Bubba and the Wacky Wedding Wickedness (The Bubba Mysteries Book 7) Page 7

  But Just After he Found That the Body was Missing

  Because it Really is that Kind of Book.

  Janie lowered the front end of the wheelbarrow while Brownie tried to roll the body into it. He used a rake to lever the corpse over the edge of the faded red cart. The weight of the body held the front end down so that Janie could come around and help push the rest of it mostly onto the wheelbarrow. Then both of them came around the back and each took a handle and levered it down with their combined body weights.

  “I need to rethink the whole future of serial killers,” Brownie commented while wiping sweat off his brow. “This is hard work disposing of a body. How do they do it over and over again without herniating something? My back hurts and I’m only in the sixth grade.”

  “That’s why most serial killers are grownups,” Janie snarled. “Is this going on my permanent record? Am I going to be able to get into the police force if they read about this? Maybe we should just let them cancel the wedding.”

  “Too late, dollface,” Brownie said. He looked around and snatched a nearby plastic tarp while holding onto one of the wheelbarrow’s handles. “Whoops. Don’t want that to spill out.” He awkwardly pulled the tarp over the body so that only one shoe was revealed. Janie tugged on the other side and covered it all.

  “There,” she said. “So no one will see what we’re pushing.” She lifted her head and then added, “But it really does look like a body under a tarp on a wheelbarrow.”

  Brownie glanced over his shoulder. “I think Bubba is back in the house. Quick, into the barn.”

  They took the body into the barn and dumped it into a pile of hay. Brownie took a moment to cover it up with handfuls of hay while Janie carefully returned the wheelbarrow and the tarp to their original positions.

  In less than a minute, she returned to stand by Brownie as he surveyed their work. “You think we should report it later?”

  “I don’t know,” Brownie said. “Maybe by tomorrow ifin someone don’t find him. We could say we was playing in the barn and there he was, with a heart that’s colder than an outhouse toilet seat in the dead of winter.”

  “That’s pretty danged dead,” Janie agreed. “The police part of me finds this objectionable. It’s like we should be hunting for clues instead.”

  “Janie,” Brownie said, “we can hide the body or we can hunt down the clues. After all, it don’t look like he was murdered. No blood. No marks around his neck. Nothing that I kin tell that kilt him dead.”

  “Maybe he’s like that movie director guy,” Janie suggested. “He had a heart attack in Bubba’s house and all those other people tried to make it look like he was murdered because they thought he had been murdered, which means they thought too much. Grandma said they were idiots not to notice that he’d had a heart attack.”

  “I reckon it could be natural causes,” Brownie mused, “but that would mean lightning strikes the same place one time too many. Coincidental and all that. Papa Derryberry would have said that was as likely as getting milk out of a bull’s teat. Then he would laugh, but I don’t quite understand it.”

  “Female cows give milk,” Janie said.

  “So boy cows don’t have teats,” Brownie said and shook his head. He still didn’t understand why his papa had found that saying so hilarious.

  “So what you’re really saying is that natural causes would be unlikely,” Janie said.

  “I would think that would be the case.”

  “Maybe someone’s trying to ruin the wedding,” Janie suggested.

  “I kin think of less criminal ways to ruin a wedding,” Brownie said. “Don’t have call to go and kill someone to do that.”

  “What about that thing that Miz Demetrice and my grandma don’t want anyone to talk about?”

  “But this ain’t him,” Brownie said. He paused to stare at the pile of hay. “But danged ifin he dint look familiar. You know?”

  “Doesn’t look familiar to me,” Janie said. She carefully brushed the hay away from the man’s face. “A white guy in his twenties or thirties. Brown hair. I’m not touching his face to see what color his eyes are, er, were, whatever.”

  Brownie took a deep breath. He knelt and used both hands to open one of the man’s eyes. “Blue eyes,” he said. He stood up and wiped his hand on his trousers. “Now I’ve got dead guy cooties.”

  “What’s that stuff around his mouth?” Janie asked, peering closer.

  “Looks like he drank some milk and dint wipe off.”

  Janie nudged the man’s shoulder. “No rigor mortis yet.”

