by C. L. Bevill
They all stared at David. David added, “This whole inquisitor business is going to mess with my best man checklist to ends I’m not sure we can overcome. I’ve been trying my best to get Fleet Commander Palmer Bickerstaff into his suit, but I think he’s already been swayed by Lady Whiteshade. You know, my arch nemesis.”
“Is he referring to Bubba?” Caressa asked.
“And would the Inquisitor be…a po-lice officer?” Miz Adelia asked.
“So that would mean the po-lice have appeared to take Bubba into custody?” Miz Demetrice asked. She darted toward the door in a manner that suggested that she was much younger than her actual age.
David watched Miz Demetrice scramble out the door and shrugged. “That’s in the ballpark,” he said.
* * *
Newt Durley and a Voyage
of Personal Discovery
Around 10:40 AM
Newton Ebenzer Durley was not the sort of man who gave in easily, except when it came to alcohol. When he was of a sober state he attested that alcohol was demonically influential, not unlike a steampunk super nemesis named Lady Whiteshade. He often thought it was just as W.C. Fields had said. “It’s easy to quit drinking. I’ve done it a thousand times.” Newt had done it a thousand times. Once he’d tried to count whilst being temperate and had come up with an actual figure of 1,432 times. In fact, he typically attempted to quit on a daily basis. (He hadn’t counted the common throwaway threats to quit, but the actual serious attempts.)
What presented a significant problem for Newt was that his brothers had an active still in Sturgis Woods. While it was purely for personal consumption, the brothers weren’t averse to selling a jug or two. (Although his brother’s kept restating that the still’s main purpose was personal consumption, the truth was that they sold more than they drank. A lot more.) He wasn’t averse to drinking a jug or two. Once upon a time the brothers had used old car radiators to distill their products, but they’d upgraded to copper pipes and a modified pressure cooker system. (Biggest darn pressure cookers Newt had ever seen.) Furthermore they experimented with various fruits and vegetables. (A peach moonshine was dee-light-full. The broccoli sour mash wasn’t, but it did appear green, which was always a plus around St. Patrick’s Day.)
The previous day hadn’t been much of an exception in the way of Newt’s fall from the wagon of sobriety. Newt had started off abstemious. He’d woken up in a clean bed and his adult son had offered a cup of coffee when he’d wandered into the kitchen. Since Newt lived on a disability annuity (back problems from the time he had an accident in the company van and he’d been completely clean then) and a few decent investments his late wife had made, he didn’t have a regular job. He’d often thought that a regular job would straighten him out, but having constant back pain had caused a terrible cycle of self-medication.
Newt had spent some time in the library and an hour in the courthouse listening to the new judge settling some general workman’s comp cases. (The judge’s name was Arimithia Perez and she had taken over for Judge Posey after the man had fled to climes further south where he still lingered in a Mexican jail. Apparently the Mexican officials couldn’t convince the United States to take Stenson Posey back.) He enjoyed listening to Arimithia’s cultured tones discussing points of law with various lawyers. Then Newt had avoided three bars and attended an AA meeting at the Loyal Order of Moose.
All of which had been fine and good. Mornings and early afternoons had never been a problem for Newt. The problem was that happy hour started at 4 PM and happy hour made Newt’s mouth water for a taste of something alcoholic. It didn’t matter what. Beer was like ambrosia. Wine was sweet tea on a hot Texas afternoon. Rum was a kiss from the plump lips of a beautiful woman. Tequila was the knowledge that he’d just shot a 72 on eighteen holes on a lazy September morning.
Yes, Newt was an alcoholic. Pain meds were good, too, but nothing compared to the taste of alcohol running across his tongue and down his throat. When 4 PM had come around on the previous day, Newt couldn’t help himself. He wandered into the Dew Drop Inn at 4:05 PM and ordered a beer. The reasoning went on like this, “Just one. Perhaps just two. Three will do me. I ain’t driving nowheres. How many did I have?”
