by Bill Crider
Melva hadn’t mentioned knowing Ty Berry or being a member of the Sons and Daughters. But then Rhodes hadn’t thought to ask her. He’d have to remember to do something about that later. He’d told Buddy not to bother questioning her, and that might have been a mistake. Rhodes thought that he had been making too many mistakes lately.
He tried to see what she was wearing on her feet, but there were too many people between them. Rhodes was pretty sure you couldn’t get black fuzzy slippers, anyway.
Richard Rascoe was at the funeral, too. He came up to Rhodes and said, “I talked to Mr. Berry’s cousin earlier today and told her I’d ordered her an angel like the one you saw in my store. No charge. She’s going to have it put on Mr. Berry’s monument.”
Rhodes thought that was a nice gesture, but he wondered if it didn’t mean that Rascoe had known Berry better than he’d let on.
“Did you and Berry have any other dealings?” Rhodes asked.
“Oh, no. But he was so interested when he came in the store that we had a long talk. I was sorry to hear he’d been killed. It’s just a terrible thing. I hope you catch whoever did it. It’s not a good feeling to know things like that can happen in small communities like this.”
“I’m working on it,” Rhodes said.
Rascoe drifted off after that, and Rhodes walked over near the canopy while the minister read a psalm and some verses from the New Testament. Then there was a prayer, and it was all over. Rhodes offered his condolences to Berry’s cousin, Cathy Miller, who had sat dry-eyed through the service.
As soon as she turned away to speak to someone else, it occurred to Rhodes that he’d been lax again. He hadn’t considered the fact that Cathy Miller was probably Ty Berry’s sole heir. And Ty, who some years ago had retired early from some big chemical plant in south Texas before moving back to his hometown of Clearview, might have had a fairly sizable estate. That was one more thing for Rhodes to check into.
He walked over to say a word to Clyde Ballinger, who was hovering near the front of the canopy in case Ms. Miller needed his assistance. On his way over, Rhodes stooped down and picked up a couple of dark feathers and stuck them into one of the flower arrangements that had been placed nearby. Probably the wrong arrangement, but Rhodes wasn’t too worried about it.
“Any word from Dr. White?” Rhodes asked Ballinger.
The funeral director shook his head. “Not yet. He’ll get to Faye this evening, but it’s pretty obvious how she died. I don’t think he’s going to come up with any surprises.” Ballinger paused, then said, “It’s a terrible thing, losing two fine citizens like that so close together. Who’s going to take their place?”
Rhodes said he didn’t know.
“Me neither. Sometimes I wonder what’s going to happen to Clearview. It’s not like it used to be.”
Rhodes had been thinking the same thing a lot lately, but he didn’t feel like telling Ballinger that. He just shrugged.
“Things change,” he said.
“Never for the better, though,” Ballinger said.
“Maybe it just seems that way to us old guys,” Rhodes told him.
“What old guys?” Ballinger said, looking around. “I don’t see any old guys here.”
“Don’t I wish,” Rhodes said.
28
RHODES DIDN’T WAIT AROUND FOR THE LOWERING OF THE casket. It was past time for his visit with the Packers, and he wanted to get on the road. He told Ruth to follow him. He wanted backup, since you could never be sure what might be waiting for you when you went to the Packers’ place.
The Packers all lived out a mile or so from the tiny town of Obert on down the road from a man named Nard King, whom Rhodes had dealt with on another case, one that had involved, among other things, a couple of stolen emus.
Not so long ago, emus, and even fertile emu eggs, had been selling for astronomical prices. There were people who believed they were going to get rich raising and selling emus, and King was one of them. He’d moved to Blacklin County and built a new house alongside his new emu pens.
