Deep South Dead (A Hunter Jones Mystery Book 1) Page 2

  Jaybird stopped at the buffet line to shake a few hands. He was in his early fifties and already silver-haired, a big man whose legendary good looks were beginning to show the ravages of time, sun and bourbon. He looked a little more red-faced than usual to Hunter. There was a shine of sweat on his forehead.

  He finished his backslapping and – sure enough – he headed straight toward their table. He didn’t wait for an invitation – just pulled a chair around from another table and sat down.

  “Hey, Jaybird,” Annelle said, coming past with a tray of dishes, “How’s Anne Marie?”

  “Hey, Annelle,” he said, “She’s just fine. How ‘bout just bringing me some banana puddin’ and some coffee, sugar pie?”

  “Well, Deputy,” he said leaning toward Taneesha with a big smile.” I saw your grandma the other day, and she told me that y’all are about to open your new fellowship hall. Best news I heard all week.”

  Taneesha moved back in her chair, gave him a wan smile and made no comment. Not that it mattered to Jaybird Hilliard. He was already leaning toward Hunter.

  She caught a blast of whiskey and mouthwash.

  “Hunter, honey, I went by the paper and Novena said you were over here. I just wanted to touch base and make sure you know we’re counting on you.”

  “For what?”

  “Well, you know,” he said. “To let people know what a great thing Marvis Flammonde wants to do for our county, how many jobs it will bring in, and how it will get things moving again. You know, people around here really trust The Messenger to set things straight. Always have.”

  Taneesha was on her feet.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “I’ve got to get back to work.”

  “See you later,” Hunter said, “Tell the sheriff I’ll be over to talk to him a little later this afternoon to get the incident reports and find out about, you know, that other business.”

  “What other business?” the commissioner asked, looking suspicious.

  “Same thing I was asking you about,” Annelle said as she plunked his banana pudding and coffee down on the table. “What happened over at the SaveMart?”

  Taneesha was gone –past the buffet table and out the front door – without looking back.

  “Well, I hope to hell that isn’t going to be in the paper!” Jaybird’s voice was rising. “Y’all have got to have something better to print than that.”

  “I don’t even know what happened,” Hunter said, “but I’m getting curious, now.”

  “Me too,” Annelle said. “I heard your Aunt Mae-Lula was right in the middle of it.”

  Jaybird changed tactics.

  “Hunter, Honey,” he said, leaning across the table and adopting a conspiratorial tone, “It didn’t amount to a hill of beans. Just a lil’ fuss about some petitions.”

  He seemed to be getting drunker as he talked. Hunter decided that the alcohol was just reaching his brain.

  “Some of Marvis’ volunteers din unnerstan what a small town this is, you know… “

  “Who were the volunteers?”

  “I don’t know they’d want their names in the paper, honeybunny. They’re just, you know, tryin’ to help out.”

  Hunter decided to push a little.

  “Well it would be good to talk to both sides,” she said. “I’m going over to see Miss Mae-Lula Hilliard in a little while. If I get her point of view, I need to have theirs, too.”

  Jaybird Hilliard stood up abruptly, nearly stumbling as he did so, and said in a loud, angry voice, “What both sides? There’s no both sides. We’re gonna have some progress or we’re gonna rot on the vine.”

  Annelle scurried off to the kitchen. The restaurant got quiet as everyone turned to stare.

  Hunter wished she had let the whole subject drop.

  Fortunately, Jaybird had forgotten her, and was seeing the startled customers as a constituency.

  “Man like Marvis Flammonde,” he orated, “Man like that doesn’t have to put up with any small town crap. People all down I-75 would be thrilled for him to build in their towns, and here I try to do something good for my hometown and all I get for thanks is Aunt Mae-Lula and them hollerin’ all this historic legacy stuff!”

  Two men got up from their chairs and ambled toward him. One, Hunter knew, was the Minister of Music at the First Baptist Church. The other ran a hardware store. They were both, like Jaybird, middle-aged. Probably went to high school with him.

