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

by Anna Castle

  I shucked my pack to get out my own flashlight and clicked it on. “OK. Upstairs or downstairs?”

  “Down. You go up.”

  “Check.” I sprinted up the steps to the landing and flashed my light around. Doors in all directions, except for one large window with its blinds closed at the front of the house. The door at the back led into a tiny sunporch with a fluffy blue carpet and not one stick of furniture. It had a closet, which I inspected. Empty. I gave the corners of the carpet a tug, to be thorough. Nada.

  The door to the right of the stairs led into a room full of boxes. My spirits sank. Would I have to open every box?

  They turned out to be boxes for computers and electronic equipment. Big boxes, in other words. I spent some time shifting through them, opening each one, lifting out layers of foam padding when necessary, sliding my hand into the plastic packing slip envelopes on the tops to check for a single, slender CD.

  No joy.

  Suddenly I heard a male voice shout, “Up next, the KXAN weather—” and then break off. I jumped and knocked over a stack of boxes. Krystle must have turned on the TV for some reason. I finished all the boxes and checked the closet in that room; also empty.

  Door Number Three opened into a bathroom. I rummaged through the cupboards, finding the usual flotsam and jetsam. Does everyone in this country have three bottles of half-empty hair conditioner? I looked under the lid of the toilet tank, which is where movie villains hide the cocaine. Nothing. I steeled myself and plowed my hands through the dirty clothes hamper, but came up empty. I then washed my hands thoroughly with plenty of soap.

  I found no secret panels and no safe concealed behind the toothpaste-spattered mirror. No CDs; no memory keys; no manila folders labeled Secrets of the Townspeople of Lost Hat, Texas.

  Door Number Four led me into Greg’s bedroom, dominated by a king-sized bed covered with a purple quilt and stacks of pillows in animal print satin cases. The dresser opposite was distinguished by an extra-large mirror.

  Ooh. La. La.

  I shuffled through the drawers, finding stacks of tighty-whities, T-shirts, and cotton socks. PJs, sweaters, old Playboys. The guy lived pretty simply for a blackmailer. Where was the sharkskin suit? The handmade Italian shoes? The gold chains and other manly bling?

  I heaved up the mattress from both sides, supporting it awkwardly with my back so I could shine the flashlight underneath.

  Nothing.

  Nothing in the closet either. I hopped up and down to scan the whole top shelf. Nothing but some spare blankets. I pulled them down, shook them out, refolded them and replaced them. I was indeed a tidy girl. The hangar rod held one nice suit in a dry-cleaner’s plastic bag, half a dozen plain white shirts and a few jackets, ranging from a windbreaker to a down parka. Our Greg had not been a clotheshorse. He had also not been a transvestite. Maybe if he had been, he wouldn’t have needed blackmail to fill his empty life. I’d always figured cross-dressing must be quite the absorbing hobby.

  I turned away from the closet and studied the room as a whole. What popped out was that there were no pictures on the walls. No knick-knacks on the dresser. No stack of books by the bed. He had a TV on a plain black stand in the corner and that was it.

  What a barren life the guy had lived! I felt a surge of sympathy and suppressed it ruthlessly. I did not want to feel sorry for the son-of-a-beast. How hard was it to buy a couple of posters and a book or two? There’s an infinite supply of all manner of things to do and see and enjoy in this world. You don’t have to blackmail your neighbors to keep yourself occupied.

  Where did he keep those files?

  Not only was I not finding any loose storage media, I was not coming up with any clues to passwords. Sleds? Pets? This guy was a blank slate.

  I shone the flashlight into the darkest corners of the closet floor, hoping for a hidden safe or chest bound up with chains or a shoebox labeled Stash. All I saw, apart from shoes, was a thin panel of plywood tacked slightly askew to the wall at the back. The back wall, which was shared by the bathroom.

  A compact fluorescent lightbulb flickered on in my brain. I remembered from my recent remodeling experience that such pieces of plywood were used to cover the holes that gave access to plumbing for bathtubs and shower stalls. And darkrooms.

