by Ninie Hammon
Chapter 24
When Jake and Ben got to the funeral home before the doors were opened for the visitation, Mr. Saunders told them that Bubba had come down the day before.
“Your daddy said he wanted the best casket I had, didn’t care what it cost,” Saunders said. “He picked out the most expensive one in the building. Paid cash for it, too.”
The casket was not like the dignified silver one Sarabeth had selected for her father. Jennifer’s casket looked like a sarcophagus fit for an Egyptian princess, with gaudy gold trim, and hand-painted detail on the sides that Ben thought looked like racing stripes. He wasn’t sure, but he didn’t think Jake much liked the casket.
Jake hated the casket; it was obscene.
Think if you put her in a pretty gold box that’ll fix everything? An expensive casket for your little girl’s dead body will make up for what you did, for what you turned her into?
Jake’s rage was a ferocious beast that paced back and forth in his guts, roaring and growling, threatening to take over his soul as well as his mind and heart.
The only thing that saved him from the beast was overload. All his circuits were fried. Grief, shock, despair, hatred, regret—all tumbled around inside him like clothes in a dryer as he sat in the uncomfortable, too-small chair beside Jennifer’s casket.
He actually sensed it when his father came into the room. It was like there was a power, an intimidation in the bulk of his presence that sent out ripples in the air. Jake looked up and Bubba was standing in the big double doorway, looking at him.
Bubba just stood there, apparently expecting Jake to come to him. When Jake didn’t, he came to Jake, crossed the room and stopped in front of where Jake was seated.
“Where you been, boy?” It was a simple question, no emotion.
Jake didn’t rise, just looked up at his father. “I was in the mountains, the Smokies. I got back this morning.”
“You know what happened to your sister?” Again, a simple question.
“I know she killed herself.” Jake heard the hard edge of anger in his voice and knew his father could hear it there, too. And he didn’t care! With a instant, incredible elation, he realized he wasn’t afraid! “And I know why she killed herself, too.”
Bubba just looked at him, his eyes so dark and deep it was impossible to read his reaction. If Jake’d had to guess, he’d have said his father was probably confused.
“Then you know more’n I know.” Bubba paused, waited for Jake to reply. “You gonna tell me, or not?” And for the first time, there was the familiar rumble of disapproval, like a low-power electric shock, in his words.
“Yeah, Daddy, I’ll tell you,” Jake said, and he felt Ben stiffen at the venom in his words. “Not here and not now, but I absolutely will tell you.”
“Fair ’nough.”
Bubba turned and walked away.
Ben let out a breath he’d obviously been holding and whispered, “Poke a tiger with a stick once too often and it’ll bite your hand off.”
Jake was barely able to keep his own voice a whisper. “He ever lays a hand on me, ever touches me again, and I’ll kill him.”
He turned to Ben, looked him in the eye. “Believe this, Ben—if you ever believed anything I’ve ever said, believe this—I will kill him.”
“I believe you, Jake. I just don’t want him to kill you first.”
For most of the morning, there were only a handful of people at the visitation at any given time. Lots of kids from the high school came in the beginning. After all, Jake was a big football star, even if his father was a doper.
Sarabeth came in alone on her lunch break and sat down beside Ben. She nodded toward Bubba.
“That man is a cobra,” she said quietly, “and he’s looking at us like we’re mice.”
Bubba had an odd, unpleasant half-smile on his face. Then he turned abruptly and walked out of the room. It wasn’t even noon, and the visitation wasn’t set to be over until 2:30.
As soon as Bubba left, Sarabeth got up and knelt in front of Jake. She took both his hands in hers. “How you doing, Thing Two, you going to be alright?”
“Yeah, I’ll be fine.”
Jake saw Ben and Sarabeth exchange a glance.
“I need to get back to the office now, but I’ll see you boys at supper tonight. Ok?” She stood and patted Jake’s shoulder.
Ben and Jake watched her walk away and then sat there, just the two of them, the room almost empty, waiting for the ordeal to be over, waiting because it was the respectful thing to do for Jennifer.
