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

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