Death Over the Dam (A Hunter Jones Mystery Book 2)

by Charlotte Moore

  COPYRIGHT

  DEATH OVER THE DAM

  A Hunter Jones Mystery

  Charlotte Moore

  Copyright © 2013 by Charlotte Moore. All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission from the author.

  eBook designed by MC Writing

  DEATH OVER

  THE DAM

  A Hunter Jones Mystery

  CHARLOTTE MOORE

  CHAPTER 1

  THE RAIN WAS RELENTLESS.

  It was brought on by a hurricane that used up its winds in Florida and stalled over middle and southeast Georgia. In Magnolia County, it built up from a gray drizzle to intermittent cloudbursts. It settled by daybreak Friday into a steady downpour that turned dirt to mud, created rushing streams along curbs, soaked lawns to the saturation point, defeated windshield wipers and made driving a hazard.

  Hunter Jones would have driven straight home from the Chamber of Commerce meeting if it hadn’t been payday. She was driving barefoot because her shoes had turned squishy. She got her car parked, tucked her shoes under her left arm and checked her shoulder bag to make sure her camera was under her reporter’s notebook. Then she reached into the back seat for her umbrella and opened the door. She was soaked before she got the umbrella open.

  By the time she made it through the front door of the Merchantsville Messenger, her long gauzy skirt was wet halfway up to her knees, and her ruffled pink silk shirt was a soggy, clinging mess. So much for the poetic look.

  She hurled her umbrella to the floor, and said, “I have never in my life seen rain like this.”

  It struck her as she said it that it was no exaggeration. She really hadn’t ever seen such rain before, but nobody in the office seemed impressed. She peeled her shirt away from her body, and then went looking for a rubber band in her middle desk drawer so that she could pull her blonde curls into a messy ponytail.

  Her editor, Tyler Bankston, rolled his wheelchair out of his office, one hand full of white envelopes. He usually seemed to enjoy handing out paychecks, but this time he looked ill tempered.

  “I’ve been listening to the radio. Either Will Roy Johnson has lost his mind or those guys at the National Weather Service are all college freshmen. They’re saying that the river is going to crest at 27 feet by tomorrow. I’ll believe that when I see it. “

  Novena Baxter, the Messenger’s Lifestyle Editor and Advertising Manager, wasn’t listening to him. She was on the phone, looking bothered. She had gotten a new permanent and then her hair had gotten soaked. It was emitting a chemical smell. She put down the phone and turned to glare at Tyler.

  “That was Bobby,” she said, accepting her paycheck with no comment. “He says that Willatchee Creek is about to cover the bridge and I’d better get home while I can still get there. I should’ve gone home after lunch like I told you. And I’m telling you right now, I’m not driving through flood water to cover that ribbon cutting in Cathay tomorrow.”

  “It’s not going to be that bad,” Tyler said, handing her one of the envelopes. “And even if the creek bridges get flooded, you can go the long way and take one of the river bridges.”

  Novena looked doubtful.

  “You’re talking about driving 20 miles both ways, at the very least,” she said. “If Willatchee’s rising, so is Horsehead and so is Kick Back. They’re all rising and the river’s rising with them.”

  “So what?” Tyler said, “You’d make a 40 mile round trip to buy a cut-up chicken on sale.”

  “Hey, you two!” Hunter said. “If it’s just a ribbon cutting, I’ll go and cover it.”

  “You won’t if the river floods,” Novena said.

  “We haven’t had a real flood since the levee was built,” Tyler said.

  Unlike her boss and her co-worker, Hunter had not grown up in Magnolia County, and she was having a little trouble following the argument.

  The creek bridges she drove across regularly were, for her, barely noticeable extensions of the highway. She only knew the creeks were there because of the little highway signs proclaiming their names—like Horsehead, Dogtrot or Timpoochee. They were nothing more than wandering streams with red clay banks. The bridges had metal rails on either side, but with most of them, you’d have to stop your car and get out to see the water down below.