  I tried to pull it off with my bare hands, but since I was determined not to take my gloves off while I was in this house, I couldn’t get a grip on the edge. I stood and stared at the top of the dresser, which held only a dish with a few coins and some odd buttons. I dashed back to the bathroom and studied the cupboard’s contents again. Lucky me: I snagged a monster pair of toenail clippers.

  Using both jaws and handle, I managed to work the panel off. Sure enough, taped to the inside I found one of those plastic packing slip envelopes. But this particular envelope was stuffed with cash.

  “Hoo-eee, baby!”

  This looked like evidence of blackmail to me. I couldn’t wait to show it to Sheriff Hopper and Deputy Do-Wrong Finley. Making it all up, was I? Exaggerating a lover’s quarrel, was I? I zipped out onto the landing. Leaning over the banister, I whispered, “Krystle!”

  “Shhh!”

  “I found something!”

  She stepped into the entry and shone her flashlight right into my face.

  “Hey!”

  “Sorry. Did you find the drive?”

  “No. Money! Come look.”

  “Money?” That put a chirp in her voice. She bounded up the stairs and followed me into Greg’s bedroom.

  I gestured at the panel in the closet with my flashlight. “Ta-da!”

  She pulled the bills out of the envelope. Her pink Isotoners gave her better manual control than my knitted gloves. She knelt on the floor and counted the bills into stacks.

  “Holy shit,” she breathed. “This is six thousand dollars!”

  I whistled softly.

  She split the bills into two bundles and handed one up to me. “Here you go. Don’t spend it all in one place.”

  “Krystle, we can’t take it!”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s stealing.”

  “No, it is not stealing.” She shook her fistful of dollars at me. “This is payback. That bastard owes me. Even dead, he owes me.”

  “But we should give it back to whoever he got it from.”

  “And who might that be? We don’t know and there’s no way to find out. Or maybe you think we should put an ad in the paper?” She chanted in a radio announcers’ voice, “Would whoever lost six thousand dollars to our sleazy local blackmailer please send a plain brown envelope to the following address…”

  “I get it, I get it. But still, it seems wrong.”

  “For sure it’s wrong. This whole thing is wrong. But we’re not the ones who made it wrong, Greg is. I need this money. This’ll pay for Jason’s car so he can get the hell out of my life!”

  “But it’s evidence.” I knew I was licked, but I had to get that last objection out there where she could stomp it to bits with her black ballet flats.

  “Look, Penny. We were not the first people in this house tonight and we may not be the last. Julia and Doug were lame-ass searchers; that doesn’t mean the next ones will be. And if they find this money, they’ll take it, I guarantee. Why them and not us?”

  She had a good point. Her point was sharp and clear. Plus, the stash was only proof that Greg liked to hide cash in his closet. He hadn’t left a handy note itemizing his blackmail payments.

  “OK. And I will take my half, now that you’ve got it all counted and everything.”

  “That’s my girl. Buy yourself a camera doodad. Or treat yourself to a decent haircut.”

  “Hey!”

  We stowed our mad money in our respective backpacks.

  “What’ve you got?” I pointed my chin at her pack. I’d heard the clatter of lightweight plastic inside it.

  “Bunches of DVDs. Probably nothing but porn.”

  “Then why bother?”

  She sh
rugged. “I don’t know it’s porn. I just took all the DVDs that weren’t commercial products. I’ll look at them tomorrow at your studio, OK?”

  “Better you than me.” I fitted the panel back into place. No point in leaving a trail.

  “I checked out the rest of the downstairs, too,” Krystle said. “Looked like Julia did a pretty good search in the kitchen. There’s a truckload of venison in the freezer and not one gun in anywhere, which is odd. But good, I guess.”

  We stopped to think about that for a minute. It was odd. Most Texans in rural areas had at least one rifle, for rattlesnakes and other varmints. I had two myself, courtesy of Aunt Sophie.

  “Should we do the attic?”

  The attic. I felt the energy drain out of me like someone had opened a valve in my foot. I think I actually shrank.

