by C. L. Bevill
Bubba and the Mysterious Murder Note
by C. L. Bevill
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Published by C.L. Bevill
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Copyright 2012 by Caren L. Bevill
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Smashwords Edition
Bubba and the Mysterious Murder Note is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Fictitiously used characters are utilized without intent to defame or denigrate. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Note to readers: This is the fourth book in a series. The first novel is Bubba and the Dead Woman. The second is Bubba and the 12 Deadly Days of Christmas. The third is Bubba and the Missing Woman. That one is followed by a novella titled Brownie and the Dame featuring Brownie Snoddy. The novella may or may not read in sequence, depending on one’s temperament. Ideally, the Bubba novels should be read in sequence.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to many, many people. My husband, Woody, and my daughter, Cressy, are always on the top of the list. They put up with so much, including odd questions like, “What exactly happens to a dead body that’s been floating in the water for ten days?” and “Do you suppose the county coroner would mind if I dropped in for a chat?”
Thanks to Mary E. Bates, freelance proofreader of ebooks, printed material, and websites. Contact her at [email protected]. The dear has the horrendous job of editing and proofing after I have been writing in the manner of a mad scientist creating a hodgepodge of weird experiments. (“It’s ALIVE!”)
Thanks to all the pleasant people who email me, who sign my guestbook on my website, and who are nice enough to chat with and like me on Facebook. I know I wouldn’t be selling anything if it wasn’t for the folks who took a chance and went for the gusto.
Many of these wonderful people also made suggestions for the name of this book, and there were so many good ones that my brain nearly exploded. So thank you for all the support!
Last but not least, here’s to Amy Douglas Croft, who created the title for Bubba and the Mysterious Murder Note. Good job. Perfection! It fits the novel perfectly. Thank you so much, Amy.
Prologue
Bubba and What Happened
a Whole Buncha Years Before…
“Bubba,” Miz Demetrice said to her son.
Bubba perked up and listened to his mother. When his mother spoke, he was apt to listen. He didn’t really understand why this was so, but he suspected it was because he had the pick of the litter. He had seen other children’s mothers, and theirs weren’t as motherly as his mother. At the tender age of nine, he knew one thing that was inarguable. He had a good ‘un. She worked hard. She helped him with his math homework. She told wonderful bedtime stories. She trimmed the crust off his sandwiches that he took to school in his Star Wars lunchbox. She even put a Hershey’s kiss in the lunchbox as a little surprise treat, although Bubba was no longer surprised when he got one. In any case, he knew that when his mother spoke, he listened.
Prior to the moment she had called his name, Bubba had a good idea of what his mother was thinking. She had been dealing with bills left over from his father’s death. She had been cooped up in the room she used as an office and fierce mutterings had emerged more and more as she worked. She had even used shocking words in relation to his father. She had wished him alive so she could make him dead once again. Bubba knew that his mother wasn’t really serious about that.
His father hadn’t been the best father in the world. As a matter of fact, Elgin Snoddy had been a bad father. Sometimes Bubba cried because Elgin had died, but curiously, there was also heartfelt relief that the man was dead. All Bubba had to do was think about the times when his mother had to wear long-sleeved shirts and high-necked blouses. She’d been hiding what a drunken brute had done to her, and it was wicked no matter how much he said he was sorry for it later.
“Bubba, you’re a good, good young man,” Miz Demetrice said, “and I want you to promise me something.”
“Yes, Ma.”
“Promise me you’ll never let a lady down.”
“I promise, Ma,” Bubba said solemnly. Then he crossed his heart with the index and middle fingers of his right hand in a time-honored method of committing to an oath. “Cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye,” he swore, “that I never let a lady down.”
Chapter One
Bubba and the Maleficent Motor
Friday, August 17th
Of course, Bubba Nathanial Snoddy found a dead body…again. It seemed as though the fickle hands of the Fates held sway over the circumstances of his continued discoveries of deceased individuals. The truth was that Bubba would have preferred never to even glimpse another dead body in his life. He had, after all, seen a number of them in the previous year. It was getting to the point that the good people of Pegramville were crossing the street to avoid talking to him.
I dint kill them, he thought to himself belligerently. Someone else kilt them. Not me. All I did was find them.
That impertinent fact was seemingly immaterial to most of the folk residing in the greater Pegramville Metroplex (all two thousand-ish of them).
Bubba had bad luck, and residents of the city and the county were well aware of it. Corpses, particularly murdered ones, seemed to gravitate toward him, or rather Bubba gravitated toward people who had met their ends at the deranged hands of random murderers.
Most of the folks in Pegram County mostly ain’t so bad, he thought. Mostly.
Bubba could think of some people he liked quite particularly. The beauteous sheriff’s deputy, Willodean Gray, sprang to mind straightaway. She had wondrous black hair, the gleaming shade of a raven’s wing. Her green eyes glittered like sun beams through a 7UP bottle. Her lips were the color of a Craftsman tool box as it sat in light of a summer afternoon. She was a compact package with all the curves that a woman should have. And she can also shoot a fly off a pig’s behind at a hundred paces.
Bubba sighed wistfully.
