When I am Dead, My Dearest: A Hunter Jones Mystery

by Charlotte Moore

  “How on earth do you know so much about everybody?” Hunter asked, wondering even as she said it if Charmaine and Rhonda had been friends. It seemed likely.

  “I don’t know about everybody,” Sam said. “I just happen to know about that because Jaybird told me the whole thing the other day. I was telling him that I would have bought the house myself if I had known it was for sale and he told me that the Millers didn’t really put it up for sale. They didn’t want to move, but Hill wound up offering them just about four times what they paid for it.”

  I didn’t know you liked Victorian houses,” Hunter said.

  “That style is called Queen Anne,” Sam answered, “There’s a pretty good chapter about it in the county history.”

  CHAPTER 4

  No matter what time he fell asleep, and even if he fell asleep drunk, Hill Roland was an early riser by long habit. It was his best writing time, and he liked the routine of showering, putting on fresh clothes, preferably old and comfortable ones. He liked starting the coffee and being ready to write as soon as the coffee was done.

  Even so, he groaned when he woke up on Friday morning. He was still in his clothes – in slacks and a shirt. His mouth was dry as sand and his head hurt. He was remembering the night before in fragments, and that didn’t help. He remembered that he had been charming to many people for what seemed like a very long time, then that he had managed to get very drunk. Then that dreadful girl had driven him home, and insisted on coming in. She had stayed, saying she was going to fix him something to eat.

  He had wanted her to leave, and kept telling her he didn’t want any food, that he was tired and going to bed, but she wasn’t listening. She just kept talking and poking through cabinets and the fridge like she owned the place. He had gone upstairs, slammed his bedroom door loudly, locked it and fallen into bed, trusting she would take the hint and go away.

  He dimly remembered that she had knocked on the door once and he hadn’t answered. Probably, he thought, she had given up then.

  He pulled off his twisted clothes, and headed for the healing waters of the new shower that had been the first thing he got installed in the old house. As he showered he decided that the worst of it was that somebody had to drive him home, but the girl wasn’t even from Merchantsville. She was a writer for some magazine, there to do a story about the bed-and-breakfast, and if he was lucky, he’d never see her again.

  He took two aspirin and drank two glasses of water after brushing his teeth. He didn’t feel good, but he knew that his drinking binge was over and that he’d be staying sober. Megan was on her way and the scotch was gone.

  He hadn’t bought it. Jaybird Hilliard had brought it to him as a housewarming gift the day he arrived for the closing.

  He had just taken a nip or two after he opened it the first time, but then he had the house painters to deal with, and the landscaper Megan had arranged by e-mail, and the book signing. Why on earth, he wondered, had he ever agreed to that?

  He went downstairs to the kitchen and started the coffee pot, his mind already turning from the annoyances of the week to the writing ahead.

  The aspirin seemed to be kicking in as he poured a mug full of coffee and went to the study.

  It was a beautiful room. The built-in bookcases with their glass doors were filled with books that had been there since before he was born. He needed to go through them, he thought, and make room for the ones he had brought with him. He liked the light coming through the tall windows, and had no plans for curtains.

  He had just put his coffee down when he noticed the white powder on his keyboard, and saw that the tin of rum balls that he had pushed to the back of his desk two days before had been opened. That idiot girl, he thought angrily. He didn’t care that she had eaten half of the rum balls and left the tin open. He was angry that she had been anywhere near his keyboard, and then he saw the computer was turned on.

  He would, he decided, find out what magazine that girl worked for and talk to her editor. He would get her fired.

  And then he noticed the box – just a box for good quality computer paper, but he knew what was in it even before he opened it and looked at the first page.

  Cavern of Darkness by Olivia Benedict.

  Below the title she had written by hand, “For my inspiration, Hill Roland. Enjoy!”

  Her business card was clipped to it, as if he’d want to get in touch with her as soon as he read it.