  Krystle noticed. She diagnosed my problem on the spot. “You’re beat, girl. You need to go to bed. You’ve had a pretty weird day.”

  “Beyond weird. And not in a happy way.” The thought of snuggling into my bed with my fluffy down comforter rose like a vision of paradise complete. “If I go to bed, then I’ll go to sleep, and then when I wake up, it won’t be today anymore.”

  “No.” Krystle smiled at me with the patient indulgence of the healthy for the sick. “It’ll be tomorrow.”

  “And tomorrow,” I said, giving it my best Scarlett O’Hara accent.

  “Is another day,” we quoted in unison.

  Krystle walked out onto the landing and shone her light on her watch. “Tillie should be here soon. Let’s go back outside. We don’t want her to—”

  She was interrupted by a loud series of bumps and thumps followed by an extended passage of clunks and clatters interspersed with muffled curses. It sounded like someone had rolled in our exit window and stumbled into the TV tray.

  Krystle and I clicked off our flashlights and clutched at each other’s sleeves in the darkness.

  Chapter 31

  A masculine voice said, “Dude! Move the fuck out of the way!”

  More clattering, followed by more cursing.

  A light came on in the exit-window room, filling the entryway with a soft glow.

  “We gotta get out of here,” I whispered.

  The clatters and curses tapered off. “Dude, look at the size of that TV!”

  “Shhh!”

  “Who’s going to hear us?”

  We heard light raps and taps, like cupboard doors in an oak veneer entertainment center being opened and closed. Then the soft scritchy sound of someone shuffling a stack of plastic DVD cases.

  “Nothing but movies. Yo! I’m keeping this one.”

  “Focus, man. We’re here for a reason.”

  A third voice suddenly shouted, “Next up on TMZ—” and cut abruptly off. Our new intruder was quicker with the remote control than Krystle.

  “Go check out the rest of the house,” Focus Dude said, in a raspy voice that he probably thought was sneaky and low, but that carried all the way up the stairs.

  “You check it out.”

  “I’m doing the dude’s hard disk.”

  “Whatever.”

  A tall guy in a hoodie strode through the entryway below us, shining a flashlight in front of his feet. We shrank back against the wall and watched the light diminish as he moved into the next room.

  “Worst comes to worst,” I whispered directly into Krystle’s ear, “we go out this window and jump off the porch roof.”

  Silence for a long moment.

  “No way.”

  “What, then?”

  Another stretch of silence.

  “We can get out the front door. Let’s just go for it.”

  The worst that could happen was that we would get into a scuffle with a couple of desperate young men. I weighed that against the odds of falling off the roof and breaking an ankle and decided to go with the scuffle.

  “Check.”

  We crept to the top of the stairs and paused, ready for the big dash.

  Krystle whispered, “One, two, three!”

  I broke out in front, bounding down the stairs, skidded across the hall on the throw rug, and banged up against the front door. One second later, Krystle banged up behind me. I flipped the thumb release on the deadlock bolt, grabbed the arched handle beneath it and gave it a good hard tug.

  It didn’t budge an inch.

  Turns out there was another lock at the top of the handle that required a key. A key we didn’t have.

  “What the fuck!” Focus Dude loomed in the doorway of the TV room. Unfocus Dude came out of the kitchen through the door at the end of the dining room. He had a longneck beer bottle in one hand and a flashlight in the other, aimed right at us.

  “Shit!” Krystle said.

  Both men wore stockings pulled down over their faces, which gave them an eerie, inhuman look, except that the guy with the beer had rolled his up above his mouth so he could drink. They were both at least six feet tall and had the slender build of young men built entirely of muscle and testosterone.

  Focus Dude cocked his head at me. “Penny?” Then he dropped his voice into a phony baritone and tried again. “Penelope?”

  Too late. He was Robbie Albrecht, Marion’s oldest, which meant the other stocking-faced clown was his boon companion, Skip Twohey.

  I looked him right in the nylon-covered eyes. “If you don’t let us go, I’ll tell your mother.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  “I would.”

  “Then she’ll know you were here.”

  “True, but she can’t ground me.”

