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

  A Lost Hat, Texas Mystery — #2

  Flash Memory

  Anna Castle

  Copyright 2016 by Anna Castle

  Cover image by Renée Barratt at The Cover Counts

  Flash Memory is the first book in the Lost Hat, Texas, mystery series.

  Nature photographer Penelope Trigg has landed the job of her dreams: documenting the transformation of over-grazed rangeland into an eco-dude ranch and spa, owned by her boyfriend Tyler Hawkins. Then a body is found on the ranch and Ty is arrested. The victim was an aggressive real estate developer with his greedy eyes on Ty’s land and Ty’s sister Diana, who is almost engaged to the senior deputy sheriff. Clues put her at the center of the puzzle.

  Determined to prove Ty’s innocence, Penny stirs up Diana’s old flames, trying to shed enough light to develop an alternative suspect. She mainly learns how to lose friends and annoy people, until she realizes someone has been manipulating the evidence. But is Ty the framer or the framee? Penny uses her eye for detail and her camera's memory to put the picture together and reveal the killer.

  Table of Contents

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  About the Author

  Books by Anna Castle

  Copyright page

  Chapter 1

  I shot the sheriff just after ten. It wasn’t easy; he kept squirming around and cracking jokes. I was booked to shoot the chief deputy at eleven and hoped he would be more cooperative.

  It might not be art, but it was a living.

  The Penelope Trigg Photography Studio in Lost Hat brought in enough to cover property taxes and utilities, thanks to the low rates out here in west central Texas, plus my assistant’s wages—so far. I had enough savings to keep me in canned soup and coffee for one year. After that, I would have to get creative.

  “One down, one to go.” I slid the check for a hundred and fifty dollars into the deposit bag and handed it to Tillie across the reception counter. Not bad for an hour’s work. I still had the editing and the printing, but my time didn’t count as an expense. What else did I have to do?

  “There’ll be more when we get the campaign posters made.” Tillie’s twisted smile managed to convey optimism and anxiety in one tangled expression. She was wearing way too much makeup and had dyed a garish pink streak down the length of her blue-black hair. Possibly a lingering influence of the graduating seniors we’d done portraits for all last month. Such extreme adversity does have strange after-effects.

  Deputy Dare Thompson pulled his county vehicle into a space in front of the studio at 11:00 sharp. He had driven over from the Long County Law Enforcement Center, a whole two blocks away on the other side of the courthouse square.

  Wasteful? Well, yes. But if the gods had intended Texans to walk, they wouldn’t have given us trucks.

  Dare hopped up the curb and strode smartly through the door. He was trim as a cadet, his black hair neatly barbered and his brown eyes bright as agates. I’d pegged him for an ex-Army sergeant the first time I laid eyes on him. I’d seen enough of them, growing up.

  “Howdy, Dare.” I stepped forward to shake hands. He had a nice firm grip, not too soft and not too hard.

  “Penny. What’s the procedure?”

  We were on first-name terms because he was dating Diana Hawkins, who was the sister of my boyfriend and most important client, Tyler. When you bump heads over the coffeepot in your jammies on Sunday morning, formal titles fall by the wayside.

  I led him back to the screened area I use for portraits, leaving Tillie at the front desk behind the counter. My studio was a limestone classic, built in 1928. It was about seventy by thirty feet with fifteen-foot ceilings, oak trim, and heart pine floors. I loved it with a helpless passion. The light could be extraordinary, streaming through the big front windows, reflecting off the mellow stone walls, and setting the wood aglow. The second floor was stuffed to the rafters with the antiques I’d inherited from my Great-Aunt Sophia along with the building. I’d also gotten her three-bedroom bungalow and a three-quarter ton GMC truck that I called “The Hulk” on account of its being large, ugly, and green.

  I’d hung a drape down the wall at the back of the studio and rigged a set of white canvas screens on casters that I could move around to control the light and provide privacy for my portrait clients. I settled the deputy in a chair inside the screens and adjusted the lights and reflector umbrellas.

  Dare didn’t squirm and he didn’t crack wise. He also never smiled. He sat there with a straight back and a solemn face, watching me like he was observing a crime in progress.

  His gaze was intimidating and made me feel vaguely guilty—definitely not the best look for a campaign poster. If he wanted to give Sheriff Hopper a run for his money, he needed to loosen up. I knew he could smile; I’d seen him do it at the Hawkins’ house. Diana had promised to come help me with him, but she’d flaked out. I did my best to bring out his lighter side, cracking lame Army jokes and pretending to trip over extension cords. No joy. I even tried some of Diana’s flirty nonsense, like, “Come on along, Dare-a-ling-dong,” but that turned his jaw to granite and his glare to ice.

  I needed fresh inspiration. Then the bell over the front door jangled.

  “Tillie, what on earth have you done with your hair?” My cousin Marion Albrecht’s clarion tones rang against the rock walls. When I moved to Lost Hat, Marion appointed herself my surrogate aunt, with full rights to meddle in my business. She was the Long County Extension Agent for Family and Consumer Sciences and had an office in the courthouse across the street. She knew everything about everything and never hesitated to share her bounty.

