The Wilding Probate: A Bucky McCrae Adventure

by D. J. Butler

  “I already said no.”

  “Is this about the pot?”

  “The marijuana?”

  “Yeah, whatever you crazy kids are calling it these days. Maybe Fellows thought he could get to you and get his hands on the drugs. Or maybe he’s an old drug-dealing acquaintance of Aaron’s, and this is about revenge or turf or something.”

  “Sheriff, marijuana isn’t as…illegal…as it used to be.”

  “Still drugs.” Sheriff Sutherland shrugged. “Still attracts a rough crowd.”

  “No.” Marilyn shook her head. “I have no idea who that man is, or what he wanted. And the pot…look, I knew about it. But it was Aaron’s. Aaron’s and Charlie’s.”

  “Charlie Herbert, who tended Aaron’s pot.”

  Marilyn nodded. “Charlie was an old friend of Aaron’s. From his California days. And yes, he grew the weed.”

  “And why didn’t you call the cops?”

  “Over the pot?”

  “Over the murder.”

  Marilyn ground her teeth. “One reason I didn’t call your office immediately over the murder, Sheriff, is that I knew I was probably going to have to explain a whole bunch of marijuana in my backyard.”

  “Right.” The sheriff took his hat back into his hands. “Local girl comes to the door, says something a little weird. Your boyfriend shoots at her, then gets shot in the back by a complete stranger. You don’t understand any of it.”

  Marilyn shook her head.

  “Not to be too hard about it, but you’re saying it’s just a crazy world, and weird stuff happens.”

  “Weird stuff happens,” Marilyn agreed.

  “So probably you wouldn’t mind me coming up and looking around the house, huh? Try to figure out what it is Michael Fellows was after?”

  Marilyn was pale, but held her chin high. “Of course, I don’t mind. You won’t mind if I invite my lawyer, just in case any legal questions arise.” It wasn’t a question.

  “I wouldn’t have it any other way,” the sheriff said. “How about right now?”

  “You have a right to refuse,” Dad advised his client. “If you would prefer not to have your property searched, you can say no. Sheriff Sutherland would have to go before a judge and show probable cause that he could find evidence of a crime in order to get a warrant and come back. Or maybe you’d like to admit him later, after you’ve had a chance to sleep. You’ve had a rough few days.”

  Marilyn turned to Dad. “My husband died three days ago. Nick was really just a…a friend I had fun with.”

  Dad nodded. “Your call.”

  “I’d just as soon get this over with. Are you available now, Mr. McCrae?”

  He nodded. “Rebecca,” he said to me, “why don’t you go home?”

  I pointed at the copy of Aaron Wilding’s will, which sat on his desk. “I thought I might finish up the filing, if you’re not done.”

  “That’s insane,” he said. “It can wait.”

  “Yes,” Marilyn agreed. “Please go home.”

  But I didn’t want to go home. “I’ll just stay here, and keep Gladys company a bit.”

  “You sure?” Dad looked me in the eye, and I knew he was remembering that Charlie Herbert had died in this room right in front of me less than twenty-four hours earlier. I hadn’t forgotten it, either, but I wasn’t about to show weakness, especially not in front of a client and the sheriff.

  “You bet.” The truth was, I didn’t really want to be alone.

  “That’s nuts,” Dad said. “We’re dropping you off at home.”

  Being home alone didn’t sound any better. Before I could object, though, Sheriff Sutherland put his hand on Dad’s shoulder. “Tell you what,” he said. “How about if Rebecca comes with us?”

  So I got into the shotgun seat of Dad’s Taurus and wrapped a wool car blanket around me, the kind you keep a few of in the trunk just in case you ever get snowed in somewhere. We hadn’t pulled out of the Fun Lanes parking before the combination of sleeplessness, physical exhaustion, stress, shock, and Percocet knocked me out completely.

  I drifted in and out of sleep, waking up each time to find my forehead pressed against the cold window of the car. For a while, I saw the highway. Then there were flashing flights, and the jacket of one of Howard County’s deputies, and Marilyn Wilding’s half-moon house.

  I shook myself and stepped out of the car. My mouth was really dry. The Percocet, probably.

