A Romantic Way to Die

by Bill Crider

  Mrs. Appleby wasn’t going to give him any help, so Rhodes had to keep going. He said, “That’s what I was wondering about, then. If she was heading away from you, how could you be sure it was a woman?”

  “I told you,” Mrs. Appleby said.

  “You did?”

  “There was that underwear, for one thing. No man I ever heard of would wear underwear like that.”

  Rhodes didn’t even want to imagine Cy Appleby in bikini underwear. Especially not now that Cy was in prison.

  “Besides,” Mrs. Appleby said, “she had real long hair. You put the two together, and what do you have?”

  Terry Don Coslin, Rhodes thought. That’s what you have.

  He said, “I’m not sure.”

  “Well, I am. No doubt about it, Sheriff, it was a naked woman runnin’ around back there.”

  Rhodes wished that Claude were there. He wanted to ask if he’d gotten a front view of the “woman,” but he was willing to bet that the answer would be no.

  Rhodes said that he had to leave and that he appreciated Mrs. Appleby’s help.

  “You sure you can’t stay? This steak is fryin’ up just about right.”

  Rhodes’s mouth watered at the prospect, but considering the barbecue and the cobbler, and considering that he still had a few people to talk to up at the college, he thanked her kindly and left before he weakened.

  Rhodes wasn’t sure that anyone would want to talk to him, but he hadn’t reckoned with Claudia and Jan, who met him at the door of the dormitory and told him that although they were still working out the plot of their book, they had a couple of ideas they were sure he could use. Rhodes was becoming convinced that it wasn’t just that everyone wanted to write a mystery novel; a lot of people also wanted to be detectives.

  “I’d like to hear your ideas,” he said. “But I have to talk to someone first.”

  “But you really need to hear about this,” Claudia assured him. “It’s a really great plot twist.”

  Rhodes resigned himself and said, “All right. Go ahead.”

  Both women looked around to see if anyone else was listening. No one was. All the other writers were intent on their own conversations. Some of them hadn’t even noticed Rhodes come in.

  “Here it is,” Jan said when she was certain no one would overhear. “Suicide!”

  “Suicide?” Rhodes said.

  “Right,” Claudia said. “Suicide. Get it?”

  Rhodes had to admit that he didn’t.

  “It’s simple,” Jan said. “Henrietta, or whatever we’ll be calling her in our book, kills herself because of her unrequited love for Terry Don. Or whatever we’ll be calling him. And when Terry Don finds out what happened, he jumps to his death in remorse. Isn’t it great?”

  Rhodes didn’t think it was so great. He didn’t even think it was likely. Or even possible.

  “How could someone kill herself by falling against a dresser?” he asked.

  “Oh, it won’t happen that way in the book,” Claudia said. “She’ll probably use poison. It’s not as messy.”

  Rhodes said he didn’t see how that was supposed to help him with the actual case. And he didn’t see how it would help the book, either.

  “You’re writing a murder mystery without a murder,” he said. “That wouldn’t work.”

  “Maybe not in the book,” Claudia admitted. “But what about here and now?”

  “It’s another angle to look at,” Jan said. “It could have happened like that.”

  It could have, Rhodes thought, if Henrietta had poisoned herself, which she hadn’t. He thanked the women for their ideas, though they seemed disappointed that he wasn’t more enthusiastic, and went looking for Carrie Logan. He found her in her room, sitting at the tiny desk, and working on a notebook computer similar to the one Ballinger had been using.

  The door was open, and Rhodes knocked on the facing. When Carrie looked up and saw him, her face colored.

  “Hello, Sheriff,” she said. “I was doing a little work on my book before dinner. We’ll be eating in a few minutes, and I guess I really should be finishing up here. I’m running late already. I thought we’d be eating by now.”

  Rhodes hadn’t thought about the evening meal and how it would be served. He asked Carrie.

  “We’re going to have sandwiches and things. French fries, maybe. They’ll be bringing them here to the dorm, and we’ll eat in our rooms.”

