Ghost of a Chance

by Bill Crider

  When they were done, Rhodes was completely satisfied. There was even a bite or two of steak left on his plate, so he felt highly self-righteous. He was about to ask Ivy if she knew of any great historical events that had occurred in A.D. 11, but he didn’t get a chance. The waiter came to their table and said that there was a phone call for him.

  “It’s Mr. Jensen at the jail,” the waiter said.

  Rhodes had let Hack know where he’d be going, as he always did. There was no way of knowing what emergencies might come up at any given moment.

  He followed the waiter to the telephone at the checkout counter. After Hank Locklin had finished begging someone to send him the pillow that she dreamed on, Rhodes picked up the receiver.

  “This is Rhodes,” he said.

  “You gotta come to the jail,” Hack said. “The ghost’s got loose.”

  “Loose?” Rhodes said.

  “Loose, out on the town, runnin’ wild. Are you comin’ or not?”

  “I’ll be there in ten minutes,” Rhodes said.

  11

  IVY WENT TO THE JAIL WITH RHODES. SHE SAID THAT there wasn’t anything good on TV that evening and that whatever had Hack so excited would probably be more entertaining than TV anyway.

  When they got there, they found four Clearview teenagers, two boys and two girls, who were in a highly agitated state, to put it mildly. They were all gathered around Hack, and they were talking at once.

  Hack looked up when Rhodes and Ivy came through the door. The relief on his face was obvious.

  “Here’s the sheriff,” he said. “You can tell him all about it.”

  The four young people turned from Hack and started for Rhodes. Ivy grinned and went over to talk to Hack while Rhodes dealt with the situation.

  He sat at his desk and held up his hands. “First of all,” he said, “let me get your names.”

  He got out a report form and took down the names: Jennifer Colton, Lisa Wetmore, Jason Crites, and Larry Lake. Then he elected Jason the spokesman. Jason was thin and blond and had several dots of something that looked suspiciously like Clearasil on his chin.

  “Now,” Rhodes said. “Tell me what happened.”

  “Well, we were riding around,” Jason said, “and Jennifer’s, like, ‘Let’s go to the graveyard,’ but I go, ‘Isn’t it against the law to drive around there at night?’ and she goes, ‘I don’t think so,’ and then Lisa goes—”

  Jennifer, a small brunette who probably didn’t weigh more than ninety pounds, interrupted him. “I didn’t say it wasn’t against the law, Sheriff.”

  Lisa, who wasn’t much bigger but who had very blond hair and big, wide eyes said, “You did so say it wasn’t against the law, and anyway, it’s all Jason’s fault because that old car of his has a loose battery cable, and if he hadn’t been driving so fast it wouldn’t have come off when we hit that bump and then we wouldn’t be here in the first place and—”

  Rhodes held up a hand to stop her. “Just hold on a minute. Jason’s telling this. I’ll get your side of the story when he’s finished.”

  “That’s not fair, Sheriff,” Larry Lake said. He was short and had a determined look. “You ought to listen to Lisa because she’s the one that nearly got killed by the ghost before it got after all of us and she’s the one that tried to tell Jason that somebody’d been buried out there today, which if Jason had listened to her, he never would’ve—”

  Rhodes held up his hand again. He was beginning to see why there had been a note of near-panic in Hack’s voice during the phone call he’d made to the Round-Up. When Rhodes had been a youngster, he and most of his friends would have been paralyzed into speechlessness in the presence of a sheriff or any other representative of the power of the law. Now kids felt no need to defer to anyone. He was sure the four in front of him would have been just as voluble if he’d been the governor or the president. He couldn’t make up his mind about whether that was good or bad.

  He glanced over in the dispatcher’s direction. Both Ivy and Hack were watching him and grinning broadly.

  “Look,” Rhodes said to the teenagers. “You’re going to have to let one person tell the story. Then, when it’s done, the rest of you can tell me anything that’s been left out. Until then, just keep quiet.”

