Bubba and the Dead Woman Page 21

  Chapter Twenty-One

  What the Heck Happens to Bubba?

  Saturday (still, but later in the day, much later, in fact, it was almost Sunday, but not quite)

  Well after the sun had set and under cover of darkness a lone old, rusting Pontiac Grand Am drove down the road in front of the Snoddy Mansion. Its headlights were off, and it carefully maneuvered down the shadowed lane. It slowed down as it went past the crookedly hanging front gate with its three-foot-sized ‘S’ on either side. The Grand Am cruised down to Roscoe Stinedurf’s driveway, turned around, and cruised back. Finally, it drove off into the night going back the direction of town.

  Fifteen minutes after that, the very same Grand Am car returned and sat in front of the gates for a long time with its lights still turned off. Ultimately, a decision was made, and the car went through the open gate, progressed down the Snoddy driveway, and parked around the side of the house, where it would not be visible from the road. Two people got out, careful not to allow the interior light of the car to go on, as they opened the car doors.

  One said, “Are you sure about this?”

  The other said, “Of course I’m sure. Bubba’s in jail but for good. Everyone and their sister’s cat heard Sheriff John say they wouldn’t be letting him out this time. His mother is off to Dallas. And the housekeeper doesn’t live in. You know that.”

  “Well, we’ve looked all over the house before and dint find nothing.”

  “We didn’t have much time before.” The other was irritated and allowed it to show. “I told you I have access to papers about the damned house. There was that hidden door, wasn’t I right about that?”

  “Well, yes,” replied the first one.

  “My great-great-grandmother was Miss Annalee Hyatt’s illegitimate daughter, and her son was illegitimate, too. That’s how I ended up with the same name,” said the other. “Anyway, Great Granny kept all kinds of diaries about what her mother used to talk about. She said there was a wagon full of gold stolen from the Union soldiers in 1864 that was never recovered. I did all of the research. It was never recovered. And since the Snoddys don’t seem as though they’re living high on the hog, it stands to reason that it’s still here someplace.”

  “I know all that,” snapped the first one. “But we could simply wait until Bubba’s convicted and the mother is forced to sell the property to pay the lawyers. Then Neal Ledbetter was going to make the place a Walmart. That was the plan.”

  “A Walmart Supercenter and I don’t want to wait,” said the other. “We’ve waited long enough. I’ve spent too much time waiting around. Get the shovels and the metal detector.”

  “They’re in the trunk.”

  “Get them then.”

  “I got a problem with all this,” said the first one.

  “Yeah?”

  “What’s to stop you from doing the same thing to me as you did to Neal Ledbetter?” asked the first one.

  “Darlin’, I would never do that to you. You know how stupid Neal was being. I cannot believe that he planted some piece of electronic crap in the house to scare off Miz Demetrice. Something he bought at Radio Shack. He was so proud of it he told me all about it.” The other sighed. “He would have folded on us. Do you want to go to jail for murdering that Dearman woman?”

  “I didn’t murder her,” protested the first one. “You snuck off from Grubbo’s, came here, shot her, and then went back to the tavern.”

  The other snorted. “So I pulled the trigger. It doesn’t matter. You were there. You helped with all of the planning. You’re as guilty as anyone. Just ask a cop. And don’t forget about setting fire to Bubba’s house.”

  There was the sound of keys rattling, metal scraping on metal, and the first said, “Here’s the dammit shovels.”

  “Okay then,” the second one said. “Fifty paces due south from the southwest corner of the mansion is an old oak stump.”

  “What the hell is this? You never said anything about an old oak stump before,” the first one said angrily.

  “Sweetums,” the second one replied plaintively, “we needed to see what the Snoddys had inside before we started digging around their place, and besides, I said we had to eliminate all the places the treasure could be located first. Besides Miss Annalee said the Colonel told her about twenty places that he had buried the gold. We’ve been saving the places closest to the mansion because we couldn’t hide the holes there. Right?”

  “Well, okay,” the first one grumbled.

  They stumbled to the southwest corner of the mansion, consulted a glow in the dark compass, and counted fifty paces. “There’s no frigging stump,” the first one complained immediately.

  “It was written right after the Civil War, baby,” the second one explained. “The stump probably rotted away a hundred years ago. Use the metal detector.”

  There was a series of long beeps and whistles. Then there was a very loud whine. “Omigod,” said the first one elatedly. “Something’s here. Something really, really big.”

  “I knew it,” the second one said confidently.