  “You want history,” Jaybird went on. “I’ll tell you history. Only business mistake old Colonel Hilliard ever made was building that conservatory , which he only did, and my granddaddy told me this, I swear on a Bible, he said it was cause his wife went to Wesleyan Conservatory up in Macon, and she wanted Florida, that was their crazy wild daughter, to be refined, and they went and built a whole school just to try to turn her into a lady, and then Florida ran off with a Bible salesman and wound up over in Alabama with him preachin’ in the front of a tent and her sellin’ moonshine out the back. “

  The construction workers were looking bewildered. Annelle had gotten James Martin from the kitchen. A formidable man, he was wiping his hands with a dishtowel, looking grim.

  “Hey, Jaybird,” the hardware store man interrupted, “Come on and take a ride with me. I got a deal I want to talk to you about. You know my mama’s old house? My boy and his wife don’t want it and I’m thinking about selling it.”

  “I told him nobody’s gonna buy that house,” the Minister of Music said, putting his arm around Jaybird’s shoulders, “I told him it’s the land that’s worth something, and he needs to talk to you about that. You’re the one knows how to sell land.”

  Jaybird blinked, momentarily baffled by the change of subject, and then looked almost pathetically relieved and said in a more normal voice, “Yeah, I sure as hell do know how to sell land. If anybody ever knew how to sell land, it’s me.”

  He let himself be led out of the restaurant. After the door shut behind the three men there was a barely perceptible ripple of laughter, and the chatter resumed.

  Hunter waved to Annelle for her bill.

  “My Billy’s gonna love hearing about this,” Annelle said in a confidential tone. “You know he works at the air force base and he never hears anything before I tell him at supper. You want Jaybird’s banana puddin’? He didn’t touch it.”

  Hunter shook her head.

  Annelle added up the cost of the buffet and two iced teas, and signed it with her trademark smiley-face.

  “Ol’ Jaybird better be glad his friends look after him the way they do,” she said. “‘Cause Neesha’s been out there the whole time just waitin’ to get him if he tried to get in his own car and drive off drunk as a skunk like that.”

  Chapter 3

  HUNTER TURNED HER BATTERED BLUE ESCORT onto the bumpy bricks of Hilliard Court, and put on brakes. A large white sign was lying face down in the street, looking as if it had been run over once or twice. She parked, and then went to get it out of the middle of the street. It was one of the “Save the Conservatory” signs that had popped up all over Merchantsville in the last few days.

  She propped it against the trunk of a dogwood tree, and looked toward the conservatory and its magnolia-shaded grounds trying to imagine a shopping center in its place.

  Then she turned and studied the old mansion on the opposite side of the brick street. She took a photo of it – just to have one on file. It was an imposing, beautifully proportioned old house, with classic white columns. Pride of Mobile azaleas flanked the front stairs.

  Along with the conservatory, it had been painted, photographed and printed on postcards and Chamber of Commerce brochures, but Hunter thought that if she had to choose a house to live in, she’d prefer the big blue and cream Victorian house next door.

  Just as she made it across the street, taking pictures as she walked, she had a near collision with a runner.

  “Ooops! I’m sorry. I should have been looking!”

  “No, I should have been,” t
he man said, panting a little. He was well-built, sandy-haired, wearing shorts, and a sweat-soaked t-shirt. Hunter recognized him from a hospital authority meeting she had attended the month before at the Magnolia County Medical Center.

  Dr. Keith Somebody. One of the nurses had called him Dr. Handsome.

  And then she saw the medical practice sign on the front yard of the Victorian house. Dr. Harrow, that was it. Keith Harrow.

  He stopped at his mailbox and gave her a curious glance as she started up the driveway.

  She smiled and held up her reporter’s notebook by way of explaining her reason for being there. He gave her a friendly nod and went back to his mail.

  A calico cat came up Mae-Lula Hilliard’s driveway to meet Hunter. A patchwork of orange, black and white with long legs and a long tail, she was very obviously pregnant.