But he hadn’t gotten rich. Rhodes wasn’t sure that any of the emu farmers had. Emus turned out to be expensive to raise, and people like King, who’d thought emu steaks would soon be in high demand in restaurants all over the country, were amazed when the demand didn’t develop. Nor did the demand for the myriad other products that supposedly could be produced from emus. The promised emu boom never happened, and King’s new house was already looking old. His emu pens were empty. In a way, Rhodes felt sorry for the man, but when he remembered the circumstances of their meeting, he figured that King had probably gotten just about what he deserved.
There was no pickup parked in King’s garage, and the whole place had a deserted and neglected look about it. Rhodes wondered if King had simply abandoned the place, packed up, and left the country.
He followed the road on down for another quarter of a mile to where it joined another county road that branched off to the right. The two roads made a sort of irregularly shaped Y, and in the crotch of the Y lived the Packers.
Rhodes drove in between the two cedar trees that stood at either side of the ruts leading into the yard. Ruth Grady followed close behind him.
At the back of the lot, fenced with drooping barbed wire, was their house. The roof sagged, the brick walls were cracked, and one side of the garage had collapsed inward. The house had been built forty years earlier and left vacant for twenty years before the Packers had moved in.
But after a year or so there hadn’t been room for all of them in the house, and their dwellings had multiplied. To one side of the house there was a Winnebago that was never going to travel again. The tires had rotted off the wheels, which were sunk several inches into the ground. Most of the paint had long since disappeared, and the motor home seemed to be held together mainly by rust. The hood was up, but there was no engine inside the compartment. Both headlights were missing.
In front of the house was a double-wide mobile home in about the same condition as the Winnebago. The only difference was that the motor home was bigger and that it sat at a strange angle owing to the fact that concrete blocks had been slipped under one side of it before someone got too lazy to do the other side, the wheels of which, like those on the Winnebago, were sunk into the muddy yard.
An old Ford Thunderbird and two pickups sat in the yard. The pickups even looked as if they might run, but the Thunderbird wasn’t going anywhere. It was up on blocks, and Rhodes could see two tires in the back seat. There was nothing resembling the Dodge Ram Rhodes had seen at the cemetery.
The whole place was so overgrown with trees, bushes, and vines that in the summertime it almost disappeared from sight. You could drive right by it and not even know there were people living within fifteen yards of the road.
Rhodes got out of the county car, and Ruth Grady joined him. There was no one to be seen, but he knew they were there, watching him from the house, the motor home, and the double-wide.
There was no grass in the yard, and a bunch of runty white leghorns with dirty feathers pecked listlessly at the mud while a rooster strutted around watching them. There was a sour smell, as if the septic tank were overdue for emptying, or maybe there wasn’t a septic tank at all. Rhodes didn’t think he wanted to know.
“Ah, the greater metropolitan area,” Ruth said. “Sort of makes you want to move to the suburbs.”
“Henry David Thoreau would be proud,” Rhodes said.
He walked around the double-wide and went up to the house. There was a screen door hanging by one hinge. Rhodes moved it aside and knocked on the rotting facing.
The door opened and Rhodes found himself looking down at a boy of about five. His hair was slicked down, and he was so clean that he practically shone in the dim interior of the house. He had on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt that looked as if it had just come out of the dryer.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi,” Rhodes said. “Anyone else at home?”
“My m
ama’s here.”
“Would you tell her I’d like to see her?”
“Sure.”
The boy disappeared into the interior of the house.
“Wow,” Ruth said.
“Don’t be too impressed,” Rhodes said. “The boy’s a sure tip-off that they knew we were coming. They’re not taking any chances on us calling Child Protective Services.”
After a few seconds a woman came down the hall. She wasn’t as spiffy as the boy, but she wasn’t bad. And she wasn’t the woman who’d been at the cemetery. Rhodes was sure of that. She was too tall and too thin.
“Hey, Sheriff,” she said. “What can I do for you?”
Rhodes recognized her. She was Marlee, one of the daughters of old Abner Packer, who’d died a couple of years ago.
“I’d like to talk to Ferrell,” Rhodes said.
Ferrell was Marlee’s brother, the eldest of Abner’s sons.