There was a vague recollection of the bartender at the Dew Drop Inn escorting him to the door around nine. Newt had decided that another bar would be the logical next destination. At some point in time he’d found himself in a conversation with a lawyer at Grubbo’s Tavern without being able to remember exactly how he’d gotten there. He’d also found himself drinking something called a pink pantie dropper. That was when the night went gray. Bits and pieces danced in his head tantalizing his senses, but there was nothing coherent.
Newt had an idea that he and the lawyer had kidnapped a mailman. It might have been that he and the mailman had kidnapped a lawyer. (It was also possible that a humungous purple nerfherder had been involved, but he wasn’t certain.) He couldn’t get the picture of the blue stylized eagle out of his mind. There had been talk about Bubba’s wedding the next day. Newt had been invited, but truthfully he couldn’t quite understand why. His original plan for Friday included the items of going home, taking some Advil, drinking a quart of water, and praying for divine intervention before the appointed hour. However, plans such as those had a way of going awry.
There had been a murky haze of sozzled activity that Newt couldn’t quite recall and then, he had been stumbling around in the dark with the solicitor. It should have been nasty, but Lawyer Petrie (“Just call me Al.”) wasn’t a bad sort. He told some great jokes about Bubba’s experiences in jail, even though Newt had been in jail at nearly all the same times.
They’d even run into a pair of people carrying a LED lantern, a shovel, and a metal detector, which made both Lawyer Petrie and Newt laugh until they cried. The people disappeared into the forest toward the main road.
Lawyer Petrie had run off into the woods following the pair. Newt had tripped on something and nearly fallen into a pond where a black eyed demon fish had watched him from the murky depths. There had been a couple of explosions then. Newt had sworn that he was Chicken Little and that the sky was falling. He’d stumbled about and a third explosion had revealed a small white door with a little handle on one side. He would have thought it was a hobbit’s door except that it wasn’t round. He’d crawled inside and shut the door behind him. Then he’d crawled further inside the dark and slightly damp place. The ground was dirt. The place was as black as pitch.
By the time Newt had felt safe again, he was dog tired. He put his head down on his arms and fell asleep.
What had woken Newt up was like the rapid fire shots of a weapon above his head. It was a speedy tap-tap-tap-tap. They paused and he heard the muffled sounds of someone speaking. Then there was more tapping and Newt eventually realized that someone in heels was walking on the floor above his head. There was a dim light from the vents on the four sides of the house that showed the framing above his head and a series of PVC pipes revealed the location of the plumbing. It took Newt a little while longer to comprehend that he was lying in a crawlspace. The floor was no more than three feet above the bare ground.
The little door he’d crawled through was the exterior entrance to the crawlspace of someone’s house.
Newt would have groaned but he had woken up in worse places. A garbage dumpster with rotting Chinese food in it had been the smelliest. The time when he’d awoken in a pig’s pen with pigs in it who hadn’t minded Newt sleeping next to them had been the most disconcerting, possibly because he thought he might have to marry one of the pigs. There was the time he’d come to in the hospital parking lot still wearing a hospital gown and a hospital bracelet. The fact that the hospital was located in Sioux Falls, North Dakota had been particularly bothersome because he’d never been there before and the last he remembered was being in Pegramville, Texas.
However, none of those really compared to having a dead guy dropped on top of him. No one heard Newt scream beca
use the corpse muffled it very effectively.
Chapter 11
Bubba and the Persistent Puzzle
Saturday, April 27th around 11 AM
“Bubba!” Sheriff John yelled from the kitchen.
Bubba did not dare look away from his mother, so he said, “What?”
“That dog don’t want to hunt,” Sheriff John said. “Ain’t never seen a dog who dint want to eat her vittles— what is this? Paul Newman made an organic dog food? That’s plumb messed up. Butch Cassidy dint make no organic dog food. Cool Hand Luke is crying in his grave right now. Fast Eddie Felson is giving up pool.”
“Those cans were a gift from Willodean’s family,” Bubba called over his shoulder, not breaking eye contact with his mother. “They’re still grateful that Precious found their daughter. They send something over once a month or two.” He muttered something under his breath, then said, “Last month was organic dog food. That company gives a lot of its profit to charity, but Precious ain’t partial to it, and she don’t care none about the charity part. She lays her ears back and growls at this dish ifin you try to feed her that. Bin meaning to take it to the shelter so they kin use it for strays.”
