An awkward silence followed and they concentrated on their food.
“If we can change the subject,” Hill finally said to Hunter. “When do you want to do that interview you asked me about at the book signing? I mean the one about moving back home and my writing plans?”
“When’s a good time for you two?” Hunter asked, remembering his earlier explanation that his wife liked to be at his interviews.
She glanced at Megan, who raised her eyebrows and shrugged.
Hunter thought it through quickly. She knew that Tyler wasn’t going to want a front page feature story on Hill Roland’s writing career a week after a front page story about a young woman dying in his home. Still, once she had the interview, the timing of publication would be up to her and her boss. If something broke in the Olivia Benedict poisoning case, she could always delay publication of the interview.
“It would really be a help to me if we could go ahead with it,” Hill said with a smile. “Maybe you can be my muse. I’m kind of blocked after all this mess this week. It just can’t be this afternoon. We’re going out to look at some German Shepherds when we leave here.”
“I’m on deadline today anyway,” Hunter said. “But tomorrow afternoon would be good for me.”
“Right,” he said, “I forgot about the paper coming out tomorrow. Maybe you can bring a copy with you so I can see what size headline I got.”
He seemed to be leaving Megan out of the discussion, so Hunter turned and asked her, “Will 1:30 tomorrow be good? I’d like to get a photo of the two of you out in front of the house.”
Her cell phone buzzed. It was Novena.
“Annie Laurie Wooten is here to see you,” she said. “Are you going to be back soon, or…”
“I was just about to come back,” Hunter said. “Tell her if she wants to wait, I’ll be there in five minutes.”
Back at work Hunter found the president of the Magnolia County Historical Society waiting by her desk.
Annie Laurie Wooten was in her mid-70s, a tall, angular woman who walked with a three pronged metal cane. Her white hair was pulled upward in a bun.
Novena was nowhere in sight, and Tyler’s door was closed.
“I was downtown anyway, so I thought I’d just come by,” she said. “I got your messages. Are you really going to do a story on that old book?”
“I’m not sure,” Hunter said. “I might just write a column. I got interested after Robin Hilliard loaned us a copy that Miss Mae-Lula had. I knew a little bit about it from a college course I had in children’s literature, but I didn’t know the author had a Merchantsville connection – if he did…”
Annie Laurie’s eyes narrowed, and Hunter explained.
“I mean, after I researched it a bit, I wasn’t sure the Jimmy Sheffield mentioned in the county history was the same one who wrote the book.”
“Oh, he definitely was,” Annie Laurie said with a tone of authority, “And we can certainly claim him as a Civil War hero and the ancestor of a noted local family, but he didn’t write the book here. He was married to one of the Hilliards – the sister of Elijah Hilliard in fact — and after she died, he remarried and moved back to Chaneyville.
“One reason I know about this,” she added, sitting up a little straighter, “is that my cousin Sandra Sheffield’s husband is a descendant of his. Sandra is mayor of Chaneyville. The first lady mayor they ever had. She’s doing everything she can to put that little town on the map and bring in tourism. We’re all so proud of her.”
“I can see why you would be,” Hunter said.
“Anyway,” Annie Laurie continued, “Last year they finally got a historical marker put up at Col. Jimmy Sheffield’s birthplace. They tried to get all the descendants together and have a kind of family reunion at the same time. Buck Roland was there, because he’s one of the descendants and Pine County is in his senate district. I helped arrange that. He can tell you about it. I’m afraid I had to miss it. I have such a busy schedule between the Historical Society and the Literary Guild, and my church, of course.”
“Tyler said there was some kind of disagreement in the family about whether he wrote the book or his wife did,” Hunter said cautiously.
Annie Laurie looked toward Tyler’s office and saw that the door was shut.
“That’s Tyler Bankston for you,” she said, lowering her voice to a near whisper. “Always digging up old bones. I’ve read his version of the history of the Hilliard Conservatory, and I promise you he may have won a lot of prizes as a journalist, but he’s no kind of historian.”
She glanced at the door again and continued in a sarcastic tone.
“I suppose he thinks the State of Georgia puts up historical markers without doing any research. The truth is that Sophie Roland just never could accept her father’s getting married a second time, and, of course, she was proud of her mother’s being a Hilliard, so naturally she wanted her to have the credit. I can’t believe he’d bring up that old nonsense.”
Hunter was a little shocked by the intensity of the older woman’s response.
“He didn’t say that he thought the wife wrote it,” she said. “He just said there was some disagreement.”
Annie Laurie didn’t seem to notice. She was testing her cane, engineering herself out of the chair to leave, and changing the subject.
“We’re all so glad you’ll be staying here in Merchantsville,” she said. “You do such nice articles. I do hope it won’t be all over the paper that Hill Roland was drunk at our Literary Guild event.”
Novena peeked out of Tyler’s office a few minutes later.
“Thank the Lord she’s gone. That woman drives me crazy.”
At home, Hunter made meat loaf, baked potatoes and green peas. It was nothing fancy, but she was determined to do her share.
At the table, Bethie was full of talk about her Halloween costume.
