Of All Sad Words (3 page)

“You stay around the county,” Rhodes said. “I’ll need to talk to you again.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Crawford replied.

He drove away and was soon followed by the ambulance, Ruth Grady, Benton, and the fire trucks. Only Jennifer Loam, the fire chief, and Rhodes remained.

A man named Parker was the fire chief. He and Rhodes had worked together on a case or two before, most recently one involving a dead man whose body had been found in a burning house. Jennifer had been right there for that one, too.

Rhodes thought that Parker looked relieved that this time there wasn’t a body, though it was hard to see his face under the helmet he wore. Parker took off the helmet and wiped his face with his hand.

“What do you think happened to Terry Crawford?” he asked.

Rhodes shook his head. “I don’t have any idea. What do you think caused the explosion?”

Parker looked at Jennifer and her little recording device. “Hard to be sure at this point.”

“You can make a guess, can’t you?” Rhodes said.

Parker shook his head. “I don’t like to guess.”

“I won’t hold you to it, and neither will Ms. Loam. This is off the record.”

Jennifer gave Rhodes a look, but she nodded and turned off the recorder.

“Could the Crawfords have been running a meth lab out of this place?” Rhodes said when he was sure Jennifer was no longer recording.

“Well,” Parker said, “that’s a possibility, but I don’t think it’s what caused the explosion.”

Rhodes was surprised, but then he realized he should have known it couldn’t have been a meth explosion, not if there wasn’t a lab.

He was almost certain there hadn’t been a meth lab. He’d have smelled it if there had been any trace. For that matter, people living nearby, even someone as far away as Benton, would have smelled it long ago. No matter what Benton thought he’d seen, he hadn’t smelled anything, not that he’d mentioned to Rhodes at any rate.

“What do you think was the problem?” he asked.

“I think the propane tank blew up,” Parker told him.

Chapter 3

THEY WOULDN’T KNOW FOR SURE ABOUT THE PROPANE TANK until after a complete investigation, which Parker promised would be done the next day.

“You’d better chain the gate when you leave,” he told Rhodes. “That’ll keep people away from here. I’ll leave you a padlock. We always carry a spare, and there was plenty of slack in the chain.”

He got Rhodes the lock and left. Rhodes put the lock in his car, then stood on the hill and remembered the last time he’d been there, years earlier, when he was just a boy. The mobile home hadn’t been there, but an old frame house had been. It had long since been torn down.

Rhodes’s father had told him that a hill by a creek was a good place to look for arrowheads, and Rhodes had ridden his bicycle out of town to this very place. He’d found a couple of arrowheads, too, and he still had them stuck away somewhere or other.

It was too hot to walk around and look for arrowheads now, but Rhodes had to do some walking anyway. It wouldn’t do to leave the scene and not give it a careful going-over. What was left of the Crawfords’ house would be examined by the fire department’s inspector, but Rhodes wanted to check out the surrounding property. Besides the fact that it was standard procedure, Rhodes couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling he had.

Not that there was much to see. The grass was mostly dead, and the weeds, though they still stood tall in places, were brown and dry. The good news was that the dryness wasn’t good for chiggers, and even the fire ants would be somewhere underground and out of the way. After a good rain, the ant mounds would pop up everywhere, and the chiggers would be out in force, but it had been so long since it had rained in Blacklin County that Rhodes wasn’t in any danger of getting bitten or stung that day. He thought the ants might appear soon, however, at least on those parts of the ground that had been soaked by the fire department.

Off to Rhodes’s left were the road and the bridge. The trees were thinner there, but downstream on the right, they were much thicker, a regular little woods that covered several acres. The Crawfords must have owned at least ten acres in all, and only about half of it was cleared.

The cleared part was peppered with mesquites, some of them nearly as high as Rhodes’s head. If they weren’t dug up or poisoned, the entire hillside would soon be covered with them. Even in the heat and the drought, their leaves were green. It took more than a drought to kill a mesquite tree.

The weeds whisked and husked as Rhodes walked down the hill, and grasshoppers flew up all around him. Some of them hit him and bounced off. Others flew on by. Unlike the chiggers and fire ants, they didn’t seem bothered by the lack of rain. They were like the mesquites that way.