  “Hey, Miss McCrae,” the deputy said. I didn’t know him, but he wasn’t too much older than I was.

  “Call me Bucky,” I told him. Evil calling me Bucky made me feel like he saw me as sexless, and a child. I didn’t want the deputy thinking of me as a kid, but it wouldn’t hurt if he thought of me a little less as a girl. His misplaced chivalry might make him try to keep me in the car.

  “Bucky,” he agreed. “Your dad said you were doped up pretty good.”

  “Yep,” I said. “Got an anti-nausea pill and a stool softener in me too. Maybe we ought to start a pool on what happens first. Could be a real party.”

  I didn’t wait for him to respond, and just walked forward.

  I was back at the Wilding house, in the turf-built artificial bowl where Nick had shot at me. It was night again, and cold, so I was grateful for the car blanket. All the lights in the Wilding house seemed to be on, and since the building was mostly window, white beams shot out in all directions.

  I heard the deputy’s radio crackle behind me as he muttered into it. Probably asking for instructions about me.

  Dad met me at the door. In the strong light, I could see dark pouchy flesh under his eyes.

  “I gotta pee,” I said. It was a pretext, but it was still true.

  Marilyn Wilding stood behind Dad in the kitchen. Her arms were crossed and she glared at Sheriff Sutherland and one of his deputies, all of whom were methodically going through the kitchen’s drawers and cabinets, looking behind flatware and picking up drawer organizer trays to see what might be beneath them.

  She saw me come in, though, and nodded. She pointed down a short hall to a half-open door.

  The floor was a beautiful stone tile, and I started to kneel down to unlace my boots with my one good arm.

  “Stop,” Marilyn said. “I’m not having the girl who got shot on my property fall down trying to untie bootlaces with her left arm. Just go ahead and track a little dirt, I’ll live.”

  It wasn’t that I had disliked her before, but I liked her a little better for that. “Thanks,” I said.

  She nodded. “You about done, Sheriff?”

  Sutherland cocked his hat back on his head and scratched the short hair over his forehead. “Well, you never know where something might be hidden. Something this guy Fellows maybe knew about, and wanted to get his hands on. Heck, the fact that you don’t know what it is only increases my suspicion that we’re talking about something secret. Something taped to the underside of a table, or stuffed inside a mattress.”

  Marilyn Wilding harrumphed. “Plumbing isn’t working too well,” she said to me. “There’s a pump bottle of sanitizer on the counter.”

  I nodded and passed them both, heading into the bathroom. I shut the door behind me.

  “Just trying to avoid having to come back later, Mrs. Wilding,” I heard the sheriff say before I shut out the sounds of the search completely.

  Sheriff Sutherland had a folksy way about him, but I had to admire the fact that he’d talked Mrs. Wilding into letting him search her house immediately, without a warrant. If I were the sheriff, I’d want to do that, too. Search before any clues might disappear.

  Of course, Mrs. Wilding might be innocent. My client might be innocent, that is. She had agreed to let the sheriff into her house quickly enough.

  I felt torn. On the one hand, Marilyn Wilding was a client. To Dad, and to me, that meant we owed her professional behavior and courtesy and loyalty. On the other hand, her boyfriend had tried to shoot me.

  Only maybe he hadn’t. Maybe she was right
, he had been trying to scare me off. Maybe he was frightened, maybe he knew something about Michael Fellows. I had, after all, said provocative things to Marilyn at the door. Maybe Fellows had made me say those things exactly because he knew Nick would come out and try to kill me.

  It’s too easy to believe in good guys and bad guys, this world just isn’t that simple. But maybe Nick wasn’t a murderer, or a thug. Maybe he thought he was defending his girlfriend.

  And that memory, that Mrs. Wilding had a boyfriend, made me shudder and knocked me right off my train of thought.

  I’m not a prude. I just, I don’t know, my wounds from Mom leaving were still too raw, maybe.

  I sighed. Maybe a career as a lawyer was not in my future. I wasn’t hard-hearted enough.

  Of course, Dad wasn’t especially hard-hearted.

  But then, he didn’t have much of a career, either.