  “Mrowrrr.”

  “I’d say the same thing if I was in your condition.”

  “Mrowrrrrr.” The calico ran around the last sharp curve of the driveway and out of sight.

  Hunter turned the curve, stopped and looked around in surprise. Everything in the front had been so neat, so formal, so meticulously maintained, but here in the back, out of sight to passersby, it was a different place – an unkempt jungle of wisteria and Spanish bayonet with a collapsing carriage house and an added-on screened porch.

  There was an odd repetitive sound, a clattering and banging, coming from the kitchen.

  The calico waited at the screen door, looking up at Hunter with big, luminous green eyes.

  “Well, I don’t know if you’re supposed to be going inside,” Hunter said. She picked the animal up gently and deposited her at the bottom of the steps.

  “Now you stay there until I find out if you belong here.”

  “Mrowrrr.”

  The cat sat in place politely until the second the screen door opened. Then she shot through the open doorway and ran straight into the kitchen.

  The clattering and banging continued, and Hunter knew what it was even before she reached the kitchen.

  It was an old portable dishwasher, the kind that hooked up to the sink. Hunter had grown up with one just like it. She found the lever that held the door shut, and yanked it back. Billows of steam rose up. The clattering and banging slowed and stopped. Hunter took a look inside the dishwasher, and found the problem: a cast iron griddle with the handle sticking up right where the impeller would hit it sideways on every spin.

  She noticed that for all the fuss, bother and steam, there wasn’t much else at all in the dishwasher. A couple of cake tins. The blades to a mixer. A measuring cup. She tried moving the griddle handle down, out of the path of the impeller, but it was so hot she yanked her hand back, and left the door open.

  The calico was on the far side of the kitchen where a matching water bowl and cat food bowl sat side by side. She turned and gave Hunter a long significant look before taking a few dainty nibbles of cat food.

  “Okay. I was wrong.” Hunter said. “I apologize.”

  She went to the hallway that led through the center of the house, and called out, “Miss Hilliard? It’s Hunter Jones! I’m here!”

  There was no answer, so she went back to the kitchen and sat down at the table.

  Waiting for Miss Hilliard to show up, she noticed the smell of chocolate. Somebody had definitely been baking. She looked around, thinking that however grand the rest of the mansion might be, the kitchen was just old and homey, with its faded wallpaper and mismatched appliances, its wooden table covered with checked oilcloth.

  A telephone rang.

  It was louder than any phone Hunter had heard before, a shrill, amplified ring, coming from beyond the closed door on the other side of the kitchen.

  The cat was at the door, pushing against it with her body, pawing at the old rounded edge of the swinging door.

  The telephone rang a second time, a third time.

  Hunter considered answering it. Maybe Miss Hilliard had to go somewhere, and she was calling to say she was hurrying back.

  The telephone rang a fourth time and Hunter walked across the room and pushed the door with the flat of her hand, faring no better than the cat had. Something was on the other side, near the bottom, blocking it. The phone rang again, and she wedged her fingers between the edge of the door and the doorframe. Getting a good grip, she pulled it forward until it had cleared the doorframe. Then she grabbed it with her other hand and swung it against the kitchen wall.

  The telephone rang again, as Hunter’s mind resisted making sense of what her eyes were seeing.

  Two feet in heavy tan shoes had been blocking the door. The telephone was ringing from the floor, half propped on a ring-encrusted arthritic hand that belonged to the body lying there, face down, all in pink and yellow and blue, with white curls soaked in dark blood.

  Hunter was down on the floor on her hands and knees.

  “Miss Mae-Lula, are you all..”

  Clearly, she wasn’t all right, and she didn’t answer. The one eye Hunter could see was staring at nothing. Hunter touched the old lady gently on the cheek. It was cool. The head wound was too awful to look at.

  At some point the ringing had stopped.

  Call 911, she thought.

  The phone was right there, but she knew she shouldn’t touch it. She fumbled around in her bag for her cell phone.

  She had left it in the car.