  Tillie mumbled something.

  “It won’t do you one bit of good to imitate that flibbertigibbet Diana, you know,” Marion scolded.

  I backed up a step and poked my head around the screen. “Language, Marion, please! I’ve got a deputy sheriff in here.”

  I looked back at Dare and repeated the word flibbertigibbet in my best Donald Duck voice. That got an honest-to-gosh, full-on smile out of him. I managed to get three shots off before it faded. Thank you, Donald! Who knew the deadpan deputy liked cartoons?

  Our eyes met. I licked my finger and drew a point in the air. Game over; the photographer wins again. We were finished, so we walked on up to the front.

  “Marion.” Dare tilted his head in a short nod.

  “Dare.” She turned to face him, one hand planted on her hip, the other balanced on the reception counter. “When is that silly girl coming back? I’m at the end of my rope over there.”

  The silly girl was Diana. She was the administrative assistant at the Extension Office and she’d been AWOL for over a week. According to Tillie, this was the sort of thing Diana used to do all the time: haring off with her wild friends for a weeks-long
toot in Dallas. She had settled down considerably after taking up with Dare last fall, staying sober and getting a steady job with Marion, the Czarina of Stability.

  “Don’t give up on her, Marion,” Dare said. “People don’t change overnight. She’s come a long way in the last year. We have to be patient with her.” His voice was calm, but worry shaded the fine lines at the corners of his eyes. I wondered if their relationship had hit a bump that knocked her off the wagon.

  Then he added his spin. “I think she wanted a little time-out. Time alone. Ty’s been pressuring her pretty hard about that project of his.” He shot a look at me. Ty was restoring the ranch he and Diana had inherited and I was doing a photo-documentary of the process.

  “You could be right,” I said. Ty was hands down my favorite boyfriend so far. He might even be the One. But he was more than a little competitive and could be a shade on the bossy side. Diana, in my observation, did not like to be pushed.

  “She might have consulted me,” Marion said. “When the Extension Office falls into total chaos, I suppose the whole county will have to be patient too.” Marion sounded severely miffed, but then that was one of her favorite moods. She wore it like a perfume: Eau de Huffy.

  “That’s why I’m here.” She looked at me. “I want Tillie to take Diana’s job, at least temporarily. Graduation season is long over. You can’t afford an assistant anymore.”

  Tillie looked half stricken at the idea of working for Marion and half pleased to be wanted. She shrank into her chair at the desk behind the counter. I didn’t like the implication that I didn’t have enough work to keep an employee, even if it might be true. Ty’s project was enough to keep me going, barely, but I didn’t need Tillie for that. Spending the profits from the graduation portraits to keep her around for company was sheer extravagance.

  But it was my call, not Marion’s. I didn’t want to lose Tillie. The Espinoza clan formed a major pillar of the Lost Hat community. Tillie’s mother and grandfather owned a popular Mexican restaurant, one of her aunts owned a popular beauty salon, and one of her uncles was a desk sergeant in the sheriff’s department. I got all the hottest gossip, straight off the griddle. That was important, and not just for the entertainment value. I had only moved to Lost Hat last December and was still getting oriented, people-wise.

  Tillie would earn her keep eventually by bringing in more business. Besides, we’d been through some tough times last February and taken each other’s measure, as my father put it. We were pals.

  “Get your own Tillie.” I leaned in to wrap my arms around her plump shoulders. “This one’s mine.”

  Tillie giggled. Marion scowled. I smirked.

  Dare said, “Diana will be back before you know it, Marion. You can survive another week without her.” A bleakness in the back of his eyes contradicted his optimistic words. Maybe she’d broken up with him and left to give them both a time-out?

  He wrote me a check and we set a date for him to come back to look at the campaign poster layouts. He held the door for Marion, who gave Tillie a stern parting look. “Think about my offer, young lady. County benefits. Secure employment.”

  We stood by the desk, watching her walk across the hot street into the shade of the magnificent old pecan trees around the courthouse.

  “You probably should think about it,” I said. “County benefits are nothing to sneeze at.” I’d given up sneezing myself, since I couldn’t afford health insurance. “If Diana doesn’t sober up and come home pretty soon, her job is going to be a hot commodity.”

  “Work for Marion? All the whole week?” Tillie shuddered. “Besides, there isn’t going to be any job. Diana will come breezing back in like the Queen of Siam and everyone will forgive her, as per usual.”

  I caught a visual of Diana riding into the courthouse square on an elephant and had to blink hard to clear it.

  Tillie sat behind the desk and entered Dare’s check into the accounting thingy she’d set up for me. Another reason I needed her: I wasn’t much good at the number-crunching. They’d carelessly neglected to give us courses in small business management at art school.

  “Who’s up next?”

  Tillie glanced at her desk calendar. “There’s the commissioner tomorrow—Carson Caine. More campaign posters.” She flipped to the next week and the one following. “After that, um…”

  After that, nothing, I already knew. “Something’ll come up. Maybe Caine’s opponent will be so impressed he’ll want us to do his posters too.”