“What was it like in jail?” Jake asked. His was more than a simple curiosity. Though he was operating under the assumption that if he told the police the truth, they’d believe him, there was always the chance they wouldn’t. Something could go south. If he admitted he’d been in that barn with Ben, he just might end up in jail, too.
“It sucked. Smelled like pee. Roaches the size of chipmunks. The six hours I spent in that cell felt like three days.”
“What did you do?”
“I cried.”
Jake groaned. “Hey, man, I’m sorry.”
Ben looked like he was embarrassed he’d blurted that out. He cleared his throat and shifted directions. “Most of the time I was sitting there trying to figure out how that guy hung himself in that cell.”
“What guy?”
“One of the men who kidnapped the little Davis girl, the one Sarabeth said was going to testify against … ” Ben stopped. “He was going to tell who he and his buddies worked for.”
“And it was my father, right?”
Ben nodded, then told Jake what Sarabeth had told him about Doodlebug, described how he had gone to the jail that morning with Sarabeth, processed the film and printed the picture of the EMT for the front page.
“I saw the pictures that didn’t run in the newspaper, too, the ones that nobody else saw. Pictures of him hanging there. And something about them just didn’t look right. Anyway, I didn’t have anything better to do for six hours, so I sat there on the bunk trying to figure out how he did it.”
“And did you?”
“No. I tried, but I couldn’t come up with any way it could have worked. There were two chairs in the room, both the same size. I stood on one of them and I could barely reach up high enough to put something over that pipe. Doodlebug was a short dude, like 5 feet 5, so how did he do it?”
“Well, he must have come up with a way, ’cause he’s dead.” Jake said.
“Yep, he’s dead, and now he can’t test …”
Jake finished for him. “Testify against my father.”
Then they were silent. A few people came; others left. The room emptied out.
Jake stood up. He was done, finished. He couldn’t sit there another minute.
“I gotta get out of here.” His voice was edgy, almost frantic.
“I’ll tell Mr. Saunders to close up, that the visitation’s over early,” Ben said. “We’ll go to my house and—”
“I don’t want to go to your house.
“Jake, we’ve already been over this, you can’t go home.”
“I want to go to the newspaper office.”
“What for?”
“To look at those pictures of the guy who hanged himself.”
“Why?”
“Because I … oh, I don’t have a reason. I just do, Ok? Humor me.”
Jake was scrambling for something to occupy his mind, anything to keep from thinking about …
Ben must have picked up on the edge of desperation in Jake’s voice because he merely shrugged and said, “Let’s do it.”
When the boys got to the Trib office, Sarabeth wasn’t there and Harmony only knew that she’d gotten a phone call and rushed out of the building saying she’d be back before five o’clock.
The boys went into the darkroom and as Ben thumbed through the pile of old contact sheets, he explained the process to Jake. “A cassette holds about 36 inches of film. After I develop it, I cut the nega
tives into strips of six frames each, lay four or five strips down side-by-side on a piece of photographic paper and make a contact sheet of negative-sized pictures. Then Sarabeth looks at it and picks out which frames she wants me to print into photographs to use in the newspaper.”
“So most of what she shoots is never actually made into a full-sized photograph?”
“That’s right.” Ben found the contact sheet he’d been looking for with the negatives in a paper sleeve stapled to it. He pointed to a tiny picture of an EMT’s face, grimacing with effort. “Sarabeth knew this was the shot she was going to use. She barely glanced at the rest of them.”
Jake studied the sheet of tiny pictures. “So what didn’t look right about these?”
“I don’t know, exactly. You know how something’s just wrong, but you can’t quite put your finger on what it is?”
“Why don’t you make full-sized prints of all these negatives? Maybe we could figure it out if we could see them bigger.”
He saw Ben start to protest, then relax. “Sure. Why not?”