  “Then you don’t have much to get ready for, do you,” Rhodes said.

  “Well, you know how it is. I have to save everything to a disk and shut down the computer and all that.”

  “I can wait,” Rhodes said. “I want to talk to you for a minute when you’re finished.”

  Carrie reddened again. She got a floppy disk from a briefcase on the floor and inserted it into the drive on the side of the computer. When she’d saved her work, she shut the computer down and closed it.

  “I really do need to get ready for dinner,” she said. “I hope this won’t take long.”

  “It won’t,” Rhodes said. “I’ve been thinking about what you told me the other night, and I just wanted to ask you something about Vernell.”

  “Vernell and I were here in the room. We heard the yelling. That’s really all I know.”

  “So you said. But I was wondering about something. You didn’t say anything until Vernell gave you a cue. It almost seemed as if she’d tipped you off about what she wanted you to say.”

  Carrie’s face was getting redder all the time. She busied herself with putting her computer into the briefcase and avoided Rhodes’s eyes.

  “Are you saying I lied?” she asked, speaking to the floor.

  “It’s just something I was wondering about,” Rhodes said. “In a case like this, I have to think things over and try to make sense out of them, and that’s just one of the thoughts I’ve had.”

  “Well, you’re w-wrong,” Carrie said, her voice breaking.

  Rhodes thought she might be going to cry, so he entered the room and closed the door. Carrie cringed as if she thought he might be about to attack her. He kept his distance so she wouldn’t get too excited.

  “Are you sure I’m wrong?” he asked. “You know that you could get in serious trouble if you’re hampering the investigation of a murder, especially if you’re withholding evidence.”

  He thought about Claude Appleby. He should have given him the same speech, but he was pretty sure it wouldn’t have bothered Claude. He’d have to be handled differently.

  “I—I’m not w—withholding anything,” Carrie said.

  She got up and went to a little nightstand between the room’s twin beds and got a tissue from a box. She blew her nose and wiped her eyes.

  “I think you are,” Rhodes said. “I don’t think Vernell was in the room, and I think you’re covering up for her.”

  Carrie looked at him and started crying in earnest. Rhodes stood there and waited her out. After a while, she stopped crying, got another tissue, and wiped her eyes and cheeks.

  “You’re right,” she said finally, her voice firmer as if she’d made some kind of decision. “I didn’t want to lie, but Vernell told me it wouldn’t hurt anything. I know she didn’t kill Henrietta, no matter how much Henrietta hated her and no matter how many hateful things she said about her in that awful book she was writing.”

  “But Vernell wasn’t in the room with you,” Rhodes said.

  “She was in here most of the time. But just before the yelling started, she had to go to the bathroom.”

  The dorm’s two bathrooms were in the center of the hallway, so Vernell would have had to leave the room to get to them.

  “So she could have killed Henrietta,” Rhodes said. “When she was out of the room.”

  “No, no,” Carrie said. “She wasn’t gone long enough for that. I’m sure of it. She was just gone for a few seconds before it happened.”

  “A few seconds would’ve been enough,” Rhodes said. “The door to Henrietta’s room is
just a step away.”

  “But she’d have had to go in there, get in a fight, and kill her. She wasn’t gone that long. I just know it. I would never have said she was with me if I’d had any doubt at all. We were just trying to save her from unnecessary trouble.”

  “It didn’t work,” Rhodes said.

  “I knew all along what we were doing was wrong, and I feel just awful about it. But I’m really sure Vernell is completely innocent. She’s going to hate me for telling you this.”

  “She’ll get over it,” Rhodes said.

  30

  SO FAR, RHODES THOUGHT, JUST ABOUT EVERYONE HE’D TALKED to had lied to him, except for maybe Jan and Claudia. And he wasn’t too sure about them.

  The lies, of course, had all been small ones, and all of them had been told for the best of reasons, at least in the mind of the tellers: to protect someone who otherwise might have fallen under suspicion. Or in some cases the lies had been for self-protection, which some people might have thought was an even better reason.

