by Bill Crider
DEATH BY ACCIDENT
Book Nine of the Dan Rhodes Mysteries
By Bill Crider
A Gordian Knot Mystery
Gordian Knot is an imprint of Crossroad Press
Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press
Digital Edition Copyright 2014 / Bill Crider
Cover images courtesy of:
Nicolas Raymond (Texas flag image)
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Meet the Author
BILL CRIDER is the author of more than fifty published novels and numerous short stories. He won the Anthony Award for best first mystery novel in 1987 for Too Late to Die and was nominated for the Shamus Award for best first private-eye novel for Dead on the Island. He won the Golden Duck award for “best juvenile science fiction novel” for Mike Gonzo and the UFO Terror. He and his wife, Judy, won the best short story Anthony in 2002 for their story “Chocolate Moose.” His story “Cranked” from Damn Near Dead (Busted Flush Press) was nominated for the Edgar award for best short story.
Check out his homepage at: http:// www.billcrider.com or take a look at his peculiar blog at http://billcrider.blogspot.com
Book List
Novels:
The Sheriff Dan Rhodes Mystery Series
Too Late to Die
Shotgun Saturday Night
Cursed to Death
Death on the Move
Evil at the Root
Booked for a Hanging
Murder Most Fowl
Winning Can Be Murder
Death by Accident
A Ghost of a Chance
A Romantic Way to Die
Red, White, and Blue Murder
“The Empty Manger,” (novella in the collection entitled Murder, Mayhem, and Mistletoe.)
A Mammoth Murder
Murder Among the O.W.L.S.
Of All Sad Words
Murder in Four Parts
Murder in the Air
The Wild Hog Murders
The Murder of a Beauty Shop Queen
Compound Murder
The Carl Burns Mystery Series
One Dead Dean
Dying Voices
…A Dangerous Thing
Dead Soldiers
The Truman Smith Mystery Series
Dead on the Island
Gator Kill
When Old Men Die
The Prairie Chicken Kill
Murder Takes a Break
The Sally Good Mystery Series
Murder Is An Art
A Knife in the Back
A Bond with Death
The Stanley Waters Mystery Series (Willard Scott, Co-Author)
Murder under Blue Skies
Murder in the Mist
Stand-Alone Mystery and Suspense Novels
Blood Marks
The Texas Capitol Murders
Houston Homicide (with Clyde Wilson)
House-Name Spy Fiction
The Coyote Connection (a Nick Carter book, in collaboration with Jack Davis)
Western Novels
Ryan Rides Back
Galveston Gunman
A Time for Hanging
Medicine Show
Outrage at Blanco
Texas Vigilante
As Colby Jackson:
Dead Man’s Revenge
Gabby Darbins and the Slide-Rock Bolter
Horror Novels (all published under the pseudonym “Jack MacLane”)
Keepers of the Beast
Goodnight, Moom
Blood Dreams
Rest in Peace
Just before Dark
Books for Young Readers
A Vampire Named Fred
Muttketeer
Mike Gonzo and the Sewer Monster
Mike Gonzo and the Almost Invisible Man
Mike Gonzo and the UFO Terror
Short Story Collections:
The Nighttime is the Right Time
This Book Is Dedicated to the Memory
of Ellen Nehr
DEATH BY ACCIDENT
Chapter One
The Clearview Sons and Daughters of Texas had put a lot of time and money into improving the Old Settlers’ Grounds since the last time Sheriff Dan Rhodes had been there, a year or so ago. His visit this time wasn’t going to be any more pleasant than the last one, however, if the phone call Hack Jensen had told him about was any indication.
Rhodes drove onto the grounds through an arched gateway that no longer leaned precariously to one side. The name of the campground had been freshly painted in black letters on the span of the arch. Rhodes could see bright new wood on the dance pavilion, too. All the rotted boards had been replaced in the floor, roof, and steps. The sides had been straightened and braced.
Years ago Rhodes had square danced on the pavilion with girls were who grown up and married now, with children older than they had been on those summer nights when they had gone allemande left and do-si-do. Some of the women still lived in town, though most of them were long gone from Clearview. Rhodes had heard that one of them was a dean at a community college and that another was a social worker somewhere near Dallas. He wondered if they ever thought about the square dances or the Old Settlers’ Grounds. He figured they probably didn’t.
Rhodes drove the county car past the old pavilion on a road covered in fresh white gravel, another recent improvement if you didn’t mind a little dust. He stopped his car by Ty Berry’s blue Ford pickup and got out.
The day was warm, and the sun was high in a blue sky flecked with only a few high clouds, but it was November and there was a not-so-subtle hint of fall in the air. Rhodes wasn’t sure just what it was. It could have been the angle of the sunlight through the high tree limbs, the light breeze that swished through the red and yellow leaves, or just the smell of things, as if some faint scent of the high country was sneaking in on the breeze.
