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

by Charlotte Moore

  It was built of pine, stained to a reddish black by earth, clay and water. It splintered, but did not break open as it tumbled and jolted to a stop, caught between a tree trunk and a slab of asphalt-covered concrete.

  The floodwaters parted around the casket and moved on.

  CHAPTER 3

  ON SATURDAY WHEN THE SUN ROSE, the rain had stopped, and Magnolia County was cut in half by the flood. The river was still seeking its own level, finding places to go, backing into creeks that had already overflowed onto highways and into any building that happened to be in the way.

  Merchants were drifting down the main street of downtown Cathay in boats, looking sorrowfully into stores and shops flooded to the ceiling, worrying about what their insurance would cover and what to tell their employees.

  Merchantsville, just five miles away on the other side of the river, had been built on higher ground, and wasn’t hit as hard, but there were still closed bridges, and the dirty water had reached a half dozen homes, the baseball field at the Middle School and the animal shelter.

  Tyler Bankston listened to the reports on the radio while he drank his morning coffee at 7:30 a.m., and said, “I’ll be damned,” at least a dozen times before his wife Ellie reminded him that she didn’t like cursing in her house.

  Tyler called Hunter.

  “Where are you?”

  “At R&J’s,” she said, “They opened early for the emergency workers, and I’m getting Sam some breakfast to take over to his office. He only got a couple of hours of sleep.”

  “Well, how about getting some news out of him instead of just holding hands? And see if you can find a way over to Cathay. That’s where the worst of it is.”

  Hunter grinned as she often did when Tyler Bankston’s priorities became clear. Sam might want her to stay at home and take no risks. Tyler put getting the news for his weekly newspaper first.

  “I talked with Novena a few minutes ago,” Hunter said. “She said to tell you they’ve got creek water up to their back steps, and the interstate’s closed for about seven miles. She’s figured out that she’d have to drive about 70 miles to get to that ribbon cutting in Cathay without having to drive underwater. Oh, and she said to tell you she and Bobby didn’t drown, in case you’re interested.”

  “Looks like she’d have figured out that there’s not going to be any ribbon cutting in Cathay,” Tyler said. “Sounds like the whole downtown over there is in six feet of water.”

  Ramona Martin was waiting at the cash register, so Hunter said a quick goodbye.

  She had loaded one tray from the buffet with bacon, eggs, grits and biscuits with sawmill gravy for Sam, and another with two ham biscuits—one for herself and one for Sam. She picked up two orange juice cartons as she reached the cash register and asked Ramona Martin for two large coffees. Then she began digging into her purse.

  “If that’s for the sheriff, it’s on the house,” Ramona said. She turned and called out to the restaurant’s one waitress, “Annelle, get me some flatware for the sheriff. I don’t want him eating with a plastic fork after the night he had.”

  “The biscuit’s mine,” Hunter said, “and one of the orange juices and one of the coffees.”

  “That’s your pay for taking the man his breakfast,” Ramona said with a smile.

  Hunter knew better than to argue. Ramona Martin and her husband James had their own approach to being good citizens. Usually that meant giving food away.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Where’s Taneesha this morning? Did she get any sleep?”

  Sgt. Taneesha Martin was Hunter’s friend, Sheriff Sam Bailey’s second-in-command, and Ramona’s niece.

  “She’s on the other side of the river with the worst of it,” Ramona said. “She called me way early this morning and said Sam put her in charge over there once he knew the river bridges were going to flood. She was going to try to get a little sleep and a shower over at her grandmother’s house. You know ‘Neesha. She probably slept two hours and got up to iron the creases back into her slacks.”

  “Hunter, you want a good picture?” the waitress called out as Hunter headed for the door. “My Billy said Sonny Willcox and Little Sonny are out in a boat picking up dogs. That old man they got running the animal shelter just let all the dogs and cats loose last night when he saw how fast the water was coming up and now they’re out there rounding up the dogs. About seven of them were on the roof, and some others got up on this old trailer. “

  “What about the cats?” Hunter asked. “Are they picking up the cats, too?”

  “Cats can climb trees,” Ramona interrupted, “Now you go on and take that man his breakfast.”

  Sam’s secretary, Shellie Carstairs, who was usually “dressed for success” with plenty of jewelry and makeup, had come to work in jeans and an oversized Georgia Bulldogs t-shirt, looking as if she had just scrubbed her face before rushing out the door.

  “I would have brought you some breakfast if I had known you were here…” Hunter began.

  “I’ve had half a box of Krispy Kremes, already,” Shellie said. “It’s that man in there who needs the real food.”

  Sheriff Sam Bailey was in his office, feet on his desk, listening to someone on the phone. He looked exhausted but managed a smile as Hunter came in. He pointed at the phone and rolled his eyes upward. Hunter knew somebody was wasting his time.

  “Commissioner,” Sam said abruptly, “We’re not going to know the half of how awful it is until the water goes back down. We’re talking millions just to get the roads and bridges fixed, and we’ve got a whole bunch of poor people without any flood insurance who are going to have to find places to live, and..” he stopped as Hunter opened the tray and the smell of bacon filled the room. “Look, I got to go. But take it from me. You may not be able to get across town right now, but don’t go telling the governor Merchantsville is the disaster. The disaster is in Cathay and all over the other side of the river.”

  Hunter unwrapped the flatware for him, and then massaged his shoulders as he wound up his conversation with “I gotta go.”

  “Which one was that?” Hunter asked after he hung up.

  “Jaybird Hilliard, of course. He wants to call the governor and he wants to know what he’s talking about. If he wanted to be an authority on the flood, he could have come out and helped us in the middle of the night.”

  “How bad is it?” Hunter asked.

  “It’s a disaster,” Sam said, “But it could be worse. We’ve got people staying in churches on the other side of the river, but we didn’t lose any lives that we know of, and the rest of it will get fixed one way or the other. I’m just glad it’s not my problem to find the money. My real problem is going to be getting a little sleep before I have to go back over to Cathay. I’d better skip the coffee.”

  “You’re going to Cathay?” Hunter asked. “How are you going to get there?

  Sam dug into his breakfast for a while before answering.

  “National Guard’s coming in,” he said. “We’ll have a chopper here by noon for emergency purposes.”

  “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

  SGT. TANEESHA MARTIN OF THE MAGNOLIA 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 h
er 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.”