  Then they started to dig, using one flashlight and occasionally consulting the metal detector. While they dug, Bubba Snoddy thought about the recent turn of events. He sat hidden in the shadows about fifty feet away from the pair of diggers, along with several other people and several sophisticated listening and recording devices. He would have never believed that it could have been that easy, but it was. The entire time Sheriff John had had his doubts about Bubba’s guilt. So had Deputy Willodean Gray. Willodean had discovered the unhealed dog-bite wounds on Neal Ledbetter’s left leg and knew that he had been the ‘ghost’ haunting the Snoddy Mansion. Although that might very well have been a reason for Bubba to murder Neal, it was also something that put a hole in the whole Bubba/murderer theory. What kind of man wipes a weapon clean and then hides it in a woodpile? What kind of murderer wipes a rifle clean and puts it in the back of his truck where anyone could see it? They didn’t know right off the bat, but it wasn’t Bubba.

  The first thing that Sheriff John had said when he’d gotten Bubba in the jail cell was, “What about Melvin Wetmore, Mark Evans, and Mary Bradley, Bubba?”

  Willodean answered. “Melvin Wetmore got hired for a job at the Walmart up the road. Someone called him up and said to show up on Thursday evening. When Melvin showed up, it turned out there wasn’t really a job.” Willodean smiled at Bubba and Bubba felt his heart drop. “Melvin was real put out. Said someone had played a mean trick on him.”

  “And Mark Evans?” Sheriff John said.

  “Mark Evans quit on Thursday night, the same Thursday night. Turns out some anonymous soul called him up and told him that George Bufford was about to falsely accuse him of theft to get some insurance money or something of the like. Mark woke up in the hospital about an hour ago.” Willodean had winked at Bubba. Or at least he had tiredly thought she did. It could have been a speck of dirt caught in her beautiful green eye. He surely hoped not. “So he called up to quit and that got Bubba all by his lonesome.”

  Bubba had stopped himself from scratching at his pits, remembering just in time that was something he didn’t want to do in front of Willodean. “It didn’t seem rightly important,” he’d said, looking down at the offending hand and then putting it down quickly.

  “Finally, there’s Mary Bradley,” Willodean had said quietly. “She wasn’t at Bufford’s Gas and Groceries that night. Care to tell the Sheriff what she does for a living, Bubba?”

  “Mostly she lives off her ex-husband’s alimony, and sometimes she’s the relief cashier at Bufford’s, when she’s not taking her mother to places to play…um…games,” Bubba had said solemnly. “She didn’t answer her phone on Thursday night. Or at least that’s what I thought happened.”

  Willodean had nodded. “Turns out her phone lines went down that night. The telephone company came by and told her some kids must have been fooling around with the wires just outside her house.” She’d made a scissoring motion
with her hand consciously imitating Bubba when he had done the same motion with Mary Bradley. “All cut.”

  Sheriff John’s lips had made an ‘O’ of surprise.

  “Finally,” Willodean had announced, “there were those dummy security cameras at Bufford’s. Turns out someone who didn’t know that they weren’t, cut their wires, too. All the employees knew about it, including Bubba, so why would he have bothered with that?”

  All of which added up to a great big conspiracy to frame Bubba. Willodean had figured that out, but she and Sheriff John couldn’t quite figure why this would have been the case.

  On the other hand, Bubba had known. And he had told them. His evidence was scanty. First, there was the green button. It was retrieved from Tee Gearheart’s possession and shown to the law enforcement officers. It was generally agreed upon that it wasn’t a typical kind of button. Then Deputy Simms had said, “You know that button looks like the kind that are on Miss Lurlene’s green sweater that she wears in the café when Noey Wheatfall turns up the air conditioning too high.”

  Bubba had stared at the officers. He told them where he found the button. He told them that he asked his mother about the button right in front of Lurlene, and she had kept her mouth firmly shut, even acted strange about it. Then there had been all the questions she had asked Bubba about the Snoddy family history over the entire time they had dated. There had also been her interest in the Civil War period.

  “Which has to do with what?” Sheriff John had asked. “That’s all circumstantial, Bubba.”

  “Do you remember the People article?”

  Sheriff John had remembered. He was the one who had had to deal with trespassers looking for buried treasure on the Snoddy properties for untold years. And Miz Demetrice had shot two of them with salt rock.

  But Bubba had explained for the deputies and especially for Willodean. “People wrote an article about ghosts and Civil War treasure. One of the houses featured was the Snoddy Mansion. My mother, Miz Demetrice, embellished some of the old stories because she was always looking for more revenues in the spring and fall openings. Her reasoning was that more people would visit the place just to see a haunted house. But it backfired on her because more treasure hunters came calling than anyone else. Digging holes on every inch of the property. Running all over the place at nights with flashlights and four-wheel drives. My own father even believed the stories. Went out and dug quite a few holes in the company of a pint of vodka.”