  Now that, he thought angrily, took nerve. He considered taking it to the Hilliard Inn and handing it back to her with a few choice words, but reality was returning rapidly. The girl had driven him home in her car. His car was still at the inn. He sighed and decided he’d get some writing done and then walk down to get it, taking the manuscript, of course.

  He turned his keyboard over to shake the powdered sugar off. His headache had come roaring back. He spun his desk chair around to get up for more aspirin, and saw a flash of red through the window.

  It was the girl’s car, in his driveway.

  Had she come back? No, that wasn’t the question. Had she ever left? She must be asleep somewhere in the house, he thought, and when he found her he was going to tell her to get out or he’d call the sheriff.

  He stormed through the house to find her, wake her up and send her packing.

  He found her.

  She was crumpled on the floor of the downstairs guest bathroom, the contents of her purse spilled on the floor, pills scattered. What he could see of her face had a sickly gray cast and her eyes were open. The water was running steadily into the bathroom sink, swirling and emptying around broken glass and down the drain, over and over.

  He leaned slightly into the room and turned the water off. It was at least 15 minutes before he decided what to do next.

  Hunter Jones, in the meantime, was feeling successfully domestic. She had made a hot breakfast for the three of them, and was packing Bethie’s lunch for the very first time as Katie the Calico prowled around her ankles hoping for a bite of cheese or ham.

  She and Sam had agreed on dividing up breakfast duties, and she took the end of the week because Thursdays and Fridays were easy days for her.

  She got the call on her cell phone at 7:45 a.m., just as she was drawing a smiling cat on Bethie’s lunch bag with a felt tipped pen.

  “Hi, Hunter. This is Hill Roland.” He sounded anxious. ” I’m sorry to bother you, but I don’t have a telephone book here, and I had the card you gave me last night. I need to talk to Sam.”

  Hunter said, “Sam’s already at work. You can probably catch him at his office, but if it’s an emergency, it would be faster just to call 911.”

  That was the approach Sam had asked her to use with people who called him at home, because it really was faster to call 911, and there were some people who floundered around trying to find the one person they knew or calling the office.

  “I really need to talk to Sam privately,” Hill Roland said plaintively.

  She gave him the office number.

  Once she was off the phone, she folded the top of the lunch bag over just in time for Bethie to come bouncing in, dressed for school.

  “Do you want to walk, or do you want me to drive you?” Hunter asked.

  “Drive me,” Bethie said. “Please. If you don’t mind.”

  “Fine with me,” Hunter said, “Just give me a minute to get my things for work. Have you got your homework?”

  “Yesss, Mommm.”

  Bethie, who seemed to have gotten plenty of practice from watching her school friends with their mothers, was already mastering the version of “Mom” that had a barely detectable note of patience with silly questions.

  Hunter grinned and said, “Wasn’t it you who forgot your homework day before yesterday?”

  Bethie pretended a pout and said, “You and Daddy both forgot to remind me.”

  Hunter was just pulling up at the school, in line with the other parents dropping their kids off, when she heard the sirens start up in the distance.


  Bethie didn’t appear to notice. She was already waving to her friends.

  “He says he doesn’t know how she died,” Sam said to Taneesha as they turned into the driveway of Hill Roland’s home. “He wanted to know if I could help him get a dead girl out of his house discreetly.”

  “Discreetly?” Taneesha asked, raising her eyebrows.

  “Yeah, like it was his daddy back in the old days calling Chief Jasper.”

  “Is his wife here?” Taneesha asked.

  “No,” Sam said. “She’s coming in later today. That’s why he was hoping to get the body out discreetly.”

  They got out of the car as Skeet Borders, who was on patrol duty, arrived at the other end of the driveway.

  The yard was wide, so Sam used his cell phone to speak to Skeet. He didn’t want to create any curiosity among all those people who were listening to scanners.

  “Check out the license tag on the red car,” he said, “Then get the tape up. Just block off the entrances and the whole front yard. We don’t need any friendly neighbors coming to visit. I think that must be the victim’s car. It’s got a Baldwin County tag. Sgt. Martin and I are going to secure the house.”

