Death Over the Dam (A Hunter Jones Mystery Book 2) (3 page)

“Can I come with you in the chopper?”

“Sorry,” Sam said. “They’ve got room for me and for two nurses from the hospital who’ve volunteered to help over there, and then we’ve got this pregnant woman and her husband to bring back over here. She’s like three days past due already, and they’re about to panic that she’ll go into labor and they won’t be able to get to the hospital.”

“What are the nurses going for? Are people hurt?”

“They’re going to be giving tetanus shots to anybody getting into the floodwater,” Sam said. “It’s filthy—dead animals, runoff from the dairy lagoons and chicken houses, garbage, you name it. Otherwise, it’s just a matter of setting up a first aid station until the Red Cross comes in. Clarence Bartow is on top of all that.”

“I really need to get over there,” Hunter said. “How can I get there in my car?”

“I can give you a pretty good idea of which way you can’t go, but I don’t know what you’re going to run into once you get out of Magnolia County. You might drive 50 miles and come up on a bridge that can’t be crossed.”

Hunter thought it over as she ate her ham biscuit.

“I heard some of the rescue unit guys were out in boats picking up dogs,” she said. “Do you know where I could catch up with them?”

“You really want to go out in a motor boat with Sonny and Sonny Junior and pick up wet dogs?” Sam asked with a grin.

“No. I want to see if I can talk them into taking me across the river.”

Sam laughed aloud.

“Believe me, city girl, nobody is going across that river in a boat. You’d be more likely to wind up in the Gulf of Mexico than in Cathay.”

His cell phone buzzed and he picked it up.

Somebody else was doing most of the talking. Sam listened and sat up straighter.

“Wood? Must be an old one.”

He listened some more.

“Sounds like you’ve got it under control for now. You got Skeet and Clarence both there, they’re going to figure out how to get it pulled out. Have them take it over to the fire station.”

“Here’s a story for you,” he said when he hung up. “That was Taneesha. They’ve got an old wooden casket stuck in the bridge debris out where the Timpoochee Lake dam broke and the bridge caved in. Must’ve been a mudslide upstream of the lake. Clarence and his guys have got a tow truck and they’ve got Skeet and some other guys down there trying to pull it out it out so it won’t wash on down to the river.”

Hunter wished she were there to take pictures.

Shellie called from the next room.

“Hey, y’all come out here and look. They’ve got us on TV, from the air.”

“I can’t even tell where that is,” Hunter said a minute later, as she stared at the TV screen, and tried to relate what she was seeing to the Magnolia County she knew. It looked like a giant mud puddle, and then the camera zoomed in closer.

“Which bridge is that?” Hunter asked. “It’s not under water.”

“Missed by about four feet. That’s the new one,” Sam said, “It’s higher than the others, but it’s closed until somebody from the Army Corps of Engineers can check the foundations. None of the bridges were built with this kind of flood in mind.”

“Would you look at that buck?” Shellie said. There were deer on the road leading up to the big bridge. A big buck with wide antlers was standing on the bridge itself.

“Looks like he owns the place,” Sam said. “That must be the one that Bub said he missed last fall.”

Shellie looked amused.

“You want me to call him and tell him his big guy is out there in clear view? If the bridge will hold a buck that big, it’ll hold Bub Williston, too.”

“Not deer season,” Sam said, shaking his head. “Too bad.”

He eyed Hunter with a wicked grin, waiting for her reaction. Even though she had decided venison was edible, she still took a dim view of hunting, and usually had something to say when the subject came up.

She wasn’t thinking about that, though, and the television station had switched to a commercial.

“How far is it across that bridge?” she asked Sam.

“Five miles from one city limits to the other, but don’t even think about it,” he said and stifled a yawn.

“You don’t even know why I asked,” she said.

“Sure I do,” he said. “And I wouldn’t have time to come looking for you when you don’t show up on the other side.”

She gave him a stubborn look and he added, “There are probably snakes all over the bridge.”

“And alligators,” Shellie said, smiling wickedly.

“OK, OK!” Hunter said, laughing. “I’m going to go see if I can get some pictures of the dog rescue.”

A half hour later when she was taking pictures of Sonny Willcox and his son, Little Sonny, in their boat with four soaking wet dogs Shellie reached her by cell phone.

“Sam says to tell you that Bubba Shipley will take you and Harold Holmes over to Cathay in his Cessna in about a half hour. Do you know how to get out to his hangar?

“Yes, I’ve been there a couple of times,” Hunter said. “That’s great. Tell Sam I said thank you. Who’s Harold Holmes?”

“The coroner. He works at Harte & Holmes Funeral Home. Sam wants him to take a look at whoever’s in that old casket and he said to tell you that he needs some pictures of the damaged areas as soon as you get back. He wants me to send them to Jaybird Hilliard so Jaybird can send them to the governor and act like he knows what he’s talking about.”

“I’ll come by there as soon as I get back,” Hunter said.

CHAPTER 4

S
GT.
T
ANEESHA
M
ARTIN OF THE
M
AGNOLIA
County Sheriff’s Office stood on County Road 23 studying the wooden casket that was being pulled slowly from the wreckage of the Timpoochee Creek Bridge. It had taken in some water, and was draining as they pulled it upward.

“It looks like a real old one,” she said to Skeet Borders, the rookie in the department, who was soaking wet. Just minutes before, he had been barefoot and up to his waist in floodwater, helping wrap chains around the casket.

“Yup,” he said.

A few generations back, they would have been an unlikely team. Those were the days when it would have been beyond the belief of ordinary citizens for her to be the one in charge. She was black, a former tennis champion who managed to make her blue uniform a fashion statement even in the August heat. He was a little older, a little taller, fair skinned, freckled and red-haired. Though neither had ever paid any attention to genealogy, they both had roots in Magnolia County going back almost two centuries.

