Ghost of a Chance

by Bill Crider

  There was no one standing anywhere around now, and Rhodes didn’t even see any other cars on the street.

  He drove on to the cemetery and went straight in through the wide-open gates. The road was lined with crepe myrtle trees that had been severely trimmed. They’d be blooming in another few months, but now they were stark and bare. The cedars farther from the road were green, and so were the oaks, but they looked black in the gloom of the day. A lightning flash threw shadows on the road, and thunder shook the car.

  Rhodes didn’t know exactly where the grave he was looking for was located, but he thought it would be easy to find. And it was. There was a canopy set up off to the right, and Rhodes turned in that direction.

  He stopped the car behind a black Cadillac from which Clyde Ballinger emerged, raising a huge black umbrella over his head. Rhodes got out and joined him.

  “Nice day,” Ballinger said.

  Ballinger wore a black suit, a white shirt, a black tie, and shiny black shoes that had just a little bit of mud on them. He was smiling and cheerful, as he usually was, and he didn’t look like an undertaker, or a funeral director, as they were called these days. Or maybe that was out of fashion, too. For all Rhodes knew they were called “grief managers.”

  “Perfect,” Rhodes said. “It just doesn’t get any better than this.”

  A drop of cold rain got under his raincoat collar and rolled down his neck. Rhodes hated umbrellas, and he hated hats. He thought he was probably the only sheriff in all of Texas’ two hundred and fifty-four counties who didn’t own a Stetson. Usually he didn’t regret that fact. Today, he did.

  “Let’s go see what the trouble is,” he said.

  They walked across the wet grass to the dark green canopy. The bottoms of Rhodes’s pants legs got heavier with every step.

  The ground under the canopy had been spread with fake grass of an odd light green color more likely to be found on the floor of a domed stadium than anywhere outside. It was just as wet as the real thing, however.

  A nearby mound of dirt was also discreetly covered with the fake grass, but Rhodes could smell the rooty odor of newly dug earth. Folding chairs were lined up for the mourners to sit in. The wind flapped the edges of the canopy, but at least it was a little drier under there. The rain pounded on the canvas over their heads.

  “I came out here to check on things,” Ballinger said. He folded the umbrella and shook off some of the raindrops. “The way I always do. That’s when I found him.”

  “Who?” Rhodes asked.

  “Whoever’s in that grave. I couldn’t tell who it was, and I didn’t want to find out. I figure that’s what the county pays you the big bucks to do.”

  Rhodes stepped over to the grave and looked. There was a man lying face down at the bottom.

  Lightning ripped across the sky and thunder rolled. Rhodes felt for just a second as if he’d stumbled onto the set of an old Universal horror movie from the 1940s. He looked out through the rain, half expecting to see Lon Chaney, Jr., slink across the graveyard and skulk behind an obelisk to wait for the rising of the full moon.

  He didn’t see Chaney, but he did see someone.

  The cemetery was on a hill, and as Rhodes looked down toward the bottom, past all the tombstones, he saw someone, or something, run out of the trees. Because of the rain and the sooty darkness of the sky, he couldn’t be sure who or what it was. It flickered out of the trees and into a clearing, followed closely by another shadowy figure, and then the two of them disappeared into the trees again.

  “This is supposed to be Travis McCoy’s grave,” Ballinger said. “His wife requested a hand-dug grave, and that’s what she got. We did the job and got everything set up late yesterday because of the weather forecast.”

  “Do you see anything down there?” Rhodes asked, pointing toward the clearing.

  “Just the railroad tracks, and they’ve been there since long before I was born. Why?”

  “I thought I saw somebody run out of the trees on this side of the tracks.”

  “Not in this weather. Who’d be out on a day like this? Except us, and we have to be here, or at least you do. Anyway, I was telling you about this grave. It’s for Travis McCoy.”