  He walked toward the house with its new blue paint and cream trim, its wraparound porch and octagonal turret, the shingles that looked like fish scales, the tall, narrow windows, and for a moment, he envied Hill Roland the house, and the money he had to restore it.

  It was a momentary envy. He could hear the Emergency Medical Service siren coming closer as Hill came out the front door and down the front steps looking pale and sick.

  “Sam,” he said in a low, confidential tone, “Do we have to have all this fuss? All I wanted was to get that girl’s body out of the house. I didn’t invite her to stay and I don’t know what happened to her. I told you I didn’t even know she was still here when I woke up this morning.”

  “Where is she?” Sam asked.

  “I’ll show you. Can’t we just call the funeral home?”

  “No. You stay right here on the porch,” Sam said. “Just sit down on the porch swing and don’t go anywhere. Is she upstairs or downstairs? Is anybody else in the house?”

  “Nobody else is here, and she’s downstairs,” Hill said. “Straight down the hall, almost to the back, in the bathroom on the left.”

  “Did you move anything or change anything?” Sam asked.

  “No,” Hill said, and then he corrected himself. “Yes. I turned off the water. It was running. I turned the faucet to stop it.”

  “I don’t see any blood,” Taneesha said after they had looked at the body for a moment or two in silence.

  “Me neither,” Sam said. He knelt down on the floor just outside the bathroom, and looked at the dead girl’s eyes and her throat.

  “I wonder what that white powder is on her dress,” Taneesha said, pointing to two streaks of white that Sam would not have noticed.

  “Looks like she was trying to take some medicine and fell,” Sam said.” Hill said he turned the water off, so maybe she fell while she was trying to fill the glass. He touched the inside of the sink with his finger tip. It was damp.

  “Let’s get to work,” he said. “Treat it like a crime until we’re sure it isn’t.”

  Back on the porch, Sam asked Sonny Rayburn, the head of the Emergency Medical Service, to go in and take a look. Taneesha began to make calls to the crime scene unit, the District Attorney and the Coroner, and Sam went to talk to Hill Roland.”

  “Do you know her name?” he asked.

  “Ophelia or Sylvia or something like that,” Hill said. “She was at the book-signing party at the Hilliard mansion. Your wife took our picture together. She’d know, or I guess Robin Hilliard might.”

  “Why was this woman in your house?” Sam asked, bluntly.

  “She drove me home,” Hill said. “She was at the book signing, and I might as well tell you now that I got drunk, and somebody took my keys away. She offered to drive me home, and I didn’t know where my keys were so…”

  He answered the next question before Sam could ask it. “Whatever you’re thinking, I didn’t invite her in. She invited herself. She just followed me right up the steps and into the house, and she kept wandering around carrying on about the house, and talking about fixing us something to eat. I told her I didn’t want anything and I was going to sleep. She acted like she didn’t hear me, so I finally went upstairs and slammed and locked my bedroom door, and went to sleep. It was ridiculous. This morning, I just assumed she was gone until I saw her car still in the driveway. I have to admit it made me mad, because I thought she was still in the house, asleep in one of the bedrooms, like she was moving in, so I went looking…”

  He stopped and lowered his voice.

  “And I found her.”

  He sighed and then got himself together.

  “How long is all this going to take, Sam? My wife’s arriving this afternoon and I have things to do. I’ve got to clean up that bathroom, and I’d really just as soon Megan didn’t know about any of this.”

  “It’s going to take as long as it takes,” Sam said, and then he added more sympathetically, “You ought to let your wife know about it before she gets here, because we’re considering the whole place a crime scene for now, and you need to stay somewhere else. You want me to get somebody to drive you over to Buck’s house?”

  “Good Lord, no!” Hill said. “I’ll never hear the end of this if he finds out.”

  A mile away at her desk in the newsroom, Hunter had given up trying to make sense of the little she was hearing on the scanner, and was on the phone with Sam’s secretary, Shellie Carstairs.

