by C. L. Bevill
“Madam,” David said with his imperious British accent back in place, “the evil perpetrator has already struck twice.”
“No one’s been murdered,” Dr. Adair protested.
“What about Mrs. Ferryjig and Hurley Tanner?” Bubba asked.
Dr. Adair paused to glare at Bubba. “A heart attack and a suicide. Both regrettable but hardly homicidal. I looked at both of their bodies. I can say categorically that no foul play was involved.”
“What about the bruises on Hurley’s arms and the evidence of him being restrained?” David asked. “There is substantiation to suggest that his suicide was never just suicide.” He dug into a pocket and withdrew a badly wrinkled deerstalker cap. He straightened it out and put it carefully on his head. The calabash pipe came out of another pocket, and he inserted the end into his mouth.
“No smoking in here,” Dr. Adair asserted with a meaningful glance at Tandy who blew another smoke ring in response. He sighed deeply. “I will go and see about the phones. There must be one working in here somewhere.” He walked out of the dayroom without looking back.
Nurse Ratchley watched him go. “Like the woman with a BS in nursing wouldn’t have thought of that,” she muttered. “David, how would you know that Mr. Tanner had bruises on his arms?”
“I looked at his mortal remnants of course, and call me Sherlock. Mr. Holmes would do, but seeing as you’ve already seen my arse, formality would be wasted.”
Leeza and Jesus both tittered.
Nurse Ratchley said, “He had a tetanus shot!”
“It’s true. I stepped on a particular virulent and vile nail,” David explained. “All this blasted construction about.”
Bubba thought of something. “Only twelve of us. What about the cooks?”
“They left in the hospital’s helicopter,” Tandy said. “Right after dinner. They’re going to catch a plane to South Padre from Dallas. Didn’t you see it take off?”
“How did you get in touch with the helicopter?” Bubba asked.
“It was all arranged earlier. After they dropped those people off, the helicopter is going in for routine engine maintenance, so it isn’t coming back for a week,” Nurse Ratchley said. “I knew I was going to be sincerely sorry I got picked to stay this time.”
“Got picked,” Bubba said. He was sincerely sorry, too. He looked around. There was likely a statue of ten little Indians about. Someone was due to make an anonymous announcement of why they had all been chosen, except possibly Bubba and Peyton who were collateral damage. Then people were going to start disappearing one by one. He watched AMC too much. “How did you get picked?”
“We drew straws,” the nurse replied.
“I believe I see where you’re going with this, Watson,” David said. “Your conjecture is that Nurse Ratchley, as well as the rest of us, were somehow chosen.”
“We need to take a look at that Xoom again,” Bubba said.
Blake the social worker stepped closer. “I think this is enough of this line. There’s no need to be quite so encouraging. There’s no evidence of murder nor is there any evidence that murders will be committed here. Everyone needs to go back to doing whatever they were doing and relax.”
Bubba huffed. David handed him his Xoom and said, “I need to go to the little detective’s room. All this excitement makes the world go round…and round. Then some more.”
Tandy puffed on her cig as she went outside. Abel and Peyton followed her while Leeza went back to her crossword puzzle. Jesus and Thelda got into a conversation involving Biblical verses and Shakespearean insults. Cybil and Blake walked out while Cybil said, “I swear, I can’t make up the stuff that goes on around here. Bless their little hearts.”
Nurse Ratchley gave everyone remaining a long look. She finally looked at Bubba. “We have some rooms. We can put you up for the night with no problem no matter what the doc has to say. Then tomorrow we can get the bobcat from the shed and put that cellphone tower on the side of the road. Someone here’s got to know how to operate it.”
“The bobcat isn’t going to make a dent in the avalanche,” Bubba said.
“Maybe not, but it’s a start.” The nurse nodded. “One of us could walk out to the nearest place. It’s several miles but doable.”
Bubba couldn’t quite understand why no one except David was really taking the whole murder business seriously. It was reminiscent of how things worked whenever he found a dead body. They didn’t believe it until it was too late, and the murderer was looming over them. Then they would be all like, “Oh…”
Not even Brownie Snoddy armed with a homemade Taser and jury-rigged booby trap could save them.