  McCoy had been a retired schoolteacher. Rhodes hadn’t known him very well, though the newspaper had said he was very popular with his students. Rhodes looked at the stone at the head of the grave. The inscription on one side of it said:

  TRAVIS MCCOY

  June 23, 1919

  March 1, 1999

  The other side of the stone read:

  ELIZABETH GATLIN MCCOY

  January 5, 1920

  Second date pending, Rhodes thought, not certain what was making him so morbid. Maybe it was the ghost in the jail.

  Or maybe it was the dead man who was lying there in the wrong grave.

  Rhodes wondered how he was going to get down in the grave and have a look at the body. The weather had already played havoc with the crime scene, but he didn’t want to do any more damage than necessary.

  “The McCoy funeral’s at two,” Ballinger said. “Not that I’m rushing you, but it’s already past eleven o’clock.”

  “Don’t worry,” Rhodes said. “I’m not rushing.”

  He sat on the edge of the grave, wondering how he’d ever get the mud out of his pants and raincoat, and slid down. He managed to land on his feet at the bottom. His shoes slipped on the slick earth, but he was able to avoid stepping on the body, which was that of a short, thin man wearing jeans, leather hiking shoes, and a camo windbreaker.

  As far as Rhodes could see there were no clues lying there, so he turned the body over and looked at its face.

  “It’s Ty Berry,” he said, without surprise.

  “Oh, Lord,” Ballinger said. “Tell me he died of a heart attack.”

  “I could tell you that, but it wouldn’t be the truth.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because somebody shot him,” Rhodes said.

  3

  TY BERRY WAS, OR HAD BEEN, THE PRESIDENT OF THE Clearview Sons and Daughters of Texas, a group devoted to the preservation of landmarks and the history of Clearview and Blacklin County. Berry himself had been interested in every aspect of the county’s past. No detail had been too trivial or obscure for his attention.

  Rhodes had attended a recent meeting of the county commissioners at which Berry had been accused by one of them of having far too much love for anything in the county that was old and useless.

  Berry had given him a cold look and said, “There are some old, useless men I don’t love. Some of them I don’t even like very much.”

  The commissioner hadn’t been amused, and he hadn’t done much in the way of supporting Berry’s latest project, which had been increasing the protection of all the cemeteries in Blacklin county, including the one located within the Clearview city limits.

  Berry had brought the presidents of twelve different cemetery associations with him to the meeting. Each of them represented one of the small private cemeteries that were scattered over the county, and all had the same complaint: someone had been looting their cemeteries, stealing statues, urns, and even obelisks, stelae, and tombstones.

  The commissioners were skeptical. Some of them appeared to think that the losses were due to something like the natural deterioration of materials.

  “If people stole that kind of stuff, what would they do with it?” Jay Bowman had asked.

  Bowman was a big, red-faced man who represented Precinct Four, which contained three of the cemeteries represented by the association presidents who were there.

  “Sell it,” Berry said.

  “Those markers all have names on them,” Bowman said. “Who’d buy them?”

  “They sand off the names and dates,” Berry said. “Then they sell them at flea markets.”

  Bowman shook his head as if he were having a hard time believing what he was hearing.

  “I don’t get it. Who’d want anything like that?”


  “You’d be surprised,” Berry said.

  “Probably. But what about that other stuff you were telling us about? Urns, statues, things like that. People really buy that?”

  “Yes,” Berry said. “But not always at flea markets. Some of those items are valuable as antiques. People even use them to decorate their homes.”

  “Cemetery chic,” said Jerry Purcell from Precinct Three.

  Purcell was tall and skinny and had a face webbed by a thousand wrinkles, give or take ten or twelve. His fingers worked constantly as he sat at the table because when he wasn’t smoking a cigarette, he couldn’t figure out what to do with his hands. And there was no smoking allowed in the meeting room, or any of the rooms in county buildings.

  “You could call it that,” Berry said.

  “I can see how people could take things from the county cemeteries,” Bowman said. “But the one in Clearview’s right in town. It has gates on it. And a caretaker.”