  “He had a call from Hill Roland,” Shellie said. “Sounded like some trouble at his house. I just heard the dispatcher say that they were blocking off the road both ways and setting up a detour. I figured that was to keep you out.”

  Hunter laughed, and Shellie said, “Of course, Millicent Harvey’s house is right across the road, and if you took Dogwood Avenue you could park by the water tank and walk through. It’s that big blue house, the Victorian one.”

  “Thanks,” Hunter said. “I know the house. I may try to sneak in that way just to get some pictures in case it turns out to be news. Sam says it’s Queen Anne, by the way.”

  “What’s Queen Anne?”

  “The Roland House. It’s Queen Anne, not Victorian. Apparently there’s an article about it in the county history.”

  “And Sam Bailey read the county history?”

  “Seems like it,” Hunter said.

  She got off the phone and sat there wondering about Hill Roland’s call. If it was a break-in why did he sound so secretive over the phone? And why were there so many sirens? It had sounded like every emergency vehicle in the county was headed that way, and it couldn’t be his wife unless she had showed up early. She got her camera bag and notebook and headed for the door.

  At Hilliard House, Robin Hilliard couldn’t shake a sense of dread. Olivia Benedict hadn’t come back. Colin had done such an incredible job with the breakfast. There was country ham and scrambled eggs, cheese grits and biscuits, real cream for the coffee. The two couples had enjoyed it all so, and she’d missed it.

  And now the photographer from Southern Journey had arrived and was pouting in the front parlor waiting for her, and looking bored.

  “No,” he had said when Colin offered a tour, “I can’t start the shoot until I’ve talked to the writer. I took an outside shot and that’s all I’m doing until I talk to her.”

  He pulled out his cell phone and punched in a number. Olivia Benedict’s cell phone sounded like bells tinkling behind the registration desk. Robin held it up and showed it to the photographer, who frowned.

  “Who goes off without their cell phone? That’s weird. Where’d she go anyway?”

  Robin was considering driving over to Hill Roland’s house when the phone rang and Colin picked it up. He listened for a while, looked stunned, listened and frowned, raising both
eyebrows at Robin.

  “Yes, Sir. I’m very sorry to hear that. Yes, she was staying here. Yes, Sir, I understand. We’ll take care of it right now.”

  By the time he hung up, Robin was at his side.

  “That was Sheriff Bailey,” Colin said, “They’ve found Olivia Benedict dead in Hill Roland’s house, and the EMTs think she could have been poisoned. He wants us to close down our kitchen in case it was something she had here last night.”

  “We’re ruined,” Robin said as they both moved toward the kitchen and out of the photographer’s hearing.

  Colin thought about it.

  “No, we’re not,” he said. “I ate some of everything last night and I’ll bet you did, too, and our guests had plates of sandwiches, and all of us are fine. If she got poisoned, it was at Hill Roland’s house. He just said that they thought it might be poison. I’ll bet they’re wrong. It was probably an overdose. Maybe Hill Roland does drugs. She had a whole pocketbook full of pills.”

  “What’s going on?” the photographer asked from the doorway. “Who got poisoned?”

  Colin told him, and the photographer first turned pale and then promptly called the magazine’s editor, who, in turn, wanted to talk to Robin. She told him, between squeaks and gasps of dismay, and demands for information he didn’t have, that she would have expected a responsible Innkeeper to take better care of one of her freelancers and that he should not expect a favorable review of Hilliard Inn now or ever.

  “But you will run the ad?” he asked when she ran out of breath.

  “That,” she said after a moment’s pause, “is an entirely different department, and I assume that they will run it.”

  The photographer collided with Hunter Jones at the front door, and she backed up to let him through.

  “Don’t eat anything in there,” he muttered to her. “They’re poisoning people.”

  Hunter gave him a baffled look, and turned to Robin.

  “Do you know what’s going on at Hill Roland’s house?” she asked him. “I just got close enough to take some pictures from across the street, and what’s this about poison?”