“I don’t want to be a princess again,” she said. I’ve been a princess every single year. I want to be like Miss Taneesha, like a sheriff, but a girl one. I could wear brown pants and a brown shirt and a black belt. Can you lend me some handcuffs, Daddy, and a badge? And can I get a toy gun?”
Hunter smiled, glad to let Sam handle that one.
“Being a sheriff is really boring,” Sam said, helping himself to more mashed potatoes. “Maybe you ought to be a reporter like your mom.”
“Now that would be really, really boring,” Hunter said. “How about Wonder Woman? We can look on-line and see what we can find. It’s still two weeks off. We’ve got time to order something.”
“Maybe they’ll have police woman costumes,” Bethie said.
Later, their on-line search resulted in Bethie’s falling immediately in love with a royal blue princess costume. And with a little keyboard work, the Halloween costume was on its way.
After Bethie was in bed with two of the cats snuggling in beside her, Hunter told Sam about her lunchtime conversation with Hill and Megan Roland.
“What’s your impression of that marriage?” he asked.
Hunter thought about it.
“I think right now they’re both stressed,” she finally said. “It’s like they’ve had a big fight and gotten back together, but things are still tense.”
Sam considered this and nodded.
Katie the Calico arrived from wherever she had been hiding to get away from the younger generation of cats. She jumped onto Hunter’s lap.
Sam reached for his copy of Hill Roland’s latest book – the one Hunter had bought at the book signing.
“What’s your impression of their marriage?” Hunter asked, scratching Katie’s back.
“I think he had better stick to writing about vampires,” he said as he opened the book. “Because he sure doesn’t have a clue about real people.”
A moment later he said, “Hey, he dedicated this one to his great-grandmother, Miss Sophie. I remember her.”
“You do?”
“She was way up in her nineties and in a wheelchair when we
were little kids. Hill had a birthday party – I guess we were probably in first grade – and she read a story to us.”
“Well,” Hunter said. “You’ve just given me the first question for my interview with Hill Roland.”
CHAPTER 9
“Her name is Flannery,” Hill Roland told Hunter the next afternoon.
Flannery was a black and tan German Shepherd, half grown with outsized paws and a tail in perpetual motion.
“She’s a good dog,” Megan said. “Already housebroken, thank heavens. Of course she misses her doggie family, so she had to sleep in our bed last night.”
She was almost talking in baby talk. The dog bounded over to her.
“Sit,” Megan said.
The dog sat. Megan and Hill said, “Good girl!” in unison, and Megan gave the dog a biscuit.
Hunter, who had brought Olivia Benedict’s manuscript and quietly handed it to Megan at the door, was happy to see that they were in harmony about the dog. They were more relaxed than they had been the day before.
A new copy of The Messenger was on the coffee table, and Hill said, “I drove out and got one. I won’t say I enjoyed reading your story, but it’s the first one I’ve read about this mess that was accurate.”
Megan nodded, and the subject was closed.
“It’s a beautiful house,” Hunter said, looking around. She understood why Hill Roland would want to live in his childhood home. From the outside it was an architectural fantasy of turrets and towers. Inside, it was a soothing home with perfectly proportioned rooms, gleaming hardwood floors and sunlight pouring through the windows.
“I’m going to take Flannery out for a walk while you two talk,” Megan said, clipping a leash to the dog’s collar and then speaking to the dog who was looking up at her in happy expectation.
“You’re going to help me get my exercise, aren’t you, good girl?” she said.
“She has usually stayed around for my interviews,” Hill said after Megan left. “I guess she trusts you.”
“Do you mind if I use my tape recorder,” Hunter asked. “I’ll mainly go by my notes, but I like to have a backup when I’m doing a lot of direct quotes.”
“Fine with me,” he said. “Where do you want to start?”
“Well, actually,” she said, starting the recorder and opening her notebook. “I’d like to ask you who wrote Gone Are the Days?
He looked astonished and then smiled.
“You couldn’t start at a better place,” he said. “That’s what my next book is going to be about: the theft of Lorena Hilliard Sheffield’s stories by that conniving Sarah Jane. Megan didn’t tell you, did she?”
“No, she hasn’t mentioned it. It’s kind of an accident that I know about it at all.”
Hunter explained her experience with the book, and wound up saying, “You do know that some people would disagree with you about the authorship?”
“Of course I do,” he said, laughing. “My brother the politician even went to some big event in Chaneyville where they put up a historic marker for Col. Jimmy. I doubt they’ll be happy with my book.”
“It wasn’t the old man’s fault, though,” he added. “Nobody ever thought that he claimed the stories. It was his second wife who did that, and it was after his death.”
“Is there an original manuscript?” Hunter asked.
“There was at one point,” Hill said, “My great-grandmother remembered it well. It was in a paper portfolio, tied with ribbons. If it still exists, which is unlikely since the publishing house is long out of business, it’s in Lorena’s handwriting. I don’t need that, though. I’m writing a novel, not a history. “
“One reason I wanted to come home,” he continued, “was to be in touch with Lorena Hilliard’s world – the river and the creeks, the farmlands, the woods. That plantation she wrote about was here in what’s now Magnolia County. There’s no river near Chaneyville.”