  “Makes no difference,” Berry said. “The gates are never locked, day or night. I’ve never even seen them closed. And the caretaker doesn’t live there anymore. There hasn’t been anyone living on the grounds there in years. People go in and out at all hours.”

  Rhodes knew that was true. The deputies tried to patrol the place, especially on weekends, to keep out the local teenagers who found it a nice, quiet place to park. That was one thing that hadn’t changed in Clearview. Rhodes could remember having parked there a time or two himself, a long time ago.

  “So what do you want us to do about all this?” Purcell asked.

  “I want you to have the sheriff put a stop to it,” Berry said, which was exactly what Rhodes had been expecting.

  The trouble was, it wouldn’t be possible, not unless he got very lucky or unless the commissioners hired ten or eleven more deputies, neither of which was the least bit likely. There were so many little cemeteries sprinkled around the county that it would be impossible even to visit all of them on any particular night, and leaving a deputy on watch at one of them for any extended period of time would deprive some other part of the county of an expected patrol.

  That was the way the commissioners saw it, too, and Berry had been quite upset. But he’d behaved himself well. He hadn’t shouted or made any other demands. Instead he’d simply said that he’d patrol the cemeteries himself. Six of the cemetery association presidents had said they’d do the same, and the other six had promised that, while they wouldn’t be going out on patrol themselves, they had people in the association who’d be more than glad to do so.

  Rhodes knew that at least some of those who set themselves up as cemetery guardians would be armed, most of them legally so, thanks to the fact that it was now legal to carry concealed firearms in Texas, just as long as the carrier had been through the proper course of education. Rhodes figured that was just what the county needed: cemetery vigilantes.

  He’d recommended that the sheriff’s office be given a little time to try to put a stop to things, but that hadn’t satisfied Berry.

  “You haven’t done anything in the last six months,” he said. “In six more, there won’t be a statue or an urn left in the county. In a year, there might not be any gravestones.”

  Rhodes thought that was a pretty big exaggeration, and he was sure Berry knew it was, too. Not that it made any difference.

  “It’s a free country,” Berry said. “At least it used to be. If we want to drive past the cemeteries at night, we have a right to do it.”

  Rhodes couldn’t argue with that, or he hadn’t thought he could at the time.

  Now that it was too late, he wished he had. Maybe if he’d argued, Berry wouldn’t be lying there at his feet in an open grave that was meant for someone else.

  Rhodes looked at Berry’s face. The worry line that Rhodes remembered being between his eyebrows was still there, but right at the top of it was a small hole, probably made by a .22-caliber bullet. There was no exit wound. A .22 was likely just to rattle around inside the skull, scrambling the brain like a skillet full of eggs until it slowed to a stop.

  Rhodes scanned the ground around the body, but he didn’t see anything that looked like a clue to who had killed Berry, or why. He bent down and lifted the body to look beneath it. Berry’s body was light as a child’s.

  There was nothing on the ground, so Rhodes lowered the body and looked up at Ballinger.

  “Help me out of here,” he said, putting up a dirty hand.

  Ballinger backed away a step. “You might pull me down in there with you. I have some men on the way. They’ll help you out.”

  Rhodes didn’t mind the wait. He used the time to examine Berry’s clothing and the slick walls of the grave. He didn’t find anything resembling a clue, though he did locate Berry’s wallet and pickup keys, both of which seemed to rule out robbery as a motive. Rhodes could see at the top edge of the grave a place where the dirt was disturbed. Berry had probably been standing there when he’d been shot.

  After about five minutes Rhodes heard a vehicle pull to a stop nearby. Two doors slammed, and two men came over to the grave.

  “The sheriff’s down there,” Ballinger told them. “Along with that body I told you about. He needs a little help to get out. The sheriff, not the body.”

  One of the men stepped over and looked down at Rhodes.

  “Hey, Sheriff,” he said. “Who else is that down there with you?”

  Rhodes didn’t recognize the man. He said, “It’s Ty Berry. How about getting us out of here?”

