The grating screamed ricocheted through her skull, and her hand flew up without thought. One second she was looking into George’s face, purple and distorted in rage, and the next second she felt the blast of the pistol vibrate up her arm. The loud report in the small trailer deafened her as she watched him fall backward in a cascade of blood and tidbits of hair and flesh.
March 11, 2014
US District Court,
Lexington, Kentucky
The court room was hushed; every member of the jury, the galley, and even the judge leaned forward on the edge of their seats. All eyes rested squarely on the frail, old woman on the stand dabbing her eyes with a lace trimmed handkerchief. Her coifed white hair shook slightly as she sobbed, the pain of her memories wrecking her carefully constructed appearance.
“Ruby, I know this is very difficult for you. Thank you very much for sharing that story with the court. I can’t imagine what you were going through. Do you need a minute, before we go on?” McCain’s voice was soft and sincere as he approached the stand.
With a final dab to her eyes, Ruby raised her head, and the nerves of steel she had previously displayed returned. “No, Mr. McCain. I know this must be done. I’ll be fine.”
July 20, 1973
Lexington, Kentucky
George lay on the floor, a pool of dark blood flowing out from the back of his head and his mouth still open as if he meant to scream at her. The hole in his forehead was smaller than she might have suspected a bullet hole to be, and the blood trickling down from it was a lot less as well. Her ears still ringing, she stared down in complete shock at the body of the man who had been her first true love and her ultimate demise.
He stared upward, his dead eyes locked on the ceiling, but Ruby couldn’t stop thinking he was going to get up. In her head she saw what would happen. He’d drag himself off the floor, angrier than ever before, and he’d take the gun. He’d kill her for sure.
Her legs seemed to move without her knowledge, and when her hand raised and aimed the gun, it was as if she were watching someone else pull the trigger. Five times the gun fired, but her finger kept pulling at the trigger as she screamed. Click after empty click, the bullets didn’t come, but she couldn’t stop. She couldn’t believe he was really dead. By the time she finished, she could no longer stand. Stumbling from the room, the emptied gun still in her hand, she fell down onto the bed and cried.
Hours later, she woke, her skin soaked with sweat and her body hurting as if she’d been ran over by a large truck. Through the haze of sleep, her first thought was to panic. Not because she had shot and killed her husband, but because she knew it was late and he would want his dinner. Leaping from the bed, she flipped the covers to the side, and the clatter of the gun brought it all back to her.
Ruby fell to her knees, vomit spewing between her lips and reopening the wounds. The taste of bile and blood filled her mouth as she screamed, “George!”
When she could finally bring herself to stand, she crept to the doorway, and leaned against the frame. Her eyes focused on the shadowy figure lying prone on the floor. In the weakening light of the fading day, she could almost pretend he wasn’t….
Dead, her mind screamed. He’s D-e-a-d. Dead. You shot and killed him. You’re going to go to jail. You’re going to go to prison forever, and he’s going to win. Stupid!
“No,” she whispered.
The fear gave Ruby strength, and madness took over. She turned, ripping the cover from the bed, and marched out of the room. Looking down at the bloody mess of a man, she fought the urge to kick him. He’d done it to her many times when she was huddled on the floor, unable to dodge the blows. Anger fed into her veins, and somehow, she no longer cared.
Spreading out the baby blue coverlet next to the corpse, she hummed ‘Frankie and Johnny’, and the tears finally ceased. On hands and knees, she placed her hands on his shoulder and pushed. Sore muscles screaming, she managed to roll George onto his side, but the gaping wound at the back of his skull made her gasp. Her hands flew away from his body as she wretched.
Through the blurriness of tears and sickness, she stared into the slackened face of her husband. His blue lips seemed to be smirking at her, as if to say, “You’re too weak, Ruby. Too stupid and weak.”
She slapped him, her hand meeting the hardening flesh with a dull thud. “Shut the hell up, George. Stop laughing at me.” The gross feel of post mortem only made her angrier. She wanted to hurt him, just like he’d hurt her. She wanted him to feel the agony he’d made her suffer.
With a deep breath, she diverted her eyes, and rolled him over once, and then again. He laid face first on the blanket, what was left of his brains peeking out through the gap in his once luxurious black hair. Ruby tucked the blanket over him, and rolled him over and over as she fought to ignore the blood seeping into the fabric. Blood on her hands, literally and figuratively, she knew she’d condemned herself to a hell almost as hot as where she’d sent him.
