Deep South Dead (A Hunter Jones Mystery Book 1)

by Charlotte Moore

  She turned and was gone.

  Chapter 5

  FIVE MINUTES AFTER SHE LEFT THE Hilliard Mansion, Hunter turned off Walnut Street onto McPhaul Avenue, and made a right turn into the driveway behind Rose Tyndale’s old two-story frame house, where she was renting a second floor apartment.

  “Here we are, Kitty,” she said.

  The calico, who had managed to wedge her entire body under the driver’s seat, made a melancholy sound, halfway between a moan and a cry.

  Rose Tyndale, who was a widow, but was called Miss Rose by everybody in town, appeared at the back door just as Hunter got out of her car.

  “Hunter, come in here and just leave the cat in the car for a while,” she called out. “I’ve got some tea ready, and some of those cookies you like, too.”

  Hunter didn’t bother wondering how Miss Rose knew she’d be driving up at that moment with a cat in the car. After six months of living in Rose Tyndale’s upstairs apartment, and visiting almost daily, she had gotten over being surprised at how much her landlady knew and how fast she knew it.

  “Thanks, but I don’t have time,” she said, getting out of the car, “I just came by to leave the cat up in my place.”

  “Of course you have time,” Miss Rose said, coming out to meet her. “Novena called here just two minutes ago saying Tyler was looking for you, and I told her if you came here I was going to make you sit down and have some tea before you did another thing. You’ve had a shock going over there for an interview, and Mae-Lula passing away. Now, you just leave that kitty in the car for now. You know, cats are conservative. They have to take their own time about transitions.”

  A minute later, they were inside and Miss Rose was pouring boiling water into one of her fancy teapots, chattering about cat psychology.

  “When I take Ozymandias to see Dr. Duncan, I always just leave him in the car for a while when we get back, so he can pout for a while, and then he’ll be up on the seat, staring out the window, meowing for me.”

  Ozymandias was Miss Rose’s elderly smoke gray Persian, who was – at the moment – sitting on the cushioned seat of the bay window that overlooked Miss Rose’s garden. Like all Persians, he had a look of chronic discontent and contempt for society on his flat face, but Hunter knew that he’d be likely to be wildly affectionate before her visit was over. He just needed to take his own time about it.”

  Miss Rose, Hunter knew, had lived in Merchantsville from the day she was born, with a four-year absence to attend Bessie Tift College before she came back home to marry her high school sweetheart. She had been a high school English teacher for many years and was a pillar of the Merchantsville United Methodist Church. But, besides that, she played bridge with two different bridge clubs, belonged to two different book clubs, and had held every office in the Magnolia County Garden Club and the Merchantsville Music Lovers Club. In short, she was at the center of a half dozen gossip circuits.

  “Mittie Shepherd has called me three times,” Miss Rose said, pouring spiced tea into two fragile Staffordshire cups, and setting out a plate of sugar cookies with crisp brown edges. “You know Mittie, don’t you?”

  Hunter didn’t.

  “Well, she certainly recognized you.”

  Hunter followed Miss Rose’s example by lifting her saucer up almost to her chin. She blew on the surface of her tea and took a careful sip. If Miss Rose had such a thing as a mug in her kitchen, Hunter had never seen it, any more than she had ever heard Miss Rose make a grammatical error.

  The tea tasted like ginger, cinnamon, and oranges, and was comforting. So was Miss Rose’s chatter, which meant that Hunter didn’t have to start giving another account of her experience in Mae-Lula Hilliard’s kitchen.

  Ozymandias jumped down from the window seat with a thud, and plodded over to sniff at her shoes and rub his big head against her jeans.

  “Mittie’s in the Monday Morning Book Club with me,” Miss Rose was explaining, “She lives on the other side of Hilliard Court about three houses up from Mae-Lula’s in what used to be the Sheffield house before they moved out to Azalea Heights.

  “The first time she called was when she heard the sirens and saw the ambulance arriving, and I asked her then if your little blue car was there, because I remembered that you had said you were going over there to interview Mae-Lula, and the second time was after she learned that Mae-Lula had passed away and then she told me that your car was out front and the third time was just a few minutes ago to tell me that you had left with Mae-Lula’s cat in your arms. So I thought you must he heading here.”