  They looked at him as if he were some kind of relic of the Stone Age, which he probably was. But at least they let Jason get on with it and tell his tale.

  It seemed that, over Lisa’s objections, they had decided to take a drive through the cemetery. Sure, there had been a funeral there that afternoon, but they weren’t planning to do anything disrespectful.

  Rhodes was pretty sure they’d been planning to park for a while in the peaceful darkness, but Jason didn’t say so, and Rhodes let it go.

  They’d driven around for a few minutes, and Lisa had seen something that scared her. It hadn’t been too far from the mound of dirt that covered Mr. McCoy. She’d screamed, Jason had sped up, and the car had hit a bump.

  “That’s when the bad stuff started,” Jason said. “The battery cable came off, and the car died, and we’re all, like, ‘What’re we gonna do now?’ ”

  “Open the hood and connect the battery cable,” Rhodes suggested.

  Jason looked at him with disgust. “Oh, sure, like we didn’t think of that. But the little dealy-bopper that pops the hood is broken and we couldn’t get the hood open to get to the battery. So Lisa’s in the back seat, freaking out and going, ‘It’s a ghost! It’s a ghost! Get us out of here! Get us out of here!’ and I’m, like, ‘There’s nothing I can do.’ So Larry and I decided we’d have to walk to my house and get some tools, like maybe a screwdriver or a pair of pliers, and open the hood that way if we could.”

  “Why didn’t you call your parents?” Rhodes asked, figuring that at least one of them, if not all of them, had a cell phone.

  The faintest tinge of red crept into Jason’s face. “It was, like, we thought that might not be a good idea, you know? I mean, we weren’t really supposed to be there and all, so we thought we could just go get some tools and open the hood and fix things up. We didn’t really think there was a ghost or anything.”

  “But you saw one,” Rhodes said.

  “No, we never did. It was Lisa that saw it.”

  Lisa spoke up. “Two. I saw two.”

  “Okay, two,” Jason said. “Anyway, me and Larry told the girls that we’d all have to walk. Jennifer didn’t mind, but Lisa goes, ‘I’m not gonna get out of this car, not if you try to drag me out with a chain.’ She said we could leave, but she was staying and we’d just have to lock the doors real good and she’d scrunch down in the floor.

  “So that’s what we did. We got out and pushed all the door locks down and left her there. It was like really dark, but we had a flashlight so we could see where we were going. I guess we were about to the cemetery gate when she passed us.”

  “Passed you?” Rhodes said. “In the car?”

  “No, she was running. She must’ve been doing sixty, easy. I looked at Larry and I’m, like ‘Was that the ghost?’ and he goes, ‘no, that was Lisa.’ We followed her all the way here and we were running, too, since we thought whatever was after her might be after us, but we never caught her.”

  Rhodes looked over at Hack.

  “That’s right,” Hack said. “She busted through the front door pantin’ like a dog. She must’ve run all the way here. The others were a little ways behind her.”

  “Me and Jason could’ve caught her,” Larry said defensively, as if he didn’t want the word to get around that he’d been outrun by a girl. “We just didn’t want to go off and leave Jennifer by herself.”

  “I can see that,” Rhodes said. “What happened to make you run, Lisa?”

  “It was the ghosts,” she said. “I heard something behind the car, some kind of horrible noise like maybe some old man trying to grunt like a pig, and I got up and looked out the back window and there they were, right out there in the road. And I’m, like, ‘I’m n
ot gonna stay in here and let them get me,’ so I unlocked the door and jumped out and ran.”

  “What did they look like?” Rhodes asked.

  “They were awful! Shiny and black with their hair parted in the middle like in the olden days, and they were running after me.”

  “Did you see them behind you?” Rhodes asked.

  “Well, no, but I didn’t have to see them to know they were back there, did I? I mean, they were right out there in the road, so they must’ve been after me.”

  “All right,” Rhodes said. “Anything else?”

  None of them could think of anything, so Rhodes had Hack get on the radio and call for a deputy to come get them and take them home.

  “What about the ghosts?” Lisa wanted to know.

