Deep South Dead (A Hunter Jones Mystery Book 1)

by Charlotte Moore

  COPYRIGHT

  DEEP SOUTH DEAD

  A Hunter Jones Mystery

  Charlotte Moore

  Copyright © 2013 by Charlotte Moore. All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission from the author.

  eBook designed by MC Writing

  DEEP SOUTH DEAD

  A Hunter Jones Mystery

  CHARLOTTE MOORE

  Chapter 1

  SHE WAS PLANNING TO CHANGE INTO her best linen suit and silk blouse for the interview, but that would never happen. She was dressed as she would be later in the crime scene photos.

  Faded and snagged pink polyester slacks. A yellow knit pullover. A shapeless white cotton cardigan that might have once been blue, and had crumpled tissue in one pocket and a key in the other. A hairnet, put on to protect the perfectly organized white curls that had been set the day before at the Cut ‘n’ Curl BeauTique. Tan orthopedic shoes over rolled-down knee-highs. A $19.95 watch …

  Five carats worth of diamonds divided between two different yellow-gold heirloom rings on her right hand, and another on her left pinky. A sapphire dinner ring on the finger where most of her lady friends had always worn diamond engagement rings and wedding bands.

  “No, young lady, I certainly do not want to leave a message,” her voice rose, quavering and high, to a near shriek. “I want Robin to come to the phone. Tell him it’s his Aunt Mae-Lula and it’s an emergency.”

  With the amplifier on the earpiece of the old black dial telephone, she could hear the voice from the other end of the line clearly. She just couldn’t hear the volume of her own voice, because she wasn’t wearing her hearing aid. She couldn’t hear her killer coming through the kitchen, either.

  She was standing with her back to the kitchen, just inside the butler’s pantry – a narrow hallway lined with cabinets and counters that led to the dining room.

  Under the circumstances, caution would have been reasonable, but it never entered her mind to keep an eye on the open kitchen door. She was 85 years old, the only time she had ever been afraid of another human being in her life was when she was four years old, and her grandfather, Col. Elijah Hilliard, CSA-Ret., had a grand mal seizure in his big-wheeled wooden wheelchair right at the dining room table. She had stopped being afraid as soon as the cook had picked her straight up out of her chair and said, “You come on in the kitchen with me, Sugar, and we’ll have us a tea cake and let him have his old fit.”

  She was not afraid now. She was outraged, and she wanted to share that outrage and settle on what must be done. As she tapped her fingers on the cool brown marble counter top, she was thinking that Robin was certainly taking his precious time getting to the telephone.

  Especially considering how fast she had gotten that check into the mail for him last week when he called in such a dither about getting his car repaired.

  There was a shadow. The first blow smashed the back of her skull.

  She lurched stiffly against the built-in cabinet, her arthritic knees refusing to bend and then she fell forward. If she felt pain, it was momentary. By the time she hit the ancient linoleum, dragging the telephone – cradle, handset and all – down with her, she was brain dead.

  The killer took a careful step into the narrow passageway.

  Make sure she’s dead.

  A voice no louder than a mosquito buzz was saying “Hello. Hello.”

  The second blow came after the call to Macon was disconnected. Aimed with precision, from a braced position, it was more brutal than the first.

  For good measure. Now that it’s started, get it finished. God, what a lot of blood. But, what choice did she give me?

  At that moment, 50 miles away, at Weatherspoon Antiques & Collectibles in Macon, Robin Hilliard slammed down the telephone receiver and cursed.

  “What’s wrong with your aunt?” the office manager asked him. “She sounded upset. “

  “Would you believe that she hung up on me right after I answered? Guess I didn’t run fast enough for her royal highness.”

  “She sounded really worked up, Robin. Maybe the call just got disconnected. Why don’t you call her back before you go?”

