Between the Living and the Dead

by Bill Crider

  Rhodes went along, too. The boxes didn’t crumble when Benton and Harris touched them, but they were so dry and stiff that it was a near thing. Benton and Harris looked into all of them. Inside were what appeared to be old schoolbooks and papers. No ghosts.

  Seepy and Harris were clearly disappointed. While they pawed through the dusty books and papers, looking for some trace of the paranormal, Rhodes looked at the closet. He’d check it out, but he didn’t expect to find anything other than more old papers and books.

  He went past the boxes and took hold of the knob on the closet door. It was covered with dust. The rusty mechanism squeaked when Rhodes turned the knob. He pulled the door open, and two rats even bigger than the one on the stairs jumped out and ran across the dusty floor and through the doorway.

  Rhodes shined his light into the closet and saw just one thing: a human skeleton.

  Chapter 14

  There was more than just a skeleton, but not much more. Some bits of what appeared to be dried flesh clung to it, but the rats had done away with most of it over the years. Or something had. Natural decomposition, maybe. Rhodes shined the light around the closet, but he saw nothing else other than dust and rat droppings. Small pieces of what might have once been clothing lay on the floor. And there was something else.

  Rhodes turned around to see Harris and Seepy standing there.

  “The EMF meter’s going crazy,” Seepy said. “What’s in the closet?”

  “Take a look,” Rhodes said. “Don’t touch anything.”

  Seepy stepped past him and directed his own beam into the closet. “Good grief! That looks like a skeleton.”

  “It is a skeleton,” Rhodes said.

  Seepy backed away, but he had out his phone and was taking pictures.

  “Look at this,” Harris said to them.

  He handed the EMF meter to Rhodes. The reading had dropped well below ten.

  “Have you noticed that it’s warmer in here now?” Harris asked.

  Rhodes nodded. The house did seem warmer, but they were on an upper floor that still held more of the heat of the day than the lower levels. The prickly feeling at the back of his neck was gone, too, but he didn’t try to explain that to himself. He didn’t try to explain the rat, either. It was just a rat, after all.

  Seepy joined them and looked at the meter. “The ghost is gone now, that’s all.” He sounded relieved. “It served its purpose. It was calling to us so we’d find this skeleton.” He paused. “A skeleton in a closet. Our first success is a cliché, but I’ll take it. How would a skeleton get here?”

  “Good question,” Rhodes said.

  “Are you certain it’s even real?”

  “It looks real enough. I’ll find out for sure.”

  It was always possible that the skeleton wasn’t real, or that if it was, it had been put into the closet years ago as some kind of bizarre practical joke. Who would the joke be on, though? How long had the skeleton lain there undiscovered?

  “What will you do when you find out if it’s real?” Harris asked.

  “I’ll think of something,” Rhodes said, hoping that he would.

  “You need to find out whose skeleton it is,” Seepy said. “Or was. Whatever.”

  “I don’t know if we can do that.”

  “Maybe Harry and I can. We haven’t really thought about communicating with the spirits of the dead, but we could try.”

  “The spirit is gone,” Harris said. “It led us here, and then it was free. Wordsworth was wrong. This ghost forced its way to us. It wanted us to find the skeleton. We’ve done what it wanted, and it’s gone.”

  “We may have found the skeleton,” Rhodes said, “but there’s a lot more to do.”

  “Who you gonna call?” Seepy asked.

  “Not the Ghostbusters,” Rhodes said, “and not CPI. This is going to be a criminal investigation, not a paranormal investigation.”

  “If it hadn’t been for the paranormal investigation,” Seepy said, “you wouldn’t even have found the skeleton. You didn’t even look in the attic. Not that I’m going to point that out to anybody.”

  Rhodes hated to admit it, but Seepy had a point. However, he also thought that he’d eventually have investigated the attic on his own. He just hadn’t gotten around to it yet, not that there was any use in telling that to Seepy. He’d never believe it.

  “You’ve been a big help,” Rhodes said, “but now you need to drop out of the picture. There aren’t any more ghosts for you to find. Your own EMF meter tells you that.”