  “Rigor mortis?”

  “It’s something to do with the chemicals in a person’s body,” Janie said. “Ma has three books on the subject. She’s taking the detective’s test in a few months. When a person is killed or dies, the body stops producing certain chemicals. Mainly it’s because the person stops breathing and since he or she isn’t getting any more oxygen, then one called ATP, which stands for something I can’t remember, stops being made. Then the body gets stiff. Like a board.”

  “Cool,” Brownie said.

  “The eyes are one of the first parts affected,” Janie said. “So a detective can tell that person hasn’t been dead long.”

  Brownie digested this with gusto. Anything about dead bodies was cool. Anything about police work was uber cool. Anything about detective work was really cool. Basically Janie was truly cool, even if she was girl.

  “So we can eliminate suspects based on their alibis,” Brownie said.

  Janie nodded. “If the guy was here at say, 8 AM, and someone else was at Bufford’s Gas and Grocery at the same time, then they are not a suspect. Unless they have one of those teleporters. Then all bets are off.”

  “Gotcha,” Brownie said. “That guy has dyed hair. Look at the roots.”

  Janie crouched next to the body. She pointed without touching it. “What are those marks under his jawline? And look, there’s more behind the ears. It looks like some kind of surgical scars.”

  “Shut the front door,” Brownie said.

  “I mean,” Janie said.

  “I mean, shut the barn door,” Brownie said quickly. “I hear someone coming.”

  They fled the locality with cheerful alacrity. Brownie made certain to bring his racket with him.

  Chapter 6

  Bubba and the Search for

  Spock, er, the Dead Body

  Saturday, April 27th around 10:15 AM and So On

  Bubba changed Cookie’s diaper, which was a surreal experience all by itself. She had gone and made a dookie of a size that would have warranted interest from Ripley’s Believe It or Not. That wasn’t necessarily a good thing unless one was a mommy with a specific interest in their child’s digestive system. (Bubba had a detailed memory of a grandmother who believed that having a bowel movement once a day was the way it was supposed to be. If one didn’t and she checked all of her grandchildren for compliance, then a teaspoon of cod liver oil was the recommended/required solution. A fella could gag merely on the thought of what cod liver oil had tasted like.) (Unmistakably, Cookie had no need of cod liver oil or any other kind of intestinal lubricant.)

  Trying to hurry, Bubba tended to business quickly, making use of wipes, baby powder, fresh diapers, and a clean jumper since the previous one had some spills on it. (The clean one proclaimed, “Nine months ago my mommy read Fifty Shades of Grey.”) He used his mother’s bedroom for the whole process since there was a certain amount of irony involved, but he did capitulate, and a towel on Miz Demetrice’s bed was used where the diaper changing process actually occurred.

  Upon his return to the kitchen area, Bubba was also directed to the fridge by Miz Adelia to a neat row of baby bottles marked “COOKIE!!!!” Heating the baby milk took a little bit of patience on his part, as well as Cookie’s. She didn’t want to wait. He didn’t want to make Cookie wait. No one in the kitchen wanted to make Cookie wait. In fact, everyone in the house didn’t want to make Cookie wait. Bubba could only surmise that
everyone within listening distance beat feet to a spot where they could no longer hear Cookie’s impatient cries and increasingly louder wails of rage. (It was likely that Virtna was wearing specially made earplugs since she didn’t reappear to save her only daughter from what must have sounded like an attack of ravaging velociraptors freshly created from the lab of a local mad scientist.) (The last thought made Bubba wonder where David was presently located. Bwaha.)

  Even Precious, Bubba’s faithful companion, put her ears back in her best imitation of a cat in auditory distress, and fled the premises.

  Bubba rolled up a sleeve and tested the temperature on his forearm, he was happy to find it was just right. Cookie stopped crying immediately. She swapped out the vampire teeth binky for the bottle with an infantile exuberance that made him smile. Once she had finished the bottle and she had been burped, Bubba discovered the abject theorem that babies who eat also poop, even if they’ve recently just pooped. (He coined the term, “Repooping,” with a grimace that said everything about the way it smelled.) Recently fed babies also had a tendency to spit up. Somewhere there was a special law that referred to babies inevitably spitting up once clean clothing had been placed on them.

