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

by Charlotte Moore

  “So you really think it’s going to settle down?” Megan asked, sounding a little plaintive. “That’s what Hill says, but he, well, he just doesn’t take anything very seriously except his writing.”

  “Can I quote you on that?” Hunter asked, laughing.

  “You won’t, will you?” Megan asked.

  “No, but you see what I mean about talking to reporters? Some wouldn’t even ask you if they could quote you. They’d have this whole thing on tape and just write that you said your husband doesn’t take anything seriously except his writing.”

  “Yes, I’m getting the idea.”

  There was a commotion in the background. Hunter could hear a male voice shouting.

  “Is everything okay there?” she asked.

  “I’d better go,” Megan said with a note of weariness. “We have company.”

  A half hour later at the Roland house, Megan was feeling exhausted. She had had enough of her brother-in-law and his wife, and wished they would just go home. The only advantage in their coming over seemed to be that she liked Hill more than she had in a day or two.

  “You absolutely have to get a lawyer,” Buck was telling Hill. “And don’t go talking to any reporters.”

  “If we need one I’m going to get a lawyer through our firm,” Megan said. “We’ll need somebody who specializes in dealing with the media.”

  “I don’t need a lawyer at all,” Hill said. “What I need is some peace and quiet to get some writing done.”

  “Oh, yeah, right, go bury your head in the sand and write something,” Buck said. “Let the rest of us be embarrassed by this mess.”

  Hill’s brother was a big man who looked even bigger seated beside his wife, a small-boned, small-featured blonde who had barely spoken to Megan since they arrived.

  That was about to end, though.

  Charmaine Roland followed up her husband’s sarcasm with a whine.

  “Everybody in town is talking about your having that girl in the house,” she said to Hill. “And even if you don’t care what people say, Buck and I do. We’re part of this community. Buck’s a State Senator, and people know you’re his brother.”

  Hill looked amused, which seemed to infuriate Charmaine.

  “And don’t you give me that look like you think you’re smarter than everybody else,” she said, “As far as I’m concerned, you just came back here to show off, and you’re leaving us to answer all the questions people have. Two reporters have already left a message for Buck.”

  Megan, who was very tired, but getting ready to take charge of her life again, suddenly spoke up.

  “We appreciate your coming over,” she said, directing her words to Buck. “I will be arranging for Hill to have legal representation if it turns out to be necessary, and, Buck, I think you would be well-advised to have no comment at all to make to any reporter. Just don’t get involved. Hill hasn’t been accused of anything and if you’ll ask the sheriff, he’ll confirm that. Now, if you don’t mind… ”

  “Well, whatever Sam Bailey thinks,” Charmaine interrupted. “What everybody in town is talking about is that girl being over here in the house all night, and some people think he killed her.”

  “We can’t help what everybody is talking about,” Megan said calmly,

  “I can’t believe this,” Charmaine blurted out. “Don’t you even care that some other woman spent the night here with your husband? Is this how it’s going to be?” Her voice rose. “You running back and forth from New York and him down here making a fool of himself and embarrassing me and Buck? I guess you think that all this mess will help sell his stupid books.”

  Hill sat up, watching with interest as if the others were possible characters for a book.

  Megan turned to Buck calmly and said, “Would you take your wife home now? I think she’s off her meds.”

  Taneesha Martin had exchanged her uniform for a little red dress, big gold earrings and very high heels. She was having dinner out for the second night in a row with Assistant District Attorney Jeremy Hayes.

  Jeremy was agreeing with her that she should move from her Uncle’s home to the apartment Hunter Jones had vacated.

  “You should call that lady back right now,” he said with a wicked grin, offering her his cell phone. “Maybe she’d let you move in tonight. Is it furnished?”

  “No, and all I’ve got that’s mine is my bedroom furniture.”

  “That’ll do,” Jeremy said.

