Long Holler Road - A Dark Southern Thriller (9 page)

  “Yeah, I heard. That’s what I was calling about. Me and Daddy are headed over there now. I gotta go, bye.”

  I slammed the phone down and me and Daddy ran out and jumped in the truck. I thought he was gonna kill us before we got to the William’s place two miles away. Daddy hadn’t exaggerated one bit about the number of cop cars. There were lights flashing everywhere. It reminded me of Pickle Logan’s house in Fort Kane at Christmas time. He went all out decorating and strung lights all over creation. His light bill must have been out of sight in the month of December.

  They weren’t allowing anybody to get close to where the bodies were and there were now people from all over the county. I climbed up on top of our truck while Daddy started talking to some of the other men that were standing around, smoking cigarettes and chewing tobacco. I was trying to see if I could locate Glenn, but it was difficult with all the people that were there. It looked like a crowd you would see at the county fair or a high school football game. After a few minutes I spotted Glenn standing with Roscoe and some other men. I jumped off the truck and pushed through the crowd until I found him.

  I pulled him off to the side, out of  hearing distance from Roscoe and the other men.

  “Have you heard the bodies they found were in a barrel?” I asked him.

  “I sure did. Are you thinking what I am?”

  “That was the first thing I thought of when Daddy told me about it. Course that don’t really mean anything. One may not have anything to do with the other.”

  “I bet you it does. That’s the reason those men had those barrels hid. There was dead people in ’em.”

  I should have known Glenn would think the barrels we saw were the ones that had been found on the William’s property. That was right down his alley. Ghosts and goblins and conspiracies were what he thrived on. I knew better than to try and reason with him on something as big as this.

  “I wished we could see those barrels to see if they look the same.” I said. “If they do we need to tell the sheriff about it.”

  “Are you crazy?” Glenn hissed, looking at me like I was an idiot, “They might think we had something to do with it. We can’t say a word to nobody.”

  “We have to, Glenn. Those men might be killers. We can’t let them just get away with it. The cops might try to pin it on old Hugh, since they found them on his place.”

  “What if Hugh had somethin’ to do with it?” Glenn was really getting into high gear now. “The men in those barrels might have double crossed Hugh and those men we saw loadin’ the barrels.”

  “Hugh wouldn’t kill nobody, you fool. He don’t even get mean when he’s drunk.”

  “Anybody can kill if you push ‘em far enough. It might be somebody Hugh owed money to he couldn’t pay and they were threatnin’ him or somethin’.”

  “Well, what would those men we saw loadin’ the barrels have to do with it, if Hugh was the one that owed them money. That don’t make sense.”

  “Hugh might have hired them.”

  “Hugh couldn’t afford to hire nobody to do nuthin’. He’s so poor if it cost a quarter to go around the world, he couldn’t get out of sight.”

  The crowd finally started thinning down and the coroner had taken the bodies, or rather the bones, which was all that was left. They would be sent to the state capitol in Montgomery to see if they could be identified by dental records.

  Around eleven o’clock, Sheriff White and some investigators from the state finally made their way up to Hugh’s house to ask him some questions. Hugh had been down at the crime scene all night. So had Snake and Frank, who were excited about all the attention they were getting. This was like a big party to them.

  The sheriff had sent one of the deputies to a café in Collinwood to get enough coffee for everybody. They all got a cup and gave one to Hugh and the rest of his family. Then they took Hugh in a room by himself and asked the rest of the family to wait outside. The sheriff, not believing in the least that Hugh had anything to do with any of this, started the questioning:

  “Alright, Hugh. Did you have any idea these drums were on your property?”

  “Hell no. I ain’t even been down there in that part of the pasture in a week or more. I keep my old milk cows on the other side.”

  “Well, do you know anybody that may have put them there?” The sheriff was being gentle with Hugh. He didn’t want to get him upset and worry poor old Annie.

  “I guess some son-of-a-bitch kilt ’em and figured nobody would find ’em there fer awhile is all I can figure.” Hugh couldn’t carry on the simplest conversation without cursing.

  “Okay, is there anybody…….”

  In the middle of the sheriff’s question, one of the deputies that was searching the house yelled for them all to come there. The sheriff and the state investigators walked into Hugh’s bedroom. The deputy was standing at the tiny closet, pointing inside. It was full of nice dress shirts and dress pants that anybody who knew Hugh could ever imagine him wearing. There were also some expensive dress shoes lying in the floor, lined up neatly.

  The deputy looked at the sheriff, then at the investigators. “Sheriff, you’ve known Hugh a long time,” he said, “have you ever known him to wear duds like these?”

  The sheriff shook his head. “Hugh could never afford these kinda clothes. Hell, he can barely make enough to buy groceries and keep his lights turned on. Have you searched the rest of the house?”

  “All except that little room in the back where Snake sleeps,” the deputy answered.

  “Well you might as well look there, too. It ain’t no bigger than a chicken coup, so it won’t take a minute.”

  The sheriff walked back in the kitchen where Hugh was sipping his free coffee. “Hugh, you sure do have some awful nice clothes in there. I ain’t never seen you wear any of ’em.”

  “Yeah, Snake brung them home to me. Said somebody give ’em to him. Wouldn’t never tell me who it was.”

  The deputy walked in the room with more nice clothes folded across his forearm. “Found these in Snake’s room, sheriff.”

  The sheriff looked back at Hugh. “I guess these came from the same place.”

  “Damn shore did,” Hugh answered, taking a big gulp of coffee.

  One of the investigators from the state spoke up, “Looks like we have enough circumstantial evidence to make an arrest, sheriff.”

