by Bill Crider
“Up to Obert,” Rhodes said.
“Yes. It’s a very small place, isn’t it.”
“Maybe two hundred people if you count the ones on the farms around it,” Rhodes said.
“Yes. There was only one store that I saw, and a Post Office. And not very many lights in the houses. It was very lonesome up on that hill.”
Rhodes could understand how Brame felt, coming from Houston where there were traffic and lights at all hours of the night. Up on Obert’s Hill, where the college campus was located, it would seem very quiet and dark to a city boy.
“I located Simon’s house,” Brame said, “or at least I think it was his house. It was right next to one of the college buildings.”
“That’s where he lived,” Rhodes said. “In the old President’s House. It’s the only one that’s been fully restored.”
“That was the place, then,” Brame said. “But there was no one there. I knocked and knocked, but no one came, and there were no lights.”
“People go to bed early in the country,” Hack said from across the room.
“Yes, I’m sure they do,” Brame said. “But then I noticed lights in the old Main Building.”
“Are you sure?” Rhodes said. “I don’t think there’s been too much work done on it since they gutted it.”
“I wouldn’t know about that,” Brame said. “All I know is what I saw.”
“Lights,” Rhodes said.
“Yes, but not lights like the ones you have in here. Not room lights. These lights were moving. I could see them through the windows.”
“Oh,” Rhodes said. He had a feeling they were getting to the point now. “You mean like flashlights.”
“No,” Brame said. “I don’t mean like flashlights, at least not like flashlights held by normal people. I’m not a flighty person, Sheriff, but what I saw gave me a shiver. That’s why I’m here.”
“All right,” Rhodes said. “Tell me what you saw.”
“Very well. The lights were moving, as I said, but not as if they were being carried. One of them rose through the air very quickly until it was quite high up. Then it spun around and around and shot across the room. I could see it flying past several of the windows. Then it went out.”
“And you thought about ghosts,” Rhodes said.
Brame nodded. “Yes. But it wasn’t just the lights that made me think that way.”
“What else was there?”
“There were the noises.”
“What kind of noises?”
“Just… noises. I wouldn’t call them screams, but they could have been. Very loud groans, perhaps.”
“Like the noises a ghost might make,” Rhodes said.
Brame looked at him to see if he might be poking fun, but Rhodes’ face was serious.
“Yes,” Brame said. “Like the noises a ghost might make. I know it’s not ghosts, of course, but something strange is going on out there. So I drove back here and asked where the Sheriff’s Office was.”
“You did the right thing,” Rhodes said. “I guess we’ll have to go out there and have a look. What kind of car are you driving?”
“A black Volvo,” Brame said.
That would have cinched it even if it hadn’t been for the clothes. No one in Blacklin County owned a Volvo.
“All right,” Rhodes said. “I’ll follow you out there.”
“Very well,” Brame said. He got up. “Shall I get started?”
“Go ahead,” Rhodes said. “I’ll catch up with you.”
Hack and Lawton watched Brame walk to the door. This time he got a good grip on it, and the wind didn’t have a chance to shove it inward.
“Fancy little fella, ain’t he?” Hack said when the door closed behind Brame.
“Yeah,” Lawton said. “You reckon your computer can get in touch with the GCIC?”
“GCIC?” Hack said.
“Ghost Criminal Investigation Center,” Lawton said.
“God-dang you, Lawton,” Hack said. “It ain’t somethin’ to joke about.”
Lawton laughed. “I’ll tell you what else ain’t somethin’ to joke about.”
Hack’s anger died out as quickly as it had appeared. “What’s that?”
Lawton gestured to Rhodes. “Havin’ to call your new wife and tell her you won’t be home anytime soon.”
Rhodes looked at the telephone on his desk. Ivy had understood when she married him that he kept irregular hours, but that didn’t make calling her any easier.
“You want me and Hack to go lock ourselves in a cell for a while?” Lawton said. “Let you have a little privacy?”
“No,” Rhodes said. “You don’t need to do that.”
He reached for the phone.
Chapter 2
Rhodes followed Brame’s black Volvo out the Obert Road. The sky was heavily overcast, the night totally black, and the wind buffeted the county car. The tops of the trees by the roadside thrashed and twisted in the dark rush of air.
For two days the wind had blown from the north, bringing with it unseasonably cold weather. Rhodes knew that the county was going through the dreaded “Easter spell.” Every year it would seem that spring had arrived, with sunny days, singing birds, and blue skies; but every year Hack and Lawton would prophesy that there would be one more bad stretch of weather before summer. They called it the “Easter spell.” It was their conviction that the bad weather always coincided with the Easter weekend, and they were always correct, at least in their own opinions.
The fact that it was not Easter now, and that it would not be Easter for another two weeks, did not bother them. Any bad weather that came within two weeks of Easter was the Easter spell, and that was that. Rhodes had tried to argue that an Easter spell could come only at Easter, but they merely shook their heads in pity at his lack of understanding when it came to authentic weather lore.
