Murder On Hickory Mountain

By Walker Bramblett and Linda Cappel

Ryder Malone is content to practice indigent defense from his mountainside cabin overlooking Longstreet, the perfect little tourist town. But after a chance encounter with a prisoner in the county jail, he discovers there is a dark underside surrounding Hickory Mountain, and it’s threatening his love and his life. Will he survive long enough to discover who’s murdering innocent men?

~~~~~ Excerpt ~~~~~

The prisoner clutched the bars so hard his knuckles were white. His nails were clean, and he wore chinos, a purple Izod shirt, and red-laced boots that looked like they came from Neiman Marcus. He was maybe in his mid-forties, average height and trim, and he wore tortoiseshell glasses. A good haircut. Clean shaven. Not a typical prisoner in any jail Malone had ever seen.

“Yes, I’m a lawyer. Ryder Malone.”

“I’m Mark Coker. I need a lawyer. They just pulled me over this morning, said I was weaving, then claimed they found a hidden gun in my car. I wasn’t weaving, and I don’t even own a gun. They won’t let me use the phone. I can pay you.”

Malone handed him his card and asked, “Where are you from, Mr. Coker? What do you do?”

“I’m an architect from Marietta. I was supposed to meet clients on a mountain tract overlooking a lake named Amadahy,” said Coker.

“Lake Amadahy is in Nolan County. Next county up.”

“Well, I took a dirt road on the right going up a mountain, which was what I was looking for,” said Coker. “But I came to a group of trashy houses and trailers. A big metal garage with tractor-trailer trucks. Parts, rusty equipment scattered all over the place. I figured this had to be the wrong road, so I turned around. When I got back on the highway, I didn’t get far before blue lights lit me up from behind, and I pulled over. Then another car came rushing in with lights flashing, blocking me from the front.”

“The second car came in right away?” Malone asked.

“It all happened real fast,” Coker said, nodding. “I didn’t know what was happening.”

That seemed odd. A coordinated stop-and-block on a weaving case when the guy had just gotten on the road? Malone assumed there was something Coker wasn’t telling him, a common phenomenon in the world of criminal defense.

“Have you made any statements?” Malone asked.

Coker shook his head. “They haven’t asked me anything. I told them that wasn’t my gun.”

“Okay. Don’t make any statements, don’t talk about your case. I have to talk to the DA on Snead’s case tomorrow, I’ll see what he has to say. Maybe he will agree to a bond.” He quoted a retainer, and Coker gave him the names and numbers of his wife and his attorney in Marietta.

Malone assured Coker he would contact his wife immediately and started to leave. Then he thought of another question. He turned back toward the cell. “When you turned around where the trucks and all were, did you see or talk to anybody?” A witness who could say Coker wasn’t drunk would help.

“There was a man who came rolling out from under a truck on one of those flat things with wheels, you know, like mechanics lie down on. He stood up wiping his hands on a greasy rag, and just shook his head when I asked if the road went to Lake Amadahy.”

“What did he say?” asked Malone.

“Nothing. Nothing at all. Shook his head no, that’s it,” said Coker.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Boruma Publishing
• Release date: Jan 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005012908

Book preview

Prologue

It was in the fall of 1826 when the white man with a scruffy black beard rode into the Cherokee village on a sleek, tall, bay gelding. The air was cool and dry, and little gusts came and went, softly rattling the papery leaves of the hardwoods. Born in the spring, the spent leaves trickled down and swirled about in fading shades of orange, red, yellow, and rust. They had been floating and swirling around man and horse for days, and the bay had grown tired of it. He shook out his mane, swatted his tail, picked up his step, and strutted into the clearing.

The members of the Red Bank Tribe were weary of white men, but they really liked the horse. Ezekiel Butler had stolen it from a young woman he had impregnated in east Tennessee and ridden it hard with her father in hot pursuit. Of all the horses he could have stolen, the bay was the only one that gave him a chance against the furious old man on the Tennessee stud. By a stroke of luck born of necessity, Butler rode into the village on his ticket to tolerance by the Cherokee.

It didn’t take him long to solidify his position by marrying a pretty young maiden named Galilahi. They took up married life in an abandoned cabin next to a broad, shallow, rocky creek fed by a spring that flowed from a mountain called Awenasa. Galilahi made the cabin into a clean cozy home and gave Butler two beautiful children. She was raising those children by the clear, burbling waters of the creek when gold was discovered nearby, and all hell broke loose.

