Flash Memory: A Lost Hat, Texas, Mystery (The Lost Hat, Texas, Mystery Series Book 2)

by Anna Castle

  He sounded proud: a claim to fame.

  “Back in high school?”

  “Yeah, and after, for a while.” His eyes narrowed. “Years ago. We broke up long before I got involved with Tillie.”

  A little more than a year ago. Barely enough time to heal a broken leg.

  “It’s horrible, what happened out there,” I said.

  “It’s bizarre.”

  “We’re not even sure Diana knows about it yet.” I cocked my head. “When was the last time you saw her?”

  “Me?” His eyes caught mine and then veered away. “I see her all the time. Here and there. It’s a small town, you know. You see people.”

  “I mean to talk to.” It was funny, in the sense of annoying, how people kept reminding me that Lost Hat was a small town, as if anyone with eyes could miss that central fact.

  Ben wandered over to the wall and pretended to look at the framed pieces. “To talk to, huh?” He glanced at me again over his shoulder. “I haven’t talked to her since I got married. I don’t want to upset Tillie. She’s always been kind of jealous of Diana.”

  “I can imagine. I wouldn’t want an ex like that lurking in the background.”

  “There’s no lurking,” Ben said too quickly. “I’ve never done anything about it. I mean, there’s nothing between us anymore.”

  Oh, there was definitely something. His neck had turned pink. The flush reached right up to his ears, showing even under the tan from his outdoor job with the electricity co-op.

  “You must have talked to her sometimes, when you go out to the Lazy H to look after your father’s cows.”

  “Oh, out there. Sure, sometimes.” A smile flickered across his face. “We talk a little, now and then. You know.”

  He blinked, then turned and took a fast step in my direction, making me acutely aware of the hard muscles pulsing under the flab. “I know what you’re doing.” His hands formed fists at his sides. “You’re trying to make out a case that I did it, that I had something do to with that guy’s murder and why Diana took off.”

  “No, I’m not.” I rolled my chair back an inch. “I’m just talking.” I’d let myself get boxed in between the desk, the counter, and a large, angry man. Stupid, stupid, stupid!

  “Yeah, talk. Women love talk.” He said it like it was grounds for execution. “I didn’t do it, but I’ll tell you what. If I’d’ve caught that asshole trying to mess with her, I would’ve given him a taste of my fist.” He smacked a fist into his palm by way of illustration. I got the point, but he wasn’t done. “She’s too trusting and so beautiful. She’s the most beautiful thing I ever had in my life. I loved her, I’ll admit it. Maybe in some ways, I always will.”

  I heard a gasp by the kitchen door. Tillie had come back with Jake in time to hear the last part.

  Ben’s head whipped around and his jaw dropped. He looked like a kid caught downloading a porn site. Then his face hardened into the stony look of a man who will never admit he’s wrong.

  “In the past, I meant. It’s long over.” He aimed his words at Tillie. She walked slowly toward the front desk, unclipping Jake’s leash with fumbling fingers. “I meant it like an abstract thing, you know, like a fond memory.”

  Tillie’s lower lip trembled and her eyes brimmed with tears. A bead of mascara rolled down her cheek. She cast a look of utter betrayal in my direction. She reached the desk and grabbed her purse from behind the counter without a glance at Ben. Then she lifted her chin with the dignity of a duchess and stalked past him out the door.

  Ben glared at me, jabbing his finger in my face. “Now see what you’ve done.” He followed her out, calling, “Till, honey! Tillie! Wait up!”

  I hung my head in shame. Jake took it as an invitation and came over for a petting. I stroked his shiny fur, seeking undeserved solace.

  “That went well, I don’t think.”

  Chapter 14

  The next day I zipped over to the grocery store before work to pick up dog biscuits and coffee for the studio. I wanted to put off facing Tillie, after the misery I’d caused her.

  Alexis was at work already, a can of Diet Dr. Pepper handy by the cash register. I got the staples and then decided I needed extra chocolate in my diet, what with my boyfriend being in jail and all. I added a bag of chocolate miniatures and some cookies. Now I needed ice cream, because what good are cookies without ice cream?

