Bubba and the Curse of the Boogity

by C. L. Bevill

  “Ifin that kid had really bin kidnapped,” Laz said hastily, “he prolly would have liked it. You know, hypothetically, on account that it weren’t actually verified that he was, you know, kidnapped.” He reached over and soundly slapped Tom in the back of his head. The inhaler flew out of his hand and hit the doily on the coffee table. He scrambled to get it back and straighten the doily.

  Bubba paced for about five steps and stopped to glare at them. “I reckon you know why I’m asking you about Marquita. You were in the tunnels, and you have a history of kidnapping.”

  “Never proven,” Laz denied hurriedly. “That boy couldn’t identify anyone, and he specifically said he wasn’t at any junkyard. Specifically!”

  “And he dint explode a bunch of crap that we’re still cleaning up,” Tom added sincerely. He wheezed once and added, “I have to use a wood chisel on them porta-potties. That stuff is like cement.”

  “And you were just looking for the Boo for cash,” Bubba persisted. “That’s all.”

  “Well, shore,” Laz said. “That’s good money ifin we kin catch that critter alive, but I don’t wanna be wandering round them tunnels with the law present. Them po-lice might decide that we look guilty and take us in. Mr. Fosdick, that’s our parole officer, said ifin we got in trouble one more time, he’d send us back to the hoosegow so quick-like our mamas’ butts would leave a skid mark in the dirt.”

  Bubba paced again. It was a dead end. No Marquita here. He would cruise through the rest of the junkyard to make certain and maybe put a bug in Sheriff John’s ear about Laz and Tom and possibly Jasper, although Jasper wasn’t as obviously criminally inclined as the other two.

  Bubba took his hound and looked through the junkyard. He didn’t find Marquita nor did he find any Boos, but there was a statue of Abraham Lincoln constructed from old bumpers in one of the back corners of the large junkyard. Of course, it could have been a T-rex, but Bubba himself would have been the first to admit he wasn’t a connoisseur of fine art.

  Chapter 16

  Bubba and the Fact that

  No One Dies in This Chapter

  Bubba drove to Wok This Way to order in person because his phone was still broken, and he hadn’t made the time to get a new one. He requested what Willodean wanted, added some moo goo gai pan and some egg drop soup while doubling the amount of egg rolls necessary to sink a ship. Then he waited in a corner booth while the order was being made. The place was moderately busy, and no one paid him much attention for about five minutes.

  Sam Jones, the owner of the restaurant came out and saw Bubba sitting there. “Hey Bubba,” he said amicably. Bubba tried to remember if he’d ever done anything bad to Sam or found a body near the other man or his restaurant. All he could think of was when Pegramville had its first and only Murder Mystery Festival and one of the actors had played dead near Sam’s front entrance, which didn’t really count because the man, hadn’t it been Mark Evans?, hadn’t been truly dead. (Whose cotton-picking idea had it been to have a murder mystery festival in a town known for murders? Why, hadn’t it been Miz Demetrice, his own sainted mother? Yes indeedy.) In either case, it also hadn’t been Bubba’s fault so Sam didn’t seem to be cantankerous about it.

  “Sam,” Bubba said. “Picking up some food for the missus.”

  Sam nodded and slid into the booth opposite him. “I heard she’s about to have the baby. It’s all everyone is talking about. Well, that, and the movie. Also the Boogity-Boo, which sounds like someone was drinking and smoking too much on the set.”

  Bubba didn’t really want to talk about the film. Instead he said, “About twelve days left unless the little person decides to make an earlier appearance.”

  “I remember my first child,” Sam said fondly. “My wife was in labor for forty-five hours. She grabbed my right hand so hard it broke two of the bones, and her voice was gone for a full week because she’d screamed so much. The baby weighed ten pounds and three ounces and didn’t sleep all through the night for six months. Thank God for Nyquil, or I never would have gotten any sleep.”

  Bubba wasn’t sure what to say to any of that. “You dint give the baby Nyquil, did you?” he asked with evident horror.