  When I was done, I felt a little light-headed. Moving slowly, I turned on the faucet. Water splashed into the white basin and reminded me that Marilyn had said the sink wasn’t working too well. I quickly shut off the tap, found the pump bottle, and sanitized my hands with the pungent alcohol gel.

  I emerged from the bathroom with careful steps, trying to bluff my way through the woozy feeling with sheer determination. “Could I get a drink?”

  The sheriff and his deputies had moved into other rooms. Dad had followed them, but Marilyn stood by the kitchen sink with her arms crossed, looking out the window into the darkness. She nodded and stooped to reach into the fridge. I saw several flatpacks of bottled water inside, and she passed me a bottle with a tired smile.

  I took the water and headed out to Dad’s car with short steps. The deputy opened the door and nodded, without saying a word.

  I have no memory of getting myself into bed that night, or of anyone else helping me.

  In the morning, I woke up to the smell of bacon and the sizzling sound of frying fat.

  I hurt, all over.

  Squeezing out of the clothes I’d been wearing for three days, I found the joint in my pocket. At the sight of it, I kind of wanted to laugh, but I also kind of wanted to cry. In the end, I split the difference and did neither, just tucking the marijuana into my underwear drawer.

  Then I managed to shower without help and get into jeans and a top mostly because the top was really baggy. It wasn’t easy to do anything, with my right arm useless.

  By the time I got downstairs, the sizzling had gone away and the smell of bacon had sunk deep into the wood and drywall bones of the house. Evil Patten sat at the table with Dad, stiffly picking at a couple of strips with a fork. They both moved slowly, and they had oversized mugs of coffee in front of them.

  “You look like I feel,” I said to Evil, sitting down in front of bacon and toast.

  “You feel handsome?” He grinned.

  I ate my bacon. It was a little crispier than I’d have liked it, but that's what I get for sleeping in.

  “So,” I said to Dad, washing down a mouthful of crunchy bacon with hot black coffee, “how’s Marilyn this morning?”

  “You mean, did Sheriff Sutherland find any reason to arrest her last night?” He waved his phone at me. “Not last night, and probably not this morning either, since I’ve already had two texts from her.”

  “Texts…shoot,” I said. “I never got my phone back.”

  Dad shrugged. “A phone is easily replaced. I only have one daughter.”

  “What did Marilyn text for?”

  “She wants to know what time I’m going to get the will filed with the court.”

  “I’ll get right on it.” I took another strip of bacon and started to stand.

  Dad put his hand on my good arm and pushed me back into my seat. “Whoa, there. You’re not coming into the office today.”

  “Who’s going to put together the filing?”

  Dad put on a fake hurt face. At least, I think it was fake, but I realized even as I said them that my words might be kind of insulting to him. “I think I can get a probate started.” He looked at his phone. “I think I can even get it in by noon.”

  “All I mean is, you should be out drumming up business. You can do anything in the practice, so you should do the thing that brings the most value, and let me do paperwork. I think that’s comparative advantage, or something. You know, economics.” I was playing a little coy. I knew exactly what comparative advantage was, and if I’d been talking to, say, Evil, I’d never have downplayed my own knowledge.

  But, you know, I only had the one dad.

  “Right, comparative advantage, or something.” Dad grinned, and even though he was sleep-deprived and probably stressed, and he hadn’t tucked in his shirt or tightened his tie yet, in that flashed grin I saw the thing I knew Mom must have seen in him. Probably Marilyn Wilding saw it too, that boyish charm, confident, a little reckless, a guy you thought was willing to lose for the right cause, but was probably going to win. “You’ve been shot, Bucky. Take this as a message from the universe. You got the day off.” He shrugged into his jacket. “Besides, I can’t have you driving on Percocet.”

  “Evil can drive me.” Then it occurred to me that Evil had been given big-time painkillers, too. I frowned at him. “Unless…”

  “You don’t have to worry about me,” he said. “I already took the oxy they prescribed me down to the SuperMart parking lot and converted it into cash. You know us sagebillies.”

  “Liar,” I said. His mention of SuperMart reminded me I’d left my car there, parked behind the building and next to the dumpster. “Just promise me you didn’t drive here stoned.”