Rhodes started down the path toward the two old swimming pools that had been built down by the river. Long ago, when the citizens of Blacklin County had devoted a full week every summer to celebrating the contributions of the county’s original settlers, the Grounds had been filled for days with laughing people. There had been playgrounds for the children, and the swimming pools had been popular spots for cooling off.
But the yearly celebrations had stopped even before Rhodes was a boy. There was no evidence remaining of see-saws or swings, and the pools had become dangerous. Their concrete sides had cracked, and chunks had broken off into the pools. The river still flowed nearby and still fed water to the pools, but no one was supposed to swim in them anymore. People did, occasionally but it was a risky business, if not exactly against the law.
The shade of the pecan trees was cool, and Rhodes heard a squirrel scampering through the branches. A pecan fell from above, missing Rhodes by not more than a couple of feet. He wasn’t sure whether it had been dropped, dislodged, or deliberately aimed in his direction. You never could tell about squirrels.
Rhodes looked over toward what was left of the Wishing Well. He had thrown a penny or two into the well when he was a kid, but he couldn’t remember what he had wished for. Whatever it had been, it hadn’t been what he had found there a year ago.
Rhodes went on down the path, dry leaves crackling under his feet. Turning a bend and looking down the steep bank, he saw Ty Berry standing by one of the swimming pools.
Berry was the president of the Clearview Sons an
d Daughters of Texas. He was short and thin, and he’d drawn his eyebrows together so often in his perpetual worry that some precious bit of Blacklin County history was going to be destroyed or forgotten that there was a permanent line running up from the bridge of his nose. He had been the driving force behind the restoration of the Old Settlers’ Grounds, and he had personally raised nearly every penny of the money that had been spent on the project.
He had both hands thrust into the pockets of the blue nylon jacket he was wearing. A Clearview Catamounts baseball cap covered his balding head, and he was pacing nervously up and down the edge of the pool.
The water in the pool was as clear and green as Rhodes remembered having ever seen it. Leaves floated on the surface and covered the bottom, but they had fallen only recently and there was no dirt or slime to be seen.
The Sons and Daughters had spent quite a bit of their money in cleaning the pools and removing the debris of years from them. They hadn’t repaired the cracks, and they hadn’t made the pools safe for swimming. There hadn’t been enough money for that, and the pools were so far out of town that repairing them wouldn’t have been advisable. It would just have encouraged unsupervised swimming. But the Sons and Daughters had certainly made the pools look better.
The sunlight filtered through the tree branches and the dying leaves and sparkled off the water, and somewhere high above, a bird, either a year-round resident or one that hadn’t yet left for a warmer climate farther south, whistled softly. In the river, three turtles sitting on a log seemed to sense Rhodes’ presence at the same instant, and all three slipped into the smooth green water, hardly rippling its surface.
Rhodes thought it was a peaceful and relaxing scene, except for one thing: the dead body that floated in the water of the nearest pool, only a few feet from where Ty Berry was standing next to a bright red and white sign that read:
DANGER!
ABSOLUTELY NO SWIMMING!
THE WATER IN THIS POOL COULD BE POLLUTED!
NO LIFEGUARD ON DUTY!
DANGER!
Berry looked up, saw Rhodes, and pulled his right hand out of his jacket pocket to wave. Rhodes waved back and walked down the crumbling concrete steps to the pool.
“I called the ambulance, too,” Berry said. “I guess you beat them here.”
“I was in the neighborhood,” Rhodes said.
Chapter Two
Rhodes had been on his way back to Clearview after driving to Thurston to check on a welding machine that had been abandoned on a county road. The man who’d called in about the welding machine wanted to know if he could keep it if no one claimed it, and Rhodes had been forced to disappoint him. The machine had been reported stolen in a neighboring county the previous evening, along with the truck that the owner had used to transport it. The welding machine was in a ditch by the side of the road, but there had been no sign of the truck.
“Any idea who that is?” Rhodes asked, looking down at the body, which was floating face down.
“I haven’t tried to get a look,” Berry said. “He … he was at the bottom of the pool, but I pulled him up. I don’t know why I did it.”
Berry looked a little queasy, and Rhodes didn’t blame him. It wasn’t every day that you found a dead man, much less one that had been in the water for a while.
“After I pulled him up, he sort of floated,” Berry said. “I didn’t do anything else. I thought you’d want me to leave things pretty much like I found them.”
Rhodes nodded. “You were right.”
His knees cracked as he knelt down to look at the body which had sunk back under the water for about six inches. It was that of a man who had been wearing only a pair of jockey shorts, and it was tangled in a practically new rope, one end of which was tied to a dead-looking tree limb that floated several feet away in the pool. The rope that wasn’t twisted around the body had absorbed enough water to sink, but it hadn’t pulled the limb under.
“Looks like he was swinging over the water on that rope,” Berry said. “The limb broke, and he fell in and drowned. Maybe the limb hit him on the head. And he was probably drunk.”
“Why do you say that?” Rhodes asked.
“Why else would he be swimming out here at this time of the year? That water’s cold!” Berry jammed his right hand back into his jacket pocket and shook his head. “And it’s dangerous to swim alone, here or anywhere. Do you think he couldn’t read the sign?”
