A Romantic Way to Die

by Bill Crider

  “Heck, Sheriff, after what you did, solvin’ that moose-head murder at my place, you can eat for free any time you want to.”

  “I believe in paying my way. How much?”

  Blevins didn’t haggle. “Six seventy-five.”

  Rhodes got seven dollars from his billfold. That left him with twenty dollars in case he found something else to spend it on.

  “I don’t have any change,” Blevins said when Rhodes handed him the money.

  “The quarter’s the tip.”

  Blevins grinned. “That’s about right.”

  He went over to the van and helped unload the big pans of food and set them up on the tables over the cans of Sterno that would keep them warm.

  Just as everything was finished, people started filing out of the dormitory. Rhodes spotted Claudia and Jan and went to ask if he could join them for lunch.

  “Sure,” Claudia said. “We could probably use the protection, considering what’s been going on around here. But you don’t look up to putting up much of a fight if it came to that.”

  “He might surprise you,” Jan said. “He looks pretty tough to me.”

  “I’m not tough,” Rhodes said. “Just sore. Let’s get in line.”

  They were served on paper plates and handed a sealed plastic bag that held plastic eating utensils, a paper napkin, and two small packets of salt and pepper. It wasn’t easy to eat barbecue on a paper plate, not if you put enough sauce on it. But Rhodes was willing to make the effort.

  After they were served, they found seats at the end of one of the tables where they had an excellent view of a large part of Blacklin County. The sky was clear and blue for the most part, and they could see for miles, but there was a heavy, dark blue cloud in the north that meant a change in the weather was heading their way.

  Rhodes wasn’t interested in the view or the weather, however. He was more interested in the people seated next to them and at the nearby tables. Lorene Winslow was at another table talking to a woman Rhodes didn’t know. Vernell Lindsey was sitting by Jeanne Arnot. The two of them had their heads together, and they were engaged in an intense conversation. Rhodes wondered if they were discussing the market price of Vernell’s new book.

  Chatterton was sitting alone at the end of the table. It wasn’t as if people were avoiding him, Rhodes thought. He just didn’t seem interested in having any company.

  Belinda Marshall, Marian Willoughby, and Serena Thayer were together, chatting amiably. Rhodes wondered if they really got along well or if they were sticking together because they were the real professionals in the group.

  “This is a beautiful place,” Jan said. She took a drink of tea from a plastic glass and then set it back on the table. “It’s too bad such terrible things have been happening.”

  Claudia looked at Rhodes speculatively.

  “And speaking of terrible things,” she said, “I’ll bet you didn’t ask to sit with us just because we’re from out of town and looked lonely. Or am I wrong?”

  “You’re not wrong,” Rhodes admitted after taking a bite of the barbecue, which was fork-tender and delicious. “Where are you from, by the way?”

  “I’m from Dallas,” Claudia said. “My husband works for the county, and I’m a social worker. I’ve known Jan for years. She’s from a little town to the east of Dallas, and she and her husband both work at a college there. She’s a dean. Do you think she looks like a dean?”

  Rhodes said he wasn’t sure what a dean was supposed to look like.

  “They’re supposed to be gnarly old men,” Jan said.

  Claudia nodded. “And she’s not a bit gnarly. Anyway, we heard about this workshop, and we knew we had to come.”

  “Why?” Rhodes asked.

  “Because we’re trying to sell a historical romance that we collaborated on,” Claudia said.

  “And because Jeanne Arnot was going to be here,” Jan said. “She’s the best agent there is. There was an article about her in Romantic Times not long ago. Serena Thayer’s one of the best writers in the business, too. We knew we could learn a lot from the two of them.”

  “Like all about the arc of the story,” Rhodes said, recalling the session he’d asked Belinda Marshall to skip.

  “Right! But we didn’t think we’d get involved in two murders and an explosion,” Claudia said.

  “That’s a bonus, all right,” Jan said. “We may be able to use it all in a book.”

  “You’re going to write a mystery novel next, I guess,” Rhodes said.

