Murder Among the OWLS

by Bill Crider

  He mentioned the idea to Ivy.

  “He might have,” she said, “but I don’t think so. He seems like such an upright person.”

  Rhodes had known a great many upright people who’d done things a lot worse than hitting someone with a stool. Sometimes they didn’t even intend any harm, or so they said after the fact. Rhodes had a hard time believing them.

  He thought about Billy Joe Bryon, who had once upon a time done what he might have thought was a good thing and a harmless one, but it had turned out to be exactly the wrong thing and all too harmful. Could it have happened again? Rhodes didn’t think so, but it wasn’t out of the question.

  Leo Thorpe was another problem. He had the best motive of anyone to kill Helen Harris since he was her heir. Or he was supposed to be, according to Brant. Now, however, there was no will to prove it, and no Leo Thorpe.

  The missing will bothered Rhodes. If Thorpe had killed Mrs. Harris, he wouldn’t have taken the will. He’d have wanted it found. So where was the will?

  “You’re not eating,” Ivy said, giving him a pointed look.

  “I’m thinking,” Rhodes told her, applying himself to the meat loaf again.

  When they’d finished eating, he helped Ivy clean off the table. Then he said, “I have to go out for a while.”

  Early in their marriage, Ivy hadn’t wanted him to go out in the evenings, but she’d grown used to it, and she seemed to understand that his job required him to keep irregular hours and to put himself at risk now and then.

  “Where?” she said.

  “Looking for Leo Thorpe.”

  “Couldn’t you look for him in the morning?”

  “I could. But I don’t want to wait. If he’s hiding where I think he is, he might leave if I wait too long. I don’t want him to get away again.”

  “If he’s not where you think he is, you’ll just be wasting your time.”

  “I do that a lot. It’s part of the job.”

  “What if you do find him? Is he dangerous?”

  “He doesn’t have his chain saw,” Rhodes said. “So he’s probably harmless.”

  “Chain saw?”

  “Never mind. Just a joke.”

  Ivy didn’t look as if she believed him. “You could send one of the deputies.”

  “I know, but this is something I want to do myself.”

  “That’s the way you always feel, but now and then you should let someone else have the fun.”

  “It might not be any fun.” In fact, Rhodes was pretty sure it wouldn’t be.

  “It’ll be fun for you. I know how you feel.”

  She knew him all too well, Rhodes thought.

  “You’ll stay out of trouble, won’t you?” she said.

  Rhodes said that he didn’t plan to get into anything he couldn’t handle.

  Ivy looked skeptical. “That’s not much of an answer. Will you try not to get all muddied up again?”

  Rhodes was glad for the qualifier. “I’ll try,” he promised.

  Chapter 19

  THE ROAD TO SHELDON WAS AS STRAIGHT AS A RAILROAD TRACK, which made sense because it was built on an old railbed. Long ago, before Rhodes was born, before anybody in Clearview was born for that matter, there had been a coal mine near Sheldon, an open-pit mine of which no trace now remained.

  At one time, however, it must have produced a good bit of coal. Otherwise there wouldn’t have been any need for the railroad.

  Unlike most of the highways in Blacklin and the surrounding counties, the road had been cut straight through the little hills instead of going over them, and the bed had been built up in all the low places. It was flat and level all the way. Rhodes assumed this had been done to make things easier for the locomotives pulling the coal trains, now as forgotten as the mine itself.

  Coal mining had returned to the county in recent years, but it was now done more efficiently. Huge cranes bigger than dinosaurs scooped the coal out of the earth, and it was hauled only a short distance to the big lignite-burning power plant that was a major source of employment for the county. After the coal was mined, the earth that had been dug away was replaced and the grass was replanted. It didn’t take long for things to return to a semblance of what they’d been, except there were no trees.

  The lignite plant had come along too late to be of any help to Sheldon, which had gone the way of the mine and the railroad. It had disappeared long ago. Rhodes could remember a time when there had been a store at a crossroads where the town had once been, but nothing was left of the store except an empty building.