  “No, of course not,” Sam laughed. “I took it because that baby woke up every three hours. My wife didn’t have any problem going back to sleep but I did. And, oh, Lord, all the blood.” He went on and on about various issues and situations he and his wife had endured and didn’t notice that Bubba was turning green. Finally, the food was delivered, and Bubba cheerfully fled with his aromatic bounty before Sam could tell him anymore “helpful” stories about childbirth.

  “Why do folks feel a need to share their scariest birth story with me?” Bubba asked Precious as he climbed back into his truck. Precious leaned her head over the open passenger window and panted as if she was listening to her human. She sniffed hopefully as he put the bags of food between them. “It don’t he’p me a bit. They think it’s just a little account to commiserate with me, but it shore gives me the shrieking heebie-jeebies. What if this happens to Willodean? What if that happens to Willodean? Lord, he’p me. Lord, he’p Willodean.”

  Bubba clicked his tongue at Precious as she began to nose the nearest bag of Chinese food. She loved her some moo goo gai pan and she wasn’t beyond helping herself. Her lip curled derogatorily as he shooed her away. “I’ll give you somethin’ when we git to the house. Two Milk-Bones,” he promised. She snarled and he quickly added, “Three Milk-Bones.” Precious stuck her nose heavenward and turned away, clearly put out with the fact that neither Milk-Bones nor moo goo were instantly being offered to her.

  As Bubba drove, his thoughts came back to Marquita Thaddeus. He didn’t like that she was still missing. The fact that he wasn’t actively helping went against his grain. It seemed to him as if he should be doing something at every waking moment. Of course, he had to get some food into his wife and his hound and himself, too. A few hours of sleep wouldn’t be too bad, either.

  Bubba had forgotten about Cape Snod-averal as he approached the Snoddy Estate and so he took the back road into the property just so he could drive past the rocketship. The chain-link fence made a dandy perimeter around the area and a guard stood by it. As the sun was about to dip into the west, the place was mostly deserted. Only the one man with his blue polo shirt and a matching ball cap with khaki pants remained, and he gave Bubba the stinky eye as he pulled to a stop to look at the progress the loonies and the professor were making.

  The S.S. Stormspike loomed across the horizon, all fifty-odd feet of it, aluminum glistening in the last light of the day. Someone had even painted the name across the bow, was it called a bow?, in bright red letters.

  Dang, ifin it don’t look like it can take off right here and now, Bubba thought wonderingly. He thought about getting out to talk to the security guy but the Chinese food was getting cold, and while cold food didn’t bother him, it did bother Willodean. (Nuked Chinese food was not done. Neither were french fries or pizza, although pizza could be eaten cold for breakfast if no one was looking. Oh, these obscure married person rules.)

  Bubba waved at the man and drove the rest of the way home, threading his way down the part of the road that was most decrepit. The way into the back pasture had been graded for the trucks. (More money that apparently David Beathard had provided, and did his wealthy family know about his latest venture? Maybe they thought he was the next Elon Musk and just needed a little encouragement.) However, the remainder of the track was rarely used, and the weather had left ruts covered with brush.

  Bubba pulled up to the caretaker’s house a little while later and gathered up all the food. Just as he stepped onto the porch he stopped abruptly because he had a thought that he was beginning to see things that couldn’t conceivably be there. His head shot back toward the front of the mansion and he said, “That ain’t a carousel, is it?” The answer was that yes, it was a carousel. A full-sized carousel like the kind one might see at a county fair was sitting in the
dead center of the acre-sized front lawn. Lions, tigers, unicorns, and mermaids cavorted as lights glinted and danced. A jaunty song played as the merry-go-round twirled vibrantly. Over the music, someone yelled, “Okay, that’s good on the test, Marv! Shut it down!”

  Bubba’s eyes rolled in his head, and for a whole three seconds, he felt certain that he might not be able to put them back in the right position. Then they went right again, and he snarled a dirty word in the direction of the Snoddy Mansion. Whatever his mother was doing was going to have to wait.

  Once inside he took a deep breath, called out to Willodean, who answered chirpily, and went to serve them both dinner. He also got two glasses of iced tea, sweet tea for him and the decaf unsweetened kind for Willodean. He fed his dog the aforementioned Milk-Bones and took the prepared tray upstairs.