Bubba stared at his mother. Miz Demetrice was more than a little ruffled. Her hair was sticking out in points. Her tangerine suit was askew. One of the buttons on the jacket was buttoned incorrectly, leading the remainder in a line that appeared as though a two year old had done it up for her. Her matching tangerine shoes were also scuffed with a bit of mud. Her hands twitched spastically and if Bubba had a phrase for the way she looked, he would have said she looked like a bear with its head caught in the hive. It wasn’t a typical look for his mother.
“Ma,” he said.
“Blah!” Cookie said.
“Ma,” he began again, “what’s wrong?”
Miz Demetrice stood up straight and fluttered a hand over her breast in a way that would make all southern belles proud. Caressa appeared behind her, looking nearly as frazzled as her sister with a smear of dirt on her rosy cheek and her garnet colored jacket badly wrinkled. Caressa was immediately followed by David Beathard, whose brass monocular buzzed and whirled in place. He wasn’t rumpled at all. The three of them stared at Bubba as if he had sprouted a horn in the middle of his forehead.
“You aren’t, uh, arrested?” Miz Demetrice ventured.
“The po-lice don’t come to my house only to arrest me,” Bubba said. He should have added a modifier of “mostly,” but he did not. He gazed suspiciously at his mother. “Please, for the love of God, tell me what’s wrong?”
“There was a bit of a mishap at the jail,” Miz Demetrice said.
Jail? Bubba thought about it. He’d spoken to Willodean, so she was okay. He’d seen just about everyone else that day, and he’d probably see the rest in mere hours. That left all the folks who’d been arrested in the last few years in correlation with misdeeds preformed in or around Pegram County. Donna Hyatt who had also been known as Lurlene Grady, and who had helped to kill two people, was in a woman’s prison, still waiting for a trial to come about. Her lawyers kept delaying things. Her cohort, Noey Wheatfall, had been moved to another prison because the Pegram County Jail couldn’t maintain him indefinitely. Then there was Nancy Musgrave, who had been the Christmas Killer, and who was in another women’s prison. Her trial date was just as iffy as Donna’s because of the inane manipulations of defense attorneys. Her partner-in-crime and brother, Morgan Newbrough, was in a Smith County Jail because of the same problems with Pegram County Jail. Then there was Constance Posey who currently called a special women’s jail in Cherokee County home. (There was some talk of just putting her in a psychiatric hospital because of her intense fascination with Betty Crocker and a recent insistence that three well-nourished home improvement divas had framed her for everything. Martha Stewart was the ringleader, and also possibly the anti-Christ.) Her husband, the once honorable Stenson Posey, was still lingering in a Mexican jail. (The local district attorney had chortled at Bubba’s question about when the judge was being extradited to Texas and had muttered something about letting Mexico keep him.) Finally there was Blake Landry who had recently run amok at the Dogley Institute for Mental Well-Being. After consulting with three state psychiatrists, he had been sent to the state hospital in Wichita Falls and wasn’t likely to come out anytime soon.
“A mishap which has been on the news lately,” Bubba ventured, “where it might be witnessed by a fella who had either a smart phone or a television.”
“Yes,” Miz Demetrice agreed simply. She’d often schooled him on the answer-only-what-you’ve-been-asked technique. The other way of describing it was the don’t-say-more-than-you-have-to method. Sometimes Bubba likened it to the I-won’t-get-nothing-out-of-her-without-a-sledgehammer-and-a-five-pound-wedge routine.
“Which means that someone…escaped?” Bubba suggested.
“You call it escape, the police call it a brief lark of freedom before being captured,” Miz Demetrice said airily. Then she added under her breath, “The latter of which hasn’t happened quite yet.”
“And you don’t think it has anything to do with a mysteriously appearing and disappearing corpse,” Bubba said.
Cookie said in a distinctly skeptical manner, “Bah moo!”
“What corpse?” Miz Demetrice asked and her eyes skated up and to the left. She didn’t really like to lie to her only child and Bubba knew it well. She could and would lie to dozens of women while playing poker and taking their milk money, but her child was another matter.
