Chapter Six
Bubba and a Ghost
Monday furthermore then onto Tuesday - Oh, Glory!
Later that day, Bubba was forced to endure the unsolicited attentions of his mother as she returned from her trip to plead for assistance from her state representative on the scurrilous and baseless case of the formerly incarcerated Bubba Snoddy.
Miz Demetrice had been adamant. “I wouldn’t leave his office until he agreed to see me.” She made a noise not unlike an hmph. “Next election, I believe my five hundred dollars will go to the opposition, even if he is some liberal Yankee who moved down here a mere twenty years ago.” But then she was sentimental. “Oh, Bubba honey, did they do anything to you? Those jails have perverts in there. You know what they say on the news about those jails. Men get the AIDS virus there. They beat folks with rubber hoses filled with rocks. And worse.” She had rushed over from the big house to the caretaker’s house and burst in without even knocking, which was patently unlike her. Then she had launched herself at her son, throwing her arms around him as if he was a life vest, and she was drowning.
Bubba gently disentangled his mother from around his waist, giving her an affectionate pat on her head. “Mama, I was alone in a jail cell for the whole time. We got our meals from the Pegram Café. I don’t believe I slept better than I have for a month of Sundays. And you know, that Newt Durley plays a mean game of chess, when he’s of a sober state.”
His mother looked at him skeptically. “Oh, Bubba, you’re not just saying that...”
Bubba rolled his eyes heavenward, asking for guidance and perhaps some patience. “You know Sheriff John and Tee Gearheart wouldn’t put up with any of that nonsense in their jail.”
Precious kept in the corner, half behind the couch and eyed Miz Demetrice warily. She knew what that particular human was capable of doing, and she was staying where it was safe until the bomb had safely been defused.
Miz Demetrice considered this information. She could probably even agree with it. She knew Sheriff John. She knew Tee. Both were God-fearing, church-going men who didn’t cheat on their wives or lie overly. She nodded, finally satisfied that her only beloved nestling had escaped unscathed from the villainous Sheriff of Pegram County.
By the time Miz Demetrice was done fussing over her solitary child’s wretched experience, it was too late for Bubba to go to the jail to visit with Deputy Willodean Gray. His eyes almost misted with regret and then with pride. Now there was a fine, Southern name for a woman such as her. Long, inky black hair. Green eyes that could have been carved from a precious stone. A slender figure with all of the right curves delicately placed...
Bubba shook his head violently, startling his mother. Now it was time to address his mother bluntly, “Mama, did you shoot Melissa Dearman?”
His mother had been expecting the question. She knew her son pretty well. She knew what he was capable of and what he was not capable of was shooting a woman he’d once loved so much he had asked her to marry him. She also knew that Bubba was the one that Sheriff John was looking at harder and harder. But also, since Elgin Snoddy’s forty-five was missing, and it had been her forty-five by way of inheritance for some multitude of years, that Sheriff John, and like as not, her son, would be looking at her, too. “Of course not, dear. If I were of a mind to kill a body, young Melissa Dearman being a good example of a body who needed to be killed, I’d of taken a chain saw to her and then put her poor hapless corpse into a wood chipper.” She smiled brightly. “Just like I did to your father.”
“Pa died of a heart attack, Ma.” Miz Demetrice smiled knowingly.
“You were at the poker game all night?”
“Of course, dear. I lost over a hundred dollars and that dad-blasted Wilma Rabsitt was cheating like a son of a bitch.” Miz Demetrice adjusted her polka-dotted silk dress and finally sat carefully down on Bubba’s ratty couch like the queen she was, back straight, legs crossed delicately at the ankles. Precious decided it was safe and came out to sniff her shoes. Miz Demetrice offered the hound a hand to inspect, which the dog did, and then was scratched lightly behind the long ears for her efforts. The animal made a noise of contentment and settled herself down beside Miz Demetrice just in case the human decided that more loving was in order. “Besides,” his mother went on, “you already asked Miz Adelia the same thing.”
“You know why.”