  “He’s right,” Harris said. “It’s not showing anything unusual at all.”

  Rhodes didn’t believe that ghosts were the cause of the EMF meter reading, but he was glad that Benton and Harris seemed to if it made it easier to convince them to leave.

  “You two go on home,” he said. “If I need any paranormal help, you’ll be the first ones I’ll call.”

  “How about an endorsement,” Seepy said. “Something for our ads. We’re going to have them starting tomorrow on Jennifer Loam’s Web site. We could put, ‘Sheriff Dan Rhodes says he’ll take care of the normal investigations and leave the paranormal to us.’ That’s what you said, isn’t it?”

  “More or less, but I’m not giving you permission to use my name. As a county official, I can’t give out endorsements.”

  “We could just say ‘Certain county officials who must remain nameless.’”

  “Don’t,” Rhodes said. “Just go home.”

  “Okay, but how about this: I’ll leak the story to Jennifer Loam. ‘Intrepid paranormal investigators aid sheriff in finding skeleton in closet.’ We could reenact it right now. I could do a video on my phone while Harry lights it with his flashlight. Very spooky and thrilling. You need to act surprised when you see the skeleton, but I know you can do it.”

  “Maybe I can, but I won’t.”

  “The story’s going to get out. You might as well make the most of it.”

  “You mean you might as well make the most of it.”

  “Well, it would help get our business off to a great start. We’ll be getting calls from all over the county. The state, too. The nation.”

  “Tomorrow, the world,” Rhodes said.

  Seepy smiled. “Why not?”

  “Does the phrase ‘delusions of grandeur’ ring a bell?”

  “We’ll see,” Seepy said. “We’ll see.”

  “I hope you can sleep tonight,” Rhodes said. “Your head might be too big for your pillow. Now go on home.”

  Seepy and Harris lingered for a few seconds, but they didn’t argue anymore. Before they left, however, Seepy had one more thing to say. “That’s the skeleton of a woman, by the way. You can tell by the pelvic structure.”

  Rhodes didn’t argue, and Benton and Harris went back downstairs, leaving Rhodes alone with the skeleton. He shined his light on it and wondered how long it had been there and who it had once inhabited. He was going to need more help than the county could provide to get the answers he was looking for. Dr. White was fine for autopsies, but he wasn’t a forensic scientist. The skeleton would have to go to the state lab for testing.

  Rhodes considered calling Hack and having him send the EMTs to get the skeleton, but he thought better of it. He got out his phone. He’d make the call himself. Hack would ask too many questions.

  After making the call, Rhodes examined the skeleton more closely. He could see that the skeleton was really just a collection of bones, not anything that was likely to get up and dance around like one of the skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts. While it looked intact lying on the floor of the closet, there was nothing to hold the bones together. The ligaments had decomposed or been eaten by rats. Rhodes couldn’t tell by the light of the flashlight, but the state lab would be able to tell whether the bones had been gnawed.

  Rhodes didn’t need the lab to tell him the cause of death. Taking a closer look, he saw that the skull was indented and cracked as if it had been struck with something. Maybe the state lab
could come up with an answer on what the something had been, or maybe it would just be called a blunt instrument if the lab folks liked to stick with the classics.

  Rhodes took photos of the skeleton, and when he was finished, he got an evidence bag from his car for the scraps of cloth. Once they were bagged, he looked around the attic again. He didn’t find anything of interest. The boxes weren’t going to be of any help, but they’d all have to be examined more closely anyway. Rhodes would have someone pick them up the next day.

  When the EMTs arrived, Rhodes went down to explain the situation to them. They weren’t used to dealing with skeletons, but he wanted them to take the bones to Ballinger’s Funeral Home, to be prepared for transportation to the state lab. They’d be better at handling the bones than Rhodes would.

  The bones were loaded into the ambulance, and Rhodes followed it to the funeral home, which had once been a mansion owned by one of Clearview’s prominent families. The family was now pretty much forgotten, and only the older people in town or the younger ones interested in the community’s history knew that the old mansion had once been home to a family at all. For more than sixty years now it had been a funeral home, and most people thought it always had been. Rhodes wondered if there was some kind of moral there, but he couldn’t think of one.