  It was back to the bedroom to clean and change Cookie again.

  “No wonder them diapers come in such big boxes,” Bubba muttered as he fastened a new jumper on Cookie. This one said, “Got boobs?”

  By the time he finished, Cookie was asleep again. He tucked her in the corner of his arm and wished for one of those baby carriers. Lo and behold, there was one in Virtna’s bag. It was the kind that straps around the shoulders and tucks the infant in the front, facing outward from the mule, er, person doing the carrying. Bubba took about five minutes to figure out the mechanics of the invention. He had to let out the straps to fit him. (It was apparently sized for Virtna and not Fudge.) Once it was on, and the baby was inserted properly, all was just fine.

  “Good experience for me,” Bubba said to Cookie who had remained asleep while being transferred into the apparatus. “I wonder if I kin do some mechanicking with this here doodad. I don’t expect Willodean will be doing a patrol while carrying a baby about.” He sighed heavily. “Now let’s get something done. There’s a dead body to be found. I got to figure out why folks don’t want me to listen to the news. Then I have to get ready to get married. I trust your mother will want to be holding you again by that time. Don’t make no never mind to me, but I think my mother and Willodean’s mother might draw the line at holding you in front of me whilst the preacher is reciting the vows.” He considered. “But then, she might think it’s cute and start crying. Let’s not talk about that now.”

  Bubba made his way out of the mansion without running into too many people. There was Jeffrey Carnicon, the town’s only atheist, who was chatting with Wilma Rabsitt and one of Willodean’s sisters. There might have been more atheists in the town, but no one else was out of the closet. He stopped to chat with them, and it seemed as though Jeffrey might have been hitting on Anora. Bubba leaned down to tell Jeffrey of her marital, and not to mention, her police status, but the other man said, “I love a good wedding. I’ve been thinking about getting married myself.”

  “I dint hear about that,” Bubba said with an eye on the exit.

  “Yes, yes,” Jeffrey said. “It’s a long distance relationship. I met her through a program. We started writing letters. Then emails. Now we Skype. Very progressive. I expect things to progress along. Wonderful woman.”

  “Congratulations,” Bubba said.

  “I just need to make things a little easier for her,” Jeffrey said. He swallowed the remainder of his mimosa, and Bubba realized the other man was mostly soused. Bubba was rapidly rethinking the whole alcohol at the wedding thing as he slipped away before Jeffrey could go into explicit details.

  In the living room near the open bar, Arlette Formica, one of the local 9-1-1 operators, flirted with Bam Bam Jones, a man of dubious occupation who Bubba had first encountered in Dallas while searching for the missing, but still beauteous sheriff’s deputy when she had been missing. The McGees, a local couple, talked with one of the DEA agents, Warley Smith by name. His mother hadn’t lied about inviting them. Agent Smith didn’t look too happy, and briefly glared at Bubba, who shrugged apologetically. Bryan McGee spoke at length about the cryptic and sad state of affairs of the United States government to a man who was already well-versed on the cryptic and sad state of affairs of local DEA investigations. Miz Demetrice had previously played fast and loose with ten pounds of whole wheat flour and the DEA’s determination to find someone who was transporting illegal drugs. Why Agent Smith wanted to attend Bubba’s wedding was just as mysterious as why the DEA had ever thought Bubba to be a mastermind drug dealer. (Possibly they had thought Miz Demetrice was the mastermind, but smuggling drugs hadn’t ever been her forte.)

  Bubba ambled around the side of the caretaker’s house and looked intently at the back door of the property. If Bubba wasn’t insane or delusional, and he didn’t think he was at that particular moment, then someone must have taken the body out the back way while Bubba had been occupied with Baron Von Blackcap the Revenger. Furthermore, Bubba seemed to recall that there had been a throw rug in the living room that was no longer there when he had gone to show David Beathard the corpse. He hadn’t paid attention to its absence, but if a fella was going to drag a body away, then wouldn’t a throw rug do the trick if a shower curtain or a hand cart weren’t readily available? Why yes, it would. It would slide right down the hard wood floor in a convenient manner that would aid any individual intent on moving said dead person.