  Sheriff White was pinching the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger, “Now just wait a minute. I’ve known Hugh for thirty-five years, since both of us was just kids. I know he wouldn’t kill nobody. Hell, he wouldn’t hurt a damn fly unless it pissed him off.”

  The investigator smiled and said, “Well, maybe those guys or gals that were in those barrels pissed him off.”

  The sheriff motioned for the investigator to walk out the back door with him. Once they were away from everyone else the sheriff said, “Hell, we can’t arrest a man just for havin’ clothes in his house he claims somebody gave him, or gave his boy.”

  “No, but a man with a bunch of clothes he can’t afford, and two barrels full of dead people, well that might get the district attorney’s attention, don’t you think? Let’s at least take him in for questioning and get him away from his house and family. He’s too comfortable here.”

  “Alright, we’ll take him to the station and question him, but we’ve got to let him know he’s not under arrest for anything.”

  “Of course we don’t want to arrest him. He’ll lawyer up if we do.”

  Sheriff White didn’t like this investigator at all. And to make matters worse, he had a Yankee accent. A transplant from somewhere up North. 

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Deputies had watched the William’s property all night until the investigation could resume the next morning. Forensic experts had been called in for the day and were due any time, as well as chemists who were summoned to try and identify what sort of solution had been used to dissolve the bodies.

  The persistent detective from the state troopers department had taken over the interrogation of Hugh Williams the night before after Sheriff White had gotten nowhere. The detective, whose name was Baker, told the sheriff he was too soft and could not be objective, given his long relationship with the suspect. But he too had failed to get anything out of old Hugh, other than a considerable amount of cursing. After about four hours of non-stop questioning and at least two gallons of coffee, they took Hugh home.

  “I ain’t gonna be worth a damn tomorrow,” he told the sheriff when he let him out of the car at about 1 A.M. “Y’all kept me up all damn night. Some folks has got to work for a livin’.”

  “Sorry about that Hugh,” the sheriff apologized, “it was that damn Yankee detective. I never would have made you go to my office in the first place.”

  When all the experts had arrived, they started examining the solution that had been left in the barrels. They quickly ruled out sulfuric acid, surmising that if the bodies had been in sulfuric acid very long at all, the bones would have been at least semi- liquefied as well. They all agreed that it was most likely some sort of lye solution. Mixed the right way with water, lye would be very efficient in dissolving a human body and would still leave most of the bones intact.

  Ben Goodman and Wally Yates had been put in charge of the continued search of the property. They had been told by Detective Brown to ‘leave no stone unturned.’ Easy for him to say. He wasn’t the one having to dig through all of old Hugh’s junk in the ninety-five degree heat. Hugh’s barn, where he kept his mule and milked his two cows, had been gone over with a fine tooth comb. The smaller barn, where the hay and various hand tools were kept, along with huge piles of worthless junk, would take a while.

  Sheriff White had slept later than he meant to after the late night spent with Hugh and the annoying and abrasive detective. He had missed supper with his family after all, and decided he would at least stay and have breakfast with them.

  When the sheriff arrived just after noon, the place was bustling with activity. There were state detectives walking around in the yard and going in and out of the house.
Poor old Annie is probably a nervous wreck,
he was thinking. He made his way down into the pasture and saw two men wearing gas masks and protective clothing gathering samples of the putrid sludge that was in the barrels. He decided to stay as far away from those barrels as possible. He would never forget that horrible odor. Just thinking about it made him queasy.

 
He was walking toward the barn where Detective Baker was standing, wishing he could avoid him too, when he saw Goodman and Yates walking out of the hay shed. Goodman had what appeared to be some kind of tool in his hand, examining it closely. Detective Baker apparently spotted them at the same time the sheriff did and started walking toward them.

 
The sheriff and detective walked up to the two deputies at the same time.

 
“What you got there, men?” Brown asked, taking the buck saw from Goodman’s hand.

 
They all looked at the saw, which was covered in blood stains and had what looked like human hair stuck to the teeth. Then Baker turned to the sheriff, “Looks like human hair to me. And I’d bet you a dollar to a doughnut that is human blood,” he said, pointing to the stains.

 
“That ain’t all,” Yates chimed in, “those chemist guys said the stuff they put in them barrels to dissolve the bodies was most likely lye.” He looked over at Goodman and then back at Baker. “Me and Ben found two full bottles of lye and about ten empty ones.”

 
Baker looked at the sheriff with a smug expression on his face. “Well sheriff, do you still believe Hugh Williams wouldn’t hurt a fly? Those bodies would most likely had to have been cut up to fit in those barrels. And what would anyone need with that much lye?”

 
Andrew White couldn’t believe it. Didn’t want to believe it. There had to be some mistake. But the evidence was there and he couldn’t dispute it. He started to feel queasy again. Almost as bad as the horrid odor had made him feel.

 
“Sheriff, why don’t you let me and some of my men go and pick him up. I know you two have known each other for a long time,” Baker said, actually looking like he felt sorry for the sheriff.

  “That’s mighty kind of you, detective. But I reckon I need to be the one to go get him. That’s what they pay me for. Ben, you and Wally bring your car and go with me. I don’t expect him to put up a fight, but hell, I didn’t expect him to be capable of this either,” the sheriff said, motioning toward the saw.

*****

  Hugh and his two sons were about four miles south of his house, near Collinwood, cutting pulp-wood off the Higgins place. They weren’t working too far off Long Hollow Road. The sheriff turned onto the rutty little logging road that Hugh had worn down with his old truck. He had his windows rolled down and could hear the chain saws whining as they sliced through the timber. He drove about a hundred feet up the road and stopped his car, waiting for Goodman and Yates to pull up behind him. When they had stopped, the sheriff got out and the three lawmen started walking in the direction of the sound of the chain saws.