Half an hour later, the boys were looking at the 15 shots Sarabeth had taken in the jail that day. Some were wide-angle shots that showed everything, including Doodlebug’s body, the chair and the EMTs trying to get him down. Two were horrific close-ups of the man’s face with the belt cutting into his neck. Another couple showed the EMTs trying to unfasten the belt with the buckle between the pipe and the ceiling.
Nothing struck Jake as odd about any of them.
“You said you stood on the chair,” he mused out loud, “and you could barely reach up over the ceiling pipe?”
Ben nodded. He was staring intently at the pictures.
“But I guess you wouldn’t have to reach all the way up. You could shove the belt through from below and fasten it, then scoot it so the buckle was on top of the pipe. But why would you bother to do that?”
“How long would you say that belt is?” Ben said, pointing to a full-body shot of Doodlebug hanging from the pipe.
“I don’t know, but it’s barely long enough to go around his fat neck and up over the pipe.”
“Doodlebug’s waist was huge! His belt would have been long—45, 50 inches—maybe longer,” Ben said. “That can’t be Doodlebug’s belt; it’s too short!”
“Well, if it’s not his belt, whose is it? And how did he get it to kill himself with?”
In the greenish glow of the safe light, Jake could see Ben’s eyes open wide with growing excitement.
“Somebody gave him that belt. Somebody helped him rig it up and fastened it at the top because he wasn’t tall enough to do it. Somebody helped him commit suicide.”
Jake thought of something that turned his skin cold.
“Tell me again about going to the jail that day with your sister.”
So Ben told the whole story again. “… and the jailer didn’t want to be blamed for Doodlebug’s suicide so he made Detective Hayes admit he couldn’t see whether Doodlebug had on a belt or not when he’d been in Doodlebug’s cell the night before.”
“Detective Hayes is that albino-looking guy, tall and skinny right?”
Ben’s response was quiet. “With a thin little waist.”
Their eyes met.
“Ok, reality check. Are we saying a Kentucky State Police detective helped a prisoner commit suicide so he couldn’t testify against your father?”
“Yeah, that’s what we’re saying.” Jake’s voice was hard and cold.
“That’s nuts.”
“You got that right! It’s nuts. But what other explanation is there?”
Ben was silent. When he spoke, his voice sounded hard, too. “Soon as these pictures dry, we’ll take them to my house and see what Sarabeth says about them when she comes home to supper. Maybe there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation we didn’t think of.”
But Ben’s sister didn’t come home to supper that night.
• • • • •
Billy Joe had sounded funny. Sarabeth couldn’t put her finger on exactly what wasn’t right, but there was something. He’d assured her that he was fine, but she wasn’t convinced.
His call had come in about an hour after she’d gotten back to her office from the funeral home.
“Sarabeth, it’s Billy Joe,” said the voice on the other end of the line when she picked up the receiver. He sounded breathy, and why’d he identify himself? Like she wouldn’t recognize his voice.
“I found something at Bubba’s.”
“You went to Bubba’s? What for?”
“He called me, said he’d found Jennifer’s suicide note and that it talked about Kelsey.”
“What did it say?”
“We can talk about that later. That’s not why I called. While I was at Bubba’s, I found something you and the sheriff have to see.”
“What?”
“I can’t talk about it over the phone. I had to book it out of there before he realized I’d found it, went out the back way and over the knob. I’m at Double Springs now with Seth. You need to get out here as soon as you can. I’ll explain everything when I see you.”
Then the line went dead.
Sarabeth had grabbed her purse and camera, told Harmony she’d be back before closing time, and ran to her car. It was cooler outside. A storm was moving in from the west and the wind whipped her hair into her face as she ran.
As she drove the winding roads out to the distillery, she held on tight to her growing excitement, wouldn’t let it sweep her away. Instead, she mulled over what Billy Joe had said, tried to put her finger on what it was about it that didn’t fit.
He’d just sounded … odd. Like he had a cold and his nose was stopped up. He hadn’t had a cold when she saw him last night, at least she didn’t remember that he had. And his voice was hoarse and breathy. Of course, if he’d just run all the way from Bubba’s over the knob to Double Springs, that would certainly explain being out of breath.