Berry took a step and whacked the red-and-white warning sign with his hand.
“Do you think it wasn’t big enough for him to see? Or do you think he even looked at it?”
“He probably just ignored it,” Rhodes said.
“That’s right,” Berry said. “He ignored it, and now he’s dead. I tried to tell everyone that this would happen if we cleaned up the pools. I tried to get them to agree to drain them, but would they listen to me? Hell, no.”
He stalked away and stood looking angrily out over the pool. “And now what’s going to happen?” He didn’t wait for Rhodes to answer. “I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. First of all, everybody’ll blame the Sons and Daughters for this. They’ll say that we should’ve built a fence around the pool or something stupid like that. Never mind that the pool’s been here for ninety years without anybody drowning in it. And then somebody’ll sue us, sign or no sign.”
The breeze shook brown leaves out of the pecan trees, and they spiraled down toward the water. Rhodes stood up. His knees cracked again. He wished they wouldn’t do that.
“You know what Bob Dylan said in the sixties?” Berry asked.
Rhodes remembered quite a few things that Bob Dylan had said, but he didn’t know which one of them Berry was referring to.
“Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man?” Rhodes guessed.
Berry shook his head. “He said that everybody must get stoned. Remember?”
Rhodes said that he remembered.
“I thought you would. But he wouldn’t say that these days. You know what he’d say?”
Rhodes looked down at the body and shook his head.
“He’d say everybody must get sued,” Berry told him.
“Maybe no one will sue. There was a warning sign here, after all.”
Berry laughed, but it wasn’t a happy sound. “That woman sued McDonald’s when she spilled the coffee in her lap, didn’t she? Surely you read about that. You’d think anyone would know coffee was hot, but she got a judgment for millions. Oh, we’ll get sued, all right.”
Rhodes decided that he might as well agree. “Maybe so. But that doesn’t really matter right now. What matters is that we’ve got a dead man here. Any idea where his clothes are?”
“Right over there,” Berry said, pointing to where the bath house had once stood. Only part of the foundation remained. “Behind that tree.”
Rhodes walked over to the tree Berry had indicated. Sure enough, the clothes were there — a pair of faded Wrangler jeans, a pair of cheap roping boots, a western shirt, socks, a belt with a buckle the size of a hubcap, and a t-shirt that had been white at one time but that now had a distinct yellowish tinge. Nothing was folded. It was as if everything had simply been tossed there as someone undressed.
He looked back at Berry. “Any idea where that rope was tied?”
“In one of those trees close to you, I guess,” Berry said.
Rhodes looked around. There were several pecan trees towering over him. All of them had limbs that stretched out over the pool.
“You could run along the bank there,” Berry said. “Then you could grab the rope and keep right on going, swing out over the water and drop straight down and in. Not a good thing to do if you’re drunk, though, but of course a jury won’t consider that. They’ll just award the family eighty million dollars and go home to watch themselves on TV.”
Rhodes didn’t think it was worth mentioning that Blacklin County had never had a trial that merited television coverage and wasn’t likely to. He didn’t think Berry would be comforted.
<
br /> “You seem mighty worried about a lawsuit,” he said.
“Hell, yes. Wouldn’t you be?”
“I’m more worried that a man’s dead here.”
“Through his own damn fault. If he’d stayed home and stayed sober, he’d still be alive.”
Rhodes wasn’t so sure about that. Several things were bothering him. For one, it didn’t seem likely that anybody, drunk or sober, would suddenly decide to go to the Old Settlers’ Grounds for a swim all by himself, much less decide to go for a swim where no one had been accustomed to swimming for fifty years or more. How had he gotten here, anyway? And where had that rope come from?
“Did you see his car?” Rhodes asked.
Berry walked over to where Rhodes was standing under the tree. “Yeah. That’s why I came down to the pool. I was out here checking on the Burleson cabin. There’s a pickup parked behind it, little Chevy S-10. I looked around, but I didn’t see anybody, so I came down here. That’s when I found him and called the jail.”
“How’d you call?”
Berry pulled a cellular phone out of his pocket and held it up without saying anything. Then he put it back.
“Do you come out here often?” Rhodes asked.
“At least once a week. I have to check on the Burleson cabin, like I said.”
The Burleson cabin was the central issue in a feud between the Sons and Daughters and another organization, the Clearview Historical Society. The Society claimed that the cabin, supposedly the oldest structure in the county and supposedly built by Cletus Burleson, one of the very first settlers, had been moved from near Clearview to the Old Settlers’ Grounds in the early part of the century.
The Society members, prodded by Faye Knape, their president, wanted the cabin brought back to Clearview and set up on the grounds of the county courthouse where they thought it belonged and where they hoped it might be more of a tourist attraction than it was hidden off in the country. The Sons and Daughters believed that if they didn’t keep a close watch, the Society would sneak out to the Grounds in the dead of night to spirit the cabin away.