  Taneesha was thinking of having her own kitchen, where she could cook for Jeremy. He lived on restaurant food, or on some Sundays he ate at the house where she lived with her Uncle James and Aunt Ramona. They were possibly the world’s best southern cooks next to her grandmother, Mama Rene.

  Taneesha wanted to do her own cooking though – maybe elegant French dishes, certainly beautiful salads and fancy desserts. She’d like to have china of her own, too, she thought.

  Jeremy took the dreamy look on her face to be about the bed, and reached across the table for her hand.

  Their steaks arrived just then, and when they resumed the conversation Jeremy wanted to know about what he called “this business with the author of those vampire books.”

  It was shop talk, but Taneesha was glad to have someone she could talk with openly about her work.

  “It looks like Hill Roland got drunk at a book signing and this magazine writer – her name was Olivia Benedict – offered to drive him home. According to him, he didn’t invite her in. She sort of invited herself and wouldn’t take a hint to leave, so he went to bed upstairs – it’s a huge house – and after he woke up this morning, he found her dead in the bathroom.”

  She went on to tell Jeremy about the poisoned rum balls and Olivia Benedict’s heart condition.

  “Do you believe Hill Roland’s version of this?” Jeremy asked.

  “Yes,” she said after taking another sip of wine. “I do, and there are two witnesses. I’ve talked to the house cleaner who brought the box with the rum balls in and saw him open them. She said he offered them to her and said he didn’t like them. And there are two women from the Literary Guild who saw how drunk he was. One of them took his keys and gave them to Robin Hilliard. The other told me how Olivia Benedict pushed to drive Hill Roland home. I mean, he really does seem to be a victim of circumstances. You know what’s worrying me most about it?”

  “What?”

  “That it may never be solved at all,” she said, “That it was a crazy, obsessed person who just happened to poison the wrong person.”

  “But if that person hates Hill Roland that much,” Jeremy said. “Maybe there’ll be another attempt.”

  Taneesha frowned.

  Jeremy smiled, “Enough shop talk. Tell me more about this upstairs apartment you’re going to rent.”

  Later that evening, after a fit of frustrated rage, the poisoner accepted the fact that, by all news accounts on the internet, the author was as alive as ever, and maybe not even in any trouble. The rum ball plan, as clever as it had seemed, had been flawed by an excess of caution. Some risks would have to be taken next time, so there should be no room for error or collateral damage.

  Not yet, though. Hill Roland, if he had any common sense at all, would know that the rum balls were meant for him, and he’d be more vigilant. Wait a little while. Let him relax and let his guard down.

  But not too long.

  CHAPTER 7

  On Sunday morning Buck and Charmaine Roland decided not to go to church since neither of them wanted to face concerned questions about the dead girl at the old family home.

  “I wonder if they’re really going to fix the house up.” Charmaine said, sipping on a canned diet drink, while Buck made himself a breakfast of bacon and eggs. “It looked like a mess to me.”

  “They’re going to fix it up,” Buck said. “Jaybird said Hill was planning to put a bunch of money into it, and that Megan wants to make a showcase of it. She had some architect friend of hers fly down and check it out before they made t
heir last offer, and she’s going to have an interior design team come in. He said Megan loves the house, but she wasn’t going along with buying it unless it was a place she could show off to her New York friends.”

  “When did you hear all that?” Charmaine said, looking cross. “You didn’t tell me you talked to Jaybird about it. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Buck lifted four slices of bacon from the frying pan to a stack of paper towels, turned down the heat and poured in the eggs.

  He shrugged. In fact, he hadn’t told her because he was a little embarrassed at having to hear his brother’s plans from Jaybird Hilliard, and also because he expected she might want to renovate their house again, or even build a new one.

  This morning he thought she needed taking down a peg or two.

  “I didn’t think you were interested in them or the house,” he said, “But I doubt we’ll ever see the inside of it again after the way you talked to Megan last night.”

