Kara Lennox - One Stubborn Texan

Doing the job alone wasn’t nearly as appealing. But she kept the goal in mind-verifying the identity of the Oberlin heir. Maybe one of those boxes held a ten-million-dollar clue.

But before she could do anything, she had to use the bathroom. She wandered into the single downstairs bedroom, but the only door led to a closet which was, as Russ had promised, filled with spare clothes. Changing into a comfy pair of jeans and a sweatshirt sounded like a good idea-after the bathroom.

But there was no bathroom.

Sydney inspected every inch of that cabin. There was no bathroom. She ran out to the front porch.

“Russ!” she yelled as loud as she could. “Russ, come back! I have a problem!” But he must have been too far down the trail, because he didn’t return. Either that or he had chosen to ignore her.

That was when she spotted a small building off to the side, shielded by some sapling trees. “Oh, no.” It couldn’t be. Surely she was just missing something, a hidden door or something. Surely he didn’t expect her to…But, yes. As she drew closer to the small building, she saw the quarter moon carved into the door.

When Sydney saw Russell Klein tomorrow, she was going to kill him. She gritted her teeth and opened the door to the outhouse. This experience would make for an amusing anecdote to tell her father, she realized with a faint smile. If it made him laugh, picturing his purely urban daughter stuck in the boonies without a flush toilet, the inconvenience would be worth it. Almost.

In the closet back in the cabin she found a pair of jeans and a flannel shirt that were miles too big but warm and comfy. She would have to remember to take a picture of herself with her phone. The snapshot of her dressed like a hillbilly would go well with the anecdote.

Finally, she climbed the stairs to the loft, eager to get on with her task. It was hard to know where to start, so she grabbed a box at random, sat cross-legged on the floor and started digging.

The first box appeared to be filled with receipts, all dated from the 1940s. The name on each and every receipt was Bert Klausen.

Bert Klausen? She’d heard that name before, she thought with a surge of excitement. Had it come up in previous research? Then her hopes fell as she realized Bert was the elderly gentleman who’d greeted her at Russ’s store, the one with the pickle.

Bert was the cousin?

She wondered what all these receipts were kept here for. Had Bert actually lived here? Obviously, because she couldn’t envision anyone hauling boxes of junk through the woods just for storage.

Other boxes yielded similar fare-mail, most of it of a business nature but a lot of it just purely junk mail. Why would anyone keep junk mail? She shuddered as she thought about those people who never threw anything away, the ones who let old newspapers, magazines and empty cans stack up in their houses floor to ceiling, until only a narrow path remained leading from room to room.

Actually, her father could easily grow into one of those people if someone didn’t keep tabs on him. He wanted to keep everything; he was always sure he might need it someday. In the first months after her mom died, his house and the office had become unbelievably cluttered and Sydney had to fight him every step of the way as she’d tried to purge the junk.

Lowell Baines never would have fought his wife-he knew Shirley had the business sense and had deferred to her. But Sydney was his little girl, who obviously knew nothing. He didn’t trust her to make decisions about his affairs. In fact, he was still trying to make decisions about her life.

Finally she found a box filled with old photo albums. She loved looking at old pictures, even if she had no idea who was in them. It always made her sad when she saw photo albums at estate sales or antique shops. Hadn’t some family member wanted those photos? She had loads of old albums that had belonged to her mother, each picture meticulously labeled, and she knew the stories behind them, too.

But not everyone shared her love for recording the past. These albums, for instance, were falling to pieces. Many of the old photos were faded and few had captions. The subjects that were identified featured first names only. But she did see a few photos, dated from the 1930s, with a little boy whose name was Bertram Jr. She could only guess this was the pickle-eating Bert and that the receipts had probably belonged to his father.

But no Kleins. No Oberlins. No Winnies or Winifreds or Sams.

The deeper she delved into the boxes, the more positive she became that these boxes had all belonged to Bert and had nothing whatsoever to do with Russ or any other Kleins.

She’d been had.

Why did he want her out of town so badly? What was he trying to hide?

She wasn’t going to kill Russ, though. That would be too quick and easy. Somehow, she was going to make him suffer for dragging her up here for no good reason.

“DO I REALLY HAVE TO buy that expensive shampoo?” asked Sylvia Grimes. She was one of Winnie Klein’s best, most regular customers. But she also asked the same question every time she walked into Winnie’s hair salon, the Cut ’n’ Curl.

“Darlin’,” Winnie said as she used a soft brush to sweep away the last few stray hair clippings from Sylvia’s shoulders, “you can use any kind of shampoo you want-if you want to be back here in a week begging for a new dye job because you look like Bozo the Clown. I know this all-natural stuff is pricey, but it’s the best shampoo I’ve found for preserving color.”

Winnie patted her own deftly highlighted locks. She did the best color this side of San Antonio, if she did say so herself. But a cheap shampoo would ruin everything and Sylvia knew that.

“Oh, all right,” Sylvia grumbled, stuffing the bottle of shampoo into her bag along with one of each freebie Winnie put out for her customers-a refrigerator magnet, a key chain, a pen, an emery board and a letter opener. Sylvia must have had dozens of each by now, but every two weeks she loaded up again.

Sylvia was Winnie’s last customer, thank goodness. Her other two stylists, Betty and Glory, were just finishing up with their clients.

Winnie did a tidy little business. Just about everybody in Linhart came to the Cut ’n’ Curl to get their hair and nails done. Her customers tended to be extremely loyal; a few who had moved away even made the trek back to town just to have Winnie work her magic on their locks.

As Winnie changed out of her uniform, Betty and Glory swept up, readying everything for tomorrow. Winnie was straightening up the dressing room when the bell over the door rang.

“Tell whoever it is, we’re closed,” Winnie called out from where she was gathering used smocks to run through the washer.

“Winnie, honey, it’s not a customer,” Glory informed her. “It’s that handsome son of yours.”

Glory Dickerson had been lusting after Russ since the two of them were in high school. In fact, Winnie suspected Glory had gone to beauty school strictly so she could get a job with her, Russ’s mother, and foster a connection. But it hadn’t worked. While Russ was always pleasant to Glory, he’d never shown any signs of being attracted to her, despite the fact Glory was curvy in all the right places, with big green eyes and piles of long red hair.

Winnie stuffed the smocks into a laundry bag and emerged from the dressing room with a smile for her son, who offered her a dutiful kiss on the cheek.

“What’s the occasion?” Winnie asked. Though she saw Russ on a fairly regular basis, he seldom dropped by the shop. The ultrafeminine decor and the perfumed air made him uncomfortable, she suspected.

Not to mention the cow eyes from Glory and every other woman under the age of fifty. But he never dated local women, preferring the glossy city girls he somehow managed to meet.