“That’s real Lifestyle writing,” Tyler said.
“I don’t see anything wrong with it,” Novena, the Lifestyle Editor, said.
“Let me continue,” Hunter said with a grin. “You two can argue later.”
Mayor Sandra Sheffield, whose husband, Ralph Sheffield is a direct descendant of James Lanier Sheffield, a veteran of the War Between the States and Pine County civic leader, affectionately known as “Colonel Jimmy,” was Mistress of Ceremonies at the gala occasion.
“I take it back,” Tyler said. “The Mayor wrote it.”
Hunter smiled and continued.
Mayor Sheffield welcomed the special guests, including State Senator Arlington “Arlie” Freeman and Barnett “Buck” Roland, candidate for State Senator who is also a direct descendant of “Colonel Jimmy.” All members of the Chaneyville City Council were present, as were the Rev. Thomas “Tommy” Bolton of Chaneyville United Methodist Church and the Rev. William “Billy” Rodgers of Chaneyville Baptist Church.
Mayor Sheffield announced that the Chaneyville Public Library has been gifted with a collection of the papers of “Colonel Jimmy,” donated by his great-granddaughter, Twilla Sheffield Tawson of Vidalia, who was unable to attend the special ceremony.
“Gifted!” Tyler growled.
Hunter laughed and went on reading.
A highlight of the program was a dramatic presentation by another direct descendant of “Colonel Jimmy”, Professor James Sheffield Tolliver, who gave a dramatic impersonation of “Colonel Jimmy”, expressing his love of the Old South, and reading excerpts from “Gone Are the Days.” Mindy Sheffield, eight, and Trevor Sheffield, five , both direct descendants of “Col. Jimmy” and grandchildren of the Mayor and her husband, were dressed in period costume as children of the Old South, and joined Professor Tolliver beside the historic marker as he read the stories.
At the close of the program, everyone joined in singing “Dixie.”
The historic marker was obtained through the efforts of Mayor Sheffield prior to her election, with supplementary funds raised by the Pine County Chapter of the Daughters of the Old South, and with the support of State Senator Arlie Freeman who also sponsored a resolution in the Georgia General Assembly belatedly recognizing “Colonel Jimmy” for his literary, patriotic and civic contributions to Pine County and the State of Georgia.
Senator Freeman, who will retire at the end of this year, introduced Barnett “Buck” Roland, an attorney from Merchantsville, as his successor. Mr. Roland spoke about the accomplishments of Senator Freeman, thanked Mayor Sheffield for inviting him to the event honoring his great-great grandfather, and asked for everyone’s vote in the upcoming primary election. The other candidate for the office, Darla Jean Cullen, was also present and spoke briefly on the importance of states’ rights, as well as serving snow cones from her campaign van.
Following the program, those in attendance were invited to Mayor Sheffield’s home for refreshments, which included pimiento cheese sandwiches, cream puffs with chicken salad, cheese straws, a chocolate fountain, and lime punch with sherbet.
“Absolutely no doubt written by Mayor Sheffield,” Tyler concluded. “Patsy’s right. Her paper’s going down the drain.”
“I haven’t heard anybody sing “Dixie” in years,” Novena said, “And what on earth is ‘The Daughters of the Old South’. I thought it was the United Daughters of the Confederacy.”
“That sounds like they couldn’t get into the U.D.C.” Tyler said. “That Col. Jimmy impersonator sounds like someone you might want to talk to,” Tyler said to Hunter. “If he’s really a Professor, he might have some historical background, or at least be good for quotes.”
“I think I might talk to Buck Roland first, “Hunter said. “If he went to that event at all, it makes me wonder if he shares Hill’s point of view about who wrote that book.”
“Well, he was campaigning then, and I’m sure he was there to get votes, regardless of ancestral disputes,” Tyler said.
“Let’s see the picture,” Novena said. “I want to see this famous cousin of Annie Laurie Wooten’s.”
Mayor Sheffield looked nothing like her gaunt cousin. She was short and plump with fluffy dark hair and was dressed in her Sunday best, smiling at the camera.
The man who portrayed “Colonel Jimmy” had chosen a white suit and a handlebar mustache that gave him a Mark Twain look. He had a cane in his left hand and was clutching a small book to his chest.
Hunter spotted Buck Roland, off to one side, squinting into the sun.
“I definitely think I’ll start with Buck,” she said.
“Oh Lord, that was awful,” Buck Roland said late that afternoon, when she showed him a copy of the photograph and the story.
She had explained to him on the phone that she needed some background for a story she planned to write about his brother, and he seemed glad to help.
They were sitting in the well-furnished office where he practiced law. Hunter knew that being a State Senator probably meant a loss of income for him during the spring when the General Assembly, but he appeared to thrive on it. The walls of his office were covered with diplomas, proclamations, framed newspaper endorsements and photos of him shaking hands with those higher up the ladder of government.
He looked at the newspaper photo again and shook his head woefully.
“That,” he said, stabbing it with his finger, “was the day I almost decided I wasn’t cut out for politics.”
“That bad?” Hunter asked.
“Have you ever been bitten by fire ants?” he asked her.