Miz Demetrice sighed. “I know why. I didn’t know what to say when the Sheriff asked where I had been all night. He’s going to arrest me and Miz Adelia when he finds out.”
“What about the intruders while I was gone?”
“Well, who told you...oh, Adelia has got the biggest mouth, besides my own, of course,” Miz Demetrice chuckled. “Adelia left around five on Saturday, and around midnight someone was banging around downstairs as if they were dying. So naturally, I got the shotgun and went downstairs to look, but by the time I got downstairs they were gone. They must have seen all the lights coming on and scrambled the hell on out of there. I went outside and let off a shotgun blast just to let them know they weren’t welcome to come a-skulking in the Snoddy Mansion no more. It’s certainly not the first time we’ve had people come wandering over the property looking for things best forgotten a century ago. Damned, ridge-crawling, rough-necked thieves, that’s what they are. And stupid to boot, listening to gossip about Colonel Snoddy and his disease ridden stories. These idjits heard you were in jail and decided the pickings were rich that night.” She gave Bubba a satisfied look that told him how gleeful she was to have scared the ever living crap out of the morons who came looking for rumors on Saturday night. She would have rubbed her still-sore rump, but her son was staring directly at her with an unfathomable expression on his handsome face. “I keep that shotgun right by my bed.”
“They came back on Sunday night?”
“Then I was up waiting for them. Right at midnight, I heard one of the windows in the dining room being messed with, and I let a blast go right through the wall of the living room.” She snickered loudly. “I bet they wet their pants for sure.”
“I missed the hole in the living room,” Bubba commented dryly. “I’ll come over and sleep there tonight.”
Miz Demetrice shrugged. She wouldn’t admit that that would make her feel a lot better. Whoever it was, who had dared to come back after two nights, was either the world’s biggest fool or the world’s greediest, and certainly up to no good. “Perhaps that would be a good idea.”
“I’ll be over later. Try not to shoot me, too.” Bubba glanced out the window. The sun was setting and vivid clouds of purple slashed over the west. “What about Daddy’s forty-five?”
“Oh, you know about that?” She wasn’t really surprised.
Bubba smiled, but it wasn’t a nice smile. “What about the forty-five?”
“Sugar, I don’t know when it went missing. I don’t believe I’ve looked at that gun for five years, maybe more. I kept it in a box in the top of my closet so you wouldn’t get your hands on it when you were growing up. I meant to give it to you one of these days. You and your grandpappies always liked guns and hunting, that is, when you were young. I thought it would nice for you to have something that your daddy valued. But I had forgotten about it until the Sheriff started asking about guns in the house. Even then I didn’t make a connection until later.”
“A forty-five was used to kill Melissa,” Bubba said. “I had access to one that happens to be missing.”
“Bubba, that gun has been sitting in a box in my closet for over twenty years. I don’t even know if it would fire without blowing up. It was probably rusted to kingdom come.”
“Could it be somewhere else in your house?” he asked patiently. “Could Miz Adelia have moved it?”
“No, and no. Miz Adelia never cleaned my closet. I can see that box in my closet every day I walk into it. It’s right in plain sight. The box is still there. The holster is still in the box. But the gun is missing.” Miz Demetrice considered, rubbing her hands
delicately together. Her eyebrows rose eloquently. “Although, the Sheriff didn’t seem to be too surprised that I couldn’t find it.”
Bubba gave up and chalked it up to someone else knowing it was there and taking it. In the spring and in the autumn, the Snoddy Mansion was open to groups of visitors as it had been for the past fifty years. Some sixty people had gone through the house, not a month past, oohing and ahhing over the architecture and the carvings. A thousand people had tromped through the house in the last decade alone. Only the Lord above and the thief knew who could have taken that gun.
Bubba escorted his mother back to the big house and instructed her to lock the doors and windows. Precious was beside him the entire time he did a circuit around the house. He found two windows which were partially obscured that he thought had been tampered with. One was probably the same window that the intruder had messed with when his mother had blown a hole in the living room wall. He studied them carefully and left them alone.