  Hunter took another sip of tea, put the cup and saucer down and bit into a cookie, wondering if all the old ladies knew that it was murder, or if they just knew that Mae-Lula Hilliard had ‘passed away.’

  That answer came next.

  “Mittie said she saw her just yesterday and she was spry as a spring chicken, getting her hair done like she does every week, but then that’s the way it is some time. We never can tell, can we? At our age, every day is a gift. Of course, every one of those Hilliards has had high blood pressure, and Mae-Lula had diabetes on top of that, and she has certainly been putting herself through her paces these last few weeks, fighting so hard to keep the Conservatory from being torn down.”

  “Prrrrwrrrrrrorrrr.”

  Ozymandias was under the table rubbing his chin repeatedly on Hunter’s knee. She reached down under the table and scratched him behind one ear with her left hand, as she tried to decide how much to tell her landlady. Miss Rose put a spoonful of sugar into her second cup of tea and stirred it carefully.

  “Poor Mae-Lula,” she said solemnly, “I’m feeling so thankful that I signed one of her petitions to save the conservatory, and we had a nice little chit-chat about it. Have another cookie, dear.”

  Hunter obediently took another cookie. They were thin, crisp and delicious, and besides, as long as her mouth as full, she could keep on sorting out her options. Maybe just this once, she thought, she’d get something into the paper that Miss Rose and her crowd didn’t already know.

  “Of course, I won’t sit here and lie and say that I liked her, because we had little run-in years ago, and we never seemed to get past it.” Miss Rose said. “Fortunately, she was an Episcopalian – well a Baptist to start with, but you know those Hilliards — and I’m a Methodist, and we belong to different book clubs and she never played bridge, so it never became too complicated.”

  Hunter nodded again, hoping Miss Rose was going to explain about the “little run-in” that made different church memberships advantageous.

  No such luck. Miss Rose continued speaking well of the dead.

  “I also must say that she was always so kind to the younger generation of Hilliards, always took a real interest in them. Well, of course she and Jaybird had their differences, but she never was as close to his side of the family.”

  Hunter nodded.

  Miss Rose got up and turned the heat on under the teakettle. Ozymandias promptly jumped into her chair. She returned, moved her cup and saucer over to the next placemat, took another chair, and sat down with a concerned look on her face.

  “You look pale, dear” she said, “You haven’t said a word, and here I am chattering on and on. I know it must have been upsetting.”

  “She didn’t just pass away,” Hunter blurted out. “She was killed, Miss Rose. I mean, somebody murdered her, and I didn’t just learn about it when I got there. I was the one who found her that way.”

  “Murdered? My Lord! How?”

  “I don’t think I’m supposed to talk much about it until they finish their investigation,” Hunter said, “but if you’ll keep this quiet for now, she was hit over the head. Her skull was fractured.”

  “Oh, how dreadful” Miss Rose said. ‘My goodness that must have been terrible for you.”

  “Do they know who did it?” she asked after a decent pause.

  “No,” Hunter said.

  “It must have been a burglar, “Miss Rose said, “Deaf
as Mae-Lula is, well, was, she’d have never heard anybody in the house. Did you notice if she was still wearing all those rings of hers?”

  “She had on a bunch of them,” Hunter said, surprised that she remembered, but then there was an image burned into her mind.

  Miss Rose did some more thinking.

  “Or it could have been those college students she had that row with at the grocery store. You know about that, don’t you?”

  “I keep hearing bits and pieces,” Hunter said. “What have you heard?”

  “Well, I heard that Mae-Lula and Annie Laurie Wooten had just set up their card table to get petitions signed to save the conservatory, when these young people showed up with petitions to tear it down and build the shopping center. They were being paid by that Flammonde man, Mae-Lula wanted Jake to make them leave, they wouldn’t leave, and Jake called Sam Bailey. Martha Willis was there and she said they were just dreadful looking, with tattoos and rings in their noses.”

  “That doesn’t mean they’d kill somebody,” Hunter said.