Occasionally, Rhodes looked down to see a piece of the mobile home, a twisted bit of blackened metal that the explosion had tossed a long way from its origin.

Rhodes ignored the grasshoppers and the bits of metal and looked for a sign of something or other that might be a clue. He wasn’t quite sure what he was looking for. Nothing in particular, that was for sure.

But even with his uncertainty, he ran across something almost at once, not far from an old well that had served the house originally built on the property. It’s probably dry now, Rhodes thought, but broken and flattened weeds showed that someone had passed that way not too long before, headed in the direction of the creek.

Rhodes followed the fresh trail down toward the trees that lined the creek. From the side of the hill, he could see that only a thin stream of water, hardly more than an inch deep and less than a foot wide, trickled through the creek bed. Rhodes remembered a time not so long ago when the water had run deep and swift enough to expose the bones of a mammoth. A lot more was exposed before that episode was over, he thought, hoping that he wouldn’t make any grim discoveries.

But he did. He was almost to the creek when he found Terry Crawford. He lay on his back, his dead eyes staring up at nothing. He wore a T-shirt identical to his brother’s, except that the arrow pointed to the right.

And except for the blood, quite a bit of it, almost obscuring the arrow and the wording.

Rhodes always felt a hollow sadness when he saw a dead body. Maybe it was pity. There was something about the absence of light in the eyes that affected him. Terry Crawford might not have been of much account, but he didn’t deserve to be killed for no reason and left to lie in a dry field for the buzzards to find. Or the sheriff.

Rhodes looked away, first down to the dry creek bed and then up at the cloudless sky. No buzzards yet, but they’d be along soon enough if he didn’t get the body moved. That couldn’t be done until the crime scene had been worked.

A grasshopper hummed past. Rhodes swatted at it and missed. Then he started back up the hill.

“Well, it’s obvious that he didn’t die in the explosion,” Ruth Grady said.

Rhodes nodded. He’d called Ruth on the radio and told her to come back because he wanted her to work the scene.

“The JP should be here in a few minutes,” Rhodes said. “The ambulance is on the way back, too. You see what you can find out here, and I’ll go tell Larry about his brother.”

“He’s not going to take it well.”

“You think?” Rhodes said.

Rhodes could have driven to Obert on the county road, but he went back to the highway and took that route. He’d worked a few cases in Obert, the most recent one involving the rock crusher that had moved into town, blasting away at the limestone hill where Obert sat, the highest point in the county. As a result of a murder and a conviction, the rock crusher had been shut down. It would eventually be sold, and the blasting would start again, but that would take quite some time. Meanwhile, the residents of Obert had a little break from the noise, dust, and disruptions.

Obert, as even its residents would have had to admit, wasn’t much of a town. Its population was around four hundred, and only a few buildings and stores remained. Most of them faced the highway that was the town’s main street. One of the buildings was Jamey Hamilton’s barbershop. Rhodes parked in front of it and got out of the car.

A short red-and-white barber pole hung on the brick wall, and a sign that said CLOSED hung on the inside of the glass door. Rhodes rattled the doorknob and tapped on the glass, but nobody showed up. He peered through the glass and saw only a barber chair and a couple of regular chairs for the customers.

Rhodes went next door to Michal Schafer’s Antiques Emporium. A black-and-white cat slept, unmoving, in a window display that included a couple of old school lunch boxes with Disney cartoon characters on them, a few dishes with designs that might have been hand-painted, a couple of motors for ceiling fans, a board with samples of different kinds of barbed wire attached to it, and three lightning rod arrows with colored glass where there would have been feathers on an actual arrow.

Rhodes opened the door and went inside, causing an overhead bell to jingle. Michal was in the back of the large, dimly lit room, standing behind an old candy counter that held baseball cards, some paperback books, a stack of 45 rpm records, and a pile of eight-track tapes, but no candy.

“What can I do for you, Sheriff?” she asked when Rhodes made his way back to her through the crowded aisles. “Could I interest you in some baseball cards?” She tapped with a fingernail on the glass top of the candy counter. “I have a Jeff Bagwell rookie card here.”

