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

by Charlotte Moore

  “Grady! Grady Bennett!”

  “That’s Mama,” Grady said. “I better go see what she needs. Nice to meet you, m’am.”

  “I’ll be over there later,” Hunter said.

  She and Sam walked around the edges of the flood, which had spread out like a lake in a downhill slope that Hunter had never noticed before on her drives through Cathay. She was acquiring an entirely new sense of the relationship between the river, the creeks and the land.

  Cathay didn’t have much of a downtown to start with—just a dozen stores, mixed in with empty buildings, two beauty parlors, a small restaurant that specialized in fried chicken , a post office, a fire station and a frame house that had been remodeled to serve as a city hall and library branch. All of that had been flooded, some just with just a foot or two, some as high as their first floor ceilings or the rooftops. Where the waters had begun to recede there was a layer of rusty-looking mud. Beyond that, in the deeper water between the businesses and the levee, she could see a small church with only its steeple above the water, and the roofs and window tops of five or six modest homes.

  “It’s flooded before,” Sam was saying,” but never this high that anybody remembers.”

  “Why’d they build so close to the river?” Hunter asked, looking down toward the roofs of the houses.

  “It was a river town to start with,” Sam said. “You know Cathay’s older than Merchantsville. Merchantsville got built along the railroad later, and I guess by that time they knew where the floods would go.”

  “I didn’t mean the downtown,” Hunter said. “Those houses and that church don’t look all that old.”

  “Well, the land’s cheap,” Sam said. ”And I think those houses are all rental properties that were moved here when the knitting mill closed. People with money don’t usually build in a flood plain. You want to go have dinner with the governor?”

  Hunter weighed her options.

  “No,” she said, “I got enough quotes from him already and his aide handed out written statements. Are you still coming over for supper tonight?”

  “Definitely,” he said with a smile. “I even got a bottle of wine.”

  Hunter found her way over to Grady Bennett’s mother’s shop, which turned out to be a small house at the edge of the downtown area. She had noticed it before because the sign said, “Sharon’s Shabby Chick & Gift Shoppe,” leading her to wonder if owner had a whimsical sense of humor or really didn’t know how to spell “chic.”

  The ground in front was soggy, and the sale was in the back yard, with planks in a few places across puddles of water.

  “Hey, Mama,” she heard Grady Bennett say. “That’s Sheriff Bailey’s girlfriend.”

  Apparently Mama wasn’t as curious about the Sheriff’s personal life as most of Magnolia County was, because they had both disappeared through the back door of the shop by the time Hunter reached the sale area. She wandered around looking at the merchandise—a clutter of second hand items, some with flood mud still on them. There were well made wooden toys worth washing off, but she didn’t know a child the right age for them. She wondered how anybody made a living with the kind of merchandise Sharon Bennett had, flood or no flood.

  A young woman came out of the backdoor of the store carrying a box. She had long dark hair falling below her shoulders, and she seemed curiously out of place.

  “No, not out of place,” Hunter thought. “Just not from here, the way I’m not from here.”

  The woman wore an embroidered peasant blouse untucked over a faded denim skirt that came almost to her ankles. She was barefoot, and had a look of intense concentration as she maneuvered the stairs and found a table for the box. Grady came out behind her and unloaded the granny-square afghans from the box.

  Hunter was about to go over and find out if this poetic-looking creature could possibly be Grady’s wife, when something caught her eye.

  There were two paintings on canvas leaning against a pecan tree and she knew as soon as she saw them that she would buy them, and maybe give one to Nikki, who loved that sort of thing too.

  Primitive Art, they called it, or Outsider Art.

  The paintings were in bold colors, painted with a sure hand but a wildly original vision. The larger one had a tree with three cats of different colors sitting on the branches. The smaller one was of an angel in upward flight, carrying a small dog. Both, she saw on closer inspection, had an inch-wide band of flood stain on one side, as if they had been on the floor, leaning against a wall.

  Who on earth could have painted these?