  After smooching Willodean to within an inch of her life (well, maybe not that much), they ate in silence. After the initial foray into the first serving, Bubba leaned back on the headboard and asked, “Ma say anything about that carousel?”

  “Not really,” Willodean said. “Should be a good party. There’s a band, food galore, and that carousel, of course. There’s a game section by the barn, too. I’m sorry I won’t be able to do anything but watch.”

  “Mebe I could git a wheelchair,” Bubba said restraining himself from grinding his teeth.

  “Doctor said no to that,” Willodean said agreeably. “Is there another egg roll?”

  “Of course.” Bubba plucked one off his plate and gave it to her. “There’s enough for seconds and thirds, too.”

  Precious whined.

  “No Chinese food for you, though,” he said to his hound. “All that sodium is bad for you. Also MSG. You need real dog food.”

  “You seem a little off, Bubba darling,” Willodean said after eating the egg roll in what seemed like record time.

  “It’s the Marquita thing.”

  “She’s missing,” Willodean stated as if she was making a comment about the color of the sky. “Still missing, I mean.”

  “Yep.”

  Willodean considered a piece of General Tso’s chicken that had magically escaped her consumption. Bubba didn’t know who General Tso was, but dang if he didn’t make good spicy chicken. She speared the portion with a fork and held it in the air triumphantly. “And you feel…what? Responsible?” she asked before the chicken went into her mouth.

  “No, not responsible,” he muttered because he was disconcerted that a piece of chicken going into her mouth could entrance him in such a fashion. He made his mind go back to the subject at hand. It wasn’t his fault that Marquita had disappeared. He felt sure he hadn’t had anything to do with that. “More like I should be doing more to find her.”

  Willodean thought about it. “I thought going to do something for the film would keep you occupied, keep your mind off all the stuff that could happen to me.”

  Like ten-pound babies and forty-odd hours of labor and breaking hand bones because a lady is in so much pain, Bubba’s mind helpfully provided. Shut up, he told himself.

  “Maybe I should have left well enough alone,” Willodean conceded. “You seem more wound up than ever.”

  “I figured out that several things could have happened to Marquita,” he said. He listed the five previously thought out scenarios on his fingers while she listened.

  Willodean nodded. “Yes, that’s all reasonable. Well, mostly reasonable. You don’t really think there’s a real Boo, do you? Having a real Boo kidnapping Marquita isn’t reasonable.”

  “No, I don’t think that. I was just listing it because it needed to be said.” Bubba grasped Willodean’s hand and kissed the back of it. “Like y’all do when you’re investigating and all. We have to consider all the aspects.”

  “My own little redneck detective,” Willodean cooed. Bubba couldn’t possibly take offense to that.

  “So ifin John is looking in the tunnels, then I figured I would eliminate one of the other possibilities.”

  Willodean deliberated on his statement. She brightened and asked, “You mean those two guys who kidnapped Brownie? You think they kidnapped Marquita?”

  “Laz, Tom, and Jasper Dukeminer have been hired by Marquita to shore up parts of the tunnels, so they were around at the right, er, wrong time.”

  “And what did you do?” Willodean asked carefully.

  “Went to the junkyard and looked around.”

  “Normally I would say leave it to the law,” Willodean said, “but it’s Lazarus Berryhill, Tom Bledsoe, and Jasper, who isn’t much of a brain trust himself. I take it you didn’t find any evidence of their complicity.”

  “No, but there’s still furniture duct-taped to the ceiling of one of the mobile home’s bedrooms,” Bubba said and chuckled. “The duct tape had hearts and unicorns on it.”

  Willodean’s eyes were large. “Duct-taped to the ceiling. Sounds like Brownie was there all right.”

  “I reckon they cain’t figure out how to git it down without ripping up the ceiling, so they left it. I’m surprised Tayla put up with that nonsense.”

  “I think she was out of town at the time,” Willodean said. “Regardless, you didn’t find Marquita or anything that would show that she was there.”

  “I looked in the mobile home and all over the junkyard,” Bubba said. “Plus, they were surprised that I wasn’t there about Brownie, which they denied categorically. I don’t think any of them has it in them to be that good an actor.”

