Booked for a Hanging

by Bill Crider

Rhodes set down the cooler. “Not a chance. I came here once or twice when I was a teenager, but only to look at the rocks.”

  Ivy gave him a look.

  “I thought they looked like dinosaurs, too,” he said.

  He opened the cooler and brought out the Dr Peppers. They had been nestled in ice, and the glass bottles were cold and wet. He gave one of them to Ivy. There was a bottle opener tied to a string dangling from the cooler handle, and he opened the bottle he was holding. Then he traded it to Ivy for the other one and opened it.

  He took a swallow. “That tastes good,” he said.

  “What about the sandwiches?”

  “Make yourself comfortable,” he said. “I’ll get them.”

  Ivy sat down on the hard-packed earth while he got out the sandwiches. Then he joined her on the ground. It had been protected from the Easter spell’s rain by the rocks and it felt warm and comfortable.

  They unwrapped the sandwiches and ate them. When they were finished, Rhodes took the cooler out in the field and dumped the ice. He took it back under the rocks and put the sandwich wrappers and bottles inside, then sat down beside Ivy and leaned back against the rocks. He found it very relaxing just to sit there with his eyes closed, not thinking of anything in particular.

  “Wake up,” Ivy said, giving him a light jab in the ribs.

  “I wasn’t asleep,” Rhodes said. “Just resting my eyes.”

  “Ha.”

  “I was,” Rhodes said. “I’m awake. Alert. A trained lawman never rests.”

  Ivy laughed. “What about Rolingson?” she said. “Did he really kill three people just because of a book he couldn’t find?”

  “I think he did,” Rhodes said. “He obviously didn’t think we hick lawmen would ever catch him, but at least he tried to make Graham’s death look like an accident. By the time he killed the others, he’d decided that we were so dumb he didn’t even have to do that.”

  “What about the book?” Ivy said. “Did it really exist?”

  “I think so,” Rhodes said.

  “And how much did you say it was worth?”

  “A quarter of a million, maybe. If it’s genuine, that is. If it’s not, I don’t guess it’s worth much of anything, except as a curiosity.”

  “I don’t see why no one could find it,” Ivy said.

  “It wasn’t really a book,” Rhodes said. “It was more like a booklet. It could be hidden pretty easily.”

  “Yes, but still. Those two were searching for days. And to hear you tell about the way the house looked, they must have done a pretty thorough job.”

  “Maybe they weren’t looking in the right place,” Rhodes said.

  “Maybe not. It seems a shame that something like that should be lost, though.”

  “We don’t know that it’s lost.”

  “You sound pretty sure of yourself, Dan Rhodes. Do you know where that book is?”

  “No,” Rhodes said. “I only think I know. I could be wrong.”

  “And that’s why we came to Obert. You’re going to find it and prove that Rolingson underestimated you again.”

  “I’m going to try to find it. Hack says there’s a big difference between thinking and knowing.”

  “All right,” Ivy said, getting to her feet. “Let’s go find it.”

  “We don’t have to go anywhere,” Rhodes said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I think it’s here.”

  “Right here? In these rocks?”

  Rhodes told her about finding the sandwich papers, the aluminum cans, the cigarette filters.

  “That doesn’t mean anything,” Ivy said. “Anyone could have left those here.”

  “I know. But I think Claude and Clyde did. They strike me as the litterbug type, and this would sure be a convenient place for them to come when they wanted to get away from the house. Boys like private places.”

  “Did you have one?” she said.

  “I did. It was an old deserted house about six blocks from where I lived. Three or four of us used to meet there and talk, swap baseball cards, that kind of thing.”

  “What about smoking?”

  “No smoking. We were afraid we might burn the house down.”

  “I’d think Claude and Clyde could smoke at home if they wanted to,” Ivy said.

  Rhodes shrugged. “They probably could, and did. They smoked here, too, though. If it was them.”

  “OK, I believe you. But I don’t see any book around here.”

  “I don’t think they’d leave it right out in the open,” Rhodes said. “We hid things in that house. Comic books. Magazines.”

  “What kind of magazines?”

  “Never mind that,” Rhodes said. “What’s that in that little crevice over there?” He pointed to a place where two rocks lay together at an angle, a place that was well-protected from both sun and rain.

  “I don’t know,” Ivy said, peering at it. “And I’m not going to stick my hand in it and find out, either. It’s dark, and there might be snakes in there.”

  “I’ve never seen a single rattler in Blacklin County,” Rhodes said.

  “A snake is a snake,” Ivy said. “You can find out what’s in the crack if you want to, but I’m not going to stick my hand into a place like that.”

  “Where’s your spirit of adventure? There might be a book worth two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in there.”

  “There might be a brown recluse spider in there, too. Or a stinging scorpion. No thanks.”

  Rhodes hadn’t thought about the spiders. A brown recluse was as bad as a snake, if not worse. Nevertheless, he got up and brushed off the seat of his pants.

  “Well, all right, then,” he said. “If you don’t want to be the hero in this case, I will.”

  He bent down and put his hand into the crack. He didn’t really know what he expected to find there. He had no way of knowing if the litter he had found had really been left there by the twins, and he had no way of knowing that they were the ones who had taken the book.

  But they were the ones who had been in the office that first morning, and it was possible that Graham had showed the book to them and bragged about its worth. He might not have told them exactly how much it was worth, but even if he only said that it was worth a lot of money, the twins would have been sorely tempted.

  Even if they had taken the book, they might have hidden it somewhere else, like the Haunted House, but Rhodes thought it would be closer to home, somewhere they could get to it easily. This was the best place he could think of.

  If he was wrong, well, the worst that could happen was that he would get bitten by a brown recluse and his arm would rot off. Or a rattler would bite him on top of the hand.

  His fingers touched slick paper, and he pulled out a handful of magazines. Something clinked in the hole as he pulled the magazines out.

  “Is that it?” Ivy said.

  “No,” Rhodes said. He was holding an old copy of Penthouse and two issues of Playboy.

  “Oh,” Ivy said. “That kind of magazine.”

  Rhodes didn’t answer. He reached back in the hole and brought out a key ring. There were five or six keys hanging on it.

  He hadn’t thought he would find that. Claude and Clyde had more to trade than he’d thought. They must have arrived at the main building before Rolingson could search Graham’s body. Maybe they had even frightened him away. It looked as if he were going to have to make a trade with them after all.

  He put the keys in his pocket