“Bubba!” Sheriff John said. “Your dog won’t leave the pantry alone! Should I try a different kind of dog food?”
“Try one of them cans of Blue Buffalo,” Bubba called, watching as his mother winced. “Who escaped?”
“It wasn’t anyone too serious,” Miz Demetrice said. “And those folks all said it was unlikely that the fella would come back to Pegram County. There’s po-lice everywhere, except last night I shot the shotgun twice, or was it three times, to warn some of those treasure hunters off, and no one said boo. The FBI is wandering about here someplace. And you remember the DEA agents, don’t you, Bubba dearest?”
“Who…escaped?”
“It was that Morgan Newbrough fella,” Caressa said. “They had to reduce his charges, so he made a deal, and that’s when they went to transfer him to the prison he escaped. Dint even kill anyone.”
“When did this happen?”
“Oh, about a month ago,” Caressa said and her sister shushed her. “They think he went to Mexico. There was a sighting at a border crossing. He looked right into the security camera.”
“Mebe he’s hanging out with Judge Posey,” Bubba said.
“But then Elvira Evermoss, you recollect your bus driver and Brownie’s bus driver, too, she swore she saw him at the Walmart fifteen miles up the road not two days ago,” Miz Demetrice said. “Of course, Foot Johnson said he saw a strange man watching Culpepper’s Garage, where you work. Said it might have been Newbrough, but he didn’t know on account that he dint talk to him. That poor murdering fella has such a stutter, bless his heart.”
“That’s why the phones and televisions are missing,” Bubba said. That was also why the cable had been out for weeks. It was also why the cable company wouldn’t get back to him. Finally, it was probably why his mother had been dirty first thing in the morning. She had dug up the lines to the landline and cut them. It was her mad-scientist laughter he’d heard early in the morning. (Baron Von Blackcap the Revenger would be so proud.)
Bubba thought about the dead body. That man looked a little like Morgan Newbrough, except his hair was the wrong color. His nose was a little different. So was his jawline. He’d gone to Mexico. Was it possibly he’d had a little surgical procedure while he’d gone down there? Maybe he’d invested in some Clairol?
“It’s bin a hellish year, Bubba darling,” Miz Demetrice said. “There was the movie business and Brownie’s kidnapping and then the whole business at Dogley
. Willodean thought you didn’t need any more stress.”
“Willodean did this?” Bubba felt a surge of anger, but it was immediately followed by admiration. His fiancée had only wanted to protect him. How could a fella think badly of her for that?
“Okay,” Bubba said after a lengthy pause, “that just makes for a bunch of other questions then.” If the dead body was Morgan Newbrough, then who had killed him? And why did Morgan’s body keep coming back to Bubba’s living room like a newly deceased boomerang?
“Bubba?” Sheriff John called from the kitchen. “I think you need to see something in your pantry.”
“I kin explain everything,” Miz Demetrice said immediately.
Bubba sighed. “I need to get Cookie a bottle.”
Cookie said, “Bah!”
Caressa glanced at the infant. “I’ll get one. They’re in the fridge, right? It needs to be heated up.”
“Test it on your inner arm,” Bubba said.
“Oh, Bubba, I used to mind you when you were that small,” Caressa said, “and I never once burned your little gums.”
Caressa smiled crookedly and went back out the door.
Bubba trudged into the kitchen to find Sheriff John standing at the pantry door looking down at Precious who was pawing at the floor.
Miz Demetrice clutched at his arm. “Really, I kin explain everything.”
Sheriff John looked at Miz Demetrice suspiciously. “How do you explain something like that?”
“What?” Bubba asked. “What is it?”
Sheriff John motioned at the bottom of the pantry. “That.”
* * *
Newt and the Uncertainty Principle
Around 10:40 AM
After the one scream, the abrupt weight of the body pretty much startled Newt Durley into silence. If he had been thinking about the way that the universe worked, he would have called it the Heisenberg Principle in motion. Once upon a time, before Newt was a town drunk, he liked to read just about everything. He still liked to read just about everything, but he didn’t remember most of it.