There were other people in the area worth a grain of salt. His mother, Miz Demetrice Snoddy, was one of them. Petite, determined, and up to her individual brand of no-good, Miz Demetrice had a code of ethics set in stone that she had passed on to her only child. She ran the Snoddy Mansion with an iron fist, and it didn’t matter that her son towered over her tiny frame by more than a foot. She simply stood up to him, and he deferred to her. Well, that ain’t exactly true. Maybe half the time. When she catches me anyway.
Her housekeeper and longtime friend, Miz Adelia Cedarbloom, was another earnest individual. She kept her family straight, and by proxy, she kept the Snoddy family ducks in a row. Although she had her own familial issues, Miz Adelia wasn’t too overwhelmed that she didn’t make certain of the Snoddy’s waterfowl-like straightness.
Oh, there were lots of others in the area who weren’t complete toodleheads. Sure there were bad apples, too. Pesky, no-good-apples as well as apples with wormy, rotten cores were present and accounted for. Bubba had run into all types in the past few years. The last year seemed to be a bumper crop for attracting the odd and unusual, too.
A fella had to take the bad with the good. He considered. A fella had to take the nutcases along wi
th everything else. Some of the nutcases were better folk than the ones who went to church every Sunday.
Certainly, Bubba had an interesting day before the whole dead-body issue developed. Today was the last day of his working week. He had the weekend off from Culpepper’s Garage, which was unusual in itself. That bright and shiny morning he had shown up to fix Prudence Barnheart’s 1995 Chevy Tahoe. She had brought it to the garage because it, and he couldn’t help but to quote, “Sounds like a cat being strangled by a mutated Saint Bernard on a snoot full of methamphetamine. It ain’t a good sound no how.”
Having never before heard that singular noise, Bubba was intrigued. In fact, the running engine of the Tahoe did sound peculiar. Bubba rapidly discovered that an explorative and cunning squirrel had nested on the engine and chewed up parts that were not meant to be digested, causing its premature demise. The smell that had resulted was a giveaway, but Bubba had come to the conclusion that Prudence Barnheart possessed some physical inability to smell because she hadn’t said a word about any aroma. After all, everyone in Culpepper’s garage instantly smelled the deceased squirrel as soon as Bubba popped the hood. It had wafted outward like a great green cloud of a malodorous entity reaching out to clasp its stinky fingers around each and every God-fearing soul in the place. In fact, Gideon Culpepper, the owner of Culpepper’s Garage, had staggered out of his office armed with a can of Lysol in each hand and snarled, “For the love of bowlegged women from Shanghai, Bubba, push that Chevy out of the shop before we all ass-fix-i-ate!”
Two cans of Lysol couldn’t put a dent in the overwhelming odor, and Bubba had been forced to breathe through his mouth as he attempted to disengage the squirrel’s not-quite-yet-desiccated corpse from the engine block. (A spatula might have been involved, but Bubba would never admit it.) The nest, constructed of branches, old socks, and insulation from someone’s attic, had gotten into the fan belts and was making the dreadful noise that Prudence Barnheart had heard. The radiator hose had to be replaced and the squirrel’s body put into the outside garbage bin, and that was the end of the issue.
Gideon Culpepper frowned at the bill Bubba had produced. Bubba knew it was because the digits were not over three in totality. “Cain’t you add something else to it? She kin afford a new battery or such.” Gideon’s mantra was often repeated in variations of, “Ifin it’s less than $99 and 99¢, it ain’t worth writing up.”
“It only took me ten minutes to pry that squirrel out and five to change the hose. I’m goin’ need to shove a jar of Mentholatum up each nostril to take the smell out for dang sure. Anyhow, that Tahoe’s like a rock,” Bubba said. “Battery’s two months old. She’ll be driving it when she’s ninety-five years old. ”
Gideon brightened. “And she’ll keep bringing it back here, too.”
Bubba handed the keys to the clerk and watched as Prudence Barnheart’s eyes skipped down to the bottom line of the bill. He knew she was the female’s jailor of the city of Pegramville, and her salary wasn’t enough to keep paying Gideon a hundred bucks here and a hundred bucks there because the garage owner encouraged his employees to get creative with auto repair and prevention. Bubba had surreptitiously cleaned off her battery connections and tightened a few of the belts that the dearly departed squirrel had bounced upon.
There, he told himself. I done good. The universe owes me one. Am I right?
No, he was not right. Hours later, at the end of his working day, Bubba got into his 1954 Chevy truck, the color of a faded St. Patrick’s Day parade banner, and attempted to start it up. It did not sound like a strangled feline, but it squealed piteously and groaned like a man on his deathbed who had not completed the last item on his bucket list.
One must understand that Bubba did not make a fortune being an automobile mechanic. Specifically, he made enough to get by and save some. Most of his savings was going into paying to have his home rebuilt. It had been burned down the previous year by an idiotic woman intent on finding the infamous Civil War gold on the Snoddy property. She hadn’t found the gold, but the house had suffered the brunt of her ill will. So had two other people that Bubba had the misfortune of discovering.