March 11, 2014
US District Court
Lexington, Kentucky
Ruby Brandon’s voice was as fragile as a wounded bird, “I drove all night. Didn’t stop for anything. Him all rolled up in that blanket, and still laying in the floor. I didn’t know what I was doing, I was running scared.”
“Ruby, where did you go,” McClain coaxed.
“I drove back to Missouri.”
“Why did you choose to go there?”
“I wanted to see my mother,” she dabbed at her eyes with the handkerchief again. “I was young, terrified girl. Where else would I go?”
“And did you? Go see your mother?”
“Eventually, yes. First, I had to do something about George.”
July 21, 1973
Benton, Missouri
The motor home bumped and juggled across the overgrown and badly rutted path where the driveway had once been. Ruby could see the charred remains of the farmhouse peaking out of the weaving layers of ivy and weeds. The old chimney stood like a sentential, watching over the ruins. The mid-day sun beamed down, casting its long shadow to the very place she meant to go.
The broken circle of bricks sat mostly concealed by a fallen tree and high weeds, but she knew it was there—it had always been there. The Ketteman farm had burned down long before a time she could remember, the family had escaped unharmed, but had moved on to other places. Only the burned and crumpling remains of the house and the deep water reservoir had survived the years. As children, she and her friends had chucked things down the blackened hole, believing it to be a bottomless pit or a gateway to hell. She wasn’t sure how’d she thought to bring George there, but if he belonged anywhere, it was in a bottomless pit where he’d never be found.
Back and forth, old brakes screaming and the body of the vehicle squeaking as it lurched, she worked to get the door as close to the cistern as possible. When at last she had managed to position the motor home close enough, Ruby took a deep breath and went to open the door. The bright day seemed wrong for such dastardly deeds, but who was she to judge the sun for shining down on her crimes. The Hollywood version would have had her disposing of the body in the dead of the night, but there was no reason for such precautions out in the middle of the backwoods.
Her fingers gripped the ancient and faded bricks as she leaned over the side and looked down into the murky rainwater standing stagnant a few feet below. The smell of damp, dead things rolled upward in the lazy heat, and she knew she’d come to the right place. Recent rains had brought the putrid waters high into the shaft, but she wasn’t worried about that. No one would ever find him there in the bottom of the muck that had collected for so many years.
The old tow rope was just big enough to wrap around his feet several times, run out the door, and hook to the two cinderblocks they’d used to place behind the wheels. Ruby congratulated herself on her wisdom. Lining the blocks alongside the edge of the cistern and parking so close, she only had to drag George’s feet out of the door and place them on
the rim of the bricks. One good heave and he’d tumble into the water, and then she could toss the cinder blocks in afterward.
No fuss, no muss, she thought to herself as she grabbed for his blanket covered boots.
The plan worked out mostly as she’d expected, the work was tiresome and the heat oppressive, but soon the satisfying splash and the wave of nauseating stench from the water were her reward. Two more splats, and she was done. Sweat flattened her hair to her forehead, and her abused body trembled with the effort it had taken to lift both the main and the bricks.
“Goodbye, George,” she whispered as she let the six shooter fall into the water as well.
She spent hours scrubbing away the proof of what she’d done, bleaching every surface in the small living space. She gathered the bloody towels and everything George had owned, and carried it to where the farm house had once stood. Evidence of teenagers partying there, littered the ground, and she knew one more pile of burnt ash would go unnoticed.
There was no sunset to drive off into, no great victory to be celebrated. She’d taken a life, and as she steered the hulking motor home back onto the highway, she prayed to God that he could forgive her.
March 11, 2014
US District Court
Lexington, Kentucky
“Ruby, where did you go, and what did you do after that?”
“Well, Mr. McCain, I lived. I went back to my mother’s for awhile. I told everyone George had just up and left me, said he beat me senseless and then packed all his things. I told them he’d had a floozy named Nelly, and she’d finally won him over.”
“And how is it that you procured your divorce from, Mr. Drake?”
“I filed the papers as soon as the courthouse opened the next day. After a year without a response from George, the court considered me an abandoned spouse and granted me the divorce.”
“Did you ever think of telling the police? Of telling anyone?”
“I did. Every day of my life I told myself I should turn myself in, but then I met Bobbie Gallant.”
“That was your second husband, correct?”
“Yes, sir. He was the love of my life. We were together two years before I finally agreed to marry him. I was so afraid if I said yes, he’d turn out just like George. We lived out the rest of his life in happiness with three children.”
“Did you ever tell Bobbie before he passed away in August of last year about what happened to George?”