Precious nudged his leg again because she had been forgotten. Bubba knelt to scratch her behind the jowls. “No one counted you, girl, did they?” he murmured. “Silly of them not to count the best looking lady in the whole hospital, right?”
Precious leaned into the scratches until she apparently remembered that she hadn’t played hard to get for hours. She leaned away and put her prodigious nose into the air. I’m not that easy, mister.
“Who’s the best dog a fella ever had?” Bubba crooned.
Not me. I will pee on your fishing poles, all three of them.
“Who wants to go outside to the truck with me to get a few Milk-Bones out of a bag in the glove box?”
Not me. Wait. Milk-Bones? Maybe. No, absolutely not. Precious turned her nose further away. It twitched once. Then it twitched again. Milk-Bones? Real Milk-Bones? Not the cheap kind that Miz Adelia bought by mistake? No generic Milk-Bones for this dog!
Precious forgot that she was supposed to be put out and bayed energetically. Bubba led the way, happy that someone could be pleased for the moment.
* * *
Bubba came back in the front way and was buzzed inside by Cybil. Precious followed at his heels, content with the knowledge that she had consumed three Milk-Bones when she normally could only mooch two at a sitting.
Cybil nodded at Bubba before she hurried off, muttering something about having to do all the paperwork in the hospital herself, adding, “Useless Ulrics.”
No one was in the dayroom. No one was in the hallway. Bubba turned around and opened the Xoom. He turned the device over and found the button. It took him a moment to realize he was supposed to press and hold. The screen came on with a little green lighted figure.
An abrupt soul-clenching shriek made his fingers slip. The scream hadn’t ended by the time the Xoom hit the tiled floor and broke into about thirty pieces. “Crap,” Bubba said. “I mean, carp.”
Then he realized the shriek had stopped and that someone was likely in some kind of trouble.
Bubba ran. It took him thirty seconds to find Cybil holding her hands over her mouth and biting her index finger to keep from screaming again. He followed her horrified eyes into the office to see Blake, what was his last name?, sitting at a large mahogany desk. His chair matched the desk. Pictures of pastoral scenes lined the walls. However, Blake wasn’t looking at his desk or the pretty pictures. He was staring at the ceiling with sightless eyes, and his tongue slightly protruded from his mouth. That was caused by the fact that someone had strangled him with a jury-rigged garrote made with a length of computer wire and a steel ruler. The garrote had been left around his neck.
Several other people appeared behind Cybil, including David. They peered inside the office and made noises ranging from gasps to appalled moans.
Bubba couldn’t help but notice two things. One was that everyone was accounted for. There were eleven people there and one dead body. Two was that he hadn’t discovered this dead body, a fact for which he was profoundly grateful.
Chapter 10
Bubba and Some Investigating Goin’ On
Saturday, April 6th
Dr. Adair was the one who first regained his equanimity. He stepped around Bubba and went to Blake’s very still form with a composure that most people would have envied. He carefully put the index and middle fingers of his righ
t hand on the pulse point of Blake’s left wrist. Without saying anything else, he stepped back, rubbed his chin with the same hand he’d checked the social worker’s pulse with, and grabbed a sweater from a brass coat tree. He spread it out with both hands and covered the dead man’s body.
Finally he looked at the crowd with his eyes coming to rest on Bubba. “You said that someone was up to something bad.”
“What I said was that I thought someone was up to no good,” Bubba corrected. “This—” he pointed at the covered body— “ain’t good. You might even say it’s no good.” He made himself look around at everything but the concealed corpse. Blake had an infinity for knickknacks. There were dozens and in collections, too. He had globes, statues, and doodads. There were a lot of tiny oil derricks as if he had been haunting local tourist stands too much. There were Georgia peaches in all forms. There was a miniature Eiffel Tower. Bubba couldn’t put it all together in his head. There was no rhyme or reason.
David interjected, “I deduce that Blake Landry has likely been murdered. Strangled to death. Perhaps we should examine the ligature in detail.”
“No one’s looking at the ligature or anything else,” Dr. Adair said. “That’s for the police to do.” He grimaced. “Once we get them in here.”