  But in most investigations Rhodes had been involved in, he’d eventually seen through the lies and gotten to something that resembled the truth. This investigation wasn’t shaping up to be any different.

  And he did more than try to get the truth from people. While he was sorting through things, literally this time, in the case of Terry Don Coslin’s dirty laundry, he was also running various scenarios through his head, trying to come up with one that fit all the facts. He thought he had a pretty good one for Henrietta’s death now, one that took just about everything into account, but he still hadn’t come up with a good idea of what might have happened to Terry Don. Maybe if he tested his first notion, he’d come up with something that would help him work out the rest of the sequence.

  He walked down the hall to the dormitory’s sitting room. There weren’t enough chairs for everyone; many of the women were standing. Serena Thayer was talking to Belinda Marshall and Marian Willoughby, just as she had been at lunch.

  Rhodes wondered if Belinda and Marian had teamed up to keep Serena away from Vernell. If they had, it was a good idea. Rhodes didn’t feel like breaking up any more fights, and Serena seemed to be able to hold on to her temper when she was around the other two writers. Maybe that was because she liked them, or maybe it was because they knew better than to cross her. Rhodes didn’t really care which. At least they were helping to keep Serena’s temper in check.

  Claudia and Jan were standing on the fringes of the conversation, listening avidly, as if in hopes that some of the basic precepts of successful writing might slip out. Rhodes was pretty sure they wouldn’t, but you couldn’t blame Claudia and Jan for hoping.

  There were other small groups all around the room, and everyone was chattering away. The noise level was about like that of a third-grade classroom when the teacher has been gone for ten minutes or so.

  Tom Chatterton came in through the front door while Rhodes was looking around for Vernell. Chatterton tried to get everyone’s attention by clapping his hands, but for all the difference he made, he might as well have been patting two powder puffs together.

  He looked at Rhodes over the heads of the women as if appealing for help. Rhodes shrugged. He wasn’t going to fire off his pistol in the dormitory.

  Jeanne Arnot was standing not far from Rhodes, talking earnestly to Lorene Winslow. Lorene was nodding her head and smiling, and Rhodes wondered if Jeanne was taking her on as a client. He hated to break into their discussion if that was the case. Lorene would never forgive him. On the other hand, Chatterton needed help.

  Rhodes stepped over to Jeanne and tapped her on the shoulder. When she looked around, he said, loud enough for her to hear him over the din, “Do you have your whistle?”

  She nodded and dug around in her purse. After a second or two she found it and brought it out, holding it where Rhodes could see it clipped to her key ring.

  “Blow it,” he said, and she did.

  The shrill sound cut through all the conversations like a table saw through pine. It bounced off the walls and ceiling, and it was all Rhodes could do not to cover his ears.

  The room grew very quiet as everyone looked at Jeanne, who stuffed the whistle and keys back into her purse.

  “Thank you,” Chatterton said loudly, calling attention to himself. “The Round-Up van is on the way with sandwiches for everyone. It will be here in about ten minutes, and”—he gave Serena a significant look—“there will be vegetarian sandwiches for anyone who requires them. You may eat in here, or you may eat in your rooms, wherever you’d be more comfortable. But wherever you eat, please clean up and put all the trash in the proper receptacles.”

  Rhodes was pretty sure he’d never heard anyone use the word receptacles before, and he was impressed.

  “I thought they were going to be here before now,” someone said.

  “It must have taken them longer than they thought it would to get things ready,” Chatterton said. “Or maybe they had trouble finding the vegetarian ingredients.”

  Serena Thayer broke away from Belinda and Marian and started elbowing her way in Chatterton’s direction. Chatterton, being smart enough to use the word receptacles in a sentence, was also smart enough to know when he’d gone too far. He started backing toward the door as Rhodes tried to get himself in position to block Serena’s path.

  He did, but she didn’t want to stop. She came to a halt directly in front of him, almost touching his chest, with her eyes staring almost directly into his. He hadn’t realized until now how tall she was.