Obert was not far, only about eight miles west of Clearview, and in a short time Rhodes was pulling up beside the Volvo in a graveled parking space near the main building of the college campus. Nearby there was a historical marker that gave some information about the college’s founding and about the construction of the main building, which was built of hand-cut native stone. Rhodes could not read the marker in the dark; he’d seen it several times before.
He got out of the county car and looked around, the wind tearing at his jacket and pants. Because Obert’s hill was one of the highest points between Houston and Dallas, it was also one of the windiest. On a clear day you could see for quite a distance from up there, but on a dark night like this one there wasn’t much to see.
The side of the main building loomed in front of Rhodes. The dark hulk was three stories tall, not counting the attic space. Considering that each floor had sixteen-foot ceilings, the building was impressively tall, easily one of the tallest in the county. No light glinted from the many windows, a lot of which were probably missing their panes.
Brame walked over and stood beside Rhodes.
“Where did you see the lights?” Rhodes said.
“In there,” Brame said. He stood almost at an angle, as if bracing himself against the wind, which was so strong Rhodes was surprised that it didn’t just pick Brame up and carry him away.
“Where in there?”
“On the third floor.”
“The third floor?” Rhodes said. Brame hadn’t mentioned that little fact earlier.
“Yes. My car was parked just about where it is now. I got out and walked to that house over there.” He pointed toward a freshly painted frame house that had probably been constructed in the 1920s, making it not nearly as old as the main building. “I knocked on the door, but no one came. I waited for a while, and then I came back to the car. That’s when I saw the lights.”
Rhodes was looking toward the house. There was an unattached garage about twenty yards away and to the back. There was some kind of vehicle parked in the garage, but Rhodes couldn’t tell what it was.
“Was there a car in the garage
when you knocked?” he said.
Brame couldn’t remember. He probably hadn’t even looked.
“There’s one there now,” Rhodes said. “We’d better try the house again. Mr. Graham’s probably just been out for a while.”
Rhodes got a flashlight out of his car, and he and Brame walked over to the house. Rhodes noticed again how short Brame was. Rhodes was about six feet, which he didn’t consider tall, not in Texas, but he towered over the book dealer.
Rhodes shined the light into the garage when they got to the house. There was a black Ford Lariat pickup parked inside. Rhodes could read a sticker on the chrome bumper: “Next to sex, I like LAS VEGAS best.”
They stepped up on the porch. The house was dark, but Rhodes knocked on the door facing. There was no answer from inside. They waited for a minute; then Rhodes knocked again. There was no answer that time, either.
“Those could have been prowlers that you saw in the main building,” Rhodes told Brame. “I guess that’s justification enough for me to enter. Maybe you’d better wait for me out here.”
Brame looked around. His face was a pale blur. “If it’s all the same to you, Sheriff, I think I’d like to come along. I don’t much like the idea of being out here all alone.”
“OK,” Rhodes said. “Come on.”
They left the porch of the house and walked around to the front of the main building. In spite of the fact that it wasn’t really spring yet, the grass was already in need of trimming and thick-stemmed weeds were proliferating.
The building was fronted by a long porch covered by a roof two stories above. The porch was lined with wooden columns that were really no more than four-by-fours. Rhodes wondered what had happened to the original columns.
Because the building had been erected long before anyone had thought about air-conditioning, there were high windows lining the front just as there were on the sides and back. Most of them were covered by tattered and rusting screens. There was a screen door in front of the wooden entrance door. The screen was closed, but the entrance door was slightly ajar.
“He hasn’t really kept the place up very well, has he?” Brame said.
“No,” Rhodes said, wondering about the door. He knew a little about the plans Graham had for the campus, since those plans had a tangential connection with an earlier murder case, and it was true that most of Graham’s grandiose schemes had never been realized. He had fixed up the house he lived in, but very little had ever been done to the other buildings. Even that didn’t account for the door’s being open, however.
“I wonder if he’ll ever finish this project?” Brame said. “It doesn’t seem as if he’s gotten very far.”
Rhodes didn’t answer. He pulled open the screen door and shined his light inside.
There was nothing much to see. No desks, no blackboards, no offices, no sign that the building had ever served as an educational institution. Only the main support walls remained, and the stairway.
“The door’s open,” Rhodes said. “That could mean that someone’s inside, or that someone’s been inside recently.” He was saying it as much for the record as anything, just in case his reason for entering the building ever came up. “I’ll go inside and investigate.” He looked at Brame. “You still want to come with me?”
“Not really,” Brame said. “But I don’t want to stand out here, either.”
Rhodes didn’t particularly blame him. The wind moaned around the old building and sang through its cracks and crevices. It shook and rattled the window panes. It was almost enough to make a man believe in ghosts, all right.
Rhodes went inside, shining his light ahead of him, chasing shadows across the floor. He was followed closely by the book dealer.
The stairs were covered by ragged carpeting that had needed replacement at the time the school closed so long before. It had not improved in the interval. It was a faded green, thick with dust.
“Walk over on this side,” Rhodes said, ascending next to the wall. He didn’t really expect that there might be footprints in the dusty carpet, but if there were they would probably be in the middle of the steps or on the side by the railing.