“I walked down to the bridge,” Tandy said. “They’re right, you know. The cellphone tower’s across the road in large chunkies. There’s also a big rockslide just beside the bridge. No one’s going anywhere unless they walk out of here.”
Dr. Adair gently shooed everyone away from the office. He shut the door behind him. “Let’s talk in the cafeteria. I think Leeza made cupcakes.”
“Who can eat at a time like this?” Abel asked plaintively.
Jesus Christ said, “Iiii can eeeeat. Blessings oooon him whoooo maketh theeee cupcakes. Or her.”
Thelda said, “Thou clouted swag-bellied joitheads!”
Nurse Ratchley said, “I don’t think any of this is a good idea. You all don’t pay me enough for this.” She glanced around nervously. “I didn’t think Bubba was right. I thought he was just messing with us. But this, this is murder. You don’t accidentally fall into a garrote, and it self-strangles you. If there’s just the lot of us, then that means…”
Bubba said, “I think we should go into the cafeteria, all of us, all at the same time.”
Peyton looked around. “Am I getting this straight? There’s a murderer in this hospital and since it’s just the twelve of us, then…”
“Eleven,” Bubba said plainly. “Eleven of us now.”
“And it’s dark outside now,” David said. “No one’s going anywhere. The moors are a deadly place at night, even if the hound of the Baskervilles is among us and seemingly calmed.”
Precious whined lamentingly. It was a shame there wasn’t a moor about.
“I reckon we can stand in the hallway and be talking about this situation,” Bubba said, “or we can talk it out in the cafeteria with the bright lights on and all. And there’s cupcakes.”
“Chocolate zucchini carrot cupcakes,” Leeza said, clutching her robe closely to her body. “I love to bake when I’m stressed, and you’ll never know there’s veggies in the recipe. I swear! Cupcakes will make you better.” Her voice began to escalate in pitch. “Cupcakes can cure ANYTHING!”
“Come on people,” Dr. Adair said, “let’s do just that. I’ll make coffee from Chef Thomas’s special stash, and we can all just work this out.”
“I get dibs on the cupcakes!” Jesus yelled and bolted toward the cafeteria. Everyone else followed.
* * *
“There were twelve cupcakes,” Leeza whined. “I made twelve.” She pointed at the silver cupcake tree sitting in the middle of the table. “Now there’s only eleven.”
“It’s okay,” Nurse Ratchley said gently, “cupcakes do not equal love, Leeza.”
“But there were twelve,” Leeza persisted. “Now there are eleven. There are eleven of us. What if someone wants two cupcakes? What if someone doesn’t want a cupcake, and there’s one left over?”
Precious yipped hopefully. Bubba muttered, “You cain’t have chocolate. I have Milk-Bones.”
Everyone had made it to the cafeteria and sat around the table closest to the buffets. They watched through the cafeteria windows while Dr. Adair made coffee, and in the case of Tandy, Darjeeling tea. “Two sugars,” she called. “In fact, just dump it in until the spoon stands up straight.”
Nurse Ratchley went to help the doctor.
“They’re not going to drug that, are they?” Peyton whispered to Bubba. He had his compact out and was examining his makeup with interest. He touched the corner of his eye with the tip of his little finger. “I wonder if anyone here is planning on getting married in the near future.”
“I don’t reckon,” Bubba said. He was thinking fiercely. What everyone was dancing around was that they were well and truly trapped with a murderer. The doctor didn’t want to address anything about Mrs. Ferryjig or Hurley Tanner, and he probably wanted to ignore a rapidly cooling social worker, too.
He glanced out the window and saw that there was a light fog forming. A cold front had come through, and the air had rapidly cooled. The whitish fog clung to the ground and moved sluggishly. All they needed for the atmosphere to be complete was for Precious to start baying. Or perhaps someone could start telling a ghostly story about a haunted insane asylum.
“Iiii don’t thiiiink I’m huuuungry now,” Jesus remarked in a regretful manner. “All thiiiis death cuuuurbs the Soooon of God’s aaaappetite.”
