Evil at the Root

by Bill Crider

  The Wishing Well was there in a small clearing, all right, just about where he had remembered it. The grass around it was flattened out like the grass around the pavilion, but not by cars. Probably some of the lovers had taken blankets along and walked down the path looking for even more privacy than the clearing provided them.

  Although the well was there, it did not look anything like Rhodes remembered it. He recalled crumbling brick sides covered with a thin layer of cement that had mostly fallen away, but the sides had still been several feet tall.

  They were hardly that tall now. They were barely there at all, two or three bricks at most still showing above the ground. No evidence of the cement veneer remained.

  However, there was something new. Well, Rhodes thought, new probably isn’t exactly the right word.

  There was a pecan tree growing right up out of the well, its branches spreading out over Rhodes’s head. There were even quite a few pecans lying around on the ground. The people who visited the spot these days evidently were interested in things other than eating them.

  Rhodes picked up two of the pecans and cracked them together in his right hand. He peeled back the cracked shell, pulled out the sweet meat, and popped it into his mouth, chewing it as he looked at the tree.

  Even more than the decayed pavilion, the tree gave him the impression of the passing years. At some time in the past, maybe even while he had been coming there, an industrious squirrel had dropped a nut into the well. Or maybe some kid Rhodes’s own age had thrown it in, not having a penny to spend on wishes. Against all the odds, it had gotten covered over with enough dirt to sprout and take root, maybe as a result of a rain storm, maybe as the result of animal activity.

  Rhodes wondered if a squirrel had fallen in the well and been unable to get out. It was possible.

  At any rate, there was the tree, and not a scrawny one, growing high out of the well, a tree that had grown that tall, that strong, in the years since Rhodes had been there. It gave him a funny feeling, since it didn’t really seem that long ago that he had thrown his own pennies in. There were days when it didn’t seem more than a few months since he had been a teenager.

  This wasn’t one of those days. The tree made it seem more like a million years. The wind blew the tree branches, causing them to scrape together. Rhodes hunched his shoulders against the cold.

  He wondered if this could possibly be the well that Mr. Bobbit had been talking about. It made sense. It was certainly close enough to where Horn’s car had been found. It wouldn’t have been hard for a man of Kennedy’s size to carry a body down here, especially if he had a little help. Lloyd Bobbit had been small, but he had probably been tough and strong in his younger days.

  The well was not deep. Having been so close to the river, it had probably not needed to be. Rhodes had looked into it more than once when throwing his money in, looked to see the other pennies that were lying on the bottom. It would be possible to dig down beside it and see what was there. There had probably been enough water in it in Louis Horn’s time to cover a body.

  Rhodes thought for a second about that, about the tree being fertilized by the remains of the son of Dry Hole Horn. Then he dismissed the thought. By the time the tree had started to grow, there hadn’t been enough left of Horn to do much fertilizing.

  There was no statute of limitations on murder, and that was another problem. If he did discover a body, it was not going to be easy to prosecute anyone, not even Kennedy. If they could find him.

  And finding remains wouldn’t mean they had found Horn. There would be difficulty in identifying whatever they found.

  Rhodes looked through the trees at the river. It flowed sluggishly along, its waters muddier than he remembered having seen them lately. The lines of concrete that marked the old swimming pools were barely visible. The pools themselves were mostly filled in with dirt and leaves, another change that Rhodes hadn’t been prepared for. He’d thought that there might still be a little river water in them. He supposed it wasn’t so surprising that they had filled with silt, however, not after the tree. It had been a long time since he’d been there, sure enough.

  Then Rhodes heard something moving in the trees behind him.

  At first he thought it was just the wind, but then he heard it again. Someone was walking across the dry, dead leaves, trying hard not to be heard but making a little noise nevertheless.

  It could have been a couple of lovers looking for a private spot to spread a blanket, but Rhodes didn’t think so. This was hardly the kind of day anyone would choose for outdoor lovemaking.