  “Well, of course it doesn’t, not all by itself,” Miss Rose agreed. “But who really knows what kind of background that Flammonde man has? I saw the picture of him with Jaybird that you had in the paper. His eyes are very close together. He has a weasely look.”

  Hunter smiled, thinking Miss Rose had hit it right on the head, but then she remembered the terrible wound, the blood, the crumpled old lady on the floor. Would anybody have been that angry over something like petitions? And what good would it do to steal the petitions? It wasn’t as if they were votes or legal documents. They could be signed again, and probably would be. And why would they have come in through the back? She thought about the open door, the dishwasher clattering. The kitchen with the chocolate smell. Would they have just grabbed up a chocolate cake?

  She told her landlady about the cast iron griddle in the dishwasher, the cake mix box, the pans and mixer-blades in the dishwasher, the smell of chocolate.

  “I think Sam Bailey thought I was silly even bringing those things up,” she said.

  “Men!” Miss Rose said with disdain. “That’s not silly at all. My goodness that gives us a lot to consider.”

  “Maybe the cake was for a bake sale somewhere,” Hunter said. Now that someone was at least taking her seriously, she was ready to concede it might not be all that significant.

  “I haven’t heard anything about a bake sale anywhere, and she’d just donate money for something like that,” Miss Rose said. “and besides, she stopped driving a year or two ago, so somebody would have had to come by to get it, which brings us right back around to where I started, but the really odd thing isn’t any of that, Hunter. The odd thing is that it’s hard to imagine Mae-Lula Hilliard’s baking a cake for anybody. Of course, she used to have one of the best cooks in Magnolia County, but Marissa moved up north to live with her son last year, and I remember hearing that after Marissa left, Mae-Lula’s book club met at Hilliard House and she served them fruitcake in February.”

  The phone rang in the parlor.

  “Store-bought fruitcake,” Miss Rose said with significance as she got up to answer it.

  Hunter got up and looked out the window toward her car. The calico cat was standing on the seat with her paws on the window.

  “That was Tyler wanting you to hurry up,” Miss Rose said, coming back into the kitchen. “He sounded cross as a bear, so I told him you had just left.”

  “I’ve got to get the cat settled upstairs first,” Hunter said.

  “Just bring her in here for now,” Miss Rose said. “She’s got to have a litter box.”

  “But what about Ozymandias? Won’t they fight?”

  “Oh, he’ll just run and hide under my bed until you come back to get her. We can manage for an hour or two. You just hurry and get Mae-Lula’s kitty in here and get on back to work before Tyler has apoplexy.”

  “Well my goodness,” Miss Rose said when Hunter brought the cat into her kitchen. “Mittie didn’t tell me that she was in the family way.”

  She gave the cat a scratch behind the ears, and took her from Hunter’s arms.

  “Now you just make yourself at home,” she was saying to the cat as Hunter hurried off. “Miss Rose will give you a saucer of evaporated milk, and a yeast tablet, too, because Miss Rose knows just what kitty cats like. Yes she does.”

  Chapter 6

  “LET’S SEE YOUR PICTURES FIRST,” TYLER said.

  Novena came over to join Tyler and stood behind Hunter to watch as the photo files were opened one by one.

  The phone rang.

  “It hasn’t stopped,” Tyler said, as Novena reached across and picked up the call on Hunter’s line.

  “Yes, honey, yes, it is true, and we’re trying to find out everything we can. You just read the paper tomorrow. How’s your mamma and them? Good. Now I gotta go.”

  The first three were pictures of the mansion itself. Hunter moved to the next.

  “Oh my God in heaven!” Novena said. “You took a picture of her dead body.”

  “We can’t use that,” Tyler said, leaning over to get a closer look.

  The phone rang again, and Novena picked it up.

  “No, sweetie, I don’t think they’ve set any time for the funeral yet. You just read the paper tomorrow. We’ll try to have it all in there for you. I don’t know about the visitation either, but I imagine if you want to take some food over, you ought to take it over to Claire’s house. Yes, I would think they’re the closest family. Well, Jaybird’s the same kin, but I wouldn’t call them close…”

  “I wasn’t thinking we could use the pictures,” Hunter said to Tyler. “It was just that I was there in a crime scene with a camera and how often does that happen?”