They stopped on the second floor, and Rhodes shone the light around. There were a few pieces of lumber on the floor, but they looked as if they had been there for years.
They went on up.
The third floor was different. It had been used as the chapel in the earliest days of the college, and there were no walls. The entire floor was one large room, and at one time there had been benches for the students to sit on while they received their daily dose of religion.
Now the floor was covered with boards, ropes, paint buckets, and disassembled scaffolding. The smell of paint lingered in the air. The restoration work, such as it was, had obviously begun on this floor.
Rhodes shined the light around carefully. It reflected back at him from window panes that had loosened in their frames over the years. They clattered in the wind.
“There doesn’t seem to be anyone up here,” Rhodes said. He couldn’t see any place in the room where someone could be hiding.
Brame seemed relieved. “Good. I was afraid—yaaaahhhh!”
The book dealer yelled and jumped so high that his head was nearly on a level with Rhodes’ own.
“What’s that?” Brame screamed, pointing into the darkness with one hand. The other was clutching Rhodes’ sleeve.
Rhodes swung the flashlight beam and it caught a rat scuttling across the back of the large room, looking for a place to hide. Dust motes stirred by the rat’s feet floated up through the beam of the flashlight. The rat disappeared behind a row of paint cans and collapsed scaffolding.
“He won’t bother us,” Rhodes said. He was about to turn and leave when for some reason he glanced up.
There was no ceiling on the room, just the bare rafters of the attic. The wind whined through small holes in the roof that had not been repaired and through which stars might have been visible on a different night. At the end of the room where the rat had disappeared, high in the dark, something moved.
Rhodes turned the light upward. It twinkled off the silver toe covers of a pair of cowboy boots before being absorbed by dark blue cloth. As the light moved up higher, Rhodes could see that a man’s body was dangling from the rafters.
“Jesus Christ,” Brame said.
The light hit the man’s face.
“It’s Simon,” Brame said. “Jesus Christ, it’s Simon.”
Rhodes had never met Simon Graham, but he had heard enough about the man to know that although he was a native of New Jersey, he always dressed like a professional Texan, and the man in the light’s beam certainly fit that part of the description. He was wearing the boots with their silver toe covers, boot-cut jeans, a dark shirt with a black string tie. He wasn’t wearing a hat.
There was a hangman’s noose around his neck, and his head was twisted at an odd angle. It was practically touching the rafter high above.
Rhodes followed the rope with his light. The other end was tied around the knob of a door in the back wall. Rhodes told himself that he should have noticed the rope before, but he’d been looking for prowlers, not a hanged man, and he’d only half-believed Brame’s story in the first place.
He believed it now, though. Or at least he believed something had gone on in the old building. He still wasn’t buying into the bit about the ghosts.
Brame was breathing hard, taking deep gulping breaths. “I never saw a dead man before,” he said between gulps.
“I’ll have to call in,” Rhodes said. “Do you want to come down with me?”
“You bet I do,” Brame said.
Two hours later, Graham had been declared dead by the Justice of the Peace, his body had been removed, and Rhodes, along with Deputy Ruth Grady, had set up portable lighting and done a thorough search of the room.
Among other things they had found Graham’s hat, a genuine gray Stetson, behind a stack of lumber not far from where he was hanging. He h
ad probably shaken it off. And they had found a flashlight partially submerged in a paint can.
“Do you think he threw it in there?” Ruth said. She was short and compact, a good officer, and had studied police science in a community college.
“I don’t think he could have done it if he’d been trying,” Rhodes said. He recounted Brame’s story of what he had seen through the windows. “He would have been struggling as he died, maybe spinning around, and the light could have flown out of his hands. It just happened to land in a can of paint.”
“So he decided at the last he didn’t want to die,” Ruth said. She had thought from the first that they were dealing with a suicide.
Rhodes wasn’t so sure.
“But it looks as if he stood on the scaffolding,” Ruth said. “Then he put the noose over his head and kicked the scaffolding over.”
It could have happened that way. The boards and metal joints of scaffolding were lying about where they would have fallen if Graham had done exactly what Ruth said.
“Maybe,” Rhodes said. “Or maybe someone just wanted it to look that way to us.”
Ruth admitted that he might have a point. “I guess we go on the assumption that it’s murder, then.”
Rhodes told her that they wouldn’t make any assumptions just yet. “We’ll have to find out what we can from whatever we find out here, and then get busy asking questions. I don’t see much that’s going to help us.” He looked at the scaffolding, the paint cans, the rope.
Ruth was hoping she could get some prints off the part of the flashlight’s handle that had not been in the paint and maybe some of the metal parts of the scaffolding. She wasn’t so hopeful about the rope.
Other than those three things, there seemed to be no sign that anyone had been in the room. The dust on the floor had been disturbed by the work that had gone on there recently, but there was nothing to indicate any other kind of disturbance.
“There doesn’t look as if there was much of a struggle,” Ruth said, still pursuing the suicide angle. “What would anyone else be doing up here? And why would anyone want to kill Simon Graham? Maybe it is just a simple suicide.”