Colts Crossing...Unsolved - Episode 7

May 28
12 min read

Bargain Store

Murder, Mystery & Mom Season 4

There are certain things you expect to see at a foreclosure auction in rural Kentucky, but your sixty-something mother dressed like an extra from a 1970s biker movie was not one of them.

I was fully prepared to lose my mind, my life savings, and my sister’s remaining patience at the Forget It Storage auction. I was not prepared for this.

“Patsy?”

I turned toward the voice—and my brain completely stalled out.

I’d expected her to throw on a baseball cap or maybe a pair of oversized hoop earrings from her emergency stash in the Airstream. I did not expect her to undergo a total genetic restructuring.

Mattie McDonald was gone. Standing in her place was Mad Dog Jill Briscoe, a woman who looked like she’d spent the last twenty years managing a rock band’s security detail or running a high-stakes illegal poker game out of a salvage yard. She’d somehow unearthed a sleeveless leather vest from the depths of the trailer, pairing it with dark, menacing sunglasses that completely hid her eyes. Her hair—usually a testament to Southern propriety—was teased and tousled into a gravity-defying, windblown mane that looked like a dangerous flashback to Farrah Fawcett’s edgy phase. Even her posture shifted; her shoulders were locked back, her chin was set, and she radiated a localized aura of pure, unadulterated hostility.

Goldilocks sat perfectly at her heel, her big floppy tail completely still, looking up at Mama with a wide-eyed solemnity that suggested she’d been officially sworn into the secret service.

I stared, my mouth open wide enough to catch Kentucky gnats. “Oh my gosh. Mama. You didn’t just come up with a disguise. You went, full method actor.”

Mattie didn’t crack a smile. Mad Dog Jill Biscoe didn’t smile. Her lips remained a flat, dangerous line behind her shades. “Let’s get this over with before the humidity ruins the hairspray.”

“You’re beautiful. You’re terrifying,” I whispered, practically giddy with awe. “I want to buy you a motorcycle.”

Before Jill could reply, the auctioneer cleared his throat into a crackling megaphone, stepping up to the center of the asphalt. “Alright, folks, let’s get started!”

The metal garage door remained closed, keeping the dark cavern of Freddy Darrow’s hoarding habit a secret. But for some reason, the energy in the gravel lot didn’t surge forward with the usual cutthroat eagerness. The rumor I planted with the local town crier had officially caught fire. I watched with immense satisfaction as a ripple of genuine hesitation passed through the crowd. Shifty eyes glanced from person to person, eventually landing squarely on Mattie, who stood there like a leather-clad statue of doom.

No one wanted to be the first person to cross Mad Dog Jill Briscoe.

“Opening bid five hundred!” the auctioneer shouted, waving his hand toward the crowd.

A brave soul in a trucker hat raised a finger. “Five hundred!”

“Six!” another yelled.

“A thousand!”

Mama didn’t wave a hand. She didn’t shout. She just took one deliberate step forward, her heavy boots crunching against the gravel, and delivered her numbers like a judge handing down a sentence.

“Three thousand.”

The crowd went utterly still. Her voice hadn’t even risen above a conversational murmur, but it didn’t need to. The sheer financial audacity of a three-thousand-dollar jump on a pile of mystery cardboard boxes had effectively broken the spirit of the first two rows.

“Thirty-five!” a guy in the back called out, his voice squeaking slightly with panic.

“Four?” another tried.

I figured it was time to show the vultures that Mad Dog Jill Briscoe didn’t just have an imposing wardrobe—she had an accomplice with an open checkbook. I shot my hand into the air. “Five thousand!”

Mama didn’t look at me, but her jaw flexed. “You’re enjoying this way too much, Patsy.”

“I am,” I whispered back, my heart hammering against my ribs. “I’m experiencing a severe adrenaline rush, and honestly, it’s worth every penny.”

“Fifty-one!” a new voice barked from the left.

The bidding war was tightening up, but the reckless confidence of the crowd withered. They were bidding defensively now, throwing out numbers like they were testing thin ice.

“Fifty-five hundred,” Mattie said.

I didn’t even let the auctioneer repeat the number. “Six thousand!”

Mattie lifted an eyebrow. “Now you’re bidding against me?”

“Sorry, I got overly enthused.”

Mattie turned her head a fraction of an inch, the glare from her sunglasses catching the midday light. “That’s your entire production budget disappearing into thin air.”