  Clyde Ballinger lived in a small brick building in back that had been the servants’ quarters when the mansion was built. Clyde was a bachelor, and the little two-story building had all the room he needed.

  Rhodes knew Ballinger would have been alerted by the EMTs about the arrival of the bones. Sure enough, he greeted the ambulance and directed their proper storage. Then he joined Rhodes, who was waiting for him in the apartment.

  “Read any good books lately?” Rhodes asked, nodding at the stack of paperbacks on the desk.

  “A few,” Ballinger said. “I quit reading on the tablet. It just wasn’t the same. I missed holding the books. I even missed the smell of them.”

  Ballinger’s taste ran to older books, preferably crime novels with lurid covers and titles like You’ll Die Next! The books had become harder and harder to find, but Ballinger had discovered that many of them were being republished in electronic form, so he’d been reading on a tablet computer.

  “Here’s the thing,” Ballinger said. “It’s not as much fun buying the books online as it was finding them at garage sales, but at least they’re real books. You know?”

  Rhodes didn’t know, not being addicted to books himself, but he agreed with Ballinger that you couldn’t beat the real thing.

  “You take skeletons,” Ballinger said, reaching into his pile of books. “Back in the old days, they liked to put skeletons on the covers of books. Like this one.”

  He handed Rhodes a copy of a book called The Skeleton in the Clock by someone named Carter Dickson. On the cover a young woman wearing a green blouse and a skirt with what looked to Rhodes like a sixteen-inch waist was staring at a grandfather clock that contained a skeleton. The skeleton was intact and standing inside the clock. It looked nothing like the skeleton Rhodes had found in the closet at the Moore house, and Rhodes’s waist looked nothing like the woman’s.

  Rhodes passed the book back to Ballinger. “Maybe I should read it. It might help me solve my own skeleton problem.”

  “I doubt it,” Ballinger said, putting the book back in the stack. “It’s a complicated story. Not my usual kind of thing. It’s like your problem in a way, though, since it has to do with a bet about spending a night in an old prison where a lot of executions took place. Not exactly a haunted house, but close enough, I guess.”

  “The skeleton I found was in a closet,” Rhodes said, “not a clock.”

  “Still close enough. Any idea whose skeleton you found?”

  “Not a one. I hope the state lab can help me out. I’ll call them tomorrow, and we’ll work out transportation. What about Neil Foshee? Did Dr. White come in and do the autopsy?”

  “Came in this afternoon,” Ballinger said. He opened a desk drawer and took out some papers. “Here’s the report.”

  Rhodes glanced through the report but didn’t see anything unexpected. Cause of death was a bullet to the heart. Dr. White had extracted the slug, a .38, which he’d bagged. The bag was attached to the report.

  “Any idea who killed him?” Ballinger asked.

  “Not yet,” Rhodes said. “I’m working on it.”

  “Does it have anything to do with that skeleton?”

  “I don’t see how,” Rhodes said.

  * * *

  Rhodes stopped by the jail after leaving the funeral home. He wanted to write up the report on the skeleton. He wasn’t surprised when he found Jennifer Loam waiting for him. He put the bag of scraps in the evidence room and then greeted Jennifer.

  “Seepy Benton called you, I guess,” Rhodes said.

  “He did,” Jennifer said, “but he told me I’d have to talk to you before the story could be released. I knew you’d come in to write a report, so I stopped in to wait.” She glanced at Hack. “I filled Mr. Jensen in on things. He claims that nobody around here ever tells him anything.”

  “Dang right, they don’t,” Hack said. “I might’ve found out next week or next month or whenever you put it on the Internet, but that’s the only way.”

  Rhodes didn’t bother to contradict him.

  “I want to be sure I have the details right before I run anything,” Jennifer said. “It’s too bad there’s no video.”

  Rhodes didn’t think it was too bad at all, but he didn’t mention that. He said, “Tell me what you know. I’ll correct you if you’re wrong.”

