by C. L. Bevill
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.”
“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 h
ouse. 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, 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 would 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 Wal-Mart 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 hadn’t realized that Miz Demetrice was back from Amtrak 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 had stolen it from the governor of Texas in 1952 because he was a damned Democrat who had supported the republican presidential candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower. Stealing the truck and burying it the back yard 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 confession of the murder 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 looked 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’re 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?”
Epilogue – The Legend of Bubba –
A Few Weeks Later -
“It turned out that Noey Wheatfall did roll over on his partner, the lovely Miss Donna Hyatt of Spokane, Washington. He spilled his guts. Then he spilled a little more,” said Lloyd Goshorn, who was a consummate gossip. He stood at the bar of the Dew Drop Inn while a tourist from Dallas bought him all the whiskey he could drink. As a matter of official Pegramville history, Lloyd could drink quite a bit of whiskey before he dropped, and he had proven it on several occasions. “The major went back to the military, and buried his poor wife with full military honors. She had been in the service, too.”