  “We both think it would be a good idea,” Claudia said. “You know, we’ve been talking about our plot, and we might be able to help you solve the murders.”

  Rhodes ate some more barbecue and some pinto beans. He tried the potato salad and the coleslaw. Everything was good, though he thought there was too much salad dressing in the potato salad and the slaw.

  “All right,” he said after a while, resigning himself. “Tell me your plot.”

  “The way we see it,” Jan said, “is that one of the writers did it. She’s sure she’ll get away with it because there’s no connection between her and the people she killed.”

  That was an interesting idea. Here Rhodes had been spending all his time in the naïve belief that the murderer knew her (or his; Rhodes wasn’t letting Chatterton off the hook) victims, when he should have been considering the fact that somebody might be going around killing strangers.

  “Why would she kill people she didn’t know?” he asked.

  “Not that she didn’t know,” Claudia said. “She might know them slightly, but she wouldn’t have any connection with them. Or not much of one.”

  “Okay,” Rhodes said. “But why kill them?”

  “It’s obvious,” Jan said. “To get a plot for her book.”

  “You mean she’d write about a workshop like this one where someone was killing people she didn’t know so she’d have a plot for a mystery novel?”

  “That’s right, more or less.”

  “But wouldn’t the book be a dead giveaway when it was published?”

  “Of course not,” Claudia said. “She wouldn’t set the book at a workshop. She’d set it at a glamorous vacation resort or a fashionable dude ranch. Or maybe at some spectacular festival, like Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Or maybe the Battle of the Flowers parade in San Antonio.”

  “And she wouldn’t have a sheriff as the detective,” Jan said. “No offense.”

  “None taken,” Rhodes said. “Who would she have doing the detecting?”

  “A feisty female TV news reporter,” Claudia said. “Whose husband has recently died tragically of some terrible disease, leaving her with beautiful sad eyes and an air of mystery.”

  The thought of feisty TV news reporters momentarily spoiled Rhodes’s appetite. He was dreading facing them. But if he could get everything taken care of, he wouldn’t have to. Or if he did, he wouldn’t have to face them for long.

  “And the murders would have to be a lot more gruesome,” Jan said. “There wasn’t enough blood in these two.”

  “Probably someone would have to die in the explosion, too,” Claudia said thoughtfully. “Or maybe just be tragically maimed for life.”

  “The TV reporter’s cameraman!” Jan said.

  “Great idea!”

  Claudia got a Mont Blanc ballpoint and a small leather notebook from her purse. She flipped the notebook open and started writing in it. When she was done, she flipped the notebook closed and stuck it back in the purse with the pen.

  “What do you think, Sheriff?” she said. “Are we on the right track?”

  While they had been discussing the plot of the book, the dark cloud had been moving steadily closer. Now the wind was beginning to pick up out of the north. It was cool, and there was the smell of rain in it. Several people were looking in that direction and Lorene Wilson pointed to a flicker of lightning in the cloud.

  “Who knows?” Rhodes said about the plot idea. “You two could have it all figured out. I think I
’ll have some of that cobbler and ice cream. Can I get some for either of you?”

  The two women still hadn’t finished their barbecue, so Rhodes got the cobbler and ice cream for himself. It was served in a paper bowl.

  When he was seated at the table again, he said, “I’d like to ask you two something, if you don’t mind.”

  “We knew you’d get around to it sooner or later,” Jan said. “Are we suspects?”

  “Not at all,” Rhodes said. “Unless you’ve been killing people you don’t have any connection with so you’ll have a plot for your novel.”

  “You’re making fun of us, aren’t you,?” Claudia said.

  “No. I just have to follow up on my own theory, though, in case I’m right and you’re not.”

  “Okay. I can see that, and besides, I’ve never been grilled before. It might be fun. Go ahead.”

  “I don’t think this really counts as grilling. Lorene Winslow says that she was talking to the two of you when Henrietta was killed. Is that the truth?”

  “I hope you don’t think we’d tell a lie,” Claudia said.