  “Daphne, darling, you just don’t know my Aunt Mae-Lula. She stays all worked up. It’s probably just one more argument she’s had with somebody about that old conservatory building she trying to save.” Robin said, checking his hair in a gold-framed mirror. “Not that she’s wrong about that, but I just don’t have time to get into all that with her right now. I have to meet Colin at Len Berg’s. If she calls back, tell her I had to run to a business lunch, but for God’s sake, don’t tell her where we’re eating.”

  “What if it really is an emergency, Robin?”

  “Then call me and I’ll call her back.”

  “Why don’t I just give her your cell phone number?”

  “Have mercy, Daphne! She doesn’t even know I have a cell phone. I’ve got to have one phone I can answer without worrying that it’s going to be one of my crazy relatives.”

  Or a bill collector, he thought to himself as he made his way through the narrow aisles toward the front door of the shop, and a wave of guilt came over him. She could be a pain, he thought, but she was always there to back him up.

  Back in Merchantsville, in the shabby kitchen of the grand old mansion that Col. Elijah Hilliard built with cotton, peach and moonshine money, the killer swung the door to the butler’s pantry shut to get the body out of view.

  Stop panicking. She’s not going to jump up and start in on it again. She’s dead.

  Can I make it look like an accident?

  There’s that cat again, climbing up the screen door.

  Forget the cat. Think. Think hard.

  The telephone rang.

  It rang seven more times unanswered.

  Robin Hilliard shrugged and pocketed his cell phone. Well, he had tried.

  Chapter 2

  OUTSIDE THE OLD MANSION THAT COL. Elijah Hilliard had built with cotton, peach and bootleg money, life went on. The dogwoods and azaleas were in full bloom. Traffic was picking up a little during as noon hour began.

  On Main Street at the office of The Merchantsville Weekly Messenger, Ann Hunter Jones was studying a digital photograph of the Hilliard Conservatory on her computer screen.

  Located directly across the street from the Hilliard mansion, and built by the same Elijah Hilliard to be a finishing school for young ladies, the abandoned and boarded-up building was at the center of a heated local battle. On one side of the battle, determined to save the Conservatory and prevent the building of a shopping center on its historic grounds, the Magnolia County Historical Society and the Downtown Merchants Association were united.

  On the other side was an Atlanta developer named Marvis Flammonde, aided by a Magnolia County Commissioner, who happened to be a realtor, and also happened to be a Hilliard.

  Tyler Bankston, editor, owner and publisher of the Messenger, rolled his wheelchair across the newsroom to look over Hunter’s shoulder.

  “Well, you certainly got the best angle on that one,” he said. “People will be calling for copies.”

  Hunter smiled at the compliment. She had knelt down in a dried up goldfish pond filled with dead magnolia leaves to take it. As a reporter, she had to avoid taking sides, but as a photographer, she didn�
�t have to worry about staying objective.

  She had caught the eccentric old Victorian folly with the morning sun behind it. The dark red brick towers and turrets were backed by clouds. The boarded-up first floor windows and the padlocked door were obscured by a magnolia branch in the foreground. The casement windows were too small and too high to have needed securing, and the wooden balustrade surrounding the tiny balcony had remained intact for over a century – probably because there was no door to the balcony anyway.

  “We’ll put it on the front page,” Tyler said. “Make the Historical Society happy.”

  “I’ll have a picture of Miss Hilliard, too,” Hunter reminded him. “I’m going over there at one to interview her. She said that she already has over 400 signatures on the petitions and she hopes to have 500 by the next council meeting. I thought I’d get her holding some of the petitions, or going over them at her desk.”

  “Better count those signatures,” he said. “It could be 400 or it could be 75. Mae-Lula’s been known to exaggerate. That’s why we’re going to use my story about the conservatory instead of hers from the county history. I like the old pile of bricks, too, but not enough to leave out all the connivance that’s gone on over the years, and how the city got tricked into accepting the title.”