  Silence. I was surprised he even had to think about it. He must have gotten himself into something majorly serious.

  Robbie rolled his mask up to the hairline. Skip did, too. He took a long swallow of beer. Robbie said, “OK. You can go. But we want whatever you’ve found.”

  “We didn’t find anything,” Krystle said. Too fast, I thought, but the boys didn’t notice.

  “How long have you been in here?”

  Krystle and I looked at each other and shrugged. “Half an hour.”

  “Two other people were here when we came in,” Krystle said. “They probably got whatever there was.”

  “No way!” The boys looked at each other, panic flashing on their faces.

  Skip said, “We gotta find that drive.”

  I shrugged again. “We didn’t look in the attic.”

  I took a step toward the door Robbie was guarding. He hesitated for a moment, then stepped aside. I said, “Good luck,” as I passed him.

  I meant it. Whatever he’d done to get into Greg’s clutches, he was a truly decent kid. If he found the files, he’d destroy them. And who knows? Maybe the boys would be better at putting themselves into Greg’s viewpoint and figure out where he’d hidden them.

  The living room was lit by the blue glow of the TV screen, which displayed a computer desktop. That was the most likely hiding place. They might not even need a password. How well had Krystle searched it? For her sake, I hoped the boys would at least tell her if they found the files and destroyed them.

  I reached the window and raised it all the way up, letting in a blast of cold air. I put one foot on the sill, considering the best way to climb down. Krystle was right behind me.

  The boys followed us into the room and started jostling for the controls to the TV computer. “Give me that.” “I’m doing it.”

  Krystle had been carrying her backpack in her hand all this time. Now she slung it around to slip her arms through the straps. As it moved, the DVD cases inside it shifted, making the distinctive chik-chik-chik of light plastic boxes clicking together. The boys’ heads swiveled toward her like dogs dropping a bone to chase a cat. Everyone stood still.

  Skip broke the spell. “She’s got DVDs in there!”

  Robbie said, “Give ’em to us.”

  Krystle said, “No way.”

  Skip cried, “Get her!” and everything went berserk.

  Skip lunged for Krystle
, grabbing one of her arms and trying to wrestle her pack off her back. Robbie struggled to get around Skip, pushing against the couch and cursing as it knocked over an end table with a lamp on it. He reached a long arm over Krystle’s shoulder and started tugging at the other side of her pack.

  I was caught utterly unprepared. Exhausted, woolly headed, thinking only of getting out of this long, weary day: I didn’t have the oomph to fend off two varsity football players. I managed to get both feet back on the floor and was warming up to say something authoritative when Krystle let out a scream.

  This was no ordinary scream. This was the sharpest, loudest, most perfect scream I’d ever heard. The kind of scream that B-movie directors dream about, one that rings in your ears for days. The kind of scream that makes boys drop whatever they’re doing and run for cover.

  The scream shot a powerful jolt of adrenaline through my system. I was over the sill and into the shrubbery before I had time to think about things like knees and ankles. I dove through the privet, head down, aiming for lawn. Once out, I looked back and saw Krystle plowing through the shrubs two yards behind me. Headlamps at the curb flashed on and off. Our ride was here. We dashed across the yard and piled into Tillie’s truck. She drove with the lights off to the end of the block. I saw the boys streak around the corner. As we turned onto the next street, a sheriff’s department car passed us going the other way. In the side mirror, I saw its colored lights flash on.

  “Somebody must have heard me scream,” Krystle said.

  “Everybody in Long County heard you scream,” Tillie said.

  Krystle grinned. “It’s a gift.”

  Chapter 32

  Tillie dropped me off at my house. I stumbled inside, glad to be home. I flipped on the bathroom light as I walked down the hall, which was enough to guide me to the lamp by my bed. As I bent to switch it on, I felt a breeze.

  Had I left the window open with the heat on in the house? How wasteful of me!

  A memory of closing the window formed in my head. Was I thinking of this morning or a different day? I couldn’t shake it and I tended to trust my habits to run on auto-pilot. Which meant that window should have been closed.