It was after ten PM when he arranged a chair at one of the windows, sitting in the dark shadows with a cup of coffee in his hands and Miz Demetrice’s long-barreled shotgun at his side, with Precious at his other side. The stroke of midnight went by without as much as a peep. The only noise was crickets and June bugs outside in the grass and in the trees. Then Bubba heard the grandfather clock in the long hallway ring once for one AM. Bubba didn’t hear the bells strike two, but Precious did hear someone fiddling with the window. She had been trained to hunt as a pup but never could sit patiently until her master completed the transaction by killing the prey, which was why she came to be in Bubba’s possession. She waited until someone had their leg halfway into the open window and pounced. All the more unexpected it was because she didn’t make a noise until after she had something in her jaws.
Bubba woke up abruptly to the sounds of claws on the floor, a man cursing violently, and Precious trying to bark and bite at the same time. Then the intruder started yelling in earnest as the dog achieved her aim by joyfully sinking her teeth into his leg.
Bubba reached for the shotgun and leaped up, shouting, “Who the hell is that?!” Upon reflection, he knew he had been half asleep, dreaming about Deputy Willodean Gray and should not have been anywhere near a shotgun.
Apparently, the abrupt noise he’d made scared the intruder more than anything because he hastily jerked his leg back out the window, causing Precious to fall backwards onto the floor with a thud and a loud yelp. Bubba, who was still groggy, ran smack dab into the window, which wasn’t fully open and knocked himself down. The shotgun flew out of his hand and clattered across the room. Precious leaped up from the floor and launched herself at the window, but she was too short and the window was too high for her to get out. By the time Bubba got up, found the shotgun, and returned to the window, he knew that the trespasser was long gone.
Precious was gnawing and ripping at something near the base of the window. Bubba turned on the light in the dining room, blinked a little at the brightness and saw that Precious had herself part of a white sheet. She had ripped it from the intruder’s body. Well, part of it, anyway. Bubba held it up and examined it closely. Either the Ku Klux Klan had called, and he didn’t see any burning cross on the lawn, or the man had been dressed up like a ghost. The snow-white sheet had two little, neat eye holes cut out next to one another.
Somehow Bubba was sure it hadn’t been the Ku Klux Klan.
Miz Demetrice came halfway down the stairs with a flashlight and a hunting rifle held capably in her slender hands. Next to her, the rifle seemed huge. She was dressed in an oversized red robe that seemed to dwarf her as much as the rifle did. Bubba scowled when he saw it. “Just how many guns you got in this house?” he demanded irately.
“Let’s say that the NRA and I see eye to eye on a great many issues,” Miz Demetrice issued royally. “You mind telling me what in the hell happened just now?”
Bubba held up the sheet like a banner, poking his fingers through the eye holes. Then he grinned. “We got ourselves a ghost.”
“What? Another one? We got three already.” She ticked them off on the hand that wasn’t holding the rifle. “The civil war lady in the upstairs powder room. The little black slave out in the back ten acres, and the midnight coachman who only comes before someone in the Snoddy family dies. No one’s seen that one since the week before I stabbed your father.” She grumbled all the way back up the stairs, the tails of her long robe trailing behind her. “Just what we need, another goldarned specter.”
Six hours later Bubba was up and on his way. Not only had he shaved, showered, and put on his cleanest, newest blue jeans, but he dragged out a pearl white western shirt, and topped it all off with his best Stetson, a dark brown one. Precious gave him an approving woof and climbed into the ‘54 Chevy truck that was parked off to the side of the yellow crime scene tape. He gave his own approving nod when he saw that Melissa’s rental car had mysteriously vanished, presumably taken by the police to the impound lot.
With a roar and a clunk the Chevy started up, emitting about a storm cloud’s worth of blue smoke. Some mechanic I am, thought Bubba. But he dismissed it. He was on the trail of Melissa’s murderer. He supposed that if it had been two years earlier, he might have thanked that particular individual himself. However, he didn’t know exactly when it had happened, but he had stopped hating Melissa. He could even understand why she had felt insecure about her position and wanted to feel safe. On one of his big hands was the issue of clearing his own name. On the other one of his big hands was the matter of finding out just who had murdered Melissa and why they had done it.