  All that remained of Sheldon itself was a state historical marker affixed to a concrete stand by the side of the road, and Rhodes figured that few people pulled over to read it.

  Rhodes wondered if in fifty or sixty years the big cranes would be gone and the lignite plant vacant, as forgotten as the coal cars and the town of Sheldon.

  If the town itself was gone, however, a good many people still lived in the country between Clearview and where Sheldon had been. Some of them still farmed in a small way, raising corn, tomatoes, and watermelons that they sold in little tin-roofed roadside stands. There were a couple of peach orchards, and Rhodes knew of one man who still grew a little cotton every year, though that was more for nostalgic reasons than for any profit that he might make.

  Rhodes drove past the scattered houses and wondered how many people living in them had mineral rights that would make them rich in the coming years. He knew that at least some of them did, and they’d be building new homes sooner or later, maybe where the old homes were or maybe in town, leaving the country around Sheldon even more deserted than it already was.

  He wondered what Helen Harris would have done with her money if she’d lived to get any of it. Maybe she’d have built a new house or, as Brant had implied, bought herself a new car or traveled to some place far from Clearview and Blacklin County. Or she might just have stayed home and watched TV.

  A mile or so before he came to the historical marker, Rhodes turned off onto an unpaved county road. It was mostly clay, and it wasn’t even graveled. Rhodes hoped the mudholes wouldn’t be too bad. He’d hate to get stuck and have to call for help. The car’s traction control system might help, but he didn’t want to have to depend on it.

  Things went fine for about a hundred yards. Then Rhodes saw a bad hole in front of him. The key to driving in the mud, Rhodes believed, was to keep moving. If you ever stopped, you wouldn’t be able to start again.

  The county car wallowed and slid a bit, and muddy water sloshed up on the sides, but Rhodes got past the hole without any serious trouble. Maybe the traction control was the key. He thought he’d be able to get to the Tumlinson house without any major problems.

  He rounded a curve and drove past some old clay pits that had been dug out forty or fifty years earlier by a brick company in a neighboring county. There hadn’t been any environmental rules in place in those days, and the land still looked a little like the surface of the moon with only a few straggling trees and weeds growing on the white soil.

  There was a long hill after he passed the pits, but it was all sand rather than clay. The sand got treacherous in the summer if it had been dry for a long time, but when it was wet, the hill was easy to climb.

  After a couple more turns, Rhodes drove down another clay road, more like a lane, lined with trees that grew close along the sides and made a canopy overhead, cutting out almost all the moonlight.

  Driving up a little hill, Rhodes turned onto Helen Harris’s property and went across a brand-new cattle guard installed on the new road. There was no gate because the trucks would be coming and going to the drilling rig all the time. The rig stood about a quarter of a mile away, lighted from top to bottom. Rhodes could hear the sound of drilling even inside the closed car.

  Not far away from the rig was the slush pit that Rhodes knew contained the drilling fluid, mud, and water. What else might be mixed in with those things, Rhodes didn’t know, and he didn’t think he wanted to kno
w.

  The Tumlinson house sat near a little copse of trees about fifty yards from the new road. The house was completely dark.

  Rhodes didn’t want to take a chance of getting the car stuck, so he parked on the road. He didn’t mind walking, but he’d have to be careful of the mud, and of whatever else there might be to step in. Rhodes thought that Mrs. Harris had been running a few cattle on the place to get an agricultural exemption and keep her tax rate at a reasonable level.

  He got out of the car and transferred his pistol from the ankle holster to his waist at the middle of his back. Then he got the heavy, four-cell flashlight from the trunk.

  The night was cool but not cold, even though the stars looked icy in the black sky. The moon was just past full, pale and white. The drilling rig hummed.

  Rhodes shone the flashlight on the ground, looking for car tracks. There would be no use in looking on the road, since trucks from the rig would have been in and out all day. He didn’t see any tracks, but if a car had been there, it could have parked on the road as Rhodes had done.