  Hunter picked the larger one up and looked for a signature. She found only two upper case D’s in the lower left corner. The larger one was priced at $10, and the smaller one at $5.

  “No,” she thought. “They shouldn’t be that cheap.”

  Wondering if she had discovered a new artist, she turned to see Grady and the dark haired girl going back into the house, and a woman in her sixties coming out.

  That had to be Grady’s Mama, she thought. There was the same sturdy quality that he had, a woman not so much overweight as big-boned. She was dressed in a pink and white outfit with pedal pushers, her hair in a helmet of curls.

  “Can I help you?” she asked with a smile.

  “Yes, are these done by a local artist?” Hunter asked.

  “My daughter-in-law paints them,” Grady’s Mama answered, “They usually sell a right good many of them at the festivals up in North Georgia.”

  “I like these very much,” Hunter said. “She’s a wonderful artist. Was that her who was just out here with Grady? What’s her name?”

  “Her name’s Dee Dee. See the two D’s there. I’m Sharon Bennett. Aren’t you from the newspaper?”

  Hunter smiled and introduced herself, and Sharon Bennett said, “I hope y’all are going to be letting people know how hard Cathay got hit,” she said. “The paper is ninety percent Merchantsville. I don’t mean that to be critical, but..”

  “I’ve been told that before,” Hunter said.. “And I’m sorry if it seems that way, but I can promise you that Wednesday’s issue is going to have a great deal about Cathay.”

  “Hunter paid for the two paintings with cash, feeling slightly dishonest about the transaction.

  “I probably should just give them away,” Sharon said. “They’ve got that nasty flood water on them. Maybe you could take a damp cloth with a little bleach to those stains.”

  “Is Dee Dee still here,” Hunter asked, looking toward the house that served as a shop. “I’d like to meet her. I’m thinking maybe I could write a feature story about her for the paper.”

  Sharon pondered the idea for a minute with a worried look, and said, “No, I don’t think she’d want that. She’s kinda shy.”

  An older couple had arrived and were picking through some of the sale items. Sharon Bennett headed toward them.

  Hunter took her newly acquired paintings and left, thinking to herself that she’d find a way to do the story whether Grady’s Mama thought Dee Dee was too shy or not.

  Driving back to Merchantsville, it struck Hunter that the obvious way to deal with the stains would be to cut that small strip of canvas off and restretch it on a new frame, and also that Dee Dee Bennett would be the best person to do that, or that she would certainly know who could do it. She put the pictures in the back seat of her car, planning to try to find a telephone number for the younger Bennetts the next day.

  Back home, she straightened up her apartment, started a pot of spaghetti sauce with plenty of Italian sausage and mushrooms, and sat down at her computer to read her e-mail and answer Nikki’s latest barrage of questions.

  The flood is way, way worse than I thought it would be. Not so bad in Merchantsville, but really terrible in Cathay, the little town just across the river. The guv himself was there today and says this whole part of Georgia is going to be declared a disaster area. There are media people all over the place, but we’re planning to do the biggest and best coverage. I must have t
aken a hundred pictures today.

  You will not believe the paintings I found on sale today. They are like Howard Finster’s work, and Nellie Mae Rowe’s ,really wild outsider art by a local artist who looks like somebody out of the sixties (except she’s our age). I’ll take pictures and send them to you later.

  I have spaghetti sauce simmering. And, yes, I’m going to go pick Sam up at his house and take him home again. I know you think that’s hilarious, and it wouldn’t make sense in Atlanta, but I promise you, down here everybody notices whose car is in whose back yard. He says he doesn’t care about it for himself, but he doesn’t want people talking about me. Bethie left for 4-H camp this morning, which does make that part of things simpler.

  In answer to your extremely nosy questions, no, he hasn’t asked me to marry him, and I hope he doesn’t anytime soon. It’s not a question of whether I love him or not. I do. It’s a question of whether I want to spend my whole life in Merchantsville, because no way is he going to leave this place. Ever.

  When are you going to tell me more about the new guy?