Then Bubba had some other bills. Bubba managed to pay off Roscoe Stinedurf for wrecking the car he’d borrowed from him, although most of it had been in trade. Roscoe was the next door neighbor to the Snoddy’s estate, and he owned a lot of vehicles that needed tender loving care. Bubba had also paid off a state trooper for destroying his cell phone. Who knew a cellular phone could cost so dadgummed much?
There was also the issue of some legal bills for the last year and then hospital bills on top of that, like a towering swirl of whipped cream on a piece of apple pie. The city of Dallas was rightly upset with the loss of one of its boots, and well, Bubba was too honest to keep the knowledge of its fate to himself, so he’d owned up to the event.
Bubba thought the cellular phone was pricey, but it didn’t compare to the cost of a boot. He would have given it back, but he’d left the boot on the side of a street in downtown Dallas, and somehow it had disappeared before the traffic police had come back to check on the truck. So he’d been billed for the parking ticket, failure to appear, and the loss of the boot itself.
Excuse me. A Fat Boy Ultimate Large Antitheft Wheel Device used expressly for parking enforcement, Bubba corrected himself. He’d memorized the name because he couldn’t look away from the bill itself. Apparently everyone down on the farm didn’t buy one because it was priced at around $800, and that was the discounted price for the city of Dallas. I reckon I should have gone into the ultimate large antitheft wheel device business instead of mechanicking. What was I thinking?
Consequently, because of the revenues flowing in an outward direction, Bubba’s normally unwavering care of his truck had not been as meticulous as usual. As the Chevy 3100 was primarily original in its present state, parts tended to be somewhat scarce. Bubba wanted to keep the ’54 original, but it was getting harder and harder. There were only so many ways to rebuild a carburetor, and the last time he’d rebuilt the master brake cylinder, it smelled like an armadillo had taken a major dump on the brake pads until they had gotten properly carbonized.
Bubba had money for the house to be rebuilt, which involved paying Wallie the carpenter on a weekly basis, and he had money to eat. Some of the eating money involved the purchasing of food for his beloved Basset hound, Precious. But there had been a number of surprise bills occurring in the last twelve months. An unexpected veterinarian’s bill had cropped up the previous spring in the form of puppies.
I keep telling folks that Lew Robson done tole me the dog was fixed, Bubba thought.
As a result, the puppies were all distributed to good homes, with the exception of one to Brownie Snoddy, who was Bubba’s cousin’s son and whose home could not exactly be categorized as “good” or “bad” for that matter. Brownie had gotten the orneriest puppy of the lot and the one most able to keep up with the indomitable ten-year-old. Brownie had been issued stringent and legally binding instructions about canine care and that dogs were not to be experimented on in any shape or fashion.
The dissemination of puppies was followed by Precious getting to go to the vet for a little procedure of her own to ensure that there would be no more “surprises.” The dog was not pleased with Bubba or any other human for weeks afterward, but she eventually forgave everyone.
Fortunately, the vet took an installment plan because Bubba wouldn’t let his mother nor Willodean pay the bill. In addition, his stay in the hospital at the end of the previous year wasn’t covered by much of Gideon Culpepper’s meager health insurance coverage, and likewise, the hospital officials were happy to take monthly payments. There had been a separate hospital bill for December, but the city of Pegramville had grudgingly paid that one, seeing as the steel-toed boot of a city police officer was to blame for the hospitalization.
Sadly, the Chevy truck was at the bottom of the list. Therefore, it decided to let its discontentment be known. The a
ppalling noise that the truck made was disconcerting but not completely unexpected.
Turning the key to the off position, Bubba put his head against the large steering wheel and said a little prayer. God, I know I haven’t been the best Christian in the world. I know I have said some bad words. I might have had some lewd thoughts about Willodean. I cain’t help those, as You know very well. As a matter of fact, that’s probably Your doing, am I right, God? Anyway, I digress. God, I’m trying to make sure everyone gets their cut of the pie and ain’t no one hurt in the process, and You know that. So can You do me a square and give Ol’ Green a little kick in the carbs, so I don’t have to walk home? Thank you, God. I don’t care what those people said about You last week in the news. Amen.
Bubba adjusted the choke, crossed all of the fingers on his left hand, and cautiously tried the engine again. It snorted, cracked, creaked, did what sounded like a Brazilian barking spider would do naturally, and started. Bubba bumped his chest with his fist and pointed heavenward. You the God, God.
He is.
Culpepper’s Garage was located on the end of Pegramville farthest away from the Snoddy Mansion, so Bubba accordingly planned for the shortest route. After all, although God was THE God, He couldn’t very well be expected to take care of antique Chevy trucks all the time. He had more important things to attend to. In other words, the truck might seize up and die at any moment, having given a valiant effort to persevere and take that hill in a gallant struggle to disperse the enemy and save the world.
The Chevy might have made it all the way home, if other events hadn’t intervened. As Bubba turned onto Main Street, he ran into what amounted to rush hour in Pegramville. People were wandering all over the place. The street was cordoned off a block down where downtown began, and traffic was redirected onto a side street. Cars slowed to a crawl, with intermittent speed-ups and slow-downs.