“He ain’t around. Nobody here but me and Annie and the kids.”
The boy who had answered the door came up quietly behind her and stood there looking up at Rhodes.
“Tobe’s not here?” Rhodes said. “Roger? Dude?”
Those were the names of some of the Packer boys that he’d dealt with in the past. There were others he didn’t know.
“All gone,” Marlee said.
Rhodes wasn’t really surprised. They must have left the county, hoping he’d give up on them. But if that was what they hoped, they didn’t know him very well.
He was about to tell Marlee to give him a call when they got back when the boy said, “They’re in school.”
“School?” Rhodes said.
“You hush, Chris,” Marlee said, pushing the boy farther behind her.
“What school?” Rhodes asked.
“He doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Marlee said.
“Do so,” Chris said.
“No, you don’t,” Marlee said. “There’s no school around here for people like us.”
She turned around and pushed the boy down the hall, leaving the door open. Rhodes and Ruth waited for several minutes, but she didn’t come back.
“What was that all about?” Ruth asked after a while.
“I’m not sure,” Rhodes said. “But I do have an idea. Let’s go.”
They turned to leave, but Ruth tugged at Rhodes’s sleeve.
“Look,” she said, pointing.
There were freshly cut ruts in the mud beside the house, and the ruts led off into the trees in the back.
“Now, where do you suppose that track leads?” Ruth asked.
“I don’t know,” Rhodes said. “But I have an idea about that, too.”
“So do I,” Ruth said. “And I’ll bet it’s the same one.”
“Then we’d better find out,” Rhodes said.
They followed the ruts into the trees and out of them again into a field grown up in weeds. Another mobile home shell rusted in the field. The ruts cut through the weeds, up a hill, and straight through the barbed-wire fence. The fence hadn’t been cut. Someone had just driven right over it, pulling down the old cedar posts and crushing the barbed wire into the mud.
The ruts ran downhill from the fence, into more trees.
“Isn’t there a creek running along down there in those trees?” Ruth asked.
“Sandy Creek,” Rhodes said. “There’s a deep hole along in here somewhere that people used to come out and seine in the summer. That was a long time ago.”
“I’d like to see that hole,” Ruth said. “How deep would you say it is? Deep enough to cover a pickup truck?”
“It used to be. I’d guess it’s silted up a lot over the years.”
They walked down the hill and into the trees. It wasn’t far from the first of the trees to the creek bank, where the ruts turned off to the right.
“That hole must be in that direction,” Ruth said.
“I think that’s right,” Rhodes said.
They walked for about fifty yards. There was hardly any wind, and the trees were quiet. A little sunlight filtered through the leaves and speckled the muddy water. A turtle plopped off the bank with a splash. Suddenly the creek widened out.
“That’s the place,” Rhodes said.
“And it’s not as deep as somebody thought it was,” Ruth said. “Look.”
Rhodes looked. The ruts turned and went down the bank and into the creek. About ten inches of the top of a Dodge Ram pickup cab stuck out of the water.
“They’re no Eckstines,” Rhodes said.
“What?”
“Never mind. Looks like we both guessed right.”
“Looks like it,” Ruth said. “Now we know for sure who was shooting at us. So what do we do about it?”
“Go to school,” Rhodes said.
29
WHEN HE GOT BACK TO THE COUNTY CAR, RHODES CALLED Hack on the radio and told him to send Buddy Reynolds to pick up Burt Trask.
Rhodes hoped that if they picked up Trask, he’d think they knew more than they did about where he’d gotten the drugs. If he thought that, he might try to cut a deal by confirming Rhodes’s suspicions about the source.
“How much do we know about Trask?” Hack asked.
Rhodes didn’t want to give anything away, not on the radio. So he just said, “Enough.”
“Speaking of knowing,” Hack said, “since you didn’t ask, I guess you don’t want to hear what me and Buddy found out. I’ll just send him on his way.”