“Is this for the interview?” Hunter asked. “How much do you want to say in advance about the book itself?”
“Let’s just talk and I’ll let you figure out what you want to write about it,” he said. “The way I see it is that Col. Jimmy, who was a good-looking devil when he was young, showed up here in Merchantsville to practice law. He married the daughter of the major landowner in this whole area. I don’t know that her family disapproved, but I’m assuming they weren’t thrilled, and they were even less thrilled when he turned out to be a mediocre lawyer with a drinking problem.”
“Did they live in this house?” Hunter asked.
“They lived in a house on this land,” Hill said, “Lorena’s father still owned it when she died. Lorena had Sophie and then she had Jamie 12 years later, and died of what they used to call childbed fever.
“Sophie and her brother Jamie went to live with the Hilliards after Lorena’s death. They inherited the old house and land and eventually Sophie and her husband, who was a very successful lawyer, had the old house torn down and built this one. By that time Col. Jimmy had been living in Chaneyville for years.”
“There was talk about his second marriage,” Hill said. “She was 17, and apparently wasn’t accepted by the Merchantsville ladies. It was a bit of a scandal.”
Hunter scribbled in her notebook without looking up.
“Are you thinking Lorena was planning to have her stories published?” Hunter asked.
“I don’t know,” Hill said, “At that time, people with money frequently had their poetry or stories published at their own expense, and the Hilliards certainly had money, but I don’t imagine that Col. Jimmy did.”
He got up.
“Come on, let me show you their picture.”
In his study, he pointed out the tinted photograph of the mother and daughter.
“They were both lovely,” Hunter said.
“And close,” Hill said. “Now, let me show you something else.”
He took a battered book from the top drawer of his desk, and Hunter understood in a moment what it was: another copy of Gone Are the Days but with a different cover, handmade with fading ink proclaiming it the work of Lorena Hilliard Sheffield.
She handled it carefully, noting that the illustrations she had found so crude in the book had been cut out raggedly.
“I think my great-grandmother attacked the book with a pair of scissors,” Hill said with a grin.
He paused. “There are things I don’t know about Lorena,” he said, “but I know a lot about Sophie. Sophie stayed angry about the book for decades. It was the great family ordeal – Sophie’s never letting it go – her insistence that the stories were her mother’s. She took the battle all over town. She put up a major fight to put in the county history that her mother was the author, and she didn’t win, but she did succeed in Col. Jimmy being relegated to a mere mention. She got it taken off the library shelves, too. In fact, my granddad said that she was obsessed and that he was sick of hearing about it by the time he was 10 years old. My father just laughed about it, but that was after Grandma Sophie died.”
“But you believed that she was right?”
“Oh, I think they all believed she was right,” he said. “What they didn’t believe,” he said,” was that it mattered, and somehow, the more determined she got, the more they got tired of hearing about it.”
An hour later when Megan returned, a little breathless from her long walk with Flannery, the interview had really just begun. When Hunter left, it was with a plan for a second session because she had more than she needed about the stolen stories, but less than she needed about Hill Roland’s choosing Merchantsville over New York City, and putting an end to the series that had made his fortune.
They went outside and Hunter took photos – first of Hill with the house in the background, then of Hill with the dog sitting beside him and the house in the background, and finally one of Hill and Megan sitting on the front porch steps with the dog.
“I don’t want my picture in the paper,” Megan said, looking over Hunter’s shoul
der at the digital images, “But I really would like to have copies of these.”
It had been a good interview, a good visit in a beautiful old house. Hunter had enjoyed seeing Hill Roland and his wife happy with their new dog, more comfortable with each other than she had seen them before.
She drove home thinking that maybe the move to Merchantsville would work out for Megan Brooks-Roland after all, and maybe Hill Roland was on the verge of doing his best work.
CHAPTER 10
At mid-morning on Thursday, Hunter was having a lesson in biscuit baking. It had begun with very specific instructions about the oven temperature.
“Never trust an oven,” Miss Rose Tyndale said. “Always have an oven thermometer. I took mine over to Hilliard House to teach Colin and Robin a few things, and that oven over there was 25 degrees off.”
“The biscuit Colin gave me was perfect,” Hunter said, “That’s why I called to see if you’d teach me, too.”
“It would not have been perfect if we hadn’t gotten the temperature right,” Miss Rose said with a sniff. “I cannot believe that with all the money Robin spent on that house, he’s still using Mae-Lula’s old stove. I think I’ve talked them into upgrading.”
She looked over Hunter’s shoulder.
“Now if the dough isn’t coming together right – which it isn’t – try adding just a tablespoon of water. You don’t want to add more cream, because we need the rest for the second batch.”
The recipe for whipping cream biscuits was a simple one involving mixing flour, baking powder and a pinch of salt and adding heavy cream. Hunter measured a tablespoon of water and added it to the sticky mixture. With a little more stirring, it came together as a ball of dough.
Miss Rose then supervised the dusting of a wooden bread board with flour, and the turning out of the ball of dough.
“Now some people use a rolling pin at this point,” Miss Rose said, “but I get better results by just patting the dough out lightly with my hands after I sprinkle a tiny bit of flour on it.”
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