Understanding might ease the feeling of disquiet within him. Bubba knew it was going to get a lot worse if the grand jury saw fit to indict him. Furthermore, he knew full and well, it wouldn’t take much to do just that. The county prosecutor would take the word of Sheriff John and Sheriff John wouldn’t look past the most obvious suspect in the whole state of Texas. Why should they? If it wasn’t Bubba himself who was the suspect, he’d be saying the same thing that half the population of Pegramville was saying, too.
It was half past eight in the morning before Bubba parked his truck in front of the Pegram County Sheriff’s Department. He noted with some relief that Sheriff John was not present, known by the absence of his county car. However, he didn’t know what Deputy Steve Simms’ car looked like nor did he know what Deputy Gray drove. So he was taking his chances either way. He rolled down the truck windows, instructed Precious not to attack anyone dressed in sheets no matter how much they looked like the ghost of the previous night, and presented himself to the receptionist. He carried a large brown bag with him, and he put it on one of the various seats in the front office of the Sheriff’s Department’s offices.
The receptionist was none other than Mary Lou Treadwell, who also manned the emergency phone line. She was a-goggle when Bubba exhibited himself to her, asking for the fair deputy, Willodean Gray, and Bubba did indeed emphasize the lady’s first name in such a manner.
He even went so far to tip his hat to Mary Lou, who knew all of Pegramville’s dirtiest secrets and was not one to keep a confidence to herself. As a matter of fact, Mary Lou didn’t even keep her own secrets to herself. Her hair was dyed scarlet red. She wore blue contacts, and she had had not one, but two face lifts. Lastly, she had had a boob job, going from an ‘A’ cup to a ‘D’ cup, and her husband was extremely happy about that. She would even share that singular information with anyone who was so inclined to listen on 911 calls. “It shore gets their attention away from them having stabbed their girlfriend or mother,” Mary Lou would justify herself.
Mary Lou muttered, “Just a second, Bubba. I’ll buzz her desk.” As she dialed the telephone, she inspected Bubba with an intrigued eye. The big man cleans up awfully nice, she thought. Too bad he’s an ex-fiancée killer. But who could blame him, after finding her in bed with another man? In their very own bed, too.
In the time that Bubba waited, Foot Johnson, janitor at th
e Sheriff’s Department, came wandering through, as did a secretary, and another sheriff’s deputy. All gave Bubba Snoddy a wide berth, although he was trying his best to appear as nonthreatening as possible. If he had been able to, he would have melted into the woodwork, but he was, after all, a large man. A few minutes later, the attractive deputy, Willodean Gray, appeared, coming through the magnetized doors behind Mary Lou.
Bubba respectfully removed his Stetson. Willodean placed herself in front of Bubba squarely and looked intently into his face. After a few seconds she said, “Well?”
Bubba took a list from his jeans pocket. He held it in one hand as Willodean looked first at his face and then at the piece of paper. “My mother’s house was broken into over the weekend, and I thought maybe that you could look into it.”
Willodean kept her face neutral. She was new to the area of Pegram County it was true, but she had been in law enforcement for five years. She had worked in Dallas for most of that time and decided recently that big city life was not to her liking. When a job opportunity had arisen, even though knew full well that she was a token woman, she had taken it eagerly. For the past month, she had worked with the other deputies and Sheriff John, trying to show them that she was as tough, as capable, as good as any of them. Some of them had grudgingly begun to behave as though she was a ‘real’ cop, and not a ditzy female who had been hired for the gender alone, and not her ability. But here was Bubba Snoddy, lately a murder suspect, asking her to bend the rules because he was clearly infatuated with her. Finally, she asked, “Did you call it in over the weekend?”
“Nope.”
Willodean waited for details and when none were forthcoming, finally asked, “Why not?”