  The river bridges were far more imposing, but as for the river that ran right down the center of the county, it certainly seemed tame enough. The one time she had ridden with Sheriff Sam Bailey down to the boat landing beneath the newer of the two river bridges, the water was wide and low. It had looked like something you could wade across—with broad shallow streams dividing and flowing around tree trunks and sandbars.

  In fact, she had been more focused on Sam than on the river.

  Now she was going to have to go home and change before she met Sam at his house. He was going to pick up pizza, and they were going to watch two movies: one with his nine-year-old daughter, Bethie, who was leaving for 4-H camp the next morning, and the next one after Bethie went to bed.

  Hunter and Sam had a romance that was a bit like a wandering creek, finding its way between the night meetings she covered, the unpredictabilities of his job and his efforts to be a good dad.

  It got complicated at times.

  Outside the newspaper office, the rain was a wall of water. Hunter couldn’t even see the courthouse across the street, but she did see the blinking red and blue lights as a van from the sheriff’s office came right up on the sidewalk. A door slammed and she made out the form of a tall poncho-draped man hurtling toward the door.

  She was hoping it was Sam, but it turned out to be Deputy Sheriff Bub Williston.

  “Y’all must not be listening to the radio,” he said. “Everybody needs to close down and go on home. Mr. Tyler, the sheriff said for me to get you over to your house in the van. Miss Novena, you need to go home the long way around by the river bridge because we’ve closed Willatchee Bridge.”

  “I knew it,” Novena exploded.” I just knew this was going to happen. I got my hair ruined and now I’ve got to drive an hour and a half in this damned pouring-down rain just to get home.” She stopped her tirade and scowled at Hunter. “And you need to go home right now and change out of that shirt.”

  Hunter peeled the shirt loose again.

  “Thanks for the offer,” Tyler was saying to the young deputy, ignoring Novena’s furious departure, “but Ellie’s coming for me at 5,”

  “He didn’t say make you an offer, Sir,” Bub said. “He said do it. He said Miss Ellie don’t need to be out driving in this mess. I already called her and told her to stay put. It ain’t no problem for me to get you in and out.”

  A staticky voice came over Bub’s radio and he stopped, listened, and answered.

  “Yes Sir, I told him. I’ll take care of it. Yes, Sir, Miss Novena’s already gone. Yes, Sir, she’s here. I’ll tell her.”

  He clipped his radio to his belt and turned to Hunter, averting his eyes from her blouse.

  “The sheriff says to tell you to put for about two minutes.”

  Hunter walked over to her desk and picked up her phone on the first ring.

  “You ought to keep your cell phone turned on,” Sam said.

  “It needs recharging,” Hunter answered.

  “Well, pizza’s off,
” Sam said “And my mom’s going to stay with Bethie tonight and get her off to camp in the morning, because we’re probably going to be out in the county all night. You go home and stay there and don’t even think about driving after dark. Please.”

  The “please” was an afterthought. Off the job, Sam was never bossy. On the job, he was the Sheriff and gave orders when he was in a hurry, even to Hunter. She resisted telling him that she could take care of herself, and stuck to priorities, like satisfying her reporter’s curiosity.

  “Where are you, Sam? What’s going on?”

  “Over by the Timpoochee Lake,” he said. “And what’s going on is that we’re about to have the mother of all floods. Go home and stay there. It’s dangerous for driving even where there’s no flood. I’ve got enough to do without wondering whether you’re under water or not.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’ll call you later,” Sam said.

  “You mark my words,” Tyler was saying to Bub when Hunter got off the phone. “The river never has gotten over 20 feet even with the big one in ‘44, and it’s not going to now.

  “When you’ve been around as long as I have,” he continued, “you’ll know how it goes. About every ten years, we wind up shutting down half the roads in the county because the hundred-year flood is coming. And you know what? Every time it turns out to be some people out at Mimosa Corners paddling a boat around in knee-high swamp water and taking each other’s pictures.”