  “Oh, now you’re taking her side? Well, what about the way you yelled at Hill?”

  “Hill’s my little brother. I’ve yelled at him before and I’ll yell at him again, but you may recall that I didn’t ask you to go over there with me. When we were driving over there, I asked you just to stay out of it and behave yourself, and you had to go and jump on Megan like a chicken on a junebug.”

  “Well she jumped right back, didn’t she?” Charmaine said. “She practically threw us out of the house.”

  She was scowling as Buck took his heaping plate of bacon and eggs to the den to watch television as he ate.

  Underneath Charmaine’s bravado, there was a worried woman. A vision of that old house redone in splendor was sinking in. She could remember how hard she had fought to get it sold, but now houses like that seemed to be what rich people wanted.

  She imagined the old place with shining hardwood floors and all new furniture. Probably, she thought, Megan would insist on one of those dream kitchens with granite countertops and stainless steel appliances, even though neither of them cooked. Maybe there would even be magazine articles since Hill was famous now.

  She looked around at her own kitchen and remembered the very moment she had heard the word “dated” on that television show, and had first doubted her preference for golden oak.

  She imagined Megan hosting parties, maybe even opening the house for next year’s Magnolia Holiday Tour of Homes. That front room would easily hold a 10 ft. tree.

  Maybe, she thought, she was going about this the wrong way. Maybe she should have one of her brunches for Megan, just to introduce her to a few friends, and help her start fitting in to Merchantsville… maybe even get her to talk Hill into joining the country club.

  As for the little unpleasantness the night before, well, they had all been under a stress, Charmaine told herself, but it was really Hill’s fault, not Megan’s.

  Hill, Charmaine thought with a frown, had never seemed to care what anybody thought of him. He had been that way even in high school, just in his own world, reading books. She remembered trying to flirt with him a few times just for fun, just to see if she could get him to pay attention to her, because he really was cute looking.

  She had even run her fingers through his hair once, and brushing it out of his eyes while he was reading some beat-up paperback book in the lunchroom. She had gotten his attention then, though not the kind she was looking for. He had looked up from the book and asked her, “Don’t you have some cheerleading to do?”

  She had never liked him after that, but then, she thought, she had never liked Buck that much when they were in high school, either, or even given him a second thought. It was funny how things turned out. She thought about it, running through her mental yearbook.

  Sam Bailey, she finally decided, was the only one who turned out pretty much the way she would have expected – still good-looking, still in Merchantsville, following in his daddy’s footsteps. Of course, nobody would have figured on Rhonda leaving him with that little girl, and nobody could have imagined his marrying that girl at the newspaper who couldn’t be a day past 25.

  On the other side of town, Hunter was carefully turning the brittle pages of Gone Are the Days. She had read the first four stories and thought to herself that it was a pity that the book was burdened with the plantation setting because the stories were lively and often funny and the author was clearly writing from a happy childhood.

  Even so, it just wasn’t a book she wanted Bethie to read because the author, without a single stereotype or racially-tinged word, had still based these happy stories in a world where some children and their whole families were owned by other families.

  The surprising thing, though, was how well-written it was – almost poetic in places with descriptions of the woods and creeks beyond the planted fields, of the banks of the river, and an old ferry that took people across the river. She found herself imagining it in Magnolia County terms.

  She went to her computer to do a search on Col. Jimmy Sheffield, and found a biographical sketch on a Georgia History website. It made reference to his civil war service, his later work as an attorney in Chaneyville, Georgia, and the publication of Gone Are the Days posthumously by his wife, Sarah Jane Sheffield.

  There was no reference to Merchantsville or Magnolia County, which Hunter found disappointing. She went and found Sam’s copy of “The History of Magnolia County,” which had been published in the early 1930’s and was reliable mostly for locating dates and tracing the genealogy of the families that had paid to be in it.