  “Him first,” the man said.

  Rhodes lifted Berry up easily enough, and Ballinger’s two helpers pulled him up to ground level, where they laid him on a gurney they’d brought with them. They’d worked for Ballinger long enough to be almost casual about it.

  When they had things arranged to their satisfaction, they returned to the grave and helped Rhodes climb out. By the time he reached the top, his shoes were covered with mud, which he tracked on the fake grass.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Ballinger said. “I’ll get it cleaned off before the funeral.”

  His helpers pushed the gurney over to the hearse. They’d put the body in a plastic bag, so it wasn’t getting rained on. Rhodes could hear the rain popping against the plastic.

  “You want me to call Dr. White?” Ballinger asked.

  White did autopsies for the county. Rhodes told Ballinger to make the call.

  “What about Berry’s family?”

  Berry had been a lifelong bachelor, but he probably had relatives who would have to be notified. Rhodes dreaded making the call, but since he was the one who’d have to find out who the relatives were, he was the logical one to do the calling.

  “I’ll take care of that part,” Rhodes said.

  “What about the McCoy funeral?” Ballinger wanted to know. “Can we go ahead with it?”

  Rhodes didn’t think there was anything in the grave that would help him, and there was no trace of any other evidence that he could see. There was no .22 casing lying on the fake grass, no footprints except for those left by Berry as he fell, no sign that anyone had been there at all.

  “Sure,” Rhodes said. “Go ahead.”

  “All right. If you say so. I hope Miz McCoy isn’t too upset by all this.”

  That wasn’t Rhodes’s problem, and he was sure Ballinger was capable of dealing with it. Then something else occurred to him, something he should have thought of earlier.

  “I wonder where Berry’s truck is,” he said.

  “I didn’t think about that,” Ballinger said. “He had to get here somehow, though. Maybe he rode with somebody. Or maybe he walked.”

  “I’ll have a look around,” Rhodes said. “You can go on and take care of Mrs. McCoy. And thanks for giving me a call about this.”

  “Just doing my duty as a citizen.”

  Ballinger raised his umbrella and stepped out from under the tent. He got into his Cadillac and followed the black hearse as it drove away through the rain.<
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  4

  RHODES DIDN’T OWN A STETSON, BUT HE DID HAVE AN old fishing hat that he kept in the trunk of the county car in case of emergency. The rain hadn’t slacked off at all, and that was enough of an emergency for Rhodes. He opened the trunk and rummaged under a set of jumper cables. After a second, he dragged out the crumpled hat and jammed it firmly down on his head.

  He looked back down the hill, but no mysterious figures slunk out of the trees.

  Maybe I was just imagining things, he thought, though it had certainly seemed he’d seen something down there.

  Whatever it had been, he didn’t have time to wonder about it now. He sloshed off through the rain to have a look around the cemetery, which he’d always found an interesting place. He could see why Ty Berry didn’t want anything to happen to it.

  Or anything more. Off to Rhodes’s right there was a mildew-streaked pedestal on which a marble angel had once stood. The angel was no longer there, and it hadn’t flown away by itself. It had received a little help from whoever was looting the county’s graveyards.

  Rhodes brushed rain off his forehead. Farther up the road there was a semicircle of Greek columns that indicated the area where the members of the Pooley family were buried. The family had made its money during the oil years, but there were no Pooleys left in Clearview now, not counting those who were under the ground. The ones who were still alive had all moved to Dallas and Houston, where they lived in big houses, drove big cars, and hardly ever returned to the place where the family fortune had been made.

  Rhodes figured he’d be hearing from some of them the next time they were in town, however, since within the last few months someone had stolen a couple of urns and a concrete bench from the Pooley tract.

  Rhodes turned right and walked toward the place where the caretaker’s house had once stood. It had been replaced years ago by a concrete-block storage building that held groundskeeping equipment and supplies: mowers, weed whackers, tree trimmers, fertilizer, weed killer, hoses.