Brownie and the Dame (2 page)

Precious darted out of some bushes. Bubba stopped and glared at the hound. Precious picked something up in her mouth and dashed into the trees. Bubba yelled something Brownie couldn’t understand. It had the sound of four-letter words in it, if he was any type of critic of the imaginative expletive. Brownie thought that he was getting rather good at four-letter words. There had been twenty new ones that he had heard from the evil perpetrator. Bubba let the occasional new one rip when he didn’t know Brownie was about. Miz Demetrice had used a fascinating combination that intrigued Brownie.

Brownie had a duty to share the new-found type of communication with his fellow Boy Scouts. Now Scout Leader Marlon Tarterhouse would not approve, but Scout Leader Tarterhouse wouldn’t be about when the scouts held their next overnight campout by the Red River. He would be in the next tent over, and he slept like the dead once he closed his eyes. Once Brownie had brought a battery-powered shaver and coerced three other scouts into giving Scout Leader Tarterhouse a reverse Mohawk. The Scout Leader had been less than amused, and Brownie had been banned from Scouts for a month, but it had been worth it.

Precious dashed back across the yard. Her full floppy ears sailed in the wind.
Basset hounds have very large ears,
he thought.
Wonder if she could fly…like Dumbo. Naw, don’t go there. Think that would violate the agreement I done signed.

Bubba thundered past again. He had green leaves in his hair, and there was more than a few red marks across his chest where he had clearly encountered low-lying brush. He paused to roar at the dog.

Precious didn’t pause. She slipped around the side of the house, something clutched in her mouth.

Brownie shrugged. Precious was probably playing keep-away with Bubba.
But Cousin Bubba doesn’t usually go out only in underwear. Although Great-Aunt Demetrice does talk about one time he fell in a hole chasing after someone, who was dressed in a sheet, that had shot at him. Something about him wearing boxers then, too.

Brownie nodded.
Golly, strange things happen around here a lot.
It was absolutely perfect for a budding sleuth. He had the attitude. He had the attire. All he needed was the mystery. The
mystery.

He wadded newspapers as he considered his options. There was the mystery of the missing Civil War gold. Bubba swore up and down there wasn’t any gold, but wouldn’t someone say that if they wanted to keep it a secret?
That’s what Pa says, but then Pa wants a cut. Besides, Miz Demetrice is driving an old Cadillac, and Bubba is driving a really, really old truck. Bubba trades automotive work for stuff he needs on account that he don’t have a lot of cash, and his last date with Willodean Gray included a picnic at the cemetery. What the frick?

Brownie didn’t really want to have anything to do with girls, but he knew that if he dated a girl, then he wouldn’t take her to the cemetery for a picnic. However, the beauteous Willodean Gray was a sheriff’s deputy and therefore all the more mysterious in Brownie’s eyes.
Maybe she likes cemeteries.

Okay, a mystery
. There had been a murder at the Snoddy Estate, but that one had been solved. Brownie didn’t really care about that one. He hadn’t been around, and well, it sounded like a pretty benign sort of mystery.
 

Precious trotted into the kitchen and paused when she saw Brownie. “Hey, girl,” he said politely. “I ain’t supposed to chase you, pull your tail, or otherwise touch you, except in a gentle fashion, so you’re safe.”

The Basset hound took that to mean that all was well in the kitchen universe. She shuffled over to Brownie and nudged his leg with her large wet nose. He paused in his work of wadding newspapers and scratched behind her ears. “Whatchu got there, Precious?” he asked.

She woofed softly and dropped a set of keys on the floor.
Oh,
he thought.
Car keys. No wonder Bubba’s madder than a bat in a suitcase.
Precious clambered into the chair next to Brownie and watched him as he wadded more newspaper.

Together they watched Bubba race across the yard, plainly unaware that his hound had absconded into the Mansion. If Brownie wasn’t mistaken, Bubba now had a segment of poison ivy wrapped around his leg.
 

Brownie paused to get Precious a doggy biscuit. Precious took it gratefully and settled across the chair to eat it. She didn’t really fit on the kitchen chair. Her legs drooped off the back, and her head hung off the front. But she obviously enjoyed sitting in the human chairs so she stayed.