  “That’s something I want to see for myself,” Rhodes said.

  “What about my car?” Jason asked.

  “You can pick it up tomorrow.”

  “My dad’s really not gonna like that.”

  “I don’t blame him,” Rhodes said.

  The rain had been over for hours, but the clouds had hung around, making the night very dark. Rhodes put the Edsel in the garage and walked Ivy to the door.

  “I don’t see why I can’t go with you,” she said.

  “Official business. I don’t want to put a civilian in harm’s way.”

  “Baloney,” Ivy said. “You know there’s no such thing as ghosts.”

  “Try telling that to Lisa,” Rhodes said.

  Ivy laughed. “I don’t think I could get a word in edgewise with anybody in that bunch. You looked a little harassed, yourself.”

  “Maybe I’m getting too old to deal with the younger members of the public.”

  “I don’t think so. Anyway, even if I could get a word in edgewise, I’m not sure I could convince her. She must have seen something out there.”

  “You couldn’t convince our prisoners, either,” Rhodes said. “They think there’s a ghost in the jail. So I’m kind of glad to hear about these other two.”

  “Why?” Ivy asked.

  “Because now either the whole town’s infested, or else the one in the jail’s found a partner and left.”

  “What if the whole town’s infested?” Ivy wanted to know. “Who you gonna call? Ghostbusters?”

  “Nope,” Rhodes said. “I don’t think they have a Clearview branch.”

  “So it’s all up to you, then.”

  “Yeah. I hope I don’t get slimed.”

  “So do I,” Ivy said.

  12

  THE WIND WAS BLOWING THE CEDARS AROUND, AND THE oak trees were thrashing. But the wind hadn’t blown the clouds away, and the cemetery was dark as the graves that filled it.

  Rhodes drove to the McCoy plot. Jason’s car, a ten-year-old Chevrolet Lumina, sat in the road nearby. There was nothing else around it. Rhodes shone his spotlight on the car and then on the mound of earth that covered McCoy’s last resting place. The soil shone wet and black under the light, but it didn’t appear that Mr. McCoy had disturbed it. For that matter, it didn’t seem to have been disturbed by anyone or anything.

  Rhodes thought of the two figures he’d seen running across the clearing that afternoon in the rain. Maybe some homeless people were camping in the woods down there, though he’d seen no sign of them when he searched. If they were there, though, they might have thought it would be funny to scare someone who was driving through the cemetery. Just why anyone would think that was funny, Rhodes couldn’t say. But if he’d learned anything in his career, it was that you could never tell what someone might do for a laugh.

  Or maybe they’d been the monument thieves.

  Rhodes got out of the car and used his flashlight to have a look around. He didn’t find anything suspicious. Clyde Ballinger and his crew had cleaned up around the grave site. The canopy was gone, along with the folding chairs and the fake grass. The only things left were a couple of flower arrangements and some random white petals on the ground.

  The night air was damp and cool, and it settled on Rhodes like a shroud. He got back in the car and toured the whole cemetery. There was nothing alive there, not that he could see. If he hadn’t seen those running figures in the clearing earlier in the afternoon, he would have been tempted to dismiss the teens’ story out of hand.

  As it was, he didn’t. They might very well have seen someone. He just didn’t know who.

  Or what. For all he knew, there really were ghosts out there. It was certainly the right kind of night for them.

  After a little more than half an hour, Rhodes still hadn’t spotted anyone or anything. No one else had driven through the cemetery gates or even passed by on the street, so Rhodes decided to go back to the jail.

  He was about to head for the gates when he thought he saw something move out of the corner of his eye. He stopped the car, got out, and turned his flashlight in the direction of the motion. The beam showed only immobile stones, but down at the bottom of the hill, a dark and shapeless shadow darted between a couple of sooty monuments topped respectively by a soldier and an angel with widespread wings. The shadow was moving faster than any human being could possibly run, Rhodes thought.