  “Never. I would have done the same thing,” Tyler said. “Let’s see the rest.”

  “Okay, here’s a long shot,” she said. “You can see how the rooms arranged.”

  “Why’s the dishwasher standing open?” Novena asked as she hung up the phone and leaned over to look.

  Hunter explained, zooming in.

  “Good Lord,” Novena said, “That’s a good way to ruin cast iron.”

  Tyler rolled his eyes.

  “That’s a point, Tyler,” Hunter said defensively. “Taneesha and I both said the same thing. Besides, I don’t know why she’d be cooking with it. It had a sunflower painted on the back, like it was a decoration.”

  The phone rang again.

  “Well, I suppose it would be at the Episcopal Church,” Novena said, “but, honey, nobody knows yet when it’s going to be. You just hold tight, and we’ll try to have it in the paper tomorrow. I gotta run now.”

  The next four photos showed different angles on the kitchen.

  “Looks like with all the money she had, she would have remodeled that old kitchen,” Novena said. “That’s some old wallpaper, that old rooster and pepper grinder pattern. I bet it’s been up there since the fifties. All faded, too.”

  “I can’t believe you two,” Tyler said. “We got the biggest story of the decade to do by tomorrow at 11 and here you are going on about griddles and wallpaper.”

  “Wait a minute,” Hunter said, zooming in on one part of the picture. “Would you look at that? It’s not faded there, is it?”

  Novena leaned in closer. Hunter zoomed in closer.

  “That’s a nail right there,” she said, and then she backed up, studying the place where the pattern was brighter, where the sun hadn’t been shining on it all those years. “And that’s where the griddle was hanging. “

  “Good Lord, you women and your griddles. I’m glad we’ve got that settled,” Tyler said. “Now let me see what you took that we can use on the front page.”

  The phone rang again and Novena went back to her desk to take the call.

  Hunter saved the photo of the wallpaper to her desktop, and moved ahead with the pictures, but her mind was only half on them.

  There was a good one of Jaybird Hilliard argui
ng with Deputy Bub Williston, another of Taneesha talking with the coroner, still another that showed the whole scene from the outside with the crime tape being put up to encircle the mansion.

  “Good, good, good,” Tyler said. “We’ll use that one. Now let’s talk about the copy. How ‘bout I put Novena on getting comments from the Mayor and all that, and I’ll go to work on a bio to go with the obit, and she if I can find a halfway decent picture of her somewhere, and you need to redo that story you wrote about the City Council meeting so she’s the late, I mean you’ve got quotes from somebody that’s not alive anymore. And you need to stick with the investigation. Is Sam going to make some kind of statement?”

  “Would you believe that the Macon TV station called here?” Novena interrupted. “Somebody from around here called them, and they couldn’t get through to anybody in the sheriff’s office who’d tell ‘em anything, so they thought I was going to tell them about it.”

  “Did you?” Hunter asked.

  “You should have heard how dumb Novena sounded,” Tyler said with a grin. “She said ‘Mae-Lula who?’ Made me real proud.”

  Tyler rolled off and Novena went back to her desk to pick up the phone one more time as Taneesha came in.

  “I tried to call,” she said to Hunter, “but it’s been one long busy signal. Sam’s going to give out a statement at five, and as long as you’re over there, he wants us to get your fingerprints. The Macon TV station is coming down, and Will Roy’ll be there, I guess.”

  Hunter grimaced. Will Roy Johnson was Magnolia County’s sole radio announcer, a man in his sixties with a deep baritone voice who reminded Hunter at every opportunity that she was “not from here” and that he was going to reach the people with the news before she did.

  “What about the Macon paper?” she asked. “Are they coming?”

  “Far as I know, not,” Taneesha said.

  “I’ve got something you might want to see,” Hunter said. “Come look at this picture.”

  “Here it is,” she said to Taneesha a moment later after she had located the picture and opened it on the computer screen. “Now look at this bright place on the wall. That’s where the griddle was hanging. It was a decoration. There was only one reason in the world for it to be in that dishwasher.”