  He knew, however, how bad her temper was, and he wasn’t surprised that she was almost vibrating with anger.

  “Let me at him,” she said.

  Rhodes wondered if she’d use a line like that in one of her books. Probably not, he decided.

  “I think you should relax,” he said. “Why don’t we go outside and have a little talk.”

  Serena took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and said, “Why Sheriff, how gallant. But I have to warn you that my heart belongs to another.”

  Rhodes liked that line, too. She’d probably actually used that one. Or maybe not. Rhodes hadn’t read enough romance novels to be sure.

  “I don’t have romance on my mind,” he said.

  “I’m sure you don’t. If I know you, you have murder on your mind.”

  Claudia had made her way to them by then, and Rhodes could almost see the lightbulb flash on over her head. She reached into her purse and brought out her notebook and pen. Rhodes thought he knew exactly what she was writing down. It was the title of the mystery novel she and Jan were working on: Murder on His Mind, which he had to admit had a nice ring to it. Claudia was certainly getting her money’s worth from the workshop.

  Rhodes took Serena’s elbow and escorted her outside. The sky was inky black, full of the stars Terry Don had been admiring not so long ago, and the night was getting cool.

  “Very romantic,” Serena said, looking up at the stars and then back at Rhodes. “Are you married, Sheriff?”

  “As a matter of fact, I am.”

  “Too bad. But then you warned me you didn’t have romance in mind.”

  “That’s right. I want to ask you something about Terry Don.”

  “And what might that be?”

  “You seem to have known him pretty well, and you knew Henrietta had a crush on him. You didn’t really mention how he felt about her.”

  “He thought the book was funny. I told you that.”

  “But the book and the woman aren’t the same thing.”

  “You’re pretty insightful for a hick-town sheriff. “You’d be surprised at how many people don’t understand that.”

  “I’d think it would be obvious,” Rhodes said.

  “Well, it isn’t.”

  “I’ll take your word for it. Now, tell me about Coslin and Henrietta.”

  “He didn’t really say much about her. He did mention that they were a hot item when they were in high school. Maybe he still so
rt of liked her, even if he didn’t say so. But he could never be serious about any one woman. He liked women too much to let himself get tied down to just one of them.”

  “But if she’d invited him to her room, he might have gone.”

  Serena laughed. She had a nice laugh, one that didn’t seem to go with her temper.

  “He’d have gone to anybody’s room. I liked Terry Don, Sheriff. I liked him a lot. But I wasn’t under any illusions about his character, thank God. And, as I said, I’m not the jealous type.”

  “Not even of Jeanne Arnot?”

  “You know about her and Terry Don?”

  “All I know is what I read in Henrietta’s book.”

  “It’s probably true. But even if it is, I don’t care. Jeanne’s my agent, and she makes a lot of money for me. What Terry Don does is his own business.”

  Serena shivered as if from the cold and moved closer to Rhodes, so close that their shoulders were touching. Serena definitely wasn’t cold.

  “What about your wife?” she asked. “Is she the jealous type?”

  “I think so,” Rhodes said. “And she’s licensed to carry a handgun.”

  That wasn’t true, but it seemed to Rhodes like a good idea to say it.

  “Oh, my. A real Texas cowgirl.”

  “Not exactly,” Rhodes said.

  Serena moved even closer. Rhodes stood his ground, though he thought he might be making a mistake.

  “You know, Sheriff,” Serena said, “you don’t seem to like me much, but I think we could get along if we’d just try a little harder.”

  Rhodes didn’t ask what she had in mind. He said, “I don’t think it’s a good idea to get too friendly with people involved in a murder investigation.”

  Serena moved away from him, and her voice turned hard.

  “You think I killed that little bitch, don’t you.”

  There was another line that Rhodes was pretty sure Serena had never used in one of her books.

  “You’re wrong about that,” Rhodes said. “I don’t think you killed her.”

  “You don’t?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Then why did you get me off to myself out here and let me waste my feminine wiles on you? I thought you were going to handcuff me and cart me off to the jail.”