“I couldn’t eat anything,” Abel added. Bubba wondered why the man was at Dogley. He didn’t know much about anyone except David. Thelda was a Shakespearean mystery complete with five competing sweaters and an affinity for poker. Jesus Christ had his holy persona, which he kept to and basically didn’t waver from. (Bubba didn’t think he even knew Jesus’s real name, but he did know that Jesus liked to go commando under the sheet he habitually wore.) Cybil the Chipper-Hearted was simply a young woman who manned the receptionist desk at Dogley. She also helped with the thrift shop. Tandy was a chain-smoking, pothead movie star who had starred in two movies that Bubba knew about. One of them had been The Deadly Dead, in which Bubba had played a redneck zombie, which hadn’t been much of a stretch for him. All Bubba knew about Leeza was that she wore a robe, made cupcakes, and didn’t care to flirt with David. Then there was Peyton. Peyton was the wedding planner who liked his facial makeup and said he had a girlfriend named Ginger in New York City. That left Dr. Adair, supposedly a psychiatrist, and Nurse Ratchley, supposedly a nurse. Why they were supposedly was something that Bubba couldn’t figure out.
When murder was rampant, everything seemed like it should be supposedly.
Everyone was supposedly. It really came down to the fact that if they were the only ones left in the Dogley Institute for Mental Well-Being, then one of them was a murderer. Supposedly.
Bubba had to suppress an urge to back into a corner until he could see where everyone else was located.
Dr. Adair carried in a tray with coffee cups galore. Nurse Ratchley followed with another tray. The pair passed out cups. The one cup with the tag of a teabag hanging from it went to Tandy.
“I don’t think we need to get too upset,” Dr. Adair said as he finished and offered the last cup to Nurse Ratchley. He didn’t get any coffee for himself.
Ratchley put out a silver creamer and a matching sugar bowl before she collected her cup. Dr. Adair went on, “I will go over the hospital myself and ensure that no one else is about. Tomorrow we will undoubtedly be noticed missing, and the police will make their way to us.”
“Thou craven, hell-hated harpy,” Thelda proclaimed.
“Now, now, Thelda,” Dr. Adair admonished, “that’s no way to talk to me. I’m simply trying to help.”
“What ifin the po-lice don’t come tomorrow?” Bubba asked. He reached down to scratch Precious as she lay across his feet.
“What make
s you say that?” Dr. Adair asked.
“That’s a dang big avalanche out there,” Bubba stated. “Ain’t that easy to get through it. Shore they could send a helicopter in too, but they won’t unless they know someone needs some urgent care. Ain’t like Pegram County has a fleet of helicopters. They borrow one from Smith County. They’re goin’ to know about the downed phone line and prolly suspect the cellphone tower too, but they ain’t goin’ to worry until it’s too late.”
“You don’t call being murdered urgent?” Abel asked.
“I do, but how they goin’ to know that?” Bubba tapped the table. “First they got to figure out we’re out here. Anyone know about who’s expecting them?”
“I’m divorced, and no one’s expecting me,” Dr. Adair said with deceptive composure. Bubba could tell by the twitching muscle in the doctor’s forehead that he wasn’t really composed.
Ratchley said, “I’m working the weekend. My husband will expect me to call, but I don’t think he’ll worry about it until tomorrow or even the day after. When I don’t show up on Monday, he’ll come looking.”
David said, “No one’s looking for me this weekend.”
“Your brains are as dry as the remainder biscuit from a voyage,” Thelda remarked in a matter-of-fact manner. Bubba took that to mean she wasn’t expected either. However, for all he knew she could be the guest of honor at an inaugural ball.
“Not me either,” Abel said.
“My mother will think I spent the night with my boyfriend,” Cybil said. She was remarkably subdued. “The cellphone will just roll over to voicemail. My boyfriend will think I’m at Mom’s. They won’t think anything until tomorrow or Monday. Probably tomorrow evening. They’ll call up here and figure out the lines are down. Then they’ll wait a little longer.”
Tandy squeezed her teabag with her fingers and put it on the table. “I’m down for twenty more days. No one will expect me until then. I’m not even supposed to have all my cellphones.”