  “Unless it was going to help us get away with killing people we’re not connected with,” Jan said. “In that case, you’d have to expect a lie or two.”

  “But we’re not lying about Lorene,” Claudia said. “She’s a very nice woman, and we were just giving her a little advice about hair coloring.”

  Both she and Jan looked over to the other table, and considered Lorene. The wind was blowing a bit harder now, and Lorene’s hair was moving with it. She patted it back into place with her hand, seemingly unaware that she was being watched and talked about.

  “That shade of red she uses is all wrong for her,” Jan said. “I think she should go with something a little more brunette.”

  “But anyway,” Claudia said, “we were with her all the time. She’s innocent.”

  Rhodes had thought that was the case. As far as he knew, Lorene had no reason to kill Henrietta. The character of Lorraine in Henrietta’s manuscript had come off pretty well compared to most of the others, and there was nothing else between the two women as far as Rhodes knew.

  “I’m glad to hear that,” he said. “And of course that means the two of you are in the clear.”

  “I thought you’d already said we weren’t suspects,” Jan reminded him.

  “Only if you weren’t killing strangers to get a plot,” Rhodes said. “In that case, I’d have to take you in, lock you up, and throw away the key.”

  “I think there are a couple of people at the college who might pay you to do that,” Jan said. “Do you take bribes?”

  “You should know better than that,” Claudia told her. “You can tell by looking that he’s an honest man.”

  Rhodes didn’t think he looked honest. He thought he looked beaten up and maybe a little bit overweight, but not particularly honest. And if he looked honest, that wouldn’t mean that he actually was. An honest man probably wouldn’t be eating cobbler and ice cream while planning not to mention his indulgence to his wife later on.

  The cloud was moving faster than ever, casting a black shadow over the fields less than a mile away. The lightning was flickering in and out of the cloud, from which a hard rain had begun to fall.

  Sam Blevins came out of the van and asked everyone to take the paper plates, the disposable utensils, and any other trash and put it all in two large plastic trash cans that had been placed by the van.

  “And hustle it up,” Blevins said. “Before we all get wet.”

  Rhodes looked at the rain moving toward them and decided he’d leave the last bite of cobbler in the bowl.

  26

  RHODES WASN’T IN A GOOD MOOD AS HE DROVE THE COUNTY car back toward Clearview. He hadn’t wanted to leave Obert before talking to several other people, but when he checked with Hack, the dispatcher had said that there was another emergency.

  “The ghost is back,” he said.

  “There was never a ghost in the first place,” Rhodes said. “And if there was, I got rid of it.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s your story. I wouldn’t try tellin’ that to the prisoners.”

  Rhodes was having trouble hearing Hack because the rain was pounding very hard on the roof of the county car, producing a kind of continuous roar.

  “Can’t Ruth handle things?” he asked.

  “She’s got her own emergency. Soon as the rain started, an eighteen-wheeler skidded off the road out near the Wal-Mart and wound up in the bar ditch. It’s a mess out there.”

  Rhodes could imagine. About the only way to create a traffic jam in Blacklin County, aside from a celebrity book-signing event, was to have an accident near Wal-Mart, which was where all the traffic was. And the rain would just make everything worse.

  “Anybody hurt?” he asked.

  “Not that I heard of.”

  “That’s good. If Ruth is investigating, who’s directing the traffic on the highway?”

  “Buddy’s doing it.”

  “All right. I guess that’s covered. Where’s the ghost?”

  “At Ballinger’s funeral home. Some guy drove past there and saw it. Called it in on a cell phone.”

  “How does he know it was a ghost?”

  “Says it must be. Weird lights flashin’ on and off all over the place.”

  “Did you call Ballinger?”

  “First thing. Both places, his office and the funeral home. Didn’t get an answer at the office, and I got the answering machine at the funeral home. Maybe the ghost’s got him.” Hack paused, then said, “Not that anybody seems to care, but I’d care if I was the sheriff. You never can tell what those lights might be. If it’s not a ghost, it might be somebody tryin’ to smoke a finger. Or maybe they went for a big toe this time.”