  Hunter nodded, thankful that she hadn’t had to sort out that history herself, and then she lingered over her photograph for a moment before filing it in the Page 1 folder on her computer, and sending another copy to her best friend and old college roommate in Atlanta.

  “Hi, Nikki,” she wrote quickly, “You asked if there was anything good for your photography show down here. See attached.”

  Nikki, she knew, would go after it in stark black and white and seek out the boarded up windows and the crumbling window frames. Nikki was a genius with a camera, though. Hunter had just started learning four months earlier when she arrived for her first day of work as a reporter and was told that she’d be taking her own pictures.

  She admired her work again, glad it was in color. It would be nice as a framed print, she decided, perfect with the faded rambling rose wallpaper on her apartment bedroom wall.

  When it came to reporting, Hunter would rather cover a fire than a festival, but she was still a romantic at heart. She had a flea market dulcimer leaning against the 1902 steamer trunk she used for a coffee table, and a poster-sized print of Waterhouse’s “Lady of Shallot” over her bed. She was partial to antique jewelry and embroidered vests, of which she had five. She wore them frequently with white shirts (sometimes silk, sometimes ruffled), with long skirts or with faded jeans and high-heeled boots. Her eyes were large and hazel, her chin pointed. Her hair was a wild mass of tangled blonde curls.

  It was not a Middle Georgia look, and four months since she had moved from Atlanta to Merchantsville, the stares had not quite stopped.

  “Hunter, don’t you dare forget you’ve got an appointment with Mae-Lula.”

  Novena Baxter had a carton of fat-free cottage cheese in one hand and a plastic container of salad in the other.

  The society editor and advertising manager for the Messenger was forever on a diet, not because she was fat, but because she wasn’t a size 6, as she had been on her wedding day, 35 years earlier.

  Her hair, which was shampooed, set once a week, and maintained with fierce care and layers of hair spray from one appointment to the next, was fire engine red. She was dressed for spring in a moss green pants suit, with a Magnolia Festival t-shirt and huge ceramic magnolia earrings.

  “I haven’t forgotten,” Hunter said. “It’s not until one.”

  “And don’t even think about ringing the front doorbell,” Novena said. “She’s deaf as a post, and half the time she isn’t wearing her hearing aid. Just go around to the back and holler for her.”

  “I will. That’s what she told me to do when we talked on the phone yesterday,” Hunter said, knowing even as she said it that Novena would never be quite convinced that somebody not from Magnolia County could be depended on to understand its complexities.

  And possibly she was right.

  “And don’t say anything ugly about Jaybird,” Novena said. “He may be on the other side of the battle, but he’s still her nephew.”

  “I wouldn’t say anything ugly about the Commissioner,” Hunter said as she got her camera and her notebook and stuffed them into the shapeless quilted shoulder bag she had used since her college days.

  “I thought you said it wasn’t until one,” Novena said. “You know where the mansion is, don’t you? It’s just right around the corner, right across from the Conservatory.”

  “I thought I’d have lunch first,” Hunter said, and made it through the door before another volley of advice began.

  Downtown Merchantsville was built around the Magnolia County Courthouse. The Messenger office faced one side of the courthouse. R&J’s faced the opposite side.

  A storefront restaurant, R&J’s was unknown to the Florida tourist crowd making stops off Interstate 75, but it was where everybody in downtown Merchantsville – including the whole courthouse gang – headed for ham biscuits at breakfast and soul food at noon.

  Hunter, who had skipped breakfast, filled her plate at the buffet line, choosing smothered pork chops, collard greens and Ramona Martin’s unbelievable sour cream cornbread. She looked around for a place to sit and saw that the place was packed.

  The one long table that usually was open to anybody who came alone had been taken over mostly by construction workers. One chair was empty. She looked at them. They looked back, all smiles.

  “Hey, Hunter, come on over here.”

  It was Deputy Sheriff Taneesha Martin, coming out from the kitchen with a plate of her own. She moved the “reserved” card on a table near the door, and sat down. Hunter went to join her.