  “But they won’t want makeup. The deputies didn’t.” Tillie was the makeup expert as well as the chief accounting officer.

  “Maybe somebody will get married. Then they’ll all need makeup, groom included.”

  Tillie’s round face brightened. “Like Diana and Dare, maybe. Mom said that Sheriff Hopper’s sister said that Dare was like this close to popping the question.” She measured a millimeter with her fingers.

  “More like this close.” I held out my hands like I was bragging about a fish. “Since she’s hiding out in Dallas.”

  “I’m not so sure about that,” Tillie said. Her black eyes glittered, a sign of gossip simmering up. “At least not the Dallas part.”

  “What have you heard?”

  “Not heard, exactly. But you know that developer guy, Roger Bainbridge?”

  “Don’t we all?” Roger “Call me the Dodger” Bainbridge had been making the rounds of Long County landowners lately, trying to hustle up some bargain acreage. He had somehow persuaded himself that we were next in line for a boom in the Hill Country outdoor recreation market. He wanted a piece of Ty’s spa project so badly it made him drool, and I mean that literally. He kept licking his lips and clearing his throat, wearing the same hungry expression when he looked at the landscape as when he looked at Diana.

  “He took me and Ben out for drinks the other night,” Tillie said, “to see if we might be interested in buying a house, or so he said. We’re nowhere near ready, but Ben said, ‘Why turn down a free beer?’”

  I shrugged. “Can’t imagine that guy giving anything away without a looong string attached.”

  “Yeah. He spent like two seconds on that topic and then asked a bunch of questions about Ben’s father’s pasture lease at Ty’s ranch. How long had he had it, how many cattle, how hard would it be to move them somewhere else…”

  “As if it was any of his business! Ty can’t stand the guy. I mean he really, seriously, growling-in-the-back-of-the-throat despises him. And the way he looks at Diana—”

  “Yeah,” Tillie said, with heat this time. “Turns out that’s what he really wanted. Ben was telling him about how the lease works, being polite, you know. Answering the guy’s questions. But Roger just blatantly stopped listening, looking around at the waitresses like he was totally bored. Then, before Ben even finished, he interrupted him, like, ‘Uh-huh. That’s great. So, have y’all known Diana a long time? How serious is her thing with that cop?’”

  I clucked my tongue.

  “That’s what I thought,” Tillie said. “What he really wanted was some dirt on Dare. Like we had any! It was horrible. And you know how twitchy Ben gets whenever anybody mentions the almighty Lady Di.”

  I had not known that interesting fact, but I did now. The snark in her tone was unmistakable. That pink hair stripe made more sense too. I shook my head. “Roger’s hot for her, that’s obvious. He looks at her like—”

  “Like she was a three-scoop banana split with extra fudge sauce. It’s disgusting.”

  I was going to say a juicy steak with extra mushrooms, but to each her own. “So let him look. Diana might like to flirt, but she’s not stupid. What could she possibly see in that bozo? He’s bogus from top to bottom. He’s bogosity times ten.”

  “I don’t know.” Tillie sounded doubtful. “He is kind of good-looking. And he’s got a really cool car. A brand new red Cadillac Escalade. The seats are genuine leather and they have these little heaters inside to warm them up. Ben said it was worth the bu
llshit just for the ride.”

  “A cow has a real leather seat.” I’d meant that to be sassy, but it occurred to me that cattle also produced a lot of bullshit and you didn’t ride them, so not actually all that funny. Ah, well. You can’t score every time. “What you’re saying is, we might not be shooting the Dare-Diana wedding anytime soon.”

  “Probably not. But lots of people get married after graduation. Or maybe there’ll be a reunion or something. Can we do reunions?”

  “We can do anything. Worst comes to worst, we can even do pornography.”

  Tillie’s eyes popped. “Um, I don’t think my husband…”

  “Just kidding.” I was saving pornography for a really, really rainy day. I slapped my hands together. “Well, old partner, old pal. We’ll just to have to get out there and dig up some more business.”

  Chapter 2

  My alarm went off five a.m. on Friday morning, getting me up to go out and shoot the sunrise from Mt. Keno on Ty’s ranch. This morning I also planned to identify some anchor points—recognizable features of the landscape to be photographed at different times of day and in different seasons.

  Tyler Hawkins was a man with a plan: turning the run-down, over-grazed ranch he and Diana had inherited from their father into an ecologically sensitive dude ranch and spa. He intended to restore the rangeland to its natural glory and had hired me to document the transformation, making the process part of the attraction. We planned to do a nice lobby exhibit and offer lectures and demonstrations about Hill Country ecology. Guests could learn about nature between yoga classes, mountain bike tours, and massages.

  It was a dream job for a nature photographer like me and a sound investment for a venture capitalist like Ty. Tourism was booming in the Hill Country, thanks to the explosive growth of the big Texas cities. People would pay real money for a glimpse of a golden-cheeked warbler. Why wouldn’t they pay to watch prairie grasses grow?