  Bubba looked at the door and then his eyes drifted to the spot where the hide-a-key rock was located. It was there, but the area around it was disturbed. Someone who knew about the key had opened the door, but then Bubba discovered something more significant. One of the window panes was broken out. He looked back at the hide-a-key rock. Why would someone need a key if they had already broken the window, or vice versa?

  Bubba tilted his head. Just another question to be answered. Then his eyes settled on the nearby wheelbarrow. He’d used it to start cleaning out one of the garden beds for his mother. She wanted a bigger vegetable patch this year. There was also a well-used tarp that had been used for transporting yard waste. (Yard waste tended to go into pre-dug holes made by folks who still thought there was missing Union gold buried on the property. It was both handy and maddening at the same time.)

  Casting his gaze about, Bubba sorted out in his head what the average mad dog perpetrator and hider of the common, every day, and average cadaver would do with said remains.

  There were the holes all about, as Bubba had just considered. Most of the ones closest to the mansion and the caretaker’s house were filled up. (Bubba knew because he himself had filled them one and each everyone with his trusty shovel.) It was a safety issue since the FBI agent had broken her leg in one when Brownie had been kidnapped. Bubba had been mildly surprised that the woman hadn’t sued them, but she had sort of gone crazy with treasure hunting lust, so maybe her superiors had talked her out of it, or it was more likely that she couldn’t find a lawyer to take her case.

  In any event, Bubba couldn’t see any traces of drag marks leading out into the woods.

  There was also the swamp on the back forty acres. Bubba had always heard his mother talk about that being the best place to dispose of a corpse, but Miz Demetrice was really all bark and no bite when it came to the tangible issue of killing a sorry well-deserving individual. Besides there was the matter of those nonexistent drag marks.

  Drag marks = direction in which the dead body had gone. No drag marks = no one went that way.

  Bubba would have thought about the koi pond, which wasn’t far away, as an expedient dumping site. Some of the koi in the pond were larger than the catfish he caught at Toledo Bend. The yellow, gold, and white fish also had a way of staring at a soul that made one wonder if they were actively considering eating them
if they made the mistake of falling into the pond. He didn’t know what they were eating because they’d stopped feeding them years before, but their population didn’t seem to be diminishing. (Coincidently, Bubba hadn’t seen a raccoon or a possum around for months.) Would the koi eat a dead body?

  A grimace crossed Bubba’s face. He didn’t really care to think about it. The grass was up around the pond. He’d taken a weedwacker within ten feet of it the weekend before, hoping that the foot and half tall grassy barrier would dissuade anyone from getting too close to the lurking koi. (Those evil little black eyes could stare holes in a body’s soul.) He stepped up to the edge of where he’d cut the grass and peered warily at the pond. There was a swishing as various fishies moved around to gain the best position to see what was near them. He saw a gold tail slice the air before going back into the water. Several vicious splashes followed.

  What Bubba didn’t see were drag marks to the edge of the pond. There wasn’t a ready way to fluff the grass back up to conceal one’s passage, so discernibly the body wasn’t there.

  That left the barn. Someone had closed the doors and it appeared innocuous as ever a barn could be. Bubba approached cautiously in case a dead body came flying out at him. One never knew about those pesky cadavers.

  One of his size 12 boots nudged the right door open.

  A half-naked man sprang out at Bubba. Mildly alarmed, one of Bubba’s hands protected Cookie while he batted with the other one. The man fell into a large pile of hay. Bubba looked down to see if Cookie had been touched. She was still asleep and a spit bubble popped as he glanced at her.

  Bubba pushed the door open further with his foot. He knew the identity of the half-naked man, but he didn’t want to believe it. The last Bubba had seen of the man was the previous night at Grubbo’s tavern, gleefully downing pink pantie droppers with Peyton the Wedding Planner and Bubba’s father-in-law-to-be, Evan Gray. The town’s only cabbie, Bert Mullahully, had been paid to take everyone to their homes, hotels, inns, or wherever they were obligated to sleep the previous night, but this one hadn’t made it to his home.