“No,” I corrected, gaze locked on the auctioneer. “That’s our answers getting closer.”

“Six thousand going once—” the auctioneer chanted, his hand cutting through the air.

“Sixty-five!” A desperate bidder wiped sweat from his forehead.

The auctioneer pointed to Mattie. “Seven to the lady in the leather vest?”

She nodded. “Why not?”

Suffocating silence dropped over the storage facility. The land-sharks had officially been driven back to deeper water.

I glanced across the muted crowd, searching for a reaction, and found Addison O’Duggan-MacQuillan standing near a stack of old truck tires. She watched the entire spectacle with her arms crossed tightly, her designer sunglasses pushed up into her hair, exposing a dark, unreadable expression. She wasn’t bidding. She hadn’t thrown out a single number since the price passed three grand. For a woman who claimed to want a crack at this locker, her sudden willingness to let a stranger walk away with it bothered me more than anything else she’d done.

Did she think the price was too high, or did she know something about the contents that I didn’t?

“Seven thousand going once—” the auctioneer shouted, checking the crowd.

No movement.

“Going twice—”

The pause stretched out, long and agonizing, ticking away in the Kentucky morning.

Smack. The gavel hit the folding table with a definitive crack. “Sold!”

And just like that, Freddy Darrow’s secret lair officially belonged to me.

I let out a slow, ragged breath, my shoulders dropping as the competitive high began to curdle into immediate financial regret. “Okay. Wow. That is… a very large number.”

Mattie crossed her arms, her voice dropping into its usual, comforting register of maternal judgment. “That is a seven-thousand-dollar mistake, Patsy.”

Goldilocks, completely oblivious to the concepts of debt or buyer’s remorse, began to wag her tail with a rhythmic thumping against my shin, treating the whole affair like we’d just secured a massive victory.

“You don’t even know what we bought, Goldie,” I muttered, looking down at her. “Any cookies are likely spoiled.”

But she didn’t care. She was already leaning forward, her nose twitching at the gap beneath the metal door, fully expecting snacks or a new chew toy to be involved.

I took the master key from the auctioneer, the cold metal heavy in my palm, and stepped up to the threshold of the unit. The rusted garage door loomed before us, quiet and stubborn, a giant question mark holding decades of secrets.

Mama moved in right beside me, her Mad Dog persona fading back into the calculating, tactical precision of Mattie McDonald.

I slid the key into the lock. Turned it until the mechanism clicked. Then I reached down, grabbed the handle, and prepared myself. Because whatever Freddy Darrow had stuffed into this dark square of concrete, I sure hoped it was worth north of seven grand.

I lifted the door with a sharp yank, and the darkness inside opened up to meet us.

If there were a historical society dedicated to the golden age of suburban consumerism, they wouldn’t need a museum. They would just need to preserve the inside of Freddy Darrow’s storage unit.

The metal door rattled all the way to the top, and for a solid ten seconds, Mama, Goldilocks, and I just stood there, breathing in a cocktail of premium Kentucky dust.

It wasn’t just a locker. It was the motherlode.

The unit was stacked to the rafters, front to back, with an overwhelming wall of pristine, cardboard-scented goodies. But this wasn’t a collection of rusty car parts or moldy lawn furniture. This was a meticulously hoarded time capsule of the late nineties through the mid-2000s.

Right at the front, practically begging to be appraised, was a fortress of special-edition Barbie dolls, their faces smiling out from behind mint-condition cellophane windows with movie tie-in branding. Behind them loomed a literal skyscraper of long white boxes, packed so tightly with vintage comic books that the cardboard was bowing at the seams. I peered deeper into the gloom and spotted the unmistakable silver sheen of boxed Star Trek collectibles and row upon row of model airplane kits.

I turned to Mama, a smug, self-satisfied grin plastering itself across my face. I didn’t even bother trying to hide my inner auction-show champion.

“See? What did I tell you?” I said, propping my hands on my hips and gesturing grandly to the wall of nostalgia. “I am going to earn back my seven-thousand-dollar investment and possibly double it. I’m a financial genius. You’re welcome.”

Mattie slid her dark sunglasses down the bridge of her nose, surveying the cardboard kingdom with a look of profound, unimpressed maternal endurance.

“Good for you, Patsy,” she said, her tone dripping with the kind of patience usually reserved for toddlers who presented something made of macaroni. “But you do realize it’s going to take years to go through all this junk.”

