Bubba and the Dead Woman (22 page)

Ticking off other miscellaneous items of reprehensible transgressions, Sheriff John thought about some of the things that had been occurring of late. Murdering, consorting, illegal gambling rings he couldn’t get a hand into, law suits against him for wrongful arrest of a madam, and God knew what else was going on in Pegram County, which he considered was directly headed for hell in a hand basket. And here he was, a man who was supposed to be on top of all of this. He would be lucky if he got voted for animal control officer next election.

“It’s true that Neal Ledbetter always has some shady deals going on,” Sheriff John grumbled. “His wife could have shot him, for all I know.” He clamped his mouth shut, amazed that he had said that to a suspect of the same crime.

Bubba rolled his eyes, feeling sorry for the woman of which Sheriff John was speaking. Her name was Nita Ledbetter, a teacher who taught elementary school, alongside of Martha Lyles, the lady who had come into Bufford’s Gas and Grocery to buy lottery tickets because of a dream. Nita seemed a shy, non-talkative type of woman, who was mousy and plain, preferring to stay in the background of everything she was involved in. She taught school, went to church, and sometimes donated goodies for bake sales. Her only peccadillo seemed to be her weekly participation in the Pegramville Women’s Club’s poker game. He personally didn’t think that Nita would know the right end of the gun to point at her husband, in order to shoot him. Sheriff John knew that as well as Bubba did.

“Look, Sheriff,” said Bubba at last, his stomach rumbling tyrannically at him, threatening an imminent repeat of recent rebellion. “You going to arrest me for this?” He waved a hand at the formerly alive and kicking Neal’s office.

“What did you want with him?” Sheriff John said gruffly.

“I think he was the one who was messing around on my mother’s property,” Bubba said.

Ignoring Bubba’s answer, Sheriff John peered at him suspiciously, suddenly seeing him for the first time clearly. “You know, every time I see you, you look more and more beat up. I know that Melissa Dearman’s husband took a swing at you, but what’s that big lump on your forehead?” Sheriff John eyed Bubba as if examining the bumps and scrapes on him could provide the answers to mysteries yet unsolved. Willodean looked closer at Bubba’s head.

“Get the hell out of here, Bubba,” Sheriff John instructed at last. He was disgusted that he couldn’t pin anything on this man. It was like Bubba was coated with Teflon. Nothing stuck. “Try to stay out of trouble.”

Bubba issued forth a grunt of acquiescence, and briefly smiled at Willodean. “Thank you, Ma’am.”
Damn it, there goes my knees again,
he thought as he glanced at her lovely face
.

Willodean nodded to him.

Bubba tiredly tipped his head. He had gotten sick in front of the most beautiful and effervescent woman he had ever seen. He was more battered than a prize fighter after ten rounds. He had stared at a dead man for a long time. He had smelled a smell that he never wanted to smell again. He was the suspect in not one, but two murders.

Bubba wasn’t sure why he didn’t tell Sheriff John about the intruder last night, or the recent holes dug on Snoddy lands, or his suspicions that this whole affair was happening because of some asinine legend about Colonel Nathaniel Snoddy, Confederate colonel and confirmed womanizer. It didn’t sound real to him. So why would Sheriff John believe him? Naturally, he would not.

He climbed into his truck, and Willodean handed him his brown Stetson again. Bubba didn’t even remember where it had come off of his head. She whispered out of the side of her mouth, “I’ve got to talk to you about that equipment.”

Bubba glanced around her at Sheriff John, who was staring at them both. Willodean was worried about her job.
Rightfully so
, thought Bubba. The sheriff wasn’t a man to condone an employee’s alliance to anyone but him. “Call me tonight, after you get off work,” Bubba said. He needed to talk to her about one particular mechanic by the name of Melvin Wetmore and a young man named Mark Evans, lately a process server. Willodean didn’t say anything, but a muscle in her cheek twitched. Attractively so, if Bubba had been asked, but he hadn’t.

Bubba spent Friday night with his mother, eating a succulent chicken dinner prepared by Adelia Cedarbloom. He talked about Neal Ledbetter and Miz Demetrice talked about Thursday’s Pokerama. She had won almost a hundred dollars from Wilma Rabsitt, and gosh darn, was Wilma put out about that.