White men flooded the area in search of gold, and the Cherokee were cruelly driven out, Galilahi and her two children among them. Butler himself remained and prospered. He bought a small store on credit, which he never paid back, and filled it with mining supplies and other staples bought on credit, which he sometimes paid back. In doing so he cornered the market, for it was the only general store in town. In addition to goods, Butler dispensed spiritual advice from his own canon, a moving target consisting of Biblical sound bites and self-serving prophesy he made up on the fly. He became an institution.

Thus, the town of Butler Springs was born, and when the former home of the Red Bank Tribe became a county, Butler County was born. But it fell on hard times after the gold rush.

The small valleys of the north Georgia hills could produce little of the cotton that spread for miles over rich black soil on the South Georgia plantations. Yet agriculture was practically the only game at hand, and the citizens did the best they could, growing sorghum and corn, cattle and chickens, pigs, fruit, and vegetables. And that rocked along until January of 1861, when the State of Georgia seceded from the Union.

Butler County sent its sons off to fight the despised Yankees, who had the temerity to tell its people they couldn’t own slaves, even though they owned no slaves and couldn’t afford them. A couple of years later, in a fit of Confederate fervor, the citizens renamed Butler Springs in honor of James Longstreet, the Confederate General from Augusta. After the war, when Longstreet became a Republican and joined the Grant administration, they tried to change it back. But the Reconstruction authorities found the situation amusing and refused.

So, the town of Longstreet limped into the twentieth century bearing the name of a turncoat and pretended not to notice when other towns erected Confederate monuments. But in a moment of prosperity, it commissioned a statue of the honorable Ezekiel Butler, and proudly planted it right in front of the courthouse.

The little town was in a spot where foothills and mountains met, near the southernmost point of the great Appalachians, and it was beautiful in its spring and fall splendor. Easily accessible at the intersection of two state highways, tourism came, followed by businesses, followed by residents. It wasn’t the gold rush, but it wasn’t bad. One hundred and sixty-five years after Ezekiel Butler came down from the Tennessee hills, Longstreet persevered.

Chapter 1

It was well into June when Wayne Williams was arrested in Atlanta, launching his induction into the serial-killer hall of fame. The same day, Billy Snead was arrested on the outskirts of Longstreet for having the remnants of a joint in the ashtray of his car.

Ryder Malone was in the front yard of his log cabin, sawing two-by-six boards on Monday afternoon, when Holly Mercer drove up and got out of her Chevy. All the floorboards had been ripped off the front porch and piled up, jagged, bent, rusty nails bristling. He wore cargo shorts and a T-shirt, with a rolled red bandana tied across his forehead, all of it drenched with sweat. As he rested his saw and raised his goggles, Malone could see Holly had brought a form in a particular shade of yellow. She always did.

She left the motor and the air conditioner running and walked toward him, pretending reproach and shaking her head. A lawyer playing carpenter. She stopped and took off her high heels, holding them by two fingers as she walked barefoot across the yard, and handed him the form. Malone’s dog Rooster stood lazily, stretched, and ambled over to greet Holly.

Or a carpenter about to play lawyer, Malone said, as he took off his heavy leather tool belt. What did you bring me?

A kid named Snead. Marijuana. And they want to seize his car. She looked at the pile of old boards ripped off the floor of Malone’s front porch. You couldn’t have picked a hotter day, Ryder. Her face was already beginning to slicken from the savage heat.

The summer had been bearable until drenching rains from a wayward tropical storm came and settled in for days. Then the sun came back out in a punishing mood, shooting the mercury up and keeping it up. The scorching heat drew moisture from the soaked red clay to add even more water to the heavy, hot vapor that passed for air. It kept most people inside if they had a choice. Holly had a choice, a small, institutional gray office in the basement of the county annex. Leaving it to see Malone had seemed like a good idea at the time, but she was ready to get back into her air-conditioned car and go back to her air-conditioned office.

Malone, reading the appointment order, pulled his bandana off and tugged at his clinging shirt. He must have had a shit load of pot if they’re seizing his car.

Holly, smiling, held up her hand, finger and thumb pinched nearly together, and said, A roach.

Malone said, Morons. What kind of car does he have?

An old Ford Falcon, said Holly. Worth what, maybe three hundred dollars on a good day? Anyway, I have to get out of this heat before I melt. Have fun. She turned and walked back to her car, pausing to gracefully raise her feet behind her and slip back into her heels.

Malone started putting his tools away. He didn’t like to leave clients in jail unadvised, and he’d had enough punishment anyway. He showered, put on a pair of khakis and a pullover shirt, and headed to town. His pickup had been sitting in the sun all day, and he began sweating all over again as he drove. He would be halfway there before the truck cooled down enough to make any difference.

The gravel drive leading from the cabin wound a bit to avoid what would otherwise be a steep descent. Hardwoods pressed from