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

  It took him a little longer than that because of the rain, but he got there as quickly as he could with the water sluicing across his windshield and causing his car to hydroplane unnervingly when it hit the puddles where the rain was blowing and washing over the road. The high wind shook the car, lightning crackled, and thunder crashed. If ever there was a time for a ghost to come back, this was it.

  Except, as Rhodes had pointed out to Hack, there had never been a ghost in the first place, no matter what the prisoners thought.

  All the houses in the neighborhood around the funeral home were dark. There were no streetlights, either, and the whole area was murky as midnight, though it was only around one-thirty in the afternoon. Probably lightning had struck a transformer, Rhodes thought.

  The funeral home itself wasn’t exactly dark. Rhodes could see a faint whitish light in some of the windows, which meant that Ballinger was prepared for emergencies, as Rhodes would have expected. There was also a light in the little building that Ballinger used for an office.

  When Rhodes parked the county car in back of the funeral home, he saw a flash of bright light on the inside. A few seconds passed, and then there was another flash. It didn’t look much like a ghost to Rhodes, but he couldn’t figure out what it was. There was no reason for a fluorescent lamp, a candle, or an old-fashioned coal-oil lamp to flash like that.

  Rhodes got out of the car and ran for the back door of the funeral home, getting thoroughly wet and cold before he was able to get under cover again.

  When he was inside, he stood there dripping water, watching for the flash. It came again, and then again. Rhodes walked down a hall, the rubber soles of his shoes squeaking on the polished hardwood floor, and went into one of the rooms where viewings were held.

  There was a battery-powered fluorescent lamp sitting on a table in one corner. An open casket stood to one side. Rhodes saw the body of an old man he didn’t recognize in the casket.

  A heavyset younger man stood near the casket, holding a camera. He either hadn’t heard Rhodes enter the room or didn’t care that he was there. He was muttering to himself and taking pictures of the dead man.

  R
hodes cleared his throat loudly, and the man turned around.

  “Sorry to bother you,” Rhodes said. “What’s going on?”

  The man held up the camera and said, “I’m taking pictures, that’s what.”

  “I can see that,” Rhodes said. “But why?”

  “Why? You want to know why?”

  “That’s right,” Rhodes said. “I do.”

  “Because my mother made me, that’s why.”

  The man was younger than the one in the casket, but he was no kid. Rhodes guessed that he was in his late forties.

  “Your mother made you?” Rhodes said.

  “That’s right. I told her I didn’t want to, but she wouldn’t let me off that easy. She put the old guilt trip on me. She said Aunt Ellie was too old to do it herself. That’s Aunt Ellie’s husband in the casket there. Uncle Roger. Who was too cheap to buy Aunt Ellie a camera, even if she were able to take pictures herself, which she isn’t. So here I am.”

  “Taking pictures,” Rhodes said.

  “Anything wrong with that?”

  “I guess not.”

  “There must not be. You should see our family albums. Half of ‘em are filled with pictures of people in caskets. There’s a picture of Uncle Earl in one of ’em. He was Aunt Ellie’s big brother. Every time Mama sees that picture, she says, ‘That’s the only picture we have of Earl.’ Me, I’d just as soon have no picture at all. How about you?”

  Rhodes said he wasn’t fond of pictures of dead people.

  “Well, my family sure is. And you want to know what makes it worse?”

  Rhodes wasn’t sure he did, but he said, “What?”

  “I have to go out after the funeral tomorrow and take pictures of the grave, that’s what. It’s not enough that our family albums are full of pictures of people in caskets. We gotta have pictures of their graves, too. And you want to guess what else?”

  Rhodes said he didn’t think so.

  “That’s all right. I don’t blame you. You couldn’t guess it if I gave you ten years. So I’ll just tell you. I have to go back when the headstone’s put in, and I have to get pictures of that, too. We could have a whole book devoted to just the headstones if we wanted to separate ’em out.”