Death Over the Dam (A Hunter Jones Mystery Book 2) (9 page)

Hunter changed the subject as she finished her second cup of coffee.

“Are you missing Bethie?”

“I’m just glad 4-H Camp was this week,” he said. “Actually, it’s you I’m missing.”

His cell phone buzzed before she could respond with more than a smile, and then hers beeped.

“Tyler asked me to remind you we’ve got a deadline, and he needs to talk with you, “ Novena said, “and he wants a cup of coffee.”

Sam was still on the phone when she left.

As it turned out, Tyler had decided that since Ned Thigpen wasn’t from Magnolia County, the story of his murder could go on page two, along with the stories about the meetings they had covered.

He was apparently waiting for her agreement, which was something new.

She agreed.

“If we don’t make the people in Cathay happy, we’ll never hear the end of it,” she said.

Skeet and Taneesha were in Cathay, going from one store to the next with the prints of the photo of Ned Thigpen his wife had e-mailed to them. Taneesha was especially glad it was a full-length shot, with his camera bag slung over one shoulder. She was thinking that people who didn’t remember his face might remember the camera bag and the suspenders—the whole out-of-town look.

Grady Bennett was one of the first to recognize the man in the photo.

He was there volunteering—tearing out flood soaked walls in one of the shops that has been flooded to the ceiling.

He stopped working, wiped the sweat off his forehead with his arm and took a look.

“Yeah, he was around talking to people, taking some pictures. It was a couple of days ago. Day before yesterday. Is this the guy you were asking me about last night that knew Dee Dee’s daddy?”

“It is,” Skeet said.

“So what’s going on?” Grady asked. “How come y’all so interested in him?”

Skeet looked at Taneesha, who said, “Somebody shot him.”

“Shot him dead? That’s awful. Who would do that?”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” Taneesha said and thanked him for his help.

They wound up at noon with a dozen people who had seen Ned Thigpen and seven who had talked with him and had their pictures taken by him. Mayor Debbie Taylor was one of those and Grady’s mother, Sharon Bennett, was another.

Mayor Taylor said she had talked to him a while about the extent of the damage, and he had taken her photo in front of the flood-damaged city hall.

“That’s awful that somebody would kill that nice man,” Sharon Bennett said when she learned the reason they were asking, and then she added. “Do you think there’s still a way to get copies of the pictures he took? I’d like to have that one he took of me in front of my shop, and he told me I could order a print on his website.”

Skeet opened his mouth, but Taneesha cut in with a brisk, “No, M’am. We don’t know anything about what’s going to happen with the pictures.”

“Can you believe that?” he said as they walked off. “Here the man’s dead, and she’s wondering if the pictures are going to be on sale on his website.”

At noon, the first clean copies of the Special Flood Edition of the Messenger were coming off the press and Hunter was suddenly feeling torn between wanting to wait around and see people coming in to buy it, and wanting to go home and take a nap. She yawned. It had happened before.

“Out of adrenaline, huh?” Tyler said. “You know why this paper comes out on Wednesday?

“No,” she said, stifling a second yawn.

“Because of Wednesday night prayer meeting,” he said. “Not that many people go, but traditionally nothing else gets scheduled on Wednesday night that we have to report on. Go on home.”

The part time circulation manager had arrived with his team. Some of the papers would go through a labeling machine to be addressed for mailing. Some would be delivered to subscribers that afternoon, and many more than usual would be picked up from newsstands strategically located around the county.

Tyler went back to his office, whistling, and Hunter considered following him and asking for a raise, but she mostly wanted to leave , go home and collapse before the telephone rang one more time.

She took a paper to give to Miss Rose, and ducked out of an invitation to have tea. Then she trudged up the stairs to her apartment, curled up on her bed with both cats joining her, and slept a deep, dreamless sleep until the phone woke her up.

“Did I wake you up?” Sam asked when she answered in a groggy voice. “Are you OK?”

“Of course,” she said, yawning and blinking. “What time is it?”

“Almost five,” Sam said. “The paper looks great. Everybody in town is reading it.”

“Good,” she said, waking up a bit more. “And please don’t tell me that somebody else has gotten killed.”

“It was just one, “Sam said. “We don’t know about the bones in the coffin yet.”

Hunter yawned again.

“Have you gotten anywhere with Ned Thigpen’s murder?” she asked.

“No. All we can find out is that he had a room at the Day’s Inn and his suitcase was there. No cameras, though. Wherever he was going, he was planning to come back and spend the night.”

“I don’t imagine he would have left his cameras in a motel room,” Hunter said. “I wouldn’t and mine isn’t even valuable. My friend Nikki is fanatical about hers.”

“And we know that he wandered around Cathay talking to people, and that he didn’t eat supper at R&J’s or any other local place,” Sam said.

Hunter yawned and exhaled with a big sigh.

“It you’re through with your nap, why don’t we go out to dinner?” he asked.

“Why don’t you pick us up something and come over here?” she answered.

After he hung up Sam frowned and wondered briefly if he should have insisted on a restaurant. He could have said they both needed a real break, or that she deserved something special after all that work on the paper.

Then he decided maybe he didn’t even need to tell her. She would find out soon enough, and he could act like he knew about it but didn’t think it was any big deal.

Because it wasn’t really any big deal, just a big nuisance.

Skeet Borders picked up his daughter from his sister’s house buckled her into her car seat and headed home.

Everybody said Madison looked just like him, but sometimes he could see a trace of her mother when she pouted, which she was doing now. She hadn’t wanted to stop playing with her cousin Chipper’s new puppy, and he could understand that. He was just glad that she was only three—not old enough to know that there were other puppies that could be adopted.