“We have resources. I’m going to call Christopher to get a professional breakdown on all the nerdy stuff. He can look up the comic books and the Star Trek gear, and I bet Hondo will know exactly what those model planes are worth.”

“But how, exactly, does a mountain of old toys help us with a missing person case? All we’ve officially confirmed here is that Freddy Darrow was a compulsive shopper and a master-class hoarder.”

“First of all, it’s called collecting when it’s in the original box,” I corrected. “And second, we’re looking at motive here. Freddy was strapped financially. He stopped paying for the unit. This is why he faked his kidnapping and forced his business partners to pay a ransom.”

“Patsy,” Mattie said, her voice dropping into that quiet, grounding register that usually meant I was missing the forest for the cardboard trees. “The man is missing now. Real-time. This stuff is ancient history.”

“Okay, so we find something that isn’t ancient.”

I rolled up my sleeves with a determination I usually reserved for a half-off shoe sale.

For the next twenty minutes, Mama, Goldilocks, and I waged an all-out war against meticulously stacked cardboard. It wasn't a sleek, cinematic montage; it was a hot, dusty, sneeze-inducing grind. I shuffled past a wall of mint-condition Batmobiles, popped the tape on a heavy storage tub, and plunged my hands in, only to find a perfectly preserved colony of Cabbage Patch Kids staring back at me with unblinking, plastic judgment.

Beside me, Mama moved with systematic efficiency, slicing through packing tape with her car keys, peering into the gloom of each box, and rejecting them one by one.

Goldilocks tried to help by sniffing a stack of vintage comic books, sneezed violently into a crate of Star Trek phasers, and immediately went to sit by the door, having decided the life of a master detective involved far too much dander.

We dug deeper, shifting boxes until my lower back started to lodge a formal protest, hunting for a single bank statement, a modern shipping label—anything that didn't scream Y2K survivor.

Mattie smacked a thick layer of gray dust off her hands and stepped back out into the humid air of the walkway. “There’s nothing here more recent than 2010.”

I opened my mouth to fire back another snap defense, but my eyes snagged on a stack of cardboard shipping boxes pushed against the left wall. I squeezed past a stack of Millennium Falcons and knelt, running a finger over a faded shipping label.

The smirk slid right off my face.

“Wait a minute,” I murmured, pulling my phone out to use the flashlight. I checked three more boxes, flipping over tags and reading the tiny print on the bottom of a nearby display case.

Mama leaned against the metal frame of the door, her eyes narrowing as she watched me. “What did you find?”

“The dates,” I said, looking back over my shoulder. “You’re right. The newest items in this entire place are from 2010. Absolutely nothing in here was purchased or stored in here recently.”

Mama’s posture shifted, the casual boredom instantly replaced by that sharp, analytical stillness. “He stopped paying the bill six months ago, but he stopped using the unit long before that.”

“Exactly.” I stood up, wiping a layer of gray dust onto my jeans. “Which means this isn’t his most recent storage unit. I bet everything I own he has another one.”

“Or,” Mama reasoned, crossing her arms, “He actually reformed. Just like Susannah said.”

“Oh, please,” I scoffed, stepping back into the humid air of the driveway. “Even Loretta agreed with me on this one—a guy with this level of obsession doesn’t just wake up one day and stop cold turkey. It’s a sickness, Mama. If he stopped putting things in this lair, it’s only because it got full.”

Goldilocks gave a low whine, her nose still sniffing intently at a box of vintage action figures.

I tapped my chin, my brain already spinning a new web of theories as I stared at the locker.

What are we missing?

Goldilocks remained obsessed with a medium-sized, water-damaged banker's box shoved into the deep, dark corner behind a stack of pristine Star Wars lunchboxes. She gave a sharp, insistent bark, her front paws scratching frantically against the cardboard.

“Goldie, leave it alone. They aren’t the toys you can pull stuffing out of and destroy,” I muttered, stepping back into the humid gloom.

But as my flashlight beam swept over the box, a faded, black-marker scrawl caught my eye—two words, written in frantic, jagged handwriting: SPILLED PERFUME.

My heart did a sudden, violent tap-dance against my ribs.

“Mama,” I breathed, dropping to my knees and nearly flattening a colony of vintage Beanie Babies. “Look at this.”

Mattie knelt beside me, her maternal skepticism instantly replaced by her tactical glare. “Spilled Perfume?”

“That’s what Addison called the missing horse before she caught herself. She acted real strange when I corrected her. Like she had something to hide.”