Bubba shifted his feet around a bit. “I didn’t think the sheriff’s department would be too inclined to look into anything that happens out at the Snoddy place right now. For obvious reasons.”
Willodean cast a look over her shoulder at Mary Lou, who was patently ignoring phone calls into her station and listening to their conversation as obviously as she could. “Say, Miz Mary Lou, you got a call there,” she told the emergency line operator slash receptionist. To Bubba, she said, “Let’s walk outside a bit.”
Bubba said, “A moment, please.” He placed himself before Mary Lou again and put the brown grocery bag before her. Mary Lou put some unfortunate soul on hold and looked inquiringly up at Bubba. “It’s books for Mike Holmgreen. You know, some mysteries, trashy fiction, and other stuff my mother was going to give to the Goodwill. Will you see he gets it? That boy needs something to do all day besides play chess with other prisoners and do algebra.”
He turned back to Willodean and even held the door open for her.
They were outside walking slowly down the street before Willodean said, “That was a nice thing to do for Mike Holmgreen.”
Bubba shrugged. “He’s not a bad kid. Just made a mistake.”
“And did you make a...mistake?”
“Not the one you’re thinking of.” Bubba considered. “I think the worst thing I’ve ever done was to lose my temper when I found my fiancée in bed with another man.”
Willodean almost groaned. Why didn’t Bubba just notarize a motive and pass it over to Sheriff John and the district attorney? “You broke his arm.”
Bubba nodded. “It wasn’t a good thing to do. When I came out of being angry, you know I was so mad I couldn’t see straight, I found out that I had broken his arm. And worse.”
Willodean paused in her step. They had crossed over Main Street and were standing next to the courthouse. It was a huge, red-bricked affair with five floors, a clock tower, and Italianate carved faces that peered out at every level and corner of the building. It dated from 1895, and in the summer the tourists would flock to it because it was such a grand, stately place, surrounded by an acre of well-manicured greenery. But she wasn’t examining the courthouse’s intricate architecture; instead she looked into Bubba’s face. It was bleak with memory. He was staring forward, but he wasn’t seeing anything, except into the past. “What’s worse than breaking his arm?” she asked gently.
“Have you ever spanked a little child, maybe a pet, a cat, a dog or the like?” he asked instead of answering.
“Yes,” she replied. Her sisters had children. And she’d had pets.
“Maybe you spanked a little hard once and had a child look up at you, or a pet look up at you, and they were scared of you.” He finally put his Stetson back on his head, adjusting it carefully. She didn’t say anything. She thought she knew what he was getting at. “When the red haze cleared out, that man was frightened of me. That’s what’s worse. I had scared a man so badly he was shaking with fear. He thought…he thought I was going to kill him.”
There was a cool spring breeze wafting around the courthouse. Not too many people were around at the time. Across the way, the Pegram Café seemed to be almost empty. “I was angry at Melissa Dearman once. But if I had seen her again, I wouldn’t have lost my temper,” he finished. “I didn’t kill her. I want to find out who did.”
“And the Sheriff isn’t inclined to help you out,” she completed the meaning he was trying to convey.
“Just so.”
“What do you want from me?”
“Someone who is objective enough to see that I’m not the only suspect, or to at least, believe that maybe I might not have done it.” Bubba crackled the list in his hands. “This here is my list of suspects. My mother was tops.”
Willodean laughed, thinking of hours spent playing poker with various, eccentric ladies of Pegram County. “Well, that’s one down.”
“And Miz Adelia Cedarbloom, my mother’s housekeeper,” he went on, “was number two.”
“I guess you know that I was involved in the...ah...Pegramville Women’s Club activities that night,” Willodean commented mildly.
“Is that what my mother is calling it lately?” Bubba chuckled. “Well, Mama claims that she murdered my father, but I don’t think she would have shot my ex-fiancée in the back. Same with Miz Adelia. Maybe they would have dropped a cement block, but not shot her in the back.”
“Who else you got on that list?”
“Melissa’s husband.” Bubba’s voice was serious. “You know, the man’s whose arm I broke.”
~ ~ ~