Mysteries
, Brownie thought. “Do you know about any mysteries, Precious?”

Precious paused mid-chew and whined.

“There’s the fact that Auntie D. is always saying she done murdered Uncle Elgin,” Brownie supposed. “But then someone else says, ‘Miz Demetrice, you know he really had a heart attack.’ And what am I supposed to think? Yesterday she said she stabbed him with a curling iron and done him in. How do you stab someone with a curling iron? I figure the worst you could do with a curling iron is to burn a fella, and that’s only if he stayed still.
I
wouldn’t stay still.”

Precious stared at Brownie and went back to the biscuit.

Bubba charged, head down around the other side. He yelled, “PRECIOUS. Bleep! Bleeping bleep bleepity!” except those weren’t all the words he really used.

“I’ll have to write that last one down. I dint know you could do that. That don’t rightly sound physically possible. I mean, can you do that?” Brownie paused to find the small notepad in his jacket pocket and he didn’t mind that Precious didn’t answer. He jotted the words down. “I reckon I can spell that phonetically. Ain’t gonna be in the dictionary.”

Where was I? Oh yes, mysteries.
Brownie put the notepad down.
Ain’t no mystery in Miz Demetrice and Elgin. Sheriff John don’t seem to care whether she done Uncle E. in by trained assassin cats or with a garrote. Big Joe would just say it’s out of his jurisdiction. Even Pa snorts when Auntie D. trots out something new.

Brownie paused and looked at the pile of wadded-up newspapers. It towered over his head and formed a rough triangular shape. “I think I might have made too much.”

Precious’s head came up. Her ears flew in all directions as she evidently heard something Brownie could not. Quickly she got off the chair and hid under the table.

A moment later, Bubba stumbled into the kitchen. His hair had pine needles stuck to it, as well as green leaves. There were red scrapes across his chest plus some mud smeared across one shoulder. The poison ivy vine was still wrapped around his leg and some more trailing behind his other foot. “Brownie,” he said, shortly, “have you seen my dog?”

“She was here a minute ago,” Brownie said. Under the table, Precious lightly bumped his leg, as if they were simpatico for the moment. He reached down and found the keys. Then he wished he hadn’t because they were thoroughly drenched in dog slobber. “But she left these.”

“Thank the Lord,” Bubba said reverently. He took the keys and immediately grimaced when the canine saliva dribbled down his wrist. “I got to go to work, and ifin I don’t get there on time, Old Man Culpepper’s going to dock my pay. He ain’t thought very much of me since all that bizness happened at Christmas.”

“
You
didn’t kill anyone,” Brownie said, staring at the pile of wadded-up newspaper. “Dint kidnap no one neither. Although you did steal a sheriff’s vehicle, but it was for a good cause.”

“Well,” Bubba said bitterly, “some people don’t got your common sense, boy.”

Tentatively Brownie stuffed some of the wads into the hat. Then he tried on the hat. It fit better.

Bubba stared. “I suspect you’re up to something,” he said warily.

“I need a mystery,” Brownie announced. “It doesn’t have to be a murder, but it has to be mysterious. You know mystifying and all that.”

Chapter 2

Brownie and the Brilliant Babes

Monday, April 2
^nd

Miz Adelia strode into the kitchen a few minutes later. Bubba was pouring himself an extra-large cup of coffee. Brownie stepped in front of the pile of wadded-up newspapers sitting on the kitchen table like some misplaced Mayan pyramid. It didn’t help. It was taller than him, and Brownie suspected it was multiplying by itself. Precious skulked under the table like a super villain.

The housekeeper paused to view the interlopers in her domain. She may not have owned the kitchen legally, but it was definitely hers. Her hands propped on her waist, and she surveyed the area before as if she was queen. “Don’t you dare drip coffee on my counter,” she said imperiously, “and Precious, don’t leave pieces of soggy biscuit under that table, and is that poison ivy on your leg, Bubba?”

Bubba looked down at his leg and immediately dropped the coffee cup. “Bleep!” he bleated. Then he said another word in a fancy combination with the first word, emphasizing the second word. “I got to wash that off!” he added and vanished out the door. A moment later, his footsteps pounded up the stairs.