“Yes,” she said with a shudder. “They’re awful.”
“Awful is right,” he said, “It must have been 95 degrees and we were out in this field, sitting on metal folding chairs with no shade, and this thing went on and on, so I decided I had to get up and get one of my opponent’s snow cones or die of dehydration, and damned if I didn’t stir up a fire ant nest.”
“Oh, you poor thing,” Hunter said. “That happened to me once at a groundbreaking ceremony.”
“Well, I hope you didn’t have on slacks,” he said. “I was slapping those ants every which way, but they were up to my knees and I couldn’t see them, and I had to speak after that. Besides, it something I shouldn’t have gone to in the first place, because I knew perfectly well that Col. Jimmy Sheffield didn’t write that book.”
His voice softened a little.
“Hill really laughed when I told him about it,” he said. “He said it was Grandma Sophie’s revenge. You know his next book was going to be about our great-great-grandmother’s being the real author of Gone Are the Days?
Hunter was relieved to know that Buck knew about the book. She had worried a little about the possibility that she knew something about his late brother that he had never heard before.
“So you agree with him that Lorena Hilliard Sheffield wrote it?” she asked.
“None of us – I mean Lorena’s descendants — have ever really doubted that,” Buck said. “I couldn’t see Buck’s book on the subject being a best-seller like the vampire books, but it sure would have started an uproar in Chaneyville, because now they’ve got that historic marker, and some collection of the old man’s papers in the library, and that mayor of theirs is trying to get their state highway named after Colonel Jimmy. She thinks they’re going to get some tourism out of it.”
He took another look at the photo and chuckled.
“Like anybody is going to take a detour to Chaneyville on their way to Florida,” he said.
He checked himself and said, “You promised this wasn’t on the record.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Hunter said. “Let me tell you about the story I’m working on, and you’ll understand why I came over.”
When she finished explaining about the interview she had taped with Hill Roland, and her plan to bring the disputed authorship out into the open, Buck’s first question was, “Have you talked with Megan about this? Is she okay with it?”
“Too much Roland?” he asked with a disarming grin.
“Yes, you could put it that way,” she said, “but also, if they make a second arrest – you know, Sam thinks that somebody put Nathan Wood up to this or paid him – well, it would be better for the whole thing to be settled.”
“Anyway,” she added, “I really need to present the other side, too, and I was wondering what you thought of that Professor Tolliver. How was his portrayal?”
“Never having known my great-great-grandfather,” Buck said, “I couldn’t really say. He looked like Mark Twain to me, but he’s a good actor and speaker.”
“Do you think he researched the part?”
“Well, how could he, really?” Buck said. “Colonel Jimmy, from what little I know, wasn’t all that impressive. I know that he didn’t succeed as a lawyer here, and the house he and Lorena lived in here belonged to her father. The high point of his career seems to be that he was elected probate judge after he moved back to Chaneyville. I think this guy just made up a personality he thought his audience would like, and he made Colonel Jimmy some kind of spokesman for states’ rights, which got some applause. I would have stayed and asked him where he got that part, except I had to get to a drugstore and put something on those fire ant bites. “
He grimaced at the memory.
“They aren’t called fire ants for nothing,” she said.
“True,” he said, “But to get back to your main question,” he said. “I don’t think Professor what’s-his-name is any kind of expert. I think he’s just enjoying putting on a show, and all that stuff about states’ rights was pretty much what any veteran of the Civil War would say. Oh, and not that it matters, but that mustache is a fake. The last thing I saw when I was heading for my care was his peeling that mustache off so he could eat a snow cone.”
Hunter laughed out loud, and then noticed his glancing at his watch, and started wrapping things up.
“One more question,” she said. “Did you ever hear any details about that collection of Col. Jimmy’s papers? I’m wondering if I need to take a look at them.”
“That’s probably old bills and legal briefs and probate court records,” Buck said. “But I guess I’d check those out if I were you. Maybe there’s something in there. Of course, I’m a lawyer, not a writer, but I’d say that it would be due diligence to go through the papers just in case all of us Rolands are wrong and the original manuscript is there in the old man’s handwriting.”
“You don’t think…” Hunter began.
“No, I don’t think there’s any such thing,” he said, “They’d have been carrying on about it if they had the manuscript. But I told Hill the same thing – that if there were papers, he should at least go through them – and not write the book and then have somebody blindside him with something he didn’t know about.”
“Was he going to take your advice?” Hunter asked.
“I doubt it,” Buck said, and laughed. “He just kept saying it was going to be a novel anyway. But you’re not writing fiction, are you?”
“You’re right,” Hunter said, getting up. “I’m not. I’ll go take a look at those papers.”
“And watch out for fire ants if you go down there,” Buck said, getting up to shake her hand.
At supper, Sam was eating methodically, frowning from time to time.
“Would you like some more potatoes,” Hunter asked him. “I kept them warm on the stove.”
He shook his head without answering.
“He gets this way sometimes,” Bethie said across the table to Hunter, “It’s when he’s worrying about sheriff stuff.”
Hunter glanced at Sam, who didn’t seem to have heard his daughter explaining his behavior.