  “I didn’t take any of that stuff this morning, Jim.” Evil raised his arm to the square and crossed his heart with his other hand. “Promise. Made me feel kind of loopy yesterday, and today I don’t hurt bad enough to need it.”

  I looked at the bandage wrapped around his head. “Really?”

  “Hope to die. So I put all the pills in my first aid kit.”

  “Good man.” Dad waved and was out the front door.

  “In case someone gets shot while you’re out hunting?”

  “Wouldn’t be the first time. But you know doctors. You tell them you need serious painkillers to take with you into the Ups in case someone gets hurt, they point you at the Advil. But if they give you ten days of oxycodone because you had a little minor surgery, they don’t ask afterward what you did with it. Many a fine first aid kit has been built on past misadventures.”

  “You know, I think I probably owe you a thank you.”

  Evil snorted. “Shut up.”

  I sat back. “That’s not a very graceful way to accept gratitude.”

  “Well, you could thank me for things. Like, I guess, tackling Fellows when he tried to shoot you. Or shooting him while you ran to the truck. Or wrapping up your wound. But then I’d have to thank you for things, too. Like shooting Fellows after he’d whacked me with a shovel. And driving the getaway truck. And letting me cart you around in a wheelbarrow.”

  I’m not really a giggler, but that one drew a snicker out of me.

  “So forget it,” he said. “Let’s just skip to the part where we both put our feet up and say ‘holy crap, that was quite an adventure we had.’”

  “It was quite an adventure,” I agreed.

  “Good preparation for my marijuana banking business.” Evil grabbed a half empty bottle of water from the table and jiggled it. “This yours?”

  I nodded. “From the Wilding house. Go ahead.”

  He drank the rest of the water. Some other guy might have been making a point by drinking out of the same bottle as me, or suggesting I was his girlfriend. With Evil Patten, I think it was more of a camping thing. He just had drunk so much water out of shared canteens and cups, he didn’t think twice about it.

  “Your dad told me you went back out there.”

  “With the sheriff,” I said. “He looked through the house, and I don’t think he found anything.” Of course, I wasn’t sure I would know if
he had.

  “Well, he was looking in the wrong place, wasn’t he? All the really killer stuff wasn’t in the house.”

  All the really killer stuff wasn’t in the house.

  Something niggled at the back of my brain.

  “Say that again,” I told Evil.

  “Well, all the interesting stuff was out on the land,” he explained. “The little cabin where I was tied up. The marijuana. Even the casings—all the shooting happened outside. I don’t know what he thought he might find in the house.”

  “Evil,” I said slowly. “How do you feel about driving me to the county records office?”

  “I dunno.” He tossed the empty plastic bottle into the kitchen garbage can. “How do you feel about watching Groundhog Day with me?”

  “I feel good about that,” I said. “If we can also somehow get my truck back.”

  “You mean the truck you left behind the SuperMart?”

  “I only have the one.”

  Evil tossed something metallic onto the kitchen table. The object hit, spun, and slid my direction. When it came to a rest, I saw it was my keyring.

  “I’m not your boyfriend,” he said. “But I am the coolest guy you know.”

  I leaned over, gasping a little as my aching muscles stretched, to look out the kitchen window into the driveway. There sat my truck.

  “Yes, you are,” I said. “For that, I’ll even watch The Last of the Mohicans. Maybe it won’t be so bad if I can watch it slightly stoned.”

  “Just what I had in mind,” Evil said. “But I’m still driving.”

  I hobbled back upstairs to take my meds. I took the antibiotic, because I’d been shot, and it’d be stupid to die of some infection after the danger had theoretically passed. But I passed on the oxycodone. It’s not that I have anything against painkillers, and I don’t have a hunting first aid kit to equip—I just wanted a clear head. I’d had an idea about the Wilding house, and I wanted to check something on the county records.

  We took his car. Evil drives a 1971 Buick GSX, a dark red and black muscle car nearly as old as Dad. Evil will tell you all about if you let him, which I know, because I’ve accidentally hit that button once or twice and heard the whole spiel about how the hood-mounted tachometer is original and he rebuilt the big block 455 engine himself after he found the car in a junkyard over in Spokane and bought it dirt cheap. The paint job is his idea; I think the car was originally yellow.