Ruby stared down at her twisting hands for a moment, when she looked back up, bright new tears danced in her faded eyes. “Right before he died, I confessed my sins to him. I told him what I’d done.”
August 27, 2013
Southeast Hospital Room 316
Cape Girardeau, MO
The confession had fallen from her lips in a rush of weakness as she gripped Bobbie’s hand. Seeing him fade from life had frightened her more than anything that had ever happened to her. Ruby knew she wouldn’t live long, the cancer was already eating away at her lungs, and the sight of death’s grip on the man she loved had driven her to tell her secrets.
“Ruby, no,” Bobbie shook his weary head, the paper thin skin on his face bleaching even whiter than it had already appeared. “Sweetheart, tell me you didn’t do such a thing,” he pleaded as the oxygen tube jiggled in his nose.
Through her tears, Ruby could not find her voice, so she only nodded. A long silence passed between them, but she felt comfort in the fact he didn’t pull his hand away and recoil from her in disgust.
“You have to give this to God, Ruby.” Bobbie sucked in a deep, rattling breath. “Put it in his hands.” Bobbie’s eyes closed, and he passed from the world, his last wish being for Ruby to find forgiveness.
March 11, 2014
US District Court
Lexington, Kentucky
Sobbing, Ruby turned to the jury, her eyes pleading for them to understand. “I was a good woman all those years. I was a good wife and a good mother. I went to church every Sunday, and I gave all I could to those who were less fortunate than I. No matter what I did, none of it could wash the blood from my hands. The secrets I hid battered me relentlessly. No matter how much life I tried to live, death followed me.
“I went to the church that day, and I prayed until my fingers bled from the beads passing over them so many times. That crimson stain only served to remind me, no matter how I’d tried to repent, I was never going to be right with God until I admitted the things I had done. I thought of confessing to the priest, but he could not offer the absolution I so desperately needed.” Her words ran like water from her lips, pouring and bubbling out in a sad and rapid stream.
“What did you do, instead,” her lawyer’s coaxing words were always gentle.
“I went to the police, and I told them what I’d done.”
March 27, 2014
US District Court
Lexington, Kentucky
Thirteen days later, Ruby Brandon returned to the courtroom to face her verdict. Dressed in a pale pink dress and sensible old lady shoes, she walked into the room looking much like an innocent grandmother caught in an episode of the Twilight Zone. As she took her seat next to Mr. McCain, she mopped at her tears and tried to give a brave smile.
“Bring in the jury,” Judge Thorbin called out.
She couldn’t look into their faces, the men and women who had been summoned to judge her guilt. Her life literally rested in the twelve stranger’s hands. The court called roll, and each one gestured that they were present. Their images and names were burned into Ruby’s mind forever.
US District Court of Kentucky, County of Fayette, in the matter of People of the State of Kentucky versus Ruby Ellen Brandon, case number BA097211. We, the jury, in the above-entitled action, find the Defendant, Ruby Ellen Brandon, not guilty of the crime of murder in violation of penal code section 187A, a felony, upon George Robert Drake, a human being, as charged in Count I of the information.
"We, the jury, in the above-entitled action, further find the special circumstances that the Defendant, Ruby Ellen Brandon, was in this case under extreme duress. It is our recommendation that the homicide of George Robert Drake be ruled a justifiable homicide.”
Judge Thorbin nodded. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is this your verdict, so say you one, so say you all?”
The members of the jury answered in unison, “Yes.”
There were more proceedings, more words, Mr. McCain was patting her hand and smiling. Ruby couldn’t understand at all. She only knew justice had been served, the courts had seen her as the woman she’d been and had become. They’d set her free, God would forgive and the people had relinquished her from her hell. A weight lifted from her heart.
“I’ll see you soon, Bobbie,” she whispered as she closed her eyes on the world.
About the Author
Catherine Stovall is the author of many fiction works in the horror, steampunk, paranormal, fantasy, dark fantasy, and YA genres. She is also the editor and a contributor to several anthologies produced by Crushing Hearts and Black Butterfly Publishing, Vamptasy Publishing, and Steamworks Ink.
Catherine is a fearless creature who surrounds herself with the joys of life both in and out of her fictional worlds. She lives in Southeast Missouri with her husband, three children, and pets. When not writing, she spends her time riding motorcycles, wearing elaborate hats, and genuinely enjoying the oddities in life.
A lover of social media, she encourages her fans to reach out to her through facebook, her website, and twitter, so they can share in the experience of publishing and creating.
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As Mad as a Hatter: A Short Story Collection Page 15