“I don’t think he’s worrying,” Hunter said, “I think he’s trying to figure out a problem.”
“Well, it’s a sheriff problem,” Bethie said, reaching for another biscuit. “It’s not about me and you. That’s what Grandma Mary says.”
Sam looked up and smiled at Bethie when he heard his mother’s name.
“Don’t mind me,” he said to Hunter, and went back to his silence.
He got up finally, said he had enjoyed his dinner, and went out the back door with Flannery right beside him. He took her leash off a hook near the back door and snapped it to her collar.
Flannery’s leg seemed to be getting stronger each day, but he still picked her up and carried her down the back stairs to the yard. Then he let her set the pace and, as Hunter watched from the kitchen window, they began a meandering walk around the dark back yard.
Bethie, with some urging, went to do her homework. Hunter left the dishes for Sam to load into the dishwasher and went to her computer to see if she could locate James Sheffield Tolliver just out of curiosity.
It didn’t take long. He had a badly designed web page, offering to bring “one of the South’s beloved storytellers and patriots to life.”
She decided that Buck Roland’s advice was sound, and if she interviewed the man, he’d probably be driving to Merchantsville to get a copy of the paper. She went on to check her e-mail and found a long rambling note from her friend Nikki in Atlanta.
Another boyfriend hadn’t worked out. Hunter read the letter with care, and responded with equal care, not adding her usual happy account of married life.
She wrapped it up when Bethie came in and said, “Daddy’s asleep on the sofa. Should I wake him up, or can you check my multiplication?”
“Of course I can,” she said, looking at the sheet of problems, and calling up the calculator on her computer. “You call out the numbers and I’ll see what the calculator gets.”
“Daddy always just looks at them and does them in his head,” Bethie said, sounding a little doubtful.
“I’m sure he does,” Hunter said with a laugh. “But I can’t multiply big numbers in my head, and I trust the calculator more than I trust myself.”
Bethie called out the numbers and Hunter entered them in the calculator one at a time.
“One hundred percent right!” she said when they were done. “I’m really impressed. Let’s have some ice cream to celebrate.”
After Bethie had gone to bed, she found Sam still asleep on the sofa with one cat on his chest and another on the back of the sofa. Flannery, who was lying on the floor by the sofa opened her eyes, and shut them again.
She decided to let him sleep, but got her camera just to have something fun to send to Nikki later on.
It was after 11 p.m. and she was in bed reading when she head the back door open and shut, and knew Sam was awake and taking Flannery out.
“Was it a good nap?” she asked, when he and Flannery arrived in the bedroom a while later.
“Yes,” he said, “Too good. And now I’m probably going to be awake half the night “
She started to tell him about her talk with Buck Roland, but decided that he needed to get his mind off the Rolands.
Instead she told him about Bethie’s multiplication homework.
“And did she get them right?”
“According to the calculator on my computer, she did,” Hunter said.
“There’s a calculator on your computer?” Sam asked. “I wish I’d known that. I’ve been working them out in my head and hoping I was right.”
“She told me that you always worked the problems out in your head,” Hunter said. ”I think she thought I was really slacking.”
“She’ll think I’m slacking the next time,” Sam said. “I hope that calculator will do long division.”
She laughed and he went off to brush his teeth.
When he got into bed, she asked him about how far Chaneyville was from Merchantsville.
“It’s 70 miles or so,” he said. “Why?”
“Can’t you just get the people down there to send you photocopies or something?” Sam asked. “That’s a long drive.”
“I don’t even know what’s in the collection until I see it,” Hunter said, “And don’t worry, Sam. I’ll take my cell phone and we’ll wear our seat belts, and I won’t pick up any hitchhikers and we’ll be back before dark.”
“I’ll make you a map,” Sam said.
“You don’t need to,” Hunter said, “I’d rather use my GPS.”
“But if I make you a map, I’ll know the route you took in case… ”
“Sam Bailey!” Hunter said, laughing and rolling over to hug him. “Stop being so overprotective. I used to live in Atlanta. I am perfectly capable of getting to Chaneyville and back.”
CHAPTER 19
Hunter was glad to have Bethie’s company when Friday arrived. Bethie was excited, too, because she had day off from school, an outing with Hunter all to herself, and a weekend ahead with her Grandma Mary and her Bailey cousins.
It was good that she had plenty to chatter about, because there was little to see. The ride to Chaneyville seemed interminable, with endless acres of fallow fields broken up by scrappy stands of pines. It all seemed flatter and sandier as they got further south. The small towns they drove through made Merchantsville look like a metropolis. When they reached the Pine County line, there were more houses and signs, but everything had a worn-out and tired look.
Then they came to the city limits sign for Chaneyville, and things got more interesting.
“Welcome to Chaneyville, Birthplace of Col. Jimmy Sheffield,” a sign proclaimed.
The country road suddenly became a small town main street, with old homes and big bare-branched trees leading the way to the downtown, which was organized around railroad tracks, a courthouse and a city hall that seemed to be combined with the public library.
When I am Dead, My Dearest: A Hunter Jones Mystery Page 16