  I dreaded reaching the end of the aisle and having another troll encounter, but the freezers were back there. I squared my shoulders and pushed my cart around the bend. Colonel Trigg had not raised any cowards.

  Sure enough, they had a full house: the three old farts and the Internet guy, sipping coffee and chomping doughnuts. Schmidzinsky had himself a chair today. He must have gotten a promotion.

  I wondered if he’d made any progress tracing those strange emails. I stopped my cart in front of their half-circle. “Good morning.”

  They tilted their chins in greeting.

  “How’s the investigation going?” Schmidzinsky asked.

  The skinny old fart giggled and slapped his knee. What could be more high-larious than a girl investigator?

  “It’s going. Ty will be out before you know it.”

  “Oh, really?” the fat troll asked. I couldn’t tell if he meant it gladly or sarcastically.

  Schmidzinsky smirked into his coffee cup and said, “I doubt it.” Sarcasm, then.

  He knew something and he wanted to be coy about it. Should I bat my eyelashes and try the flirtation route, or grab him by the collar and shake it out of him?

  He was too tall for the collar gambit. I cocked my head in a casual manner. “Why’s that?”

  “There’s some pretty strong evidence against him.”

  “If you’re talking about those emails, anyone could have sent them. You said so yourself.”

  “Who would?” the old woman asked. “Besides Ty. Who would bother?”

  “That’s right,” the skinny troll said. “Who’d bother? You’d have to be guilty to go to all that fuss.”

  We looked at him with exasperation. “That’s the point,” Schmidzinsky said. “Whoever sent email from Bainbridge’s address is guilty. And they came from my ISP via Ty’s account with me, so guess what that means?”

  “I have no idea.” I tried to sound loftily disinterested.

  He treated me to a curl of the lip. “The messages supposedly from Roger originated from Diana’s account, d.hawkins@hawkins-lazyh.com. There’s no doubt about it. She or Ty obviously spoofed Bainbridge’s address. I can prove that. It’s not my job to speculate why they would want to send email from a dead man.” He smirked at his circle of cronies. They smirked back, as if they were a circle of expert hackers.

  My brain whirred like a truck tire stuck in deep mud. Why would either of them send email from Roger to Ty? If they wanted to make it look like the guy was still alive, why not send it to someone else, or better, a bunch of other people? It made no sense, other than to incriminate the Hawkins siblings. “Couldn’t someone have hacked into Diana’s account?”

  Schmid gave me a pitying look, poor, ignorant, fool that I was. “They’d have to have the password. My systems are secure. After the mess y’all had last winter, I’m especially careful.” He took a bite of doughnut, chewed it, and washed it down with a noisy slurp of coffee. “Of course, Ty could access it, easy. He’s the admin for all the subaccounts.”

  I knew that part. Like me, Ty had set things up to keep business and personal matters separate. Unlike me, he actually managed to maintain the distinction. I’m a Photoshop wizard, but the Internet remains a place of unfathomed magic and mystery. I’m grateful for it, but do not try to understand it.

  Schmid continued his lecture, the pomposity defeated by the powdered sugar dusting his brushy red moustache. “I advise my customers to set good passwords and change them frequently. It’s not my fault if they don’t follow my guidelines.”

  “I didn’t mean to suggest it was your—”

&nbs
p; The old woman interrupted me. “Of course it’s not Schmid’s fault. Ty Hawkins set it up to protect that no-good sister of his.”

  “That’s right,” the skinny guy said. “He set it up himself. He knew it all along.”

  “Knew what?” I snapped. “Nobody thinks this crime was premeditated.”

  The skinny guy stared at me mulishly. I’d lost him with that five-syllable word.

  The old woman glared at me as if I had accused her of stocking out-of-date milk. “What business is it of yours anyway?”

  That shut me up. What could I say? To my surprise, the fat troll came to my rescue. “She was there.”

  “That’s right,” the skinny one said. “And she’s got the dog.”

  “Huh.” The old woman frowned, then nodded, satisfied. Possession of the Dog must be a local rule of precedence.