Eventually, he’d get her one, he thought, but not now, when it took every bit of energy he had to do right by his new job, finish the training course, keep some kind of normal home and be a single dad.

He was sure she had forgotten her mother, which was fine for now, but the time would come when she had to know what happened to Tamlyn before some smart-aleck kid blurted it out on the playground. Mommy was in heaven because Mommy had been killed. It gave him a headache even thinking about trying to explain that to a child, but he didn’t believe in secrets. There had been too many secrets already.

He glanced back and Madison was asleep, looking like a little angel.

He let the worry go and used the rest of the drive to think about work.

He knew that Sam had to make the decisions, and he probably would have sent the new kid on the block too, but he had gotten frustrated the night before driving all that way across the county just for Grady Bennett to tell him that he didn’t know any Ned Thigpen.

He pulled into the driveway by the prefab home he was renting . Madison woke up the moment the car stopped moving, and wailed, “I want puppeeee!”.

Grady showed Deirdre his picture on the front of the paper and she smiled and threw her arms around his neck.

“It’s you! It’s you and a cat. You saved the cat! I like the picture.”

They sat together on the sofa and looked at all the pictures. Neither one of them was good at reading, but Grady knew many of the people in the pictures, and could explain the whole thing.

CHAPTER 12

O
N
T
HURSDAY,
H
UNTER CALLED IN TO
say she wanted to take the day off to make up for all the weekend work.

“Enjoy yourself,” Tyler said, “Just don’t forget the county P&Z meeting tonight.

“P&Z” was Planning and Zoning, which could either be a total waste of time or the beginning of a community war, depending on the agenda.

“I won’t,” she said, wanting to add, “Have I ever?”

“I’d say skip it,” Tyler went on. “But their agenda just came through the fax machine. They’ll have Sam and Clarence Bartow there to report on the flood damage. I don’t know why they can’t read the paper, but maybe something new will come up..”

“Well,” she said, “It beats hearing them argue about what size signs people can put up.”

The meeting would start at 6 p.m. so she still had a full day to do other things.

One thing on her mind was Bethie’s tenth birthday party, which was just a week away.

Bethie had told Hunter she wanted a butterfly party, but she hated pink and she wanted lavender butterflies. Hunter had promised to provide a cake decorated with lavender butterflies. She knew exactly where to get one, because she had written a story only a few months back about a stay-at-home mom who was making a successful business of beautiful made-to-order cakes.

She found the card for “Just for You” cakes, and called to make the order.

By the time she was off the phone, having agreed on a side order of matching cupcakes, she was suffering from sticker shock, but smiling about it too. Sam wouldn’t need to know how much it cost. The thing was that it would be just right.

It was a real blessing, she thought, that she and Sam’s daughter had hit it off from the moment they met. Hunter had lost her mother to cancer when she was Bethie’s age. Like Bethie, she had grandmothers and aunts who made every effort to fill the gap, but she couldn’t imagine having had a mother who just moved away like Bethie’s had.

Bethie was small for her age with fine straight blonde hair that defied braids or barrettes, and glasses that magnified her big blue eyes. Although she looked vulnerable, Hunter had discovered early that Bethie was doing just fine. She made good grades, had plenty of friends and didn’t need for Hunter to be a mommy to substitute for the one who had left her behind. She had her dad and two grandmothers who adored her, and when she talked about Rhonda, it was mainly casual, like “This was my mom’s chest of drawers when she was growing up.” or “My mom sent me that for Christmas last year.”

As for Sam’s ex-wife, Rhonda Ransom Bailey, now just Rhonda Ransom, Hunter knew more about her than she wanted to know.

She had been homecoming queen, Miss Magnolia County and first runner-up in the Miss Georgia Pageant. She could sing and she wanted to be a country music star, which is why she left Sam. He wouldn’t move to Nashville, and she wouldn’t stay in Merchantsville, or that’s the way the local story went.

You could find her on line and she had some CDs out that Hunter thought she had probably paid to produce, including one with hymns. As far as Hunter could tell, Rhonda wasn’t a big name in Nashville. In her media photos she looked 18 and beautiful.

Hunter hadn’t learned anything about Rhonda from Sam, who generally clammed up on the subject except to say that it was done and over. Hunter knew that he had legal custody of Bethie, and there was a contingent of Rhonda supporters who claimed that Sam wasn’t letting Bethie visit because he wanted Rhonda to have to come back to see her own child.

The most generally accepted story in Merchantsville had been that “Rhonda broke Sam’s heart,” which had led to any number of people telling Hunter, “It’s so nice to see Sam finally going out with somebody, after well, you know..”

She had been at Bethie’s ninth birthday party at Sam’s mother’s house, a few months after she and Sam had had their first few dates, and it was a nice event with Rhonda’s mother there too. Elizabeth Ransom was a sweet woman who clearly loved her grandchild, and was fond of Sam, too. She had brought a beautifully wrapped present and told Bethie was from her mother.

“It’s for your first day of school,” she had said, but to Hunter it looked more like a dress for the Little Miss Magnolia County Pageant, all pink and frilly, nothing like Bethie picked for herself.

Bethie had not worn the dress on the first day of school, which Hunter knew because she had gone to the school to take pictures, and seen Bethie dressed much like the other girls in her class, in a simple denim skirt and a pullover top. Bethie wore what Bethie wanted to wear.

And that reminded Hunter of a phone call she needed to make.

“Dee Dee,” Grady Bennett was saying to his wife as she started out the back door with Binky. “I don’t want you walking out back. It’s all muddy and slippery out there, and you could fall. “

“I’m tired of staying inside all the time,” she said. “Binky is too. Stop frowning so much and being so bossy.”