  Having finished his lecture on flood history, he turned to Hunter, holding out her paycheck.

  “First thing in the morning if it’s clear, you might want to drive over to that big trailer court in Mimosa Corners and see if they’ve got river water up to their front doors. I don’t know what those people expect when they’re sitting down in the river valley fifty yards from the swamp, but it does make good pictures.”

  He squinted and frowned a little as if he had just noticed something.

  “You know that shirt’s soaking wet don’t you?”

  “I got to get you home, Mr. Tyler,” Bub interrupted, “and see about some other folks.”

  CHAPTER 2

  EVEN WITH HER LIGHTS ON AND windshield wipers working at top speed, Hunter had trouble seeing the driveway that led to the backyard of Rose Tyndale’s two story Victorian house.

  She made it in safely, and decided to take the inside stairs instead of sloshing her way through the pond of standing water. Her apartment was on the second floor. Outside stairs had been built years before for a private entrance, but there were still stairs inside, and her landlady, Miss Rose Tyndale, was a welcoming sort, always ready with a cup of hot tea or even the offer of a hot meal.

  The kitchen door opened before Hunter got there. The kitchen was cozy and something delicious was cooking on top of the stove.

  “Good heavens, Hunter,” Miss Rose said. “You’re soaked. Run upstairs, get into something warm, and come on back down. I’ve got a whole pot of chicken and dumplings.”

  Hunter went up the central stairway to her apartment, where her cats, Katie Calico and Mr. Marmalade were yowling at the door.

  They had plenty of food. The yowling was just for attention, and she took a moment to scratch them both behind their ears and give them quick back rubs. Katie was a green-eyed shorthair with patches of orange, black and white. She had been rescued by Hunter after her first owner, the memorable Miss Mae-Lula Hilliard, was murdered.

  Mr. Marmalade was Katie’s son, the one kitten from Katie’s first and last litter that Hunter hadn’t given away. He was a handsome fellow, almost full-grown now, with longer hair than his mother, a fluffy tail and white boots and vest setting off his orange stripes. Sam’s daughter Bethie had Mr. Marmalade’s brother and had named him Tuxedo.

  She gave the cats fresh water, and headed for the bathroom to strip out of her wet clothes and towel her hair dry. She found a tee shirt, her oldest faded jeans and a pair of clean socks. The dry clothes felt like heaven. She hadn’t realized how cold and damp she was, or how hungry!

  “I made a big batch because Robin and Colin were coming over,” Miss Rose explained as she ladled chicken and dumplings into soup bowls, “but Robin called and said that they were having an awful time at the mansion. They went up to check the attic and there was water everywhere, so they’re having to move all those old trunks and things downstairs and get the floor covered with plastic sheeting so it won’t leak to the second floor. I told him he should just be thankful he found the leak before all that water started ruining the second floor ceilings, after all the work they’ve done.”

  She served up a small amount of broth and meat on a china plate for Ozymandias, her aging smoke gray Persian cat, who circled around it, sniffing and waiting for it to cool.

  “Well, I hope it doesn’t cost a lot to repair,” Hunter said. “They’ve spent a fortune already.”

  Robin Hilliard was one of Hunter’s recently acquired friends as well as one of Miss Rose’s favorites among her former high school English students. He was taking a big risk turning the historic Hilliard Mansion into an inn.

  He had inherited the classic white-columned mansion from Mae-Lula Hilliard, who was his aunt and had doted on him. He and his partner Colin had both quit their jobs to do the restoration themselves. They had friends coming in every weekend to help, and were even trying to line up a gourmet chef… Hunter was scheduled to write a feature story on the whole project, but she knew they’d need publicity far beyond Magnolia County to make a go of it.

  “Eat,” Miss Rose said. “And then we’ll talk.”