  “I don’t know why they’re not back in prison,” Willodean said.

  “They’re after the bounty for a bigfoot. The Boo might not exactly be a bigfoot, but they don’t rightly care.”

  Willodean snagged Bubba’s other egg roll and began to nibble on it.

  “Dang,” Bubba said. “I plumb forgot about the green tea ice cream.”

  “Not to worry, there’s ice cream downstairs. Another plug-in freezer appeared on the side of the house while you were gone. I think there’s enough Häagen-Dazs to make an army of snowmen if we were so inclined.” Her gorgeous green eyes twinkled, and it was obvious to Bubba that she was actually considering making a snowman out of Häagen-Dazs.

  “It’s got to start tricklin’ off soon,” Bubba said. “Ifin anyone asks, thank them very much and tell ‘em we have enough.”

  “They don’t ask me,” Willodean said with a smile. “Don’t worry, your mother is figuring on using ice cream for part of the food tomorrow. There should be a two pint minimum.”

  “John’s still looking for Marquita,” Bubba said, changing the subject before the chain of thought was lost forever.

  “I know. It’s all over Twitter and Facebook,” Willodean said. “Is it going to bother you not to help?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then go help,” she said gently. “All’s well here.” She patted her belly. “I’ve got my cellphone. I’ve got my laptop. I’ve got chargers for those. I just ate. I’ll get washed up and wait for the evening news before I go to sleep.”

  Bubba put the tray on the nightstand and snuggled up to Willodean. “I’ll just git some shuteye and git back to it.”

  “What will you do next?”

  “Find another suspect,” Bubba said, “on account that they’re all over the place.”

  * * *

  After sleeping for an hour, Bubba was back at it. He left Willodean sleeping while Precious draped her long nose over Willodean’s thigh and looked at Bubba as if he was insane. In any case, the hound was disinclined to accompany her master on his self-appointed rounds of mysteriousness and finding an aforementioned satisfactory explanation.

  Bubba didn’t really mind. He made his way back to Foggy Mountain and parked at the bottom with a slew of law enforcement vehicles and a smattering of news-media vans. One of the news people saw him and approached quickly with a camera on her shoulder. Bubba knew her, and it took him a moment to put a name to her. She’d been at his wedding, illicitly, and he’d taken the opportunity to chase her and her
companion down the lane.

  “Daisy Dillworthy,” he said.

  “Bubba Snoddy,” she said back. “Time for a few words on camera.”

  “Moved on from the written word?” he asked.

  “Channel 4 in Dallas,” she said. “We understand you have a close relationship with the missing director, Marquita Thaddeus.”

  Is that a question? Bubba asked. No, that’s a fishing attempt. “Even a clock that doesn’t work is right twice a day,” he said.

  The tall brunette glowered at Bubba. “Oh, come on. You put all that wedding stuff behind you, right? I only called the police once. They did say I was trespassing, and I couldn’t file charges against you for chasing us down the road.”

  There was a little more than that, like an article titled Rarified Redneck Rube Detective Rips a Mystery about which Bubba had taken exception. (His mother had the article framed and placed in an upstairs bathroom in which Colonel Snoddy’s second mistress had allegedly killed herself in a fit of anger just before the Civil War, but that was neither here nor there.)

  Bubba stomped past Daisy and ignored her sputtering attempt to get him to say something or anything. The same trooper that allowed him admittance before was again guarding access and looked at Bubba curiously. “You still working for the film?” he asked.

  Bubba thought about it. He hadn’t actually been hired in the first place nor had he been officially fired from doing what Marquita had asked of him. “Shore. Goin’ to talk to a few people up there. Don’t reckon they found any sign of her.”

  “Not yet,” the trooper said. His voice lowered to a whisper, “Don’t forget about that autograph from Tandy North. She was so great in Bubble People.”

  “I ain’t forgot,” Bubba said. “I’ll look for her as soon as I git a chance.” It dawned on him that Simone or Risley had said Tandy had been packing to leave, but he’ll deal with the lack of fulfilling promises later.

  The trooper waved Bubba past and then stopped Daisy. “Hey!” she protested. “Why does he get to go in? He’s not a cop.”