Michal was a short blond woman of indeterminate age. The first time Rhodes had seen her name on the window of her store, he’d thought it was misspelled, but she’d explained that it was the name of Saul’s daughter in the Old Testament’s Book of Samuel. Rhodes had never been much of a biblical scholar.

“I might have a Craig Biggio card, too,” she added, “if you’d like to have a look at it.”

“I gave up on baseball a long time ago,” Rhodes said. “Before those two were even rookies.”

“Maybe a nice forty-five, then. I have a couple by Elvis.”

“I just wanted to ask a question,” Rhodes said. “About your neighbor.”

“Jamey the barber?”

“That’s the one. Have you seen him today?”

“He was here this morning.”

When she said the word
morning,
Rhodes realized that he’d missed lunch again. As soon as he realized it, his stomach felt hollow and empty.

“When did he leave?”

“Not long ago. Someone parked out in front of his shop and went inside. After a few minutes, they both came back out and left”

“Do you know who it was?”

“No, but he was wearing a T-shirt that had ‘I’m with Stupid’ printed on the front.”

“Bald, a little chubby, driving an old Ford pickup?”

“That’s him. Is he in trouble?”

“No, and neither is Jamey—not yet anyway. There was something I wanted to tell him.”

“Want me to take a message?”

Michal turned to a cabinet behind her and found a pencil and notepad.

“This isn’t something I’d want you to tell him,” Rhodes said. “I’ll find him. Where does Jamey live?”

“Out in the country, about a mile past the rock crusher.”

“I’ll look for him there,” Rhodes said. “Does he close up often?”

“Actually, he does. He has plenty of customers, though. He seems to be very fast at cutting hair, gets people out quickly. Maybe that’s the secret to getting some time off.”

“Maybe,” Rhodes said.

He thanked Michal for her help and drove out to Hamilton’s house. On the way, he passed the old college campus and main building that were located just off the highway. The building was nearly a hundred years old, but it was no longer a part of any college. It had been used for any number of things, most recently as a church, but the minister had left, and now the Clearview Players were converting it into a theater.

No one was working on the building when Rhodes drove by, and he wondered if the Clearview Players would change their name to the Obert Players if they ever got the theater completed and open for business.

When he passed the college building, Rhodes went by the rock crusher at the edge of town. After that, the road wound through the countryside. In a normal year, it would have been shaded by trees whose limbs reached out over it and met in the middle. This year, the trees seemed shriveled and small, and there was only a little shade. Dead, dry leaves lay in the road and swirled aside as Rhodes drove over them.

Hamilton’s house was small and had a nearly bare yard. Crawford’s truck was parked in the shade of a chinaberry tree, but Rhodes didn’t see another vehicle. When he knocked on the door, no one answered. He walked around the house and knocked on the back door. No answer there, either.

Something was going on, and Rhodes didn’t know what it was. He didn’t like that, but there was nothing he could do about it except drive back to Clearview. He was tempted to stop off and see how Ruth was doing, but she knew her job, and he didn’t want to distract her.

He did, however, get onto the county road and head for C. P. Benton’s house. The black mailbox by the road in front of the house had a little sign dangling from it. It said CASA DE MATH in red script. Rhodes wanted to talk to Benton, but the math teacher’s Saturn was gone. Apparently, nobody Rhodes wanted to see was going to be home that day.

Rhodes pulled into the driveway. Benton’s lawn might not have been mown in awhile, at least according to Judge Parry, but it was hard to tell because the grass was brown and dry. Benton obviously didn’t believe in wasting water on something like grass. Rhodes didn’t blame him. He didn’t like mowing any more than Benton did.

The gardenia bush by the front door had a few late-summer blooms on it, white among the green leaves. At least Benton waters his plants, Rhodes thought as he backed up the car.

Rhodes drove to the highway. He decided to go to the college to see Benton. It was possible that Benton was there making some kind of preparation for the classes that would be starting in a week or so.

Max Schwartz’s music store was on the way to the college, about a quarter of a mile from the college’s new building. Rhodes saw Schwartz’s red convertible parked in front, its top up. Next to it was a Saturn that had to belong to Benton. Rhodes flipped on his turn signal and pulled off the highway and into the parking lot.