  She looked for Sheffield in the index and there he was, but with only a bare mention. Married to Lorena Hilliard, 1860. She died in 1891. There were two children from the marriage, Sophronia “Sophie” Louise Sheffield and James “Jamie” Hilliard Sheffield. Sophie married Burton Roland, attorney and member of the Georgia General Assembly, and had three children. She and her husband were both still living when the history was published.

  There was nothing more on the Sheffield line, other than a mention of James Hilliard Sheffield as an attorney in Atlanta. That, she thought, getting familiar with the names, would be Sophie’s brother. Gone Are the Days was not mentioned at all.

  She decided that the author of the book very well might be an entirely different Jimmy Sheffield. Maybe that would account for a vague recollection on Robin’s part. She wondered, too if Sophie and Burton Roland were Hill Roland’s ancestors, and when she turned the page past the genealogy, she found her answer in a black and white photo of the home Hill and Megan Roland lived in now.

  She called her former landlady, and after expressing her delight that Taneesha Martin was going to move into her old upstairs apartment, she asked, “Have you ever heard of Col. Jimmy Sheffield?”

  “Oh, that’s the man who wrote that old children’s book, isn’t it?” Miss Rose answered.

  “Yes,” Hunter said, “And I just looked him up online and it said he lived in Chaneyville, but Robin has said he thought he lived here, and when I looked in the county history, I found a Jimmy Sheffield, married to a Lorena Hilliard back before the civil war. Apparently she died young and they had two children, but there’s no further mention of him and no mention of the book.”

  “Could it just be a different Jimmy Sheffield?” Miss Rose said. “I never have known any Sheffields around here, or maybe he moved on after she passed away and they decided he didn’t deserve much space. You said they had children?”

  “Yes, James and Sophronia, known as “Sophie” and she married Burton Roland. They lived in the house that Hill Roland lives in now.”

  “Oh my goodness, of course I remember Sophie Roland,” Miss Rose said. “She just about ran every women’s club in town and the whole Methodist Church. She lived way up into her 90s and stayed right there in her house. I don’t know about her parents though. Maybe Annie Laurie Wooten would know something. She’s got all the historical society files now.”

  Annie Laurie Wooten didn’t answer her telephone. Hunter left a message, thought a
bout reading more of Gone Are the Days, went to look for Hill Roland’s Sweet Sorrow instead.

  Sam was reading it.

  The next day at work, she tried calling Annie Laurie Wooten again, but the answering machine was still on. This time she left a longer message, “I was calling to find out if you knew anything about Col. Jimmy Sheffield, the author of Gone Are the Days . I’ve been told he lived here in Merchantsville, and I’ve found his name in the history but…”

  The message was cut off.

  Hunter was about to call back and complete it when she looked up to see that Tyler Bankston had rolled his wheelchair up to her desk.

  “Col. Jimmy Sheffield definitely lived here,” he said, “but you won’t find much about him in the county history because his daughter, Sophie Roland, preferred not to list him as the author of that book and my great-uncle, who was editor, refused to include her passage that said her mother wrote the stories, because there was no proof of it one way or the other. All the same, he caved in and didn’t say that the old man did write the book. I don’t know who was right, but I do know that Sophie Roland was formidable.”

  “You knew her?”

  “Only as an old lady,” he said, “ and really just to speak to, but my Aunt Mary Grace knew her quite well and she told me that Sophie Roland was just fixated on that book and insisted that her mother wrote every word of it and her stepmother published it under her father’s name posthumously.”

  “You mean after the mother died or after the father died?” Hunter asked, confused.

  “Years after the mother died. Col. Jimmy, if he ever was a colonel, moved to Chaneyville and had a whole new family. I had the impression there was no contact between the families after he passed on.”

  “Did you ever read the book?” Hunter asked.

  “My teacher read it to us in second grade,” Tyler said. “All I remember is that there were some funny parts about animals, and some raft floating down the creek and into the river.”

  “Two of the children in it were slaves,” Hunter said.