  She frowned at what she had written about not wanting Sam to propose, knowing that Nikki wouldn’t buy it.

  All the same, the evening was perfect. Sam brought a really fine red wine that the spaghetti didn’t quite live up to and a movie they didn’t get around to watching.

  CHAPTER 8

  “GRADY BENNETT’S WIFE IS AN ARTIST? “ Novena said the next morning at work. “First I ever heard of that. I know she isn’t from around here, though. Some girl Grady met at some festival. I heard she’s kind of stuck up, but I can’t see why somebody stuck up would marry Grady.”

  Novena stopped and took a hand mirror out of her desk drawer to inspect her hair.

  “What kind of paintings does she do?”

  Hunter went and got the paintings out of her car to show Novena, who was visibly not impressed. Tyler arrived and was more interested—grinning as he studied them.

  “I like them both,” he said, “but Ellie always says I’ve got awful taste in art, so you might want to get your money back.”

  “Do either of you have any idea how I can reach Grady Bennett?” Hunter asked. “I mean where does he work?”

  “I don’t,” Tyler said, “And we don’t have time for that anyway. We need to talk about how many pages we’re going to need to do this flood justice and still make money.”

  “I’ve already got an idea,” Novena said, putting away her mirror. “How about I hit the banks and see if they’ll take out some big ads supporting all the merchants who got flooded? Let’s say it’s a special issue on the flood.”

  “Sounds good.” Tyler said. “Hunter?”

  “I can do as much as you want,” she said. “I’ve got lots of photos and notes already.”

  “How about downloading the photos to the server and I’ll look through the whole bunch,” Tyler said. “Did you did get one of the governor?”

  “Probably a dozen,” Hunter said, wishing that she could sort her pictures out first for Tyler, who was sure to comment on how often Sam showed up.

  “OK, then,” he went on.” We need a story on the whole flood, one on the estimated damage and where the money might come from for restoring things, and a long one on what happened to Cathay. We’d probably better have a big Cathay picture over the fold on page one, or we’ll never hear the end of it.”

  “Oh and there’s another good story,” Hunter said. “Sam told me an old wooden coffin washed over the Timpoochee Dam but it turns out it wasn’t an old body. It was somebody with up-to-date dental work.”

  Tyler whistled.

  “That is a good one. Any foul play suspected?”

  “I’ll see if they’ve found out anything more,” Hunter said. “I’m having breakfast with Taneesha Martin, and she’ll probably know everything about it since she was there when they got it out of the creek.”

  Taneesha was having a half grapefruit and black coffee for breakfast in penance for having eaten all her meals at her grandmother’s house over the weekend.

  “Yes,” she said in answer to Hunter’s question. “We want a story about it in the paper. Somebody’s got to know who this guy was, so he can be buried again.”

  “It was definitely a man?” Hunter asked.

  “That’s according to the crime lab in Macon. We transported the casket and the remains up there. Definitely a guy. Something about the pelvic bones.

  “Do you think it was a crime?”

  “We don’t know one way or the other. There’s nothing in the remains that would say how this man died, and it’s hard to imagine somebody committing a murder and then going to the trouble of finding a casket for the victim and burying it. Sam’s thinking somebody just had a private burial, because they didn’t want all the funeral home costs, and that once the word gets around, they’ll show up. To tell you the truth, nobody’s spent much time on it yet.”

  “The other papers don’t know about it?”

  “They didn’t ask,” Taneesha said, pushing the grapefruit aside and waving to Annelle, who came over laughing.

  “I knew you weren’t going to make it on that grapefruit,” she said. “How about a ham biscuit?”

  “How about two ham biscuits?” Taneesha said.

  Hunter changed the subject.

  “Do you know Grady Bennett?” she asked.

  “Big dumb guy with a beard?” Taneesha asked. “That Grady Bennett?”

  “I don’t know that he’s dumb,” Hunter said. “But he’s a big guy with a beard. Seems nice.”

  “I went to school with him,” Taneesha said. “I think he dropped out as soon as he was 16 and they’d let him. His mother used to come in here when she worked for Thomson Realty, but I haven’t seen her in a long time.”