“Mama, don’t you care if I go to jail for murder?” Bubba asked, perplexed.

“Bubba, they don’t convict innocent men,” Miz Demetrice said, her devotion to fairness and justice dripping from her voice like gravy off chicken fried steak. “Now I don’t care for the police, because they are all communist, Nazi organizers, who never caught the back side of their mother’s hands as children, but they don’t convict honest, God-fearing men in a court of law. You see those people are our friends and neighbors and they know that Bubba Snoddy isn’t a murderer.” Her son found her logic dotty to say the least.

“What makes you think that I’m honest, or God-fearing?” asked Bubba facetiously.

“Bubba Snoddy! Don’t you blaspheme in this house!” Miz Demetrice shouted, rising up in her seat. She, who wasn’t above taking the Lord’s name in vain upon occasion, sat back down with a mild, “Goddammit.”

“Has there been anyone around asking about that old legend?” Bubba asked after a long silence that involved the eating of the main course. Adelia’s chicken supreme was, of course, as tasty as ever; the chicken was apt to melt in one’s mouth.

“Which old legend?”

“The colonel.”

“No one’s said much about that for years. Not since that awful magazine article in 1978.” Miz Demetrice cleaned her face daintily with a cloth napkin. Something occurred to her suddenly. “It was probably that badly behaved Neal Ledbetter, God rest his soul. He’s been in this house a dozen times over the last five years. Coming at the spring and fall openings to gape at the place he couldn’t buy, mentally figuring out how much it would cost him to tear it all down and what could he get on eBay for the fixtures. I’d bet you, he was the one in here trying to scare me off.”

Bubba rested his chin on his arm which in turn was resting on the table. It was bad manners, but he didn’t particularly care right now. It was true that his mother could be slow at times. “Do tell.”

“This could explain Mrs. Dearman’s death as well. She saw him, and he had to shoot her to cover up.”

Bubba had thought of that, too. It didn’t figure. He had come to the conclusion that there were at least two, possibly three people, involved. There was one who pretended to be a ghost and who was clumsy and ran like the very dickens when confronted. Then there was one with a gun who broke into the house and disappeared after a chase in the woods. And the third one was the one who broke into Bubba’s house while the second one distracted him. The second and third ones were the ones who were capable of murder.

But there was something else that Bubba had thought of, since that conclusion. On that morning when Bubba had found Melissa, Neal had been as shocked as the other man to see that woman’s dead body there in the grass. He had stood across the garden as far away from the body as he could get shaking in his boot straps. What had he been scared of? That Bubba would kill him, too, or that his accomplice had done something so horrible that if they were caught then it was going to be the lethal injection for all of them.

Neal hadn’t been a murderer. Maybe he had been a ghost. Maybe he had been the
first
accomplice or perhaps the third one.

Precious moved around under the table by Bubba’s feet, nosing his leg for a bite or so. Bubba recalled that the dog had had her teeth in the intruder’s leg. Perhaps that would prove that Neal had been on the property, breaking into the mansion. Maybe the police would find the missing diaries of Nathaniel Snoddy at Neal’s house. Maybe they would clear this all up by themselves. But Bubba was still under indictment. He was the one who would be tried, long after Nita Ledbetter buried her husband in Longtall Cemetery on the tallest hill in Pegramville. And someone else might still have something to loose.

Or something to gain.

“Maybe you ought to go visit Aunt Caressa in Dallas, tomorrow,” Bubba suggested.

Miz Demetrice studied her only child with an air of insolence. Truly, her boy was getting too big for his britches. “Now why would I want to go and do that for?” She thought about it. “Caressa may be my sister, but she snores like a cat throwing up a hairball.”

Bubba abruptly put the fork full of chicken supreme he had in his hand back on the plate.

Miz Demetrice went on. “Not only that but she keeps her house temperature on 105◦, minimum. She’s three years older than me, and half-senile besides. It’s about 100◦ outside in Dallas, and she has to have the house even hotter. If I ever get that way, I give you permission to have the doctors pull the plug.” She made an undignified noise and resumed eating.