Mattie lifted her eyebrows. “Think this box is what she was after?”

“Uh-huh.” I pried open the rotting packing tape, expecting old vet bills or maybe some breeding records. Instead, the very top of the box was lined with laminated newspaper clippings from more than fifteen years ago. I flashed my light over the headlines.

FINAL TURN THOROUGHBRED CAPTURED BY CHAMPIONSHIP JOCKEYS.

SPILLED PERFUME WINS THE KENTUCKY OAKS.

“She was a filly,” I murmured, scanning the faded text. “The very first racehorse Freddy and his partners ever bought together. So Addison’s slip of the tongue makes sense—she was thinking about the old days. But why would she get so completely psycho and defensive when I called her out on it?”

“There must be more to it,” Mattie said, finally hooked.

I dug past the yellowed newsprint, and the whimsical, nostalgic vibe of the storage unit vanished faster than my production budget.

Tucked neatly at the bottom of the box was a plastic Ziploc bag. Inside were dozens of glossy magazines—GQ, Sports Illustrated, Horse & Hound—but they looked like they’d been attacked by a crazed toddler with safety scissors. Pieces of headlines were missing. Columns of text were hollowed out, leaving behind square, empty windows.

“Cut-out letters,” Mattie whispered, her voice dropping into that chillingly quiet register. “Like what a serial killer leaves behind when they don't want the FBI tracing their printer ink.”

“Or a kidnapper,” I added, my hands shaking slightly as I pulled out the next item from the depths of the hoard.

It was a clunky, silver, handheld microcassette recorder from the early 2000s, sitting right next to a small black plastic megaphone shape—a portable voice modulator.

“Woah.”

With a dusty thumb, I pressed the rewind button on the tape recorder. The tiny wheels whirred inside the plastic casing for a few agonizing seconds before stopping with a loud, metallic clunk.

I held my breath and hit PLAY.

A harsh layer of static hissed out of the tiny speaker, followed by a deeply distorted, mechanical growl. The voice was heavily modulated, completely stripped of any human cadence, sounding like a demon speaking through a broken walkie-talkie.

“We have Freddy Darrow and Spilled Perfume,” the digital monster rasped. “If you ever want to see them again, you will drop one million dollars in unmarked cash at the designated coordinates. Better work fast if you expect her to make her race tomorrow. And don’t call the cops. If we see a single badge, you’ll never see horse or owner again.”

The tape clicked off. Silence fell over the concrete locker, heavy and suffocating.

I stared at the little silver machine in my hand. “That’s almost the exact same layout as the ransom Susannah just authorized for Double Jeopardy. Except the asking price doubled in the last few decades.”

Mattie situated her sunglasses on top of her head. “Patsy, there is absolutely no public record of Freddy Darrow or his horse being kidnapped fifteen years ago. I ran a full background check on him and the family. If this happened, it never made the news.”

“Because they didn’t call the cops,” I said, the pieces of the puzzle suddenly slamming together in my brain with the force of a freight train. “Think about it! Ray Holt told us just yesterday that in the horse racing business, if you show weakness, you’re as good as dead. Fifteen years ago, the partnership was brand new. If word got out that their star filly was stolen, they would have been ruined. So they quietly paid the ransom, got Freddy and the horse back, and buried the secret.”

Mattie stood up slowly, brushing the dust off her knees, her eyes fixed on the cut-up magazines. “And Freddy kept the evidence.”

“Because he’s a hoarder!” I practically shouted. “A guy like Freddy doesn’t just throw away a perfectly good voice modulator and a baggie full of cut-out vocabulary words. He hoarded them away in his secret lair because he figured… what if I need these again someday?”

Mattie stared at me, the horror of the realization finally washing over her face. “Are you suggesting…”

“I’m saying Freddy didn’t get kidnapped this week or fifteen years ago, Mama. He successfully extorted his own business partners for a million dollars to cover his shopping and hoarding obsession. And last week, when the bills piled up again and he defaulted on this very unit, he went right back to his favorite playbook. For those keeping score at home, that’s a grand total of three mill he extorted from his wife and friends over the years.”

Mattie steepled her fingers. “So Freddy isn’t a helpless victim tied up in a dark basement somewhere.”

“Nope.” I shook my head. “The mastermind behind the kidnapping of Freddy Darrow…is Freddy Darrow.”

It all fit. Every piece.

And somehow…that was the part that bothered me.