  “What was the story?” Deputy Simms had asked.

  “My ancestor was Colonel Nathaniel Snoddy, who was a Confederate officer. He was involved in a group of soldiers who robbed anything with a Union flag on it. One of the things they robbed was a load of gold from a Union train in 1864. And that is well-documented. That actually happened. Where my mother varied from the truth was that she told that reporter that Colonel Snoddy’s ghost still haunts the place looking for a wagon full of gold that had been his share. He hid it somewhere on the land but died before he could recover it. And since he didn’t tell anyone else about it, his ghost still looks for it.” Bubba had shaken his head sadly, as if commiserating for the ghost of his distant ancestor.

  “So what really happened?” Sheriff John had asked.

  Bubba snapped to the present and listened to the sounds of digging. It had become less frantic as they had dug deeper and deeper. Willodean poked Bubba in his side and whispered, “Why do we have to wait until they dig it up? It’s going to take forever.”

  Smiling in the shadows, Bubba whispered back. “So they’ll be good and tired when Sheriff John and you all arrest them.” Sheriff John had been amenable to the idea. He didn’t mind if everyone waited and got the legend off the books. Either there was gold under where the old oak stump had been located and it would be finished, or there wasn’t and it would be finished.

  An hour later, the sound of a shovel hitting metal made everyone sit up straight. The first voice said, “I found it. Holy Jesus God, I found it.”

  The other voice said, “Brush it off! Hurry, what is it? Coins? Bullion? Ingots?”

  The furious efforts of frenzied digging started anew. There were a few frantic curses. Then they paused for the longest time. Finally, the first voice said in a heavily strained tone, “Is that what I think it is?”

  “Motherfucking son of a bitch!” the second voice screamed furiously. “It’s a…it’s a goddamned…”

  Bubba recalled the answer to Sheriff John’s question of, “So what really happened?”

  Here was what Bubba had said: “Colonel Nathaniel Snoddy was an inveterate philanderer who made his wife, Cornelia Adams Snoddy, a most miserable woman by sleeping with anything with...uh, breasts, beg pardon, Deputy Gray. But old Nate, he wasn’t quite right in the head. He’d slept with one woman too many and had contracted syphilis, which had apparently gone into his brain. He brought back a wagon full of something in 1865, telling everyone it was gold, but the truth was that he was crazy by that time, and he brought back a load of rusted-out iron. He spent some time burying it some damn place and then died of syphilis.” Bubba had shaken his head sadly. “As far as I know old Nate never haunted the Snoddy Mansion. More likely he would have haunted the Red Door Inn. Miss Annalee Hyatt was one of his favorite prostitutes, and it’s said that she gave him the syphilis which killed him. Supposedly, she gave it to the Union colonel who was so enamored of her, too. A little historical irony.”

  “So someone’s looking for the so-called gold?” Sheriff John had asked incredulously.

  “Not just anyone, but you should have a look at Miss Annalee’s portrait in the Red Door Inn. I’m sure Miz Cambliss will show it to you. It looks just like Miss Lurlene.” Bubba had hesitated, a little ashamed of himself. “Or at least her face does. I’m not rightly sure about the rest. I don’t think that Lurlene Grady is her real name.”

  “It’s not,” Sheriff John had said. “And although this sounds like something out of a dime novel. It fills in some of the details. You see, Bubba, we have records of phone calls made to and from the Dearman residence. We figured that we could catch you in a lie about having contacted Melissa Dearman.” Bubba had already known that, but he didn’t let on with Sheriff John about where the information had come from.

  And Bubba had already knew that he hadn’t called Melissa. Sheriff John had went on, “We only found the one call from your house to Melissa Dearman’s, and we also found five calls from Lurlene Grady to Melissa Dearman.” He had stared at Bubba’s face. “At first I thought you’d called from her place, but she confirmed you ain’t never been there. So did the landlord. Said two other fellas had been though. One who seems like it might have been Neal Ledbetter. So we got Miss Lurlene’s phone records, and she’s made all kinds of calls to Neal Ledbetter. The same with Neal’s phone records, fifteen calls in the last week to Miss Lurlene and seven to the Pegram Café. There was a fingerprint on the cartridge in the .45. Clear as day. It belongs to a Miss Donna Hyatt of Spokane, Washington. A woman with a record of fraud and larceny a mile long. We got her driver’s license picture about two hours after I arrested you. Miss Donna Hyatt and Miss Lurlene Grady is one and the same woman.”

