Bubba and the Dead Woman (30 page)

“Yes,” Tee said. “Your mother’s going to kill me. So’s your grandmother, when she finds out about this. So’s my boss. Maybe Poppiann, too.”

“It’s real close to the jail,” Bubba said convincingly, correctly gauging Willodean’s rising level of reluctance.

Willodean looked pointedly at her watch. “One more place. No more people, dogs, rats, bats, or naked ladies allowed.”

They arrived at the Pegramville Café en masse. It was an odd assortment of people, an animal, and vehicles. Miz Demetrice drove with Joe Bob in his late 70s Porsche convertible. The car was as ragged and questionable as he was. Tee drove Precious and Mike in the minivan. Bubba got back into the county car with Willodean. Doris cheerfully followed in her Cadillac, having decided she couldn’t miss the denouement.

They all clambered out of various and sundry cars and stood in an awkward circle. Then Sheriff John showed up and very publicly re-arrested Bubba Snoddy. He led Bubba away to his county car, saying loudly, “We’ve got all the evidence we need to put you away until they stick the needle in you. You ain’t gonna see the daylight ever again!”

Miz Demetrice and Precious both wailed in unison.

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 an older 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 drive way, 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 Wal-Mart. That was the plan.”

“A Wal-Mart
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.”

“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.

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.”

“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 said was, “What about Melvin Wetmore, Mark Evans, and Mary Bradley, Bubba?”

Willodean answered. “Melvin Wetmore got hired for a job at the Wal-Mart 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, just remembering 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 what 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 a year afterwards. 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 was 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.”