  “So, you’re prepared to testify as to who sent those emails?” I asked Schmid.

  “There aren’t any fingerprints on them.” He shrugged. “But whoever it was logged in as Diana.”

  “That’s identity theft,” the old woman said.

  “That’s right,” the skinny guy said. “They spooked that dead guy’s mail.”

  “Spooked email,” the fat troll said. “That’s a federal crime.”

  I couldn’t take any more of their wicked nonsense. “Ty did not commit this crime. And y’all are all going to feel really bad when that gets proven in court.”

  I pushed my cart toward the freezer section, bumping roughly past the fat guy’s chair. I knew they were watching me, but I really needed that ice cream now. I grabbed the first big tub I could reach and dropped it in my basket.

  Alexis smiled at me sympathetically when I got to the checkout counter. “You shouldn’t stop back there. Roll on by or don’t even go all the way back.”

  “I wanted ice cream. What have they got against Ty, anyway?” I slapped the bag of chocolates onto the counter.

  “Oh, nothing. They live for scandal. The Lost Hat Chair Committee. Nobody with any sense pays them any mind.”

  I glanced toward the back and lowered my voice. “Which one is Willie?”

  She grinned. “The woman. The fat one is her brother and the skinny one’s an old son-of-a-witch with nothing better to do. Schmid comes over for the free coffee.”

  She rang up my items in silence. I silently thanked her for not remarking on my culinary choices. But then a girl who drank Dr. Pepper for breakfast probably didn’t subscribe to the Healthy Lifestyles newsletter either.

  “How is Mr. Hawkins?” she asked. “Not everybody in this town thinks he’s guilty, you know.”

  “Thanks. He’s okay, considering. But if it goes to trial and those old trolls back there are on his jury, he could be in real trouble.”

  “Oh, nobody’d put them on a jury. Half the town would be in prison.”

  I paid her and put my stuff in the backpack.

  “And listen,” she said. “Next time, don’t go back there. Ask me and I’ll get the ice cream for you.”

  That was a relief. The next nearest supermarket was over an hour away, a heck of a schlep for a chocolate fix. And it looked like I’d be needing a lot more chocolate in the near future.

  Chapter 15

  I walked across the parking lot, worrying about those emails, half-blinded by the light reflecting up under my sunglasses from the white gravel. I blinked at the relative darkness of the shadow cast by the old bank on the corner. Another hot trot across the street and I plunged inside my cool studio. Only the dog greeted me as I walked in. Tillie wasn’t there and it didn’t look like she’d been in.

  I went back to the kitchen to put the groceries away, then filled Jake’s water bowl. I sat at the table drinking iced tea, listening to him slurping thirstily. He sloshed water all over the floor, but who cared?

  What difference did it make? What difference did anything make?

  Those emails had come from Diana’s account, which was a subaccount or sub-something inside or under the Lazy H domain. I could never remember the right terminology for this stuff, but it didn’t matter. The bottom line was that Diana or Ty—or possibly some mysterious third person who could guess Diana’s password—had sent them.

  It made no sense whatsoever for Ty to send them to himself, unless he had set the whole thing up, from throwing a punch at Dare to insulting the judge, to confuse the situation until Diana established herself safely somewhere south of the Rio Grande. I didn’t know whether to applaud the loyalty, admire the scope of the plan, or be horrified by my boyfriend’s willingness to go to such lengths to cover up an ugly death.

  It did seem awfully elaborate. Maybe Diana had sent those messages in a lame attempt to convince everybody that Roger was still alive. She’d only sent them to Ty because she didn’t have the nerve to try it on anybody else. That made more sense—marginally more.

  Or maybe her secret lover knew her password. He could have sent those messages without consulting anyone named Hawkins. Except nobody knew about any secret lover. He probably didn’t exist.

  None of the pieces of this Bainbridge thing fit together. Trying to force them into a coherent picture made my brain hurt.

  I went to the bathroom and splashed cool water on my face and neck. As I replenished my sunscreen, I studied my face in the mirror. I felt older, but it didn’t show. Shouldn’t there at least be a new line on my forehead?