Brownie found his notepad and pencil again. Laboriously, he wrote. “Eff-u-cee.” He paused and nodded. “That’s the one my mama doesn’t like Daddy to use. Is that an eye-enn-gee on the end or do I have to use two cees?”

Miz Adelia spared Brownie a brief glance while she wiped the counter. Carefully she picked up shattered pieces of cup and put them into the garbage. “It’s a cee and a kay, but I don’t imagine your mama wants you to write it down neither,” she said.

“Knowledge is power,” Brownie answered. It was a good answer. Three-quarters of the time it confused adults into silence. Possibly it stunned them into muteness.
How can anyone argue with that? Knowledge
is
power. Mebe a commonist would argue ‘bout it. Commonists would argue ‘bout everything.
That’s what his pawpaw used to say. Papa Derryberry had been a U.S. Marine for twenty-three years, and he had all kinds of useful information for Brownie concerning freedom of speech. Papa Derryberry had been a virtual fountainhead of facts pertaining to the ability to do what-the-heck-you-want.

Commonists,
Brownie understood,
were bad people who lived in a bad country and wouldn’t let good folks say what they wanted. And if good folks said what they wanted anyway, the commonists would shoot them in the head.
Brownie couldn’t fathom not being able to say what he wanted.

“What?” Miz Adelia paused while holding the cup’s broken handle. “Knowledge is power? That don’t account to a hill of beans when your mama’s got a switch and you’re across her knees with a bare behind after you repeat that word to her.”

What? Ma doesn’t switch me…much. Only when I do something really bad. Like the time I dyed the cat purple. Poor cat had to go to the vet three times. Or when Mammaw Derryberry nearly ruptured her hernia when I glued the…maybe I shouldn’t think about that right now. Time for another tactic.

“Your cinnamon rolls are the best I’ve ever tasted,” Brownie said sincerely. Silently he added,
Ifin there were some about, I would eat them cheerfully. But there ain’t today, so I be out of luck. Mebe she’ll make some ifin I flutter my eyes at her.

Miz Adelia dropped the cup’s handle into the garbage and eyed him cautiously. “Tomorrow I’ll make some. Mebe you’d like to help?”

“You’d let me help you bake?” Brownie thought about it. He could learn how to make them himself.
Cinnamon rolls all the time. Sounds great. Ma don’t cook unless it comes pre-packaged, although her Stouffer’s Lasagna Italiano is right tasty.
“You got it, sweetheart.”

She shot him another look. Brownie tilted the fedora in a fetching manner.
Charming the dames, that’s what it’s all about and solving mysteries, too.
 

“Miz Demetrice said she thought you liked the Dashiell Hammett,” Miz Adelia commented.

“I want to be a gumshoe,” Brownie said enthusiastically.

“I kin see that,” she said. She went back to the counter. “What does a gumshoe do?”

“Solves mysteries. Backs up his partner. Says stuff that’s fancy. Looks good in a hat.” Brownie considered.
Did I leave anything out?
“Smooches all the cool kittens.”

Miz Adelia covered her mouth with her hand and looked as if she was going to choke. Brownie thought about his first aid patch. Perhaps he could utilize a few of the maneuvers from the class, but the housekeeper merely clutched her mouth with her hand and seemingly recovered.

“What kind of mystery will you be solving then?” she asked in a high voice, still covering her mouth with her hand. She turned away and stared at the wall. At least that was what Brownie thought Miz Adelia was doing. Her shoulders shook a little as she stood there.
Mebe she’s feeling down in the pants.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I done thought about it. I found everything on Auntie D.’s treasure map, so I need something.”

“
Both
diamond earrings?” Miz Adelia asked quickly. She glanced at him, her dark eyes big and wide. Evidently, Miz Adelia had been a contributor to the hiding of the treasure items.

“One in the chandelier and one hidden in the hidey-hole on the third level of the grand staircase,” Brownie said promptly.

“How in the name of— ” Miz Adelia bit off the word she was about to say and then waited a moment before adding, “how did you find the hidey-hole?”