  He walked to within about twenty yards of the house and shone the light around, looking for footprints in the mud. His own shoes were coated with it, and he knew that anyone who’d been outside the house since the rain would have left traces. Unfortunately, a cow or two had been walking around the area, and the ground was churned up with hoofprints.

  Shining the light on the house, Rhodes saw that all the window panes were missing. The front door was still there, sagging on one hinge. Some of the wood in the porch was rotten, and in some of the walls as well. If Thorpe was staying inside, he couldn’t have been very comfortable.

  “Leo Thorpe! If you’re in the house, this would be a good time to come on out.”

  Rhodes didn’t get a response, other than the sound of the drilling rig and the hooting of an owl in a tree somewhere not far away.

  Rhodes waited. Called out again. Still no response, but Rhodes thought he heard something rustling in the back of the house. It might have been his imagination, or it might have been a possum or an armadillo. It might even have been Thorpe.

  Rhodes went right up to the front porch, shining the light on the ground. He was pretty sure there were footprints there, human ones, though shapeless.

  Rhodes had walked up to a lot of houses, some of them at night, and at times he could actually sense the danger inside. He couldn’t get any sense of this one at all.

  He thought about knocking on the door just to see what would happen, shook his head, and started around the house. Its bare boards had weathered to gray, but they looked almost black in the moonlight.

  Two windows were in the back wall, probably both of them for bedrooms. The old water well stood a few yards away, but there was no way of getting water out of it, no pump or bucket that Rhodes could see. Even if there had been, the water wouldn’t have been drinkable.

  “Are you in there, Thorpe?” Rhodes said, standing well away from the windows with the flashlight turned off.

  He heard the rustling noise again. This time he was sure it wasn’t his imagination or an animal. It sounded to him as if somebody was making a stealthy move to the front of the house, so he went back around.

  When he got to the porch, he heard a louder noise, something scrabbling around in the back. The movement toward the front had been a feint. Someone, probably Thorpe, was going out the back window.

  Rhodes ran around the house again, arriving in time to see Thorpe—it had to be Thorpe—running toward the drilling rig. He couldn’t hope to get away on foot, but when Rhodes saw all the workers’ cars and pickups, he knew what Thorpe had in mind. He’d try to find one with the keys in it, and there’d almost certainly be one. Nobody expected his ride to be stolen out in the middle of a pasture, which meant somebody was in for quite a surprise.

  Thorpe stopped, turned, and saw that Rhodes was behind him. He pulled something from his belt, and Rhodes decided it might be a good idea to drop to the ground.

  It was. Thorpe fired off a couple of shots in Rhodes’s general direction before turning back toward the area where the cars were parked.

  Rhodes didn’t bother shooting back. Thorpe was too far away, and Rhodes didn’t want to kill him by accident. Sticking his pistol back in his waistband, Rhodes made straight for the county car. By the time he got it started, a black pickup was pulling away from the drilling rig. Instead of coming up the road toward Rhodes, it turned in the opposite direction.

  Rhodes went after it, though he had no idea where the road led or even what kind of road it was. The one he was on now, built for easy access to the rig, was hard-packed and topped with gravel. Rhodes knew that wouldn’t last. The drilling company wouldn’t have done any work past their own rig.

  Thorpe didn’t turn on the lights of the pickup he’d taken, so he must have had an idea of where he was going. That put him one up on Rhodes, who didn’t have a clue. Rhodes figured he could just follow the road. What he wondered about was its condition. It was bound to be muddy and treacherous.

  If it was, that didn’t bother Thorpe, who was driving much faster than was safe. Rhodes saw the black pickup bounce as it hit a bump, and he slowed to avoid banging his head on the county car’s roof. As it was, he got a good shaking. The beams from the headlights bounced up and down, and by the time they’d steadied, Rhodes saw Thorpe plow into a shallow creek branch that crossed the road.

  Most of the time the creek was likely to be dry, but the recent rains had put a little water into it, and it splashed up on both sides nearly as high as the roof of the pickup as Thorpe sailed into it. Then he was through it and climbing the hill on the other side.

