Hiking Sticks, Hawks, and Homicide by Mary Lucal

Author:Mary Lucal
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: cozy mystery, cozy mystery series, cozy mystery outdoors, environmental mystery, coffee cozy mystery, tennessee cozy mystery, bird mystery, cozy mystery with birds
Publisher: Mary Lucal
Published: 2022-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

Martha walked back to the cottage, greeted Penny, then grabbed her keys to head to the address Cherry had given her. She thought for a moment about taking Penny with her, but had a sneaking suspicion that Cherry was not a dog person. Her first impression was that Cherry was more a Cherry person.

She brushed Penny and played tug with her rope toy for a few minutes, enough to get the little dog good and tired and not as grumpy about not being taken along for the ride. Once the fur ball got drowsy, Martha grabbed her keys and bag and headed out.

The Vacancy Hotel was well-known to anyone who’d spent any time in Riley Creek. Situated on a winding road that climbed its way deep into the Paris Mountains, it was the place for those who had no other place. Just a mention that someone was staying at the Vacancy was enough to signal that they had fallen on hard times. When she’d stayed up late one summer and watched Janet Leigh get the chop in Psycho, Martha had somehow blended the two locations—the Bates Motel and the Vacancy—so a proverbial black cloud hung over the place in her mind’s eye.

Riley Creek gave way to the Little Paris River, which rose and fell to the beat of the Pickens Dam several miles upstream. She knew that old-timers in the area, though they enjoyed having electricity and heat and air conditioning, still spoke of the dam with mixed emotions since its arrival flooded many of their homeplaces. The resultant lakes had created a recreation mecca that attracted the tourists who kept Riley Creek alive in the cold winter months, but Aunt Lorna had always cautioned Martha not to mention the dam in mixed company.

As she drove along the river, broad vistas occasionally opened up and she took in as many as she could while keeping the car between the curvy lines. Feeling the higher elevation in her ears, Martha noticed the kudzu that smothered everything like a deep green blanket. Even the tallest trees were covered with the stuff. She remembered as a little girl feeling a bit of a thrill at its towering walls of green, but when she was older, Aunt Lorna explained to her that kudzu was actually a tree-smothering plant, brought to the United States from China and Japan in the late 1800s and used all around the south for erosion control. Little did those early farmers know how the plant would take over and decimate so many acres of beautiful forest.

True to her last memory of the place, the Vacancy was just an older version of the same run-down heap with red siding. Truth be told, the place had been called something else once upon a time, but the top half of its sign had snapped off long ago, leaving “Vacancy” running vertically along the left side of a white pole, and “Hotel” jutting out horizontally at the bottom. Vintage lightbulbs outlined a cosmic arrow eternally pointing the way.

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