  “Thanks,” she said as she put her plate down. “I didn’t know you could reserve a table here.”

  “You can’t. It’s the family table, “Taneesha said. “I’ve been eating right here most weekdays since I was six. Used to do my homework here, too.”

  “Are Ramona and James your parents?”

  “Uncle and aunt, but they raised me.”

  “Well, how do you stay so skinny eating their cooking?”

  Taneesha was tall and slim as a model, dark-skinned with her hair in spiral curls, three or four gold earrings in each ear lobe and perfectly applied makeup. With her sharply pressed uniform and the holstered gun on her hip, she got as many stares as Hunter did.

  “I mainly stick to the veggies, and stay clear of the fried stuff,” she said. “Except on Fridays. I’ve got to have Uncle James’ catfish and hushpuppies. Of course, Aunt Ramona eats fried chicken and sweet potatoes every day, but she works off the calories riding herd on crazy waitresses like Annelle Patterson.”

  Annelle, a short, stocky woman with salt-and-pepper hair and rhinestone-trimmed glasses, had just arrived with Hunter’s iced tea. She put the drink down and swatted at Taneesha with a menu.

  “Neesha’s been a smart aleck since she was old enough to talk,” she said to Hunter. “Now that she’s got that shiny badge, she thinks she’s hot stuff for sure.”

  Then she got serious and leaned closer, lowering her voice.

  “As long as I’ve got the newspaper and the law here at the same table,” she said, “Could one of y’all tell me what happened over at the SaveMart yesterday evening? My Billy drove by there about 4:30 yesterday and he said there was a crowd outside and two cruisers with those red and blue lights going and he swore he saw Mae-Lula herself right in the middle of it.”

  “Well, sounds like your Billy already knows about as much as I know,” Taneesha said, carefully doctoring her collards with Tabasco. “I didn’t work that one.”

  “What about you, Hunter? You got a story about it? No, wait, don’t say another word until I get back” Annelle said. “I’ve got to get that crowd of guys over there some more sweet tea.”

  “What happened at the SaveMa
rt?” Hunter asked after Annelle was gone. “And don’t tell me you don’t know every last thing about it.”

  “I can’t talk to the media about incidents,” Taneesha said.

  “So there was an incident?”

  “Mmm hmm,” Taneesha said with a laugh, “and about 25 witnesses to the whole thing, but I’m not the one to ask about it, Hunter. You’ve got to talk to Sam about that.”

  Hunter was curious, but she didn’t mind having an excuse to go and talk with Sheriff Sam Bailey. She buttered her cornbread, drifting off into her own thoughts. It was safe to have her little fantasy, she thought, because absolutely nothing was going to happen.

  Sure, he was probably the youngest and best-looking sheriff in Georgia, but he was ten years older than she was, at least, and what would they have to talk about after they got through going over incident reports?

  There were definite negatives, she told herself. He had that stuffed deer head on his office wall, probably Bambi’s mother.

  Besides that, he had baggage. Novena had said that he was still crazy about his ex-wife, Rhonda Ransom, the so-called great country singer nobody outside of Magnolia County had ever heard of – the one who left him and their little girl and went off to Nashville.

  And the kid. Don’t forget that, Hunter reminded herself. The man has a child. Not just a dog or a cat or a parrot, but a daughter, probably just like one of those perky little TV twins, scheming constantly to get her parents back together.

  Taneesha interrupted Hunter’s drifting thoughts.

  “Hey, Hunter, look who just walked in.”

  It was County Commissioner J. Burton “Jaybird” Hilliard, nephew of Mae-Lula Hilliard, and the main man behind the push to get the Merchantsville City Council to sell the Conservatory grounds to Flammonde Developers.

  “Don’t look now, but he’s heading this way,” Annelle said in a low voice as she circled back around with more tea. “Which one of y’all is he after?”