  There was a certain amount of shock involved. Up until the time when the murderers so casually confessed to the planning and murdering of a completely innocent woman, Bubba had assumed the best of the worst scenario, that Melissa had come to see him to apologize for past deeds and simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. But the truth was far more insidious. The theory was that she had been lured by Lurlene in order to frame Bubba for murder. The story about Bubba and his ex-fiancée was well-known in the community. It was only a matter of finding the details. Then there was the simple process of stealing a gun from Miz Demetrice’s house. That was another well-known fact in the community; Miz Demetrice liked to keep guns around her house. The gun was used in the murder, wiped clean, and then hidden in Bubba’s woodpile, where the police would almost certainly find it, which they had with
the help of an anonymous phone call.

  It was true that all of this evidence was circumstantial, but they had a partial confession on tape, as they had all listened to the conversation between Lurlene Grady and Noey Wheatfall, her erstwhile companion in crime. Bubba had seen the three conspirators together at the strip mall on Farmer’s Road himself.

  Lurlene was really Donna Hyatt, of Spokane, Washington. She hadn’t really been born in Georgia after all. She had in her possession diaries from her ancestors narrating the treasure story or at least the popular version. She also had Colonel Snoddy’s stolen papers from the library. Half the town of Pegramville had seen Colonel Snoddy drive into the town with a covered wagon, which he had guarded ruthlessly. She happened upon the People article years after it had been written and figured she had as good a chance to find the gold as anyone. She even did some research on the Snoddy family, figuring that they hadn’t found the gold either, and then moved down South, with a new name, and a new accent that sometimes went away. She had slowly gotten Noey into the act, followed by Neal Ledbetter, who had stumbled on them, when they were looking for the gold one evening. They had figured that all three could get what they wanted by simply removing Bubba and Miz Demetrice from the property. So they would frame Bubba for the murder of his ex-fiancée, and Miz Demetrice would have to sell the place for money to defend her son. Neal would be waiting to buy the place up. They would get to search for the gold at their leisure, and Neal would get to make the place a Walmart Supercenter. Everyone would be happy except for perhaps Bubba and Miz Demetrice.

  Except there was one little niggling detail; Bubba wasn’t so easy to frame. And he found the button that Lurlene/Donna had lost the night she had shot Melissa in the back. A button from a sweater that she had been wearing that night that the murder occurred, that shouldn’t be on Bubba’s porch because Lurlene/Donna had never been on Bubba’s porch, as far as Bubba knew. So there were the break-ins to recover the button, and then the fire, both of which failed. Then Bubba saw the cardigan hanging in the Pegram Café, and it all came to him in a sudden flash of knowledge. The sweater, Lurlene/Donna, the full-length portrait of Miss Annalee Hyatt, the missing Snoddy diaries from the library, the holes in the property, the missing forty-five. All of it.

  Bubba couldn’t even manage a hoarse laugh. It wasn’t funny. Lurlene, AKA Donna Hyatt, had killed two people for a supposed wagon full of gold. There was sad, pitiful irony in all of that. It might very well been avoided, if she had just asked Bubba about the legend. His mother might still protect the Colonel’s not-so-sainted memory, but Bubba would have told her the real story without reservations as he had to other people upon occasion.

  The Snoddys hadn’t had a pot to piss in after the Civil War. There was the mansion and the caretaker’s place. There were only fixtures left in the house, with a lot of blank walls, where various artworks had been sold off to support them. All the Confederate money that had been left over had been burned in the fire place in 1869 because it had been a very cold winter, and the money had been worthless. The Snoddys lived on revenues from his grandfather’s clothing sales business that had been sold to Sears in 1956. It wasn’t much but it still supported Miz Demetrice nicely.

  With the Sheriff and the deputies convinced of his innocence, Bubba pleaded with them to stake out the Snoddy Mansion. Lurlene/Donna and Noey had been present in the café when Bubba had been arrested the third and fourth times and had heard Miz Demetrice’s declaration to return to Dallas via a beat-up Porsche convertible. They didn’t have Neal to buy the place anymore so they would have to search at night when no one was around. This particular Saturday night was perfect for rooting out lost Yankee treasure.

  To Bubba’s surprise Sheriff John had agreed and even took Bubba along. They set up recording devices and an amplifier to listen to any conversation the two had. Sheriff John even had someone tail the pair from the café, where it became obvious that something was up because Noey Wheatfall closed the restaurant early on a Saturday night.