  He stood still, listening, but the noises had stopped.

  That didn’t mean that whoever was making them had stopped moving, however. They might have just gotten quieter.

  Rhodes looked all around him, trying to get a glimpse of something that was out of place among the trees. It wasn’t easy. Although the trees were mostly bare except for some of the oaks, they were thick, and there were many bushes growing among them. The bushes were evergreens of some kind, and they grew as thick as the trees. It would be easy for someone to hide, using them for cover, especially in the near-dark conditions.

  There was no reason for Rhodes to suspect that anyone coming to the Old Settlers’ Grounds would intend him harm, but the flesh was crawling between his shoulder blades.

  It wasn’t the cold, either. He suddenly realized that someone had been watching him for some minutes, maybe ever since he had walked down to the Wishing Well.

  He thought about the Grounds, wondering just for a minute if he might be trespassing. But then he remembered that the Blacklin County owned this property. Every now and then, someone would propose to the county commissioners that the Grounds be restored. And of course, the state owned the river banks, up to a certain distance from the center of the river. At any rate, as a taxpayer and county resident, Rhodes had as much right to be there as anyone. Maybe more, since he was the sheriff.

  “Who’s there?” he called. He didn’t really expect anyone to answer, but he thought he might stir up some action.

  His words were lost on the wind. The only reply he got was the sound of the tree branches scratching one another and the stirring of oak leaves.

  He moved cautiously in the direction he thought the sound had come from. He did not like to draw his pistol, but he did. There was no need to take unnecessary chances.

  Just as he got into the trees, he caught sight of a flash of red moving away from him, down toward the river. It looked like a red coat or shirt of some kind, and Rhodes headed in that direction.

  He was not an expert woodsman, and his feet kept getting tangled in vines. Thorns seemed to reach for him, and he walked headlong into spider webs that covered his face and stuck to his skin. Once he almost fell and had to grab hold of a limb to keep himself upright. He holstered the pistol then. Dropping it would be a big mistake.

  He probably wasn’t making any more noise than the average elephant stampede. If there really had been anyone in front of him, whoever it was sure wouldn’t have any trouble hearing him coming.

  He came out of the trees near the swimming pools. The bank of the river was fairly clear of trees here. There were two or three towering oaks, and Rhodes was sure that one of them was where the rope he had dropped from had once been tied, though there was no sign of it now.

  There was no sign of anyone wearing a red coat, either. There was no sign of anyone at all. A squirrel chattered away in the top of one of the oaks, but besides that and the north wind there was no other sound.

  Rhodes walked to where he could see into one of the pools. No one was hiding in it, though he hadn’t really thought anyone would be. There wasn’t any place to hide. The dead leaves and dirt were piled too high, even in the pool’s deepest end.

  Rhodes looked out across the river. There had once been a bridge here, a narrow wooden affair that had allowed people to cross over to the other side of the river and sit at picnic tables under the trees there.

  T
here was no bridge there now, no way for anyone to cross. It would have been easy enough for someone to circle back around behind Rhodes and get back to the well or pavilion without being seen, however. Rhodes looked back up in the direction of the Wishing Well, but he did not see anyone among the trees.

  He looked back at the pool. He wondered how long it had been since boys had been swimming there. It took a lot of years for a pool that deep to fill up with dirt and trash. No wonder there had been no sign of the rope he had once swung from. It had no doubt rotted away long ago.

  For just a moment the chill of the air went away, and Rhodes seemed to hear in his mind the sound of boys laughing and splashing in the waters of the pool. He could almost see the warm drops of water flash in the sun as one of the boys swung out over the pool, let go of a rope, and made the long drop into the pool. He could feel the rough rope in his hands, feel the warm air rushing past him as he fell.

  He almost didn’t hear the sound behind him until it was too late.

  As it was, he managed to half turn and catch most of the blow of the heavy tree limb on his shoulder rather than on the back of his head as had been intended.