But his voice had sounded tight, too. The pinched way you talk when you just slammed the car door on your thumb. That was it, Billy Joe had sounded like he was in pain. An uneasy chill ran down her spine. He’d just come from Bubba’s and he sounded like he was in pain.
That could be explained reasonably, too, though. The run up the knob would put a stitch in your side, for sure. Or maybe he fell, skinned his knee or something.
Her car rumbled across the covered bridge over the Rolling Fork and onto the distillery property. Right away, she noticed that the grounds were empty, the parking lots open and vacant. Then she remembered Seth mentioning that he’d given his staff a week off while he waited for delivery of a new cypress vat. She drove up the steep incline to the distillery on top of the knob. When she pulled into a space in front of the office building beside a beat-up old Chevy pickup truck, she saw Sonny Tackett’s cruiser parked next to Detective Hayes’ car. She let out a breath and relaxed. The sheriff and the state police were already here.
It wasn’t until that moment that she realized how tense she had become. As she walked through the empty reception area, she tried to smooth down her windblown curls. It didn’t have anything to do with seeing Seth, of course. The door to Seth’s office was closed, so she knocked and turned the knob at the same time.
Seth was seated at his desk. Detective Hayes was perched on the corner of it with his back to her. When he turned around, there was a gun in his hand.
“Welcome to the party, Miss Bingham,” said a voice from beside the big bookcase to her left. The world cranked down into slow motion and she turned to face Bubba Jamison. His gun was even bigger than the one Hayes held. Sonny Tackett sat in a nearby chair, with his hands cuffed behind his back. Billy Joe was curled up on the floor beside Sonny’s chair. His face was bruised and bloody, his eyes black, his lips and nose smashed. He’d suffered a fierce beating. Then she saw his hands! They were crushed, like he’d gotten them caught in some piece of mechanical equipment that had mangled them.
She turned on Bubba,
“What have you done to him?”
As casually as swatting a fly, Bubba stepped forward and backhanded Sarabeth. His huge paw caught her on the side of the face and knocked her against the wall. She hit it with a thud and slid down it to the floor as the world spun around and around like the Tilt-A-Whirl at the state fair.
Through a fog, she watched Seth leap to his feet, saw Hayes shove the barrel of his pistol in Seth’s belly.
“Sit down, or your die right here, right now!” Hayes’ voice was muffled by the ringing in Sarabeth’s ears.
Seth slowly returned to his seat, his eyes blazing holes in Bubba’s back.
She struggled to sit up. As soon as she righted herself, her hearing cleared, but she could feel her left eye swelling. Her hand went to her cheek. It was more than just tender. The skin was burning from the slap and there was an ice pick of pain deep in her face, an agony that brought tears to her eyes that gushed down to drip off her chin. She suspected that Bubba Jamison had broken her cheek bone.
Chapter 25
Things were moving along exactly as Bubba had planned.
It had taken awhile to break the Reynolds boy, longer than Bubba had expected. Hayes had beaten him mercilessly before Bubba got back from the visitation, but he still refused to make the call to Sarabeth. Then Bubba’d taken the sledge hammer to him. He’d duct-taped the boy’s left hand to the top of an anvil and started smashing his fingers one by one. His screams had echoed in the woodshop, but there was nobody to hear him cry.
When Bubba’d finally crushed his whole hand with one blow, Billy Joe blubbered that he’d do anything Bubba wanted him to do, say anything Bubba wanted him to say. Bubba had strapped his right hand to the anvil then and promised to crush it, too, if he gave even the slightest hint to Sarabeth or the sheriff that they were walking into a trap.
Billy Joe had done fine, just fine. Was totally convincing; neither of them suspected a thing. Then Bubba’d slammed the sledge hammer down on his right hand with all his strength anyway.
Hayes had gotten them in to see Seth with ease. And they’d been waiting there for the sheriff when Sonny showed up half an hour later.
