The Law of Finders Keepers

Chapter One

The Odds-and-Ends Drawer

The Desperado Detective Agency’s biggest case ever crept up on tiny Tupelo Landing in the dead of winter, and kicked off on the rarest of days. Unlike most of our borderline famous cases, it started with two things found. 

One thing found by me, Miss Moses LoBeau—ace detective, yellow belt karate student, and a sixth grader in her prime. 

One thing found by a stranger. 

Before all was said and done, it plunged me and my fellow Desperados—my best friends, Dale Earnhardt Johnson III and Harm Crenshaw, the agency’s newest detective—into a blood-thirsty chapter of our town’s history, and an unspoken chapter of Harm’s past. It put our lives in peril, tested our courage, and sent us racing for treasures of the world and treasures of the heart. 

As for me, Mo LoBeau, it bent my rivers and scattered my stars. 

As usual, I didn’t see it coming. 

In fact, I was dead asleep in the wee hours of January 11, when my vintage phone jangled. I clicked on my Elvis in Vegas lamp. “Desperado Detective Agency, Mo LoBeau speaking. Your disaster is our delight. How may we be of service?” 

I squinted at my alarm clock. Five thirty a.m. 

The voice came through scratchy and worried. “Mo? It’s Thes.” Crud. Fellow sixth grader Thessalonian Thompson, a weather freak desperate to take me to a movie. 

I yawned. “No movie.” 

“It’s not that, Mo. I’m over you,” Thes said. “It’s going to SNOW. I’m giving a few special friends a heads-up.” 

SNOW? We haven’t had real snow in Tupelo Landing since third grade! 

“Really?” I said, kicking off my covers. “Is school out? Is this a snow day?” 

“That’s the problem. School’s not out. Miss Retzyl makes that call, and she doesn’t know my forecast because she’s not answering her phone.” 

Our teacher, Priscilla Retzyl—tall, willowy, able to do math in her head—is the most normal person in my shy-of-normal life. I adore her. Secretly she likes me too, but ever since she got Caller ID she’s been slow to pick up sixth graders’ calls. 

“Mo, will you go to her house with me?” Thes asked. “I’m an introvert and you’re not.” 

True. 

The gardenia outside my window shimmied in the moonlight. What in the blue blazes? Dale’s face popped into view, his mama’s flowered scarf pulled tight over his blond hair and knotted beneath his chin. Not a good look. “Mo,” Dale whispered. “Wake up. Thes says it’s going to snow.” 

“I know,” I said, tapping on the glass. “Come to the door.” 

“Which door?” Thes asked. 

“Not you,” I replied into the phone as Dale crashed to the ground. I made an Executive Decision. “Thes, call Harm. Ask him to meet us at Miss Retzyl’s house in twenty minutes for an Ensemble Beg. But you better be right about the snow.” 

I smoothed my T-shirt and karate pants as I strolled the length of my narrow, window-lined flat. I swung the door open and Dale bolted inside with his mongrel dog, Queen Elizabeth II, at his heels. “Hey,” I said. “We got a snow mission. I’ll be ready in three shakes.” 

“Sorry about the gardenia,” he said. “I didn’t want to knock, and wake up . . . anybody.” 

Anybody would be Miss Lana, who wakes up slow. Also the Colonel, who’s moody thanks to an eleven-year brush with amnesia. The Colonel and Miss Lana are my family of choice and I am theirs. The Colonel saved me from a hurricane flood the day I was born. Together, we operate the café at the edge of town. 

Dale unzipped his oversized jacket—a castoff from his daddy, who won’t need it for seven to ten years unless he gets time off for good behavior, which he won’t. “Hurry, Mo. I’m sweltering to death,” Dale said. “Mama made me layover.” 

“You mean layer,” I said, sliding my jeans over my karate pants. 

Dale, a co-founder of the Desperado Detective Agency, ain’t a dead-ahead thinker, but he thinks sideways better than anybody I know.  

I pulled on my red sweater and combed my unruly hair. I opened my filing cabinet, shoved aside unanswered Desperado Detective Agency letters, and snagged my orange socks. 

“Get gloves too,” Dale instructed as someone swished across the living room. 

“Morning, Miss Lana,” I called. “Dale and Queen Elizabeth are here. Can I borrow some gloves? It’s going to snow.” 

“Snow? Really?” she said, peeking in. Miss Lana, a former child star of the Charleston community theater and a fan of Old Hollywood, gave me a wide, sleepy smile—the real one, not the one she keeps in her pocket for pain-in-the-neck customers at the café. “I love snow!” 

She leaned against my doorframe, her Gone with the Wind bed jacket over her pink nightgown, her short coppery hair glistening in the lamplight.

“Hey, Miss Lana,” Dale said, whipping his mama’s flowered scarf off his head. “I hope you slept good. The scarf wasn’t my idea. Mama said wear it or my ears would freeze off.” 

Dale’s a Mama’s Boy from the soles of his red snow boots to his scandalous good hair—a family trait. Because I’m a possible orphan, my family traits remain a mystery. 

I tossed Dale my bomber cap and laced my plaid sneakers. 

“Help yourself to my gloves, sugar,” Miss Lana said. “They’re in my odds-and-ends drawer.” As she stumbled toward the smell of coffee, we raced to her room. I zipped to the curvy white chest of drawers. Her top drawer erupted in elastic and lace. 

“All her drawers are odds-and-ends drawers,” I muttered, opening them one by one and plucking a pair of blue driving gloves from the bottom drawer. 

“Mo!” Miss Lana shrieked from the kitchen. “Don’t open my bottom drawer!” 

“Too late,” I shouted as a note drifted to the floor. For Mo When She’s Ready. 

“Ready for what?” I murmured, uncovering a large white box. I touched a sticky spot where the note used to be as Miss Lana skidded through the door. The Colonel eased in behind her, his bottle-brush gray hair dented on one side, the plaid robe I gave him in first grade cinched at his thin waist. 

“What’s in here?” I asked, hoisting the box. “Can I open it? I feel ready.” 

“No,” Miss Lana said, grabbing it. She looked at the Colonel and gave him a soft nod. He nodded back. “Tonight, sugar. When we have time to talk,” she said, her voice going tinny. 

Weird. Miss Lana’s a theater professional. Her voice never goes tinny. 

“But it has my name on it now.”

“It’s waited almost twelve years,” the Colonel said. “It can wait until the end of something as rare as a snow day.” 

Our snow day! 

“Come on,” Dale said, pounding for the door. 

We grabbed our bikes and blasted down the blacktop, into tiny Tupelo Landing. But with every pump of my pedals, my curiosity tapped at the lid of that mysterious box. 

What’s in it, in it, in it?