Bubba was lost in the vivid mental picture of his aunt snoring like a cat throwing up a hairball. He didn’t think he would ever be able to look at his aunt the same way, ever again. There was nothing like his mother to spoil a persona for him. She had done the same thing once when explaining why the folks on Gilligan’s Island couldn’t exist there and continue to have unspoiled clothing, coconuts that worked like radios, and people who wandered in like it was Grand Central Station. It had broken his five-year old heart to find out that was so.

“For one thing, someone took a couple of shots at me this morning, while you were off gambling away like a drunken sailor on shore leave.”

Miz Demetrice laughed. “That’s not what a drunken sailor on shore leave would do, dear.” She sobered. “Someone took a couple of shots at you? Here?”

Bubba nodded. “Bullet hole near the southern end of the veranda. Remind me to point it out to you.”

“I’m a loading all my guns, tonight,” Miz Demetrice declared faithfully. “I’m going to put some big holes in some trespassing son of a bitch.”

Bubba rolled his eyes. Now there was another vivid mental image with his mother knocked ass over tea kettle by using one of the Winchester twelve-gauge shotguns.

“No salt rock, tonight, by God,” Miz Demetrice swore.

“You want me to spend the night over here again?” Bubba said cautiously. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to be in the same house as his mother while she was loaded for bear. Why, he might sleepily get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, and lose one of his lungs in the process.

“I’ll be safe enough,” Miz Demetrice vowed.

“You know when I thought I had the fella cornered in the living room, he up and vanished. The next thing I knew he was outside, and the windows were still closed and latched,” Bubba said. “How do you suppose he got outside without me seeing him?”

“In the living room?” Miz Demetrice said with a concerned expression on her face.

“Yes.”

“Colonel Snoddy’s secret passage,” Miz Demetrice said tiredly. “I wonder how he found
that
.”

“A secret passage,” Bubba said. “I never knew about a secret passage in the house.”

“Well, there was the priest’s hole that really wasn’t a priest’s hole,” replied Miz Demetrice. “The Snoddy’s have never been Catholic, as you know. However, Colonel Nathaniel Snoddy’s wife, Cornelia Adams Snoddy, used to help runaway slaves, as they headed for Missouri. It was by the stables, or such. But I believe your grandfather found it to be infested with rats, and had it filled in, in the twenties. Then, there was randy Nathaniel’s living room door, behind the portrait of Cornelia on the east wall of the living room. It was his idea of a joke. He would light out to meet a fancy lady or two, by sneaking out behind his wife’s portrait. I believe I read about it in one of the colonel’s diaries.” So had, for that matter, Elgin Snoddy, who had used the secret door himself, when on one of his binges. Not that it had been necessary, Miz Demetrice considered. She would have helped him out the front door at that point in time, because he had been such a self-centered bastard.
No wonder I threw a toaster in his bath
, she thought, with a little nod of her head. “It’s a simple mechanism that swings on a pivot point. Truthfully, I’m surprised it hasn’t rusted shut. You can block it off after dinner. Push a credenza in front of it. He won’t come back in that way.”

“That makes sense,” Bubba said, thinking about missing diaries. “Our boy was breaking in the window and using the secret door at the same time? Now that doesn’t make sense.”

“It does if there’s more than one person,” his mother said virtuously. It surprised Bubba that Miz Demetrice could be so devious at times and so nonsensical at others. But this fit in with his thoughts that more than one person was involved. Had Neal Ledbetter been working with an accomplice, after all? Had this other person withheld information from Colonel Nathaniel Snoddy’s diaries? If he had, had the accomplice been keeping information to himself? It seemed to, or Neal wouldn’t have been breaking in through the windows in the dining room, but using the secret passage in the living room.

Three hours later, Bubba was in his bed, snoring much like a cat throwing up a hairball. Precious, who wasn’t the most observant of dogs, was snoring in the same manner on the end of his bed, where her paws fought for purchase against Bubba’s long legs. When all else failed, she would simply drape herself over his legs, and allow them to lie where they might.

The stately grandfather clock made of white oak in the long hall of the Snoddy Mansion had just rung the one bell, signifying the end of the witching hour. Miz Demetrice, who normally slept like the dead, was up and prowling around a darkened house with a shotgun cradled in her arms. When she carefully and quietly walked down the long darkened hallway, she saw a faint glow coming from a window in the kitchen.