  She got up, steadied herself, walked across the kitchen, through the porch and down the stairs. Then she began to run.

  The doctor in shorts was sitting on his front steps, reading a letter.

  “There’s lots of blood,” she called out. “I think she’s dead.”

  He dropped the letter and came running.

  “She’s right off the kitchen,” Hunter said as they passed each other in the driveway. “I’m going to get my phone and call 911.”

  The kitchen, when she got back from making her call, still looked homey and old-fashioned, and still smelled like chocolate. The old lady was still lying on the floor in the butler’s pantry. Dr. Harrow was washing his hands at the sink.

  “I called 911,” she said. “They’re coming.”

  “You were right,” he said to her. “She’s dead. Her skull is fractured. It’s an awful wound.”

  He reached for a dishtowel to dry his hands.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “I know we’ve met before and I know you work for the paper, but I can’t remember your name.”

  “I’m Hunter Jones. I was going to interview her. Did you know her well?”

  “Yes, of course. She’s… well she was my wife’s great-aunt,” the doctor said. “This is just going to upset Claire so much. And Robin, too. That’s Claire’s brother. She’s over in Perry at some kind of seminar, and he’s in Macon. I need to go and try to call them.”

  Hunter nodded sympathetically, only half listening. She was getting over the first shock and realizing that for the first time in her reporting life, she was inside a crime scene, and it would probably be the last. She could hear the sirens starting up in the distance.

  “One of us ought to go out there and show them the way in,” she said to the doctor.” Would you mind? I’m feeling a little weak in the knees.”

  “Sit down right now,” the doctor said.

  The moment he was out of the door, Hunter reached into her bag for her camera.

  She had taken a dozen pictures and put her camera away by the time Sheriff Sam Bailey came in with a man she didn’t know. Taneesha Martin was right behind them.

  Why were they pulling out guns?

  There was no small talk. Sam walked across the kitchen and looked down at Mae-Lula Hilliard’s body. Without turning around, he said, “Taneesha, get Hunter out of here. Put her in my car, and come right back.”

  Another siren was screaming up the driveway.

  “And tell the paramedics they can’t come in until we’ve got the house secured.”

  Chapter 4

  AN HOUR LATER SAM B
AILEY WAS standing in middle of Mae-Lula Hilliard’s kitchen holding a small tape recorder, and keeping an eye on everything going on around him.

  The house was secured, the crime tape in place all around the grounds of the mansion. The coroner had arrived and was in the next room making calls on his cell phone. All he was willing to say was that Miss Mae-Lula couldn’t have been dead very long – no more than a couple of hours, maybe less and that it was “something like a lead pipe.”

  Sam had already sent Taneesha over to talk to Dr. Harrow, who had seen the body first, and he had concurred with the coroner, and said he hadn’t seen anybody around the neighborhood that morning because he had been seeing patients until he went for his run.

  He had two of his deputies checking the fireplaces throughout the house for pokers, either missing or bloody.

  The crime photographer had arrived and was setting up lights.

  The body of a woman Sam had known for as long as he could remember was lying in that narrow hallway, feet toward the kitchen – the remains of the autocratic, eccentric, annoying Miss Mae-Lula who had been alive and well and right in his face 24 hours earlier, raising hell over at Jake’s SaveMart because of those kids Marvis Flammonde had sent to town.

  And now somebody had bashed her head in. She looked much smaller than he remembered her from the day before. As many times as he had seen her at public meetings, he hadn’t quite realized that for all her blustering and all the force of her personality she was just a fragile little old lady, her hands knotted with arthritis, her back slightly humped under her faded sweater. Somehow, she had moved into the ranks of the very old without his having really noticed. It bothered him that he had missed that. Sam Bailey didn’t miss much when it came to his hometown and his home county.

  The oldest of five, he grew up keeping an eye out for his brothers and his sister. At 18, he had been the captain and star center for the Magnolia County High School basketball team, and he had always known where the ball was, where every player was. They said back then that he had eyes in the back of his head.