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

She gave the cats fresh water, and headed for the bathroom to strip out of her wet clothes and towel her hair dry. She found a tee shirt, her oldest faded jeans and a pair of clean socks. The dry clothes felt like heaven. She hadn’t realized how cold and damp she was, or how hungry!

“I made a big batch because Robin and Colin were coming over,” Miss Rose explained as she ladled chicken and dumplings into soup bowls, “but Robin called and said that they were having an awful time at the mansion. They went up to check the attic and there was water everywhere, so they’re having to move all those old trunks and things downstairs and get the floor covered with plastic sheeting so it won’t leak to the second floor. I told him he should just be thankful he found the leak before all that water started ruining the second floor ceilings, after all the work they’ve done.”

She served up a small amount of broth and meat on a china plate for Ozymandias, her aging smoke gray Persian cat, who circled around it, sniffing and waiting for it to cool.

“Well, I hope it doesn’t cost a lot to repair,” Hunter said. “They’ve spent a fortune already.”

Robin Hilliard was one of Hunter’s recently acquired friends as well as one of Miss Rose’s favorites among her former high school English students. He was taking a big risk turning the historic Hilliard Mansion into an inn.

He had inherited the classic white-columned mansion from Mae-Lula Hilliard, who was his aunt and had doted on him. He and his partner Colin had both quit their jobs to do the restoration themselves. They had friends coming in every weekend to help, and were even trying to line up a gourmet chef… Hunter was scheduled to write a feature story on the whole project, but she knew they’d need publicity far beyond Magnolia County to make a go of it.

“Eat,” Miss Rose said. “And then we’ll talk.”

The chicken was falling off the bone. The dumplings were round, simmered in peppery gravy on the outside, light and fluffy on the inside. The only side dish was a simple salad of ripe tomato slices and onions in vinaigrette, and Hunter knew that there would be a homemade dessert.

“Robin and Colin should have hired you to run their kitchen,” she said.

Miss Rose beamed, and said, “You know, Robin actually asked me if I would bake lemon pound cakes for them, but I told him I’d give the recipe to his chef if they’d name it after me. I’ve got to have some kind of immortality.”

Then the topic turned back to the rain, which was still pounding down. Hunter told Miss Rose that Sam was expecting a big flood.

“Oh, that’s so silly,” Miss Rose said. “These men and their flood talk. There’s a whole crowd here that thinks the river’s going to flood every time it starts rising. Will Roy was on the radio saying it was going to crest at 27 feet, and that is just ridiculous. It didn’t get that high even when I was a child and we’ve built the levees since then.”

“That’s exactly what Tyler told Bub Williston,” Hunter said, “but Sam’s worried about it.”

“Well, you young people ought to listen to us old fossils sometimes,” Miss Rose said, getting up to cut slices of coconut cream pie. “If the river flooded every time it rained for three days, we’d all be living in arks by now.”

After supper, Hunter went back up to her apartment and took time to check her e-mail and add a note to her ongoing correspondence with Nikki, her best friend in Atlanta.

“You wouldn’t believe the rain here today,” she wrote. “Sam says there’s going to be ‘the mother of all floods’ and he’s going to be out with his people all night. Anyway, our usual Friday night date is off, and I just had chicken and dumplings with Miss Rose. She and Tyler both say there isn’t going to be any big flood.”

When there was no reply from Nikki after ten minutes, Hunter remembered that it was Friday night and people her age who were single and didn’t live in Magnolia County were out partying, not having supper with their landladies and going to bed early with a murder mystery and two cats for company.

As Hunter made the most of her quiet Friday night, the rain, the creeks and the river were proving Tyler Bankston and Rose Tyndale wrong.

By eight that night, the sheriff’s office, the Georgia State Patrol, the Magnolia County Fire Department and the volunteers in the Emergency Management Agency were banging on doors and telling everybody who lived in the flood plain to get out.

The rain kept pouring down.

By midnight, every creek bridge in the county was submerged and two of them had collapsed. The creeks were spreading out into muddy lakes, rising quietly out of the ditches and gullies they had dug through the centuries, spreading into back yards, circling swing sets and creeping up on houses.

And the river rose, not just with the creek waters pouring into it, but with rainwater from 75 miles north. Birds circled, screaming and cawing as the water rose over their nests. Possums and raccoons scrambled for the treetops. White-tailed deer, rabbits and foxes headed for higher ground.

At 1: 30 a.m., the rain was slowing down but the creeks were still rising and the river was about to reach its record crest. A man who lived nearly a half mile from the old river ferry landing called 911 to report that he had stepped out of his bed in the dark and found himself up to his knees in water. He was sitting on his roof with his wife and his dog.

After conferring with the Clarence Bartow, the county’s emergency management director, Sheriff Sam Bailey divided his forces between the two sides of the river, put Sgt. Taneesha Martin in charge of the west side, and drove at top speed, sirens on, to make it back to Merchantsville before the flood divided his jurisdiction in half.

At 2 a.m., Bartow ordered all roads to the river and creek bridges barricaded.

At 3 a.m., the river was over the Cathay levee and covering the pews at New Life CME Church.

At 5:17 a.m. the 75 year old Timpoochee Lake dam, five miles north of Cathay, collapsed. The waters it had been holding back roared across the two-lane bridge and the highway leading up to it.

The foundation under the highway on the south side, built a half century earlier on mounded dirt, red clay and gravel, washed out. The bridge buckled and collapsed, creating a trap for flailing catfish, branches, old bait cans, and, finally, for a casket.

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

O
N
S
ATURDAY 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.”