  Rhodes yelled, “Hey!” but got no response, so he began to run down the hill, dodging trees and the larger tombstones and hurtling over the smaller ones, his shoes squishing into the wet ground when his feet landed and sucking out when he picked them up.

  Even with the bad footing, he was moving awfully fast, thanks more to the slope and to gravity than to any natural athletic ability. But for just a moment, he felt almost like “Will-o’-the-wisp” Dan Rhodes, who’d returned the opening kickoff of the football season for a touchdown.

  But it was only for a moment. He’d almost reached the bottom of the hill when he was distracted by the whooshing sound of wings over his head. He glanced up, caught a quick glimpse of what he thought was most likely an owl, and the toe of his shoe caught on the top edge of a stone. The next thing he knew, he was flying through the air, though not exactly with the greatest of ease.

  He didn’t have much time to be uneasy, however, because he hit the wet ground in full stretch. The flashlight flew out of his hand, and he slid forward for several feet before coming to a stop when his head connected with a tombstone. The blow sent a sharp pain down his spine and made his skull feel like an egg that had been cracked against the edge of a cast-iron frying pan. Little lights sparkled in front of his eyes.

  He turned over on his back and lay there for a while, thinking that he was too old to be jumping tombstones, even low ones, and that he’d gotten what he deserved.

  Or maybe he hadn’t. Maybe there was more to come. Maybe the ghost or ghoul or whatever was roaming around the cemetery at night would come along and do to him whatever it was that ghosts and ghouls did.

  What did they do, anyway? Rhodes couldn’t think of anything.

  But if they didn’t do anything, why were people afraid of them?

  He couldn’t answer that question, either, and he realized that his mind was rambling. He shook his head to clear it and wished he hadn’t. Now he knew how Humpty-Dumpty felt.

  He sat up and looked around for the flashlight. It was lying about ten feet away, its beam shining along the ground and revealing nothing at all.

  He took a deep breath and stood up, putting his hand on top of his head to see if there was any bleeding and also to make sure nothing fell off.

  Nothing did, and there was no bleeding, though he could feel the beginnings of a lump. He retrieved his flashlight and pointed it toward the bottom of the hill.

  There was nothing there, not that he could see. The question was, should he go down and investigate with his head hurting the way it was?

  Of course he should. He was the sheriff, after all. He took another deep breath and walked down the hill.

  When he got to the bottom, though his head was still hurting, it had stopped throbbing, and he could think about as clearly as he ever could. He shined the flashli
ght all around the fence, looking for footprints, though of course ghosts wouldn’t leave any.

  Ghosts wouldn’t need a gap in the fence to get away, either, but that’s what Rhodes found, a place near one of the fence posts where two strands of wire had snapped, leaving a gap that even he could slip through with ease. It would have posed no problem at all for a ghost.

  The only things past the fence were the woods and the railroad tracks, and Rhodes had already searched that area once that day. He didn’t see any point in doing it again, considering that he hadn’t found anything the first time. Besides, as fast as the ghost had been moving, it could easily have been in the next county by now.

  Rhodes shone his light out at the trees and saw nothing unusual. He stood there for a minute, waiting for something to happen. He didn’t know what he was waiting for exactly, maybe for the mournful and far-off howl of a dog.

  There was nothing, so Rhodes turned and walked back up the hill to the county car. What he needed was a Dr Pepper and some dry clothes. In that order.

  He was driving through the cemetery gates when Hack got him on the radio.

  “Just got a call from your friend Miz Wilkie,” Hack said.

  “What did she have to say?” Rhodes asked.

  “ ‘Motorsickles,’ ” Hack told him.

  “I think you’ve given me that answer before,” Rhodes said.

  “Déjà vu,” Hack said. “That’s what they call it when that happens.”

  “Just what I needed to know,” Rhodes said.

  13

  MILSBY HAD ONCE BEEN A MORE OR LESS THRIVING LITTLE farm community, not far from Clearview. But the cotton farmers who had supported it had long since died or given up trying to make a living from the land and moved away. The old cotton gin was still there, though it was beginning to collapse inward upon itself from years of neglect.