  “She’s got a shop in Cathay now,” Hunter said. “It’s that one called ‘Shabby Chick.’ Anyway, do you know where Grady works? I bought some paintings his wife did and they’ve got a little flood water on them, and..”

  “Grady Bennett’s got a wife?”

  “Yes, her name is Dee Dee…”

  Taneesha concentrated on her ham biscuit for a minute and said, “I think maybe he gets work with different contractors, and I shouldn’t have called him dumb. I just know school wasn’t his thing, except for shop classes. Somebody told me once that he could fix just about anything, do his own car repairs, and build furniture, all that stuff.”

  Back at the Messenger, Hunter got down to work. It was almost 11 when Tyler came out to talk about the photography.

  “Excellent work,” he said, “I’m thinking we use the one of the man in the boat handing the little girl the cat on page one, four columns, and the one with the governor and the mayor beneath the fold, and we’ll have a whole page of the shots from the airplane, and another from Sunday, but let’s try not to use more than ten that have Sam Bailey in them.”

  Hunter blushed, laughed and nodded.

  Tyler said, “I’m going to write my column about how us old folks didn’t know what was coming, so we should be thankful that Sam Bailey and Clarence Bartow and all their people did.”

  He turned to roll his wheelchair off, and stopped.

  “And I was thinking,” he said, “From now on you might want to put Associate Editor after your name instead of Staff Writer.”

  “Thank you,” Hunter said, as he rolled his wheelchair away.

  She found herself in a confused mood: half wanting to run after Tyler and hug him, and half wanting to ask him if a raise came with the new title. She decided that for the moment it would be best to keep working.

  She had lunch with Sam, but not at R&J’s. Instead, they met at a little barbecue place, Porky’s, outside of Cathay.

  She told him about Tyler’s telling her to change her job title.

  “That’s nice,” Sam said, between bites of his supersized pulled pork sandwich. “Did he give you a raise?”

  “No, unless he just plans to add it to my paycheck.”

 
; Sam pondered the situation.

  “Wait until this issue is out,” and then tell him you want a raise and you deserve one.”

  “I’ll think about it, “Hunter said.

  Sam shook his head and said. “Just do it. You were going to walk across the river bridge to get to Cathay, and Bubba Shipley apparently put you through some acrobatics in that airplane, but for some reason you’re too timid to ask Tyler Bankston for a raise. He ought to go ahead and retire and let you be the editor.”

  “Not to change the subject,” Hunter said, changing the subject, “but do you know how I can get in touch with Grady Bennett? I bought two paintings his wife did, and they both have some flood stains right on the bottom of the canvas. I’m hoping they can fix them for me. I hardly paid anything for them and I wouldn’t mind paying more…”

  “Grady’s got a wife?” Sam asked.

  “Here we go again,” Hunter said laughing. “For the first time, I know something everybody else doesn’t already know. Yes, Grady has a wife. She’s very pretty and dresses like somebody out of the sixties and she’s a wonderful artist. It’s like primitive art.”

  “Like Grandma Moses?” Sam asked.

  “Well, sort of, but maybe more like Howard Finster. You know the artist from up near Rome. His paintings are in the High Museum.”

  Sam didn’t.

  “So you bought two?”

  “Yes. Grady’s mother had them outdoors for her flood sale over in Cathay, and they were just $5 and $10. The canvas alone would cost more than that. I don’t think she has any idea how talented her daughter-in-law is.”

  “Grady lives in his old family home way out past Timpoochee Lake, or where the lake was,” Sam said. “His Mama and Daddy got divorced a good while before his Daddy died, so she had already moved out and he inherited the whole thing—house, land and all.”

  Sam’s cell phone rang, ending the discussion. The District Attorney had showed up, wanting to talk about the mysterious body in the coffin.

  Hunter went straight back to her writing when she reached the office. The paper was printed on Wednesday morning, which meant that Tuesday was really the deadline day for all but last minute news.