  The water revived me enough to get some work done. I turned on both computers and noticed a light blinking on the answering machine at the front desk. Carson Caine’s secretary had left a message saying he would be at the bank all day, if I wanted to come by with his proofs.

  Double-checking the images, making copies in different sizes, and burning CDs calmed my frazzled mind. Laughter might be the best medicine, but work was the best therapy. By the time I finished, I realized I could kill two birds with one disk that afternoon. There were two more names on my Old Flames list: Carson Caine and Sid Matslar. I could to talk to them and try to get a sense of whether either of them had been having an affair with Diana, whether sexual or financial.

  I had a good excuse to talk to Carson. Maybe I could happen to pass by Sid’s office and then happen to stop in and ask him a bunch of intrusive questions. At this point, I was willing to make a pretty big fool of myself.

  The original Caine Bank building was the same vintage as my studio and catty-corner across the street. It didn’t hold a bank anymore, though. A defunct title company still owned it, but For Sale signs adorned the plywood over the windows.

  The new Caine State Bank and Trust was a generic 80’s concrete and glass box at the corner of Pecan Street and Highway 88, complete with parking lot and drive-through ATM. Inside, customers were cocooned in soothing beiges and browns, with dull orange furniture squatting on the vinyl floors and generic bluebonnet paintings hanging on the walls.

  The gal at the information desk made a quick call and directed me upstairs. I stepped off the elevator into a carpeted maze of beige walls. Having gone to Big State U, I knew how to navigate this sort of terrain and quickly found my way to the executive suite. The secretary greeted me with a smile and waved me toward the open door to Carson’s office.

  I walked into a world of color. Muted colors, mostly, but still a surprise after all that beige. Two walls of tinted glass overlooked the town. An enormous rug in Cubist rectangles of pewter, plum, and brown covered half the floor. A sleek curve of polished blond wood served as a desk, with a round extension at one end for conferencing. The surface was bare except for an open laptop, a photograph of a pencil-thin woman with two well-groomed children, and a perpetual motion toy in the shape of the solar system. Other high-tech toys stood between fat folders on the light oak bookshelves. The interior walls exhibited a few striking prints in an Abstract Expressionist style.

  If the Jetsons made a raid on the Museum of Modern Art, this was what you’d get.

  “I love your office!”

  Carson rose from his ergo
nomic chair to shake my hand. “Thanks, but I’d trade you in a heartbeat. I have fantasies about restoring the old bank, at least for executive offices, but it isn’t practical. So I go overboard with the modern to compensate.”

  “This is better. It’s unexpected, which makes it more fun.”

  “I think it helps project an image of The Man of the Future. That’s my campaign theme: ‘Taking the long view for Long County.’”

  “Catchy. And speaking of images—” I got out his CDs and he popped one into the laptop, sliding the computer onto the conference bulb so we could both see.

  “Let’s have a look.” He started clicking through the thumbnails. “Oh, now, this one’s perfect!” He tilted his head and leaned back in his chair to study it. “It makes me look a little older, don’t you think? I’m a good bit younger than my opponent, which is not an asset.”

  “It looks great. You look mature, yet youthful; energetic, yet responsible…” He shot me a sidelong look and we both laughed. “Okay, I have no idea what a county commissioner should look like. What do they do, anyway?”

  “It’s an important job in a rural county, Penny. The Commissioner’s Court sets property taxes, funds fire and ambulance services, reviews subdivision and wastewater plans, oversees road development. I’m running because I think we need some new ideas in this county. Agriculture is on the decline in central Texas.”

  “Global warming, right?”

  “Partly, perhaps, but there are other factors. Whatever the cause, the result is that it’s getting harder and harder for a family to make it on ranching alone. Tourism is booming in the Hill Country, but it’s hard for the individual rancher to take advantage of that. The county could do more to promote the development of a tourism infrastructure.”

  I was impressed by his clarity and by his jazzy office. “You’ve got my vote.”

  “Well, that makes two. Three, if I can persuade my wife.” We laughed again. It felt good. I needed a chuckle and a dose of optimism. I liked the long view.