“Hold on,” Rhodes said. “Of course I want to know what you found out. I thought it might take you longer to analyze the information.”
“It’s just a bunch of names. How long could it take?”
“What I meant was I didn’t think Buddy would come up with anything this soon.”
“How do you know it was Buddy that came up with it? It could’ve been me.”
Rhodes got a tight grip on his patience and said, “Was it you?”
“Well, no, it wasn’t. It was Buddy. But it could’ve been me.”
“You’re right. I’m surprised it wasn’t, considering how smart you are. Now, are you going to tell me what it was, or are you going to make me come back to the jail?”
“I think you better come back here,” Hack said. “You wouldn’t want this goin’ out over the air.”
“Ruth and I have to go somewhere else,” Rhodes said. “I’ll get back there as soon as I can.”
“Where you gonna be?” Hack asked.
“I wouldn’t want that going out over the air,” Rhodes said.
The way Rhodes figured it, there was only one kind of school the Packers would be interested in attending, and that was the kind that might be run by a couple of guys like Rapper and Nellie. Rhodes had heard of a number of cases where people with the know-how were more than willing to teach others to use the Nazi cook method of making methamphetamine, but the tuition would be high. According to what Rhodes had read, it could run as high as ten thousand dollars a person, though Rapper might be willing to give group discounts to people like the Packers.
And of course the Packers, never having done an honest day’s work in their lives, would be ideal candidates for enrollment in a class on drug making. The only problem they’d have would be coming up with the tuition. As far as Rhodes knew, there weren’t any financial aid programs for courses in cooking up drugs. The Packers were, however, nothing if not resourceful. They’d figure out a way to get the money for the class, even if it meant stealing from cemeteries.
Burt Trask might be interested in attending class, too, but a guy like Burt would want to try the merchandise first. For all Rhodes knew, the Packers had tried it, too. Rapper wouldn’t mind giving out a free sample, not as long as he thought he had a prospective student on the hook.
Rhodes knew things might not work out to be exactly the way he had them figured, but it all seemed right to him. Drugs, Rapper, the Packers: it all fit.
And the idea of the classes fit, too. Rapper would be wary of selling drugs, c
onsidering his previous experiences, but he wouldn’t be doing the actual selling. He’d just be making them, in his newly created role of Professor of Kitchen Chemistry. He’d think that teaching others to make the drugs and then letting them take the risks of selling the final product would be a lot safer than selling them himself.
Naturally he’d think he could get away with it in Blacklin County. After all, he’d gotten away with just about everything else he’d tried there, if you didn’t count little things like a couple of missing fingers and a permanent limp.
Rhodes explained all that to Ruth, who agreed it made sense.
“And you think they’re out there at that house near Milsby, cooking up a batch right now?” she said.
“I’d say it’s a good possibility.”
“You want to go see if you’re right?”
“I can’t think of a better way to find out,” Rhodes said.
“Then let’s go.”
“We’ll take the shortcut,” Rhodes said.
There were two ways to get from Obert to Milsby. One of them was to go back to Clearview first, traveling only the highways. That was the easy way.
The shortcut, on the other hand, meant traveling on graveled county roads. It had the advantage of being considerably more scenic, and it didn’t take quite as long, unless you got behind someone driving a tractor or harvester, in which case it could take a lot longer. Rhodes thought it was worth taking a chance.
The road led by the old college that had long ago fallen into near-ruin. Several people had tried unsuccessfully to restore it, and recently a man named Wendell Anders had finally finished the job. The sun shone on the worn stone walls, and Rhodes wondered what Anders had planned for the building.
Rhodes remembered that the building was where he had encountered what someone had reported to him as a ghost. It hadn’t been a ghost, of course, but the memory made Rhodes think about the latest ghostly sightings. He didn’t believe in ghosts, but he believed in what he could see himself. And he’d certainly seen something in the Clearview Cemetery. So had those teenagers.