  It was one thing to run through water like that in a pickup that sat high off the ground and was built for rough travel. It was quite another thing to do it in a car. In the headlight beams Rhodes could see that the edge of the branch was lined with gravel and pieces of brick. Someone had tried to make the bottom solid enough for crossing in rainy weather, for which Rhodes was grateful. He wasn’t worried about getting stuck, however. He was worried about the car engine drowning out in the water. Which was no doubt just what Thorpe was hoping for.

  Rhodes braked the car as best he could, and it slid along the muddy ruts of the road. He had to fight the wheel to keep from skidding out across the pasture, which would have made Thorpe almost as happy as having the engine drowned.

  Somehow Rhodes kept the car more or less in the ruts and slowed it almost to a crawl by the time he arrived at the water. He drove through it slowly, not making any splashes. It came up to the bottom of the undercarriage, but no higher. Of course the brakes were now wet and just about useless. Rhodes decided he’d just have to forget about using them, even if he needed them.

  He followed Thorpe up the hill. He’d lost ground, but he could see the truck ahead. It had crossed the top of the hill, which was cleared pastureland, scattering some sleepy cattle, and was on its way down the other side, into a wooded area.

  Rhodes went after it.

  At the bottom of the hill, a barbed-wire fence seemed to stretch right across the road. Thorpe didn’t slow down. The pickup hit the fence and kept right on going as wires twanged and fence posts flew up on both sides.

  When Rhodes got to the hole, he saw that Thorpe had run through a gate, the kind people called a gap, made of barbed wire, instead of crashing through the fence itself, not that there was much difference.

  Thick spring weeds grew along both sides of the road, so close that they brushed against the county car as Rhodes drove along. The road entered a long line of trees, and Thorpe drove straight toward them. Rhodes had no idea how Thorpe planned to make his way out to a main road, but he seemed to know what he was doing. Rhodes could only follow him.

  Thorpe knew what he was doing, all right. The brake lights on the truck glowed red, and he turned sharply to the left in front of the trees, throwing up a shower of mud as he did a complete one-eighty.

  Rhodes stepped on his own brakes. The
re was plenty of resistance, and not much give. They were too wet, and they weren’t going to hold.

  Uh-oh, Rhodes thought.

  The county car’s headlights showed Rhodes that the road went straight ahead, through the line of trees and right into a creek. Not a shallow branch like the one he’d crossed a little while earlier, but the real thing, at least six feet deep and three times as wide.

  Once a wooden bridge had crossed it, though not much of one, judging from the little that was left of it now. Rhodes remembered he’d promised Ivy he’d try not to get muddied up. He hadn’t promised he wouldn’t drown, but he didn’t regard that as an option.

  Fortunately he hadn’t been going as fast as Thorpe. He cranked the steering wheel to the left as fast as he could, and the car responded. The tires held their grip for about a second, then Rhodes felt the car begin to slide through the mud. He fought the wheel and tried to get the car pointed back toward the road as Thorpe had done with the truck.

  It wasn’t going to work. The car hit a bump and threw Rhodes to the right, causing him to lose his grip on the wheel. The car leaned over, too far over, Rhodes thought, sure the car would roll. It didn’t, and he grabbed the wheel again, steadied it, and stepped on the gas. Over the engine noise he heard the whir of the heavy-duty tires as they spun in the mud, digging deeper and deeper, and he hoped they’d find something solid before the car sank in up to the axle.

  He’d just about given up hoping when the tires grabbed some traction. They stopped spinning, took hold, and the car surged forward. Rhodes whipped the wheel to the left and somehow got back on the road, headed back the way he’d come. He could see the pickup topping the hill, and he went after it.

  Confident this time that he wasn’t going to get stuck and having a better idea of where he was going, Rhodes sped up. Thorpe had a good head start, but Rhodes hoped to be able to keep him in sight. He might not be able to stop him before he got off the Harris property and onto the road leading to the highway, however, and then Thorpe would have two directions to choose from. Rhodes grabbed the radio mike and called for backup.