They had known each other since their high school days, and she had been part of the team that caught his wife’s murderer a year earlier.

He had given up long distance trucking to stay close to his little daughter, and had chosen, with encouragement from the sheriff, to start training in law enforcement. She was saving up money to go to law school.

“I’d guess it’s from way back,” Skeet said. “Probably washed out of some little family plot up the creek. “

Taneesha’s cell phone rang.

“Yes M’am. Yes M’am. Yes M’am,” she said. “Yes, M’am, that would be a big help. I don’t know how long we’ll be, though. We’ve got a little problem out here.

“Hey, it’s up,” Skeet said.

“Gotta go, Mama Rene,” Taneesha said. “I’ll call you back when we’re on our way there.”

It had taken a half hour for Clarence Bartow’s rescue volunteers to get the casket out in one piece and into the back of his pickup truck.

“The sheriff says to take it to the Cathay Fire Station,” she told the men. ,”and once that’s done, my grandmother, Irene Martin, is making breakfast for all of us, I need to call her and tell her how many are going to be there.”

A cheer went up and she counted hands.

Mama Rene’s kitchen was Taneesha’s favorite room in the house. It was sunny and welcoming, a room to feel comfortable in.

The rest of the house was nice, though too frilly for Taneesha’s taste, with lace doilies and figurines everywhere.

Mama Rene was, by her own admission, “house proud.” She liked pretty things and she didn’t mind dusting them. She liked to have a lace tablecloth and her prettiest china on the table for Sunday dinner. She had a preference for flowered bedspreads and crocheted pillow tops.

She took pleasure in pretty clothes, pretty hats and jewelry, too. She was financially comfortable now, but had grown up poor and if anyone had tried to explain the concept of voluntary simplicity to her, she would have laughed and told them a bit about involuntary simplicity.

In addition to running the school lunchrooms for years before her retirement, she had made the wedding cakes for over 200 weddings in Magnolia County, taking mental notes all along, thinking ahead toward the beautiful church wedding she wanted for her only granddaughter.

Taneesha had heard it again and again: how everyone, including the men, would be dressed to kill, how there would be bouquets of fresh flowers and ribbons at the end of every pew, and little girls dropping rose petals down the aisle.

Irene Martin had the money to give Taneesha that big wedding, if a groom would just show up.

Her kitchen, at the moment they arrived, smelled like coffee, bacon and biscuits. She was scrambling eggs on low heat in two big cast iron pans. Plates were stacked on the table. Cutlery was wrapped in napkins. Orange juice was in a big pitcher.

The men —there were eight of them, four white, four black—all looked scruffy and had the smell of flood in their clothes, but they had stopped at Clarence Bartow’s direction and washed their hands and faces in the cold running water from Mama Rene’s garden hose. Clarence even had paper towels and a plastic container of antiseptic hand wash in the back of his truck. Skeet came after changing to a dry pair of jeans at the fire station, and lined up with the rest.

Taneesha, who was still getting used to having some authority of her own, had begun to watch Clarence the way she watched Sam Bailey, trying to understand how he stayed in charge with such ease.

“We’ve got to do some decontaminating,” Clarence had said. “I don’t know what all’s in that flood water, but I know I don’t have time for any of you guys to get sick on me.”

He was somebody to learn from, she thought. She didn’t doubt he could yell out an order, too, or dispense with courtesies in a crisis.

Mama Rene, who was a leader of another sort entirely, never dispensed with courtesies.

“Brother Clarence,” she said, as she switched off the burners under the eggs, “Would you return thanks for us.”

Clarence looked around the room and said, “Let us take off our caps and pray.”

“Heavenly Father,” he prayed. “We come before you in humble gratitude for seeing us through this time of danger, toil and snares. Bless this food, which Sister Irene Martin has so graciously prepared for us to the nourishment of our bodies and our bodies to thy service. Amen.”

There was a round of Amens and the men descended on the food.

Taneesha, despite her uniform, despite the fact that she was hungry, too, despite everything, started helping her grandmother make sure that everybody was served.

In Mama Rene’s kitchen, women didn’t sit by and let other women do the kitchen work without helping. Taneesha found herself getting more butter out of the refrigerator, asking if anybody wanted cream in their coffee, pouring more orange juice for men perfectly capable of picking up a pitcher.

It was Skeet Borders who noticed, looking up as she offered to crack some fresh pepper over his scrambled eggs.

“Sgt. Martin,” he said, “We’re all fine. You better get yourself some breakfast before it’s all gone.”

“He’s right, ‘Neesha,” Mama Rene said as if a surprising truth had just struck her. Then she beamed with pride.

“He’s right, Miss Sgt. Martin. Now you sit down, and let me fix you a plate.”

CHAPTER 5

T
HE SKY WAS CLOUDING OVER AGAIN
when Hunter arrived at Bubba Shipley’s hangar on a private landing strip in the west side of the county. Harold Holmes, a thin and mournful man in a dark suit, looked none too happy about flying over the flood in Bubba Shipley’s Cessna.

He chose to climb into the back, and went to work on his seatbelt, looking apprehensively around him. Hunter knew from Sam that Shipley, who now ran his family’s pecan business, had been an Air Force pilot. She kept her nervousness to herself.

It wasn’t that she was afraid of flying. It was just that all her flying had been as a passenger with a ticket, nicely buffered from the reality of hurtling through the air, burying her nose in a book until the whole thing was over.

This, she realized, was going to be a lot more like, well, like flying.

Five minutes later, when they were in the air, she had forgotten all fear and was just hoping her camera battery wouldn’t give out.

Merchantsville, off the distance, looked like a perfectly created toy town, the courthouse, the old Hilliard Conservatory, and the steeples of the larger churches rising above the other rooftops.