into his vault. And he would have a pretty good idea who that someone was.

  I’d hit a dead end. I was positive that this vault contained our secrets, but I couldn’t get in. Orcs or no orcs: that vault was locked up tight. The worst part was that I knew someone who could waltz right past those orcs as if they were mere fantasy characters: Ty. But somehow being close to a solution made me reluctant to tell him what was going on. A few minutes ago, I’d been reconciled to a full confession. Now I wanted to try one last gambit.

  I needed his help, but I couldn’t ask, because I would have to explain what was going on. Even if he had time to listen to the whole stupid story, he totally didn’t have time to do anything about it. My wizardly wiz was busy with his own wizardly biz.

  One step forward and one step back. Resolution, confusion; decision, doubt. The bipolar two-step was whirling me around.

  Chapter 18

  “Where’re you from, Penny?” This was the fourth time I’d been asked that question since Jim’s wake had begun.

  I used to answer “Bethesda, Maryland,” because that’s where I was born, when my dad was in Army Medical School. But I don’t know anything about the place, so it’s kind of a conversation stopper. Sometimes I’d say “Nowhere,” or, for a change of pace, “Everywhere.” People don’t like those answers. They don’t give them a handle on you. In my college years, I’d get philosophical and say things like “Do any of us really know where we’re from?” That worked pretty well with your average sophomore.

  Now I just say, “I’m an Army brat.” Turns out everybody knows what that means and it gives them a positive impression. Who’d’ve thunk it?

  I milled through the throng, wearing my purple velvet dress-up outfit, savoring my first social effort in Lost Hat. The babble of conversation rose to the exposed beams of my fifteen-foot ceilings and I could barely see an inch of my polished heart pine floors or the framed nature photographs I’d hung around my walls.

  Tillie and I had spent the whole afternoon cleaning and setting things up. We’d rummaged upstairs for tablecloths and candlesticks and serving platters. We found a punch bowl made of high-style sixties plastic with a set of fifty matching cups. Perfect for a crowd. Tillie printed out signs directing people to the changing room to leave their coats. That was next to the bathroom, which was next to the darkroom, which was the last stop on the Eastern Hallway. I’d tricked out the darkroom as a mini-exhibit, clipping some black and white photographs to the line over the sink and leaving the red safelight on. This evening was for Jim, but I knew he wouldn’t mind if I showed off a bit.

  He would’ve said, “Gopher it!”

  Everything that was fragile or valuable got locked into the storage closet behind the work zone. We pulled the big table out from the wall and draped it artfully, ready for the heaps of food Tillie promised me people would bring. I was looking forward to that part especially. Potluck is my favorite meal.

  But if anybody brought pink snack cakes, they were going straight in the trash.

  We propped open the swinging door between the studio and the kitchen to keep people from clobbering each other as they went back and forth. Then we positioned the white canvas screens that I use for a portrait box against the back wall. I hung pictures of Jim on wires from the top bar and we taped up a banner that read In Memory of our Dear Friend Jim Donnelly. Finally, we set a candle in a bronze holder on a small table in front of the screens along with a guest book and a pot of pens.

  The display was attractive and it drew people away from the front door, which helped with the traffic flow. Within an hour, somebody had taken the bell off the front door and set it on the table by the guest book. From then on, people would ring it and everyone would stop yakking long enough to listen to some memories of Jim.

  * * *

  Krystle breezed in a little after eight with a bottle of cheap, but respectable, wine. She looked very uptown in black leather pants and a silk poet’s shirt with an embroidered bolero. I led her back to the kitchen to find a corkscrew and fill her in on the scanning deal. I wanted to tell her about the online vault, too. Maybe she could come up with a login and password.

  But Tillie was in the kitchen, unwrapping a stack of paper plates. Her face lit up. “Ohmigod! Krystle Cameron! I heard you were back.”

  Krystle flashed her that special smile we save for old friends we don’t recognize. “You’re Dealie, right?” She snapped her fingers. “Or, wait, I know: Tammie?”

  Tillie flushed and ducked her head. “I’m Tillie. Tillie Espinoza?”

  “Tillie, right! Now I remember.”

  Having been to two high schools and also having seen their yearbook pictures, I had an instant grasp of the dynamic. Krystle had been Most Popular; Tillie had been Most Forgettable. />
  “So how ya been?” Krystle asked, leaning her elbows on the counter and crossing her booted ankles.

  “I’m OK. I got married,” Tillie offered proudly.

  “Way to go, Tillie! Who’s the lucky guy?”

  “Ben Jernigan. One year and two months.”

  “I remember him. He played football, right? He was quite the hottie. Didn’t they call him Burnin’ Jernigan?”

  Tillie flushed deeply, looking down at the floor and scuffing her boot on the black and white linoleum. I caught Krystle’s eye and exchanged a wink.

  They took a little trip down Lost Hat High School lane. Tillie caught Krystle up on the status of everyone they had known since kindergarten. I waited for a pause in the flow of gossip and jumped in, like a surfer catching a wave. “So what’d you do out in L.A., Krystle?”

  “Crapped out, mostly.” She rolled her blue eyes and said to Tillie, “Remember the school play our senior year? Romeo and Juliet?”

  “You were soooo great,” Tillie gushed. “You were the most beautiful Juliet ever!”

  “Thanks. That’s what everybody said.” She shot me a look. “Everybody said, ‘You should go to L.A., you should be an actress, you could be a star.’ So off I went. Hayseed Goes to Hollywood. Like the movie, you know? Except in my version, I spent like eight years waiting tables and racked up a total of three walk-on parts in commercials.”

  “Hey, but major points for trying,” I said. “That takes guts.”

  “Thanks.”

  “What happened?” Tillie said. “What went wrong?”

  Krystle’s eyes sparkled. “Oh, just the stupidest thing. It turns out you actually have to be able to act to get an acting job.”

  “Picky, picky.” I grinned.

  “I couldn’t stand it,” Krystle said. “It’s all ‘emote this, emote that, think about your dead cat’ or whatever. It’s a lot harder than it looks.”