  Pain shot down his left arm, and his whole upper body went numb. He felt himself falling, but there was nothing he could do to stop.

  He had heard about the dangers of nostalgia, but this was ridiculous, he thought as he fell.

  He landed hard and rolled over, just in time to avoid another blow from the tree-limb club. It smashed into the ground beside his head with a heavy thud.

  Rhodes looked up to see who was trying to bash his head but all he could see was the club coming at him again. He rolled to the left. His shoulder felt as if someone were sticking a knife in it, but he ignored the pain and tried to get to his feet. It wasn’t easy. He found it hard to get his balance with his arm hanging limp.

  He didn’t make it up. He wasn’t fast enough. The club hit him again, this time across his shoulders. He pitched forward, scraping his face in the dirt. His back felt broken.

  That wasn’t the worst of his problems. Whoever was clubbing him was going to kill him if he didn’t do something fast.

  And he couldn’t move fast at all, not now.

  He did manage to roll over on his back and look up.

  What he saw was an old man in a red hunting jacket, an old man with slightly protruding teeth and a club, a club that he was swinging at Rhodes’s head again.

  Rhodes was never going to say anything about old men who couldn’t move fast. This one was moving all too fast for Rhodes’s peace of mind.

  Rhodes rolled over twice and drew his pistol. He hardly got it out before the tree branch slammed it out of his hand.

  It sailed off into the pool. Rhodes didn’t hear it land. He was too busy worrying about the fingers of his right hand, which felt as if they had been wrenched out of joint or maybe broken by the club.

  The old man swinging the branch did seem to be tiring, however. He let the club drop to his side while he tried to get his breath. Rhodes could hear him wheezing. That seemed to be Rhodes’s only hope, to let the old man beat on him until he tired himself out.

  Rhodes tried again to get to his feet. He didn’t feel much better than the old man. In fact, he probably felt a lot worse. He hadn’t laid a finger on the man, whereas he had been hit three times. So far.

  As soon as he staggered to his feet, he realized that getting up had not been as good an idea as it had seemed. The old man—it had to be Maurice Kennedy—had been at least halfway bluffing. He was not nearly as tired as he had seemed. He had just wanted a better shot at Rhodes. He wasn’t doing too well swinging down at the ground.

  He did better now, at least from his point of view. He swung the club at Rhodes’s chest like a major leaguer cleanup hitter swinging a bat at a fast change-up.

  Rhodes tried to raise his hands, but it was no good. The tree branch connected with his chest and all the air went out of him. He staggered backward, trying to get his breath, felt his heels click against the concrete edge of the pool, and then felt himself falling, his good arm waving uselessly in the air.

  Then something hit him in the back of the head and he didn’t feel anything at all.

  Chapter 11

  Rhodes was sailing across a vast open space, clinging to a rope, his hands gripping it hard just above a large knot. A frayed end dangled underneath the knot, and far below Rhodes was the water of the pool shimmering greenly in the sunlight.

  But it was too far below. Much too far. Instead of ten or twelve feet, as it should have been, it seemed like miles, and the longer he clung to the rope, the more the pool receded in the distance below him. When he had first looked, it had been the size of a real pool, stretching out twenty feet on either side. But now it looked more the size of a school book, and as he watched, it shrank to the size of a postage stamp.

  He couldn’t tell whether the pool was moving down or the rope was being pulled upward. There was no real sensation of motion.

  He could hear voices, voices that he did not recognize, yelling at him, telling him to let go of the rope, but the more they yelled, the tighter his grip became. After a few minutes, he tried to climb the rope, but his hands were sweaty and he kept slipping back down to the knot.

  Suddenly, without warning, the rope broke and he was plunging downward, moving faster and faster. The pool had receded so far from him that now it was not even visible.

  He threw out his arms and jerked his body upward, trying to reach the tree branch high above him, though he knew that it was hopeless, and that was when he woke up.

