Death Over the Dam (A Hunter Jones Mystery Book 2) (5 page)

The boat was closer now. Hunter took another picture.

The man was climbing out of the boat. He had scratches up and down his arm.

As Hunter kept snapping pictures, Emily took the cat from him, and it cuddled up against her, purring loudly.

“I know who you are!” the little girl suddenly said. “You’re the one with the golden hair who works for the newspaper. Bethie Bailey told me about you. Bethie’s got a cat named Tuxedo.”

“Yes, I know Bethie and her daddy, and I work for the newspaper,” Hunter said, “That’s why I’m taking pictures. What’s your name?”

“Emily Turner.”

The man turned to Hunter as the little girl went off with her cat.

“They lost everything else,” he said, “There’s flood water up to the ceilings in those houses down there.”

He was a big man with a gentle voice

“Did you get one of those tetanus shots they’re giving up at the church?” Hunter asked, looking at the scratches on his arm. “They’re saying the flood water’s contaminated.”

“I already got one,” he said. “My mama made me.”

“I’m Hunter Jones from the Messenger,” she said, “Can I get your name?”

“I’m Grady Bennett. You’re the sheriff’s girlfriend, aren’t you?” he asked, sounding like a teenager.

Despite her best efforts, Hunter blushed like a teenager at the question, and just nodded.

What could she say? “Girlfriend” sounded like high school, but they weren’t engaged.

As they headed toward the church together, he told her that his mother’s store only had about a foot of flooding, but they still had to move everything out and would have a big cleaning job.

“Which store is that?” Hunter asked.

“Over that way” he said, pointing. “She sells all sorts of second hand stuff and arts and crafts. She’s got just about everything outside and on sale today. She says she’s going to get it fixed up nice and re-open.”

“I’ll go take a look before I leave,” Hunter said.

Sam joined them, and Grady smiled.

“This is a nice girlfriend you’ve got, Sheriff,” he said.

“So I’ve heard,” Sam said, smiling back. “It was good of you to get that little girl’s cat for her.”

A woman’s voice came through the crowd.

“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 taken 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

“
G
RADY
B
ENNETT’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?”