  The chicken was falling off the bone. The dumplings were round, simmered in peppery gravy on the outside, light and fluffy on the inside. The only side dish was a simple salad of ripe tomato slices and onions in vinaigrette, and Hunter knew that there would be a homemade dessert.

  “Robin and Colin should have hired you to run their kitchen,” she said.

  Miss Rose beamed, and said, “You know, Robin actually asked me if I would bake lemon pound cakes for them, but I told him I’d give the recipe to his chef if they’d name it after me. I’ve got to have some kind of immortality.”

  Then the topic turned back to the rain, which was still pounding down. Hunter told Miss Rose that Sam was expecting a big flood.

  “Oh, that’s so silly,” Miss Rose said. “These men and their flood talk. There’s a whole crowd here that thinks the river’s going to flood every time it starts rising. Will Roy was on the radio saying it was going to crest at 27 feet, and that is just ridiculous. It didn’t get that high even when I was a child and we’ve built the levees since then.”

  “That’s exactly what Tyler told Bub Williston,” Hunter said, “but Sam’s worried about it.”

  “Well, you young people ought to listen to us old fossils sometimes,” Miss Rose said, getting up to cut slices of coconut cream pie. “If the river flooded every time it rained for three days, we’d all be living in arks by now.”

  After supper, Hunter went back up to her apartment and took time to check her e-mail and add a note to her ongoing correspondence with Nikki, her best friend in Atlanta.

  “You wouldn’t believe the rain here today,” she wrote. “Sam says there’s going to be ‘the mother of all floods’ and he’s going to be out with his people all night. Anyway, our usual Friday night date is off, and I just had chicken and dumplings with Miss Rose. She and Tyler both say there isn’t going to be any big flood.”

  When there was no reply from Nikki after ten minutes, Hunter remembered that it was Friday night and people her age who were single and didn’t live in Magnolia County were out partying, not having supper with their landladies and going to bed early with a murder mystery and two cats for company.

  As Hunter made the most of her quiet Friday night, the rain, the creeks and the river were proving Tyler Bankston and Rose Tyndale wrong.

  By eight that night, the sheriff’s office, the Georgia State Patrol, the Magnolia County Fire Department and the vo
lunteers in the Emergency Management Agency were banging on doors and telling everybody who lived in the flood plain to get out.

  The rain kept pouring down.

  By midnight, every creek bridge in the county was submerged and two of them had collapsed. The creeks were spreading out into muddy lakes, rising quietly out of the ditches and gullies they had dug through the centuries, spreading into back yards, circling swing sets and creeping up on houses.

  And the river rose, not just with the creek waters pouring into it, but with rainwater from 75 miles north. Birds circled, screaming and cawing as the water rose over their nests. Possums and raccoons scrambled for the treetops. White-tailed deer, rabbits and foxes headed for higher ground.

  At 1: 30 a.m., the rain was slowing down but the creeks were still rising and the river was about to reach its record crest. A man who lived nearly a half mile from the old river ferry landing called 911 to report that he had stepped out of his bed in the dark and found himself up to his knees in water. He was sitting on his roof with his wife and his dog.

  After conferring with the Clarence Bartow, the county’s emergency management director, Sheriff Sam Bailey divided his forces between the two sides of the river, put Sgt. Taneesha Martin in charge of the west side, and drove at top speed, sirens on, to make it back to Merchantsville before the flood divided his jurisdiction in half.

  At 2 a.m., Bartow ordered all roads to the river and creek bridges barricaded.

  At 3 a.m., the river was over the Cathay levee and covering the pews at New Life CME Church.

  At 5:17 a.m. the 75 year old Timpoochee Lake dam, five miles north of Cathay, collapsed. The waters it had been holding back roared across the two-lane bridge and the highway leading up to it.

  The foundation under the highway on the south side, built a half century earlier on mounded dirt, red clay and gravel, washed out. The bridge buckled and collapsed, creating a trap for flailing catfish, branches, old bait cans, and, finally, for a casket.