  He was lying on his back in the pool, stretched out on a bed of leaf-covered dirt. It was a lot softer than you would expect it to be, but Rhodes hurt all over. He felt as if he’d fought a few rounds with Hit Man Hearns, who had gotten tired and turned him over to a grizzly bear.

  His left arm hurt, his back hurt, his chest hurt, and most of all his head hurt. It felt as if there were someone in there pounding away with a rubber mallet on the inside of his skull, especially at the back. There was another little man inside his left shoulder, which was throbbing almost as much as his head.

  He tried to sit up, and his head swelled with pain, seeming to balloon to twice its normal size. He reached back and felt a tender spot, brushing it lightly with his fingers. Even that hurt, and his fingers came away damp with blood.

  He looked behind him. There didn’t seem to be anything hard there, but when he brushed away the leaves there was a chunk of concrete from the pool’s side just beneath them.

  He got to his feet with considerable effort and then looked around for his pistol. He didn’t find it.

  The wall of the pool was only about two feet above where he stood, but for a minute he wondered if he could step up there and get out. Then he did it, but he had to stand for a while and get his breath back. He didn’t even consider trying to brush the dirt off his jacket and pants or to remove the dead leaves that still clung to him.

  He looked around him carefully. His pistol wasn’t there, either.

  After a time that might have been ten minutes or thirty, he started walking up to the Wishing Well. When he got there, he stopped to rest again. He was feeling a little better, however, and he was also feeling stupid. How could he have let someone sneak up on him like that?

  Getting caught up in old memories was counterproductive in more ways than one. Now Maurice Kennedy had a pistol.

  As Rhodes discovered when he got back to the pavilion, Kennedy had a car, too. The county car was no longer parked where it had been, and when Rhodes reached in his pocket he discovered that the keys were gone.

  He sat down on one of the less rotted portions of the pavilion steps and thought about things. The cold air seemed to be helping his head, and the throbbing in his arm had almost stopped.

  He didn’t know where Kennedy had been staying since leaving Sunny Dale, but he probably hadn’t spent too much time at the Old Settlers’ Grounds. It was too cold, for one thing, a
nd there was no place to get out of the night air. It was just bad luck that he had happened to be there when Rhodes was looking at the well.

  The fact that he was there, though, would seem to lend credence to the elder West’s story about the dumping of Louis Horn’s body. If there were indeed traces of the body still buried in that well, then Kennedy certainly had a strong motive for killing Lloyd Bobbit, assuming that what West had overheard was true. Since Bobbit had been with Kennedy on the night of the murder, everything seemed to fit.

  Now all Rhodes had to do was find Kennedy, who was on the loose with a pistol and a county car. It was really too bad about the car. It was the same one that Rhodes had recently wrecked. The commissioners hadn’t liked that much, even if the wreck hadn’t really been Rhodes’s fault, and they certainly weren’t going to like having it stolen. Things like that tended to increase the county’s insurance rates. Of course, they had a lot of other things on their minds, like the lawsuit, and might not have time to worry about a minor matter like a stolen car.

  Rhodes got up. Before he could do anything about Kennedy, or anything else, he had to get back to town. At least his legs weren’t hurting. They were about the only thing that wasn’t.

  He took a deep breath and started walking.

  He didn’t have to go far, which was a good thing. He didn’t think he could have made it much farther than the highway, which is where he caught a ride with a man on his way to town in a pickup truck. The man was going in to the hospital emergency room to have a boil lanced, and he was a lot more interested in discussing his own troubles than inquiring into Rhodes’s, which was all right with the sheriff.

  The man let Rhodes off at the jail, where Hack and Lawton were still talking about their appearance on the noon news when he walked in the door. They stopped as soon as they got a good look at him, however.

  “My God,” Hack said. “You look like you got run over by a Mack truck.”

  “Or a locomotive,” Lawton said.