  Bubba was amazed that after everything he had gone through, that it turned out to be so damned easy. Not only was it easy but the pair of murdering would-be thieves got to dig up a rotting 1946 Chevy truck. One of his great-uncles, who had supported the Republican candidate, Dwight E. Eisenhower, had stolen it from the governor of Texas in 1952 because he was a damned Democrat. Stealing the truck and burying it in the backyard was about the only way he could think to teach the damned idiot governor a lesson. When the great uncle buried the truck he found the load of rusted-out pig iron and such, and the whole Snoddy clan had a big laugh about the so-called buried treasure. It was common knowledge that there had never been Confederate gold on Snoddy property. Not then and certainly not in the present.

  But Lurlene, also known as Donna Hyatt, had loudly and clearly incriminated herself, and then gave up without incident, only pausing to snarl at Noey, “You better not say nothing to anyone.” Any hint of a Southern accent had gone and apparently was gone forever.

  Even Noey had been dumbfounded at the sudden appearance of a dozen police officers all around them. But the tape of the murder confession was strong evidence against them. Bubba didn’t know it, but Sheriff John was planning on getting Noey alone to work out a deal with him. He thought that Noey would testify against Lurlene/Donna if he were promised a lighter deal in this whole mess.

  Sheriff John stood beside his county car, watching the deputies secure the suspects, when Bubba stepped up beside him, Precious following at his heels. “Hey, Bubba,” Sheriff John said.

  “Hey,” said Bubba. “You owe me an apology.”

  Sheriff John choked for a moment. “I don’t think so.”

  “Cain’t you even say you was wrong about me?”

  “I notice that your accent goes country when you want it to,” Sheriff John remarked, folding his massive arms across his chest.

  Bubba mimicked the motion. “So does yours.”

  Sheriff John shrugged. “For your information, I’ve always had doubts about your guilt. So I wasn’t necessarily wrong.”

  Bubba shrugged, too. He looked at Lurlene, no, it was Donna Hyatt. She was handcuffed and being held by one arm by Willodean Gray, listening as another deputy rattled off her rights to her. He knew that Sheriff John had ultimately been persuaded by Willodean herself, upon the issue of Bubba’s innocence. She had done the digging that had come up with the information on the telephone records and the driver’s license photo of Donna Hyatt of Spokane, Washington. “You mind if I say something to her?” Bubba asked, referring to Lurlene/Donna.

  “You’re not gonna hurt that woman?” Sheriff John asked, only half serious. Privately, he was glad that an arrest was made and that it wasn’t Bubba who was going to be staying in jail. Bubba was a popular fella, and the townsfolk were looking at the sheriff like he was a mean, mean man of late. But not only that, it turned out that that young woman he’d hired was a fine detective and would probably do very well in the Pegram County Sheriff’s Department in the future. And that was even if her methods weren’t always above board.

  “Won’t touch her,” vowed Bubba.

  “Go ahead.” Sheriff John waved him on.

  Bubba approached Lurlene/Donna and gazed down into her face. It seemed a different face now, a face full of sly intent and even coldly homicidal tendencies. There was not only that, but her features almost seemed a mirror image of the heroine, Miss Annalee. Why hadn’t he seen it before? Maybe it was because he hadn’t looked at Miss Annalee’s portrait for years before that one night he’d dropped off the drunken Major Dearman.

  Lurlene/Donna returned his scrutiny, saying nothing. He had intended to tell her that there wasn’t any gold, that it had only been a pile of rusting junk, that she had murdered two people for no good reason, but clipped it short on his tongue. Instead, he said, “Miss Lur-uh-Donna, I don’t think we should see each other anymore.”

  Donna’s eyes opened up wide. After a long time, she said incredulously, “You’r
e breaking up with me, Bubba?”

  “I don’t associate with people of your ilk,” he said, with a regal air that would have reminded anyone instantly of Miz Demetrice had they been listening.

  The other woman stared at Bubba as though she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Finally, she screamed, “BITE ME!”

  Willodean happily restrained her prisoner and finally shoved her into the back of a police car with the assistance of another deputy. Bubba said cheerfully, “It’s only been seven dates not including lunch with my mother. You’re taking this too seriously.”

  Donna unleashed another string of profanities unfit for man or animal alike. But Willodean shut the county car door on her, and the words instantly became too muffled to understand.

  Willodean turned to Bubba with a smile that seemed to light up her whole face. “So, big fella, what do you plan to do now?”

  Bubba smiled slowly. “Do you happen to like chocolate Jell-O pudding? I seem to have a real hankering for it of late.”