  Jennifer went through the story, reading from notes on a tablet computer. Seepy had been thorough, and of course he’d thrown in a lot of details about how he and Harris had been investigating the paranormal aspects of the Moore house and how their EMF meter had revealed the presence of a restless spirit inside, a restless spirit that had led them to the skeleton in the closet. He’d made it sound as if Rhodes had asked for the assistance of the intrepid investigators of CPI, and Rhodes let that stand. It made it appear that he knew what he was doing instead of having neglected to search the closet in the first place.

  “That sounds about right,” he said when Jennifer had finished. “There’s a lot of emphasis on a ghost, though. I didn’t see any ghost. Nobody else did, either. All I saw was some rats. If Seepy wants to believe that a ghost led us to the skeleton, that’s all right, but don’t say that I believed it.”

  “You ought to,” Hack said. “What about all that gettin’ cold and then warm? What about that meter thing? Sounds like a ghost to me.”

  Rhodes didn’t say anything about the prickly feeling on the back of his neck or about the slamming door. He didn’t want to encourage Hack, not that he needed any encouragement.

  “It wasn’t a ghost,” Rhodes said, but by this point he was beginning to wonder. “When Andy comes in tomorrow, have him go over to the house and look through those boxes in the attic. Did Mika come by this afternoon?”

  “Yeah, she was here. Did some work on the bags, lookin’ for prints. She wrote up a report for you. It don’t say much. All the prints were smeared because of all the grease on the bags and the fingers of whoever touched ’em. She got one or two that might do to look for a match with.”

  “We’ll have her check them against the prints of the Foshee boys first,” Rhodes said. “They’re probably the ones who were eating that stuff. Did Wade Clement bring by his sidearm?”

  “Sure did. It’s a Glock automatic. Nine millimeter.”

  Since Foshee had been killed with a .38, that would seem to let Wade off the hook, but Rhodes wasn’t going to rule him out.

  “We’ll hang on to it for a while,” Rhodes said. “Tell Mika to check the registration along with those others I asked for. Tell her that I want her to examine the cloth in the evidence bag I brought in, too. Maybe she can tell what it is or give a guess as to how old it is. After that she can go through the r
ecords for the past forty years and look for missing persons reports.”

  “We don’t have a lot of folks goin’ missin’,” Hack said. “I could probably tell you most of ’em myself.”

  He probably could, Rhodes thought. “What about any around the time when Ralph Moore died?”

  Hack thought it over. “Nothin’ comes to me. It’d be a big deal if somebody disappeared. In the papers and all over town. I’ll think about it tonight and see if I can come up with anything.”

  “Ask Lawton, too.”

  “Lawton? Why’d I ask him? He can’t even remember his own phone number, much less his birthday. I’m surprised he can find his way here. He—”

  “Ask him anyway,” Rhodes said.

  Hack didn’t respond, unhappy at being cut off in midrant, but Rhodes knew he’d talk to Lawton about it.

  “Do you have any suspects in Neil Foshee’s murder, Sheriff?” Jennifer asked.

  “None that I can talk about,” Rhodes said.

  “That’s how he is,” Hack said. “Won’t tell you anything. Closemouthed, just like I was tellin’ you.”

  “Just doing my job,” Rhodes said. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to write up my report on the skeleton and then go home and try to get some sleep.”

  “Good luck with that,” Hack said.

  * * *

  Rhodes’s sleep for the rest of the night wasn’t interrupted by any calls from the jail, but Rhodes was restless because he couldn’t stop thinking about Foshee’s death and how it might have come about.

  Ace Gable just might be temperamental enough to try to do something about Foshee after he’d come into the store and pestered Vicki. He did have a record for assault on someone who’d bothered his date. The incident was long ago, but it was still an indicator of a temper.

  Vicki herself didn’t seem to be a killer, but Rhodes knew better than to rule anybody out of an investigation. He’d learned that most people were capable of just about anything, given the right circumstances. Vicki might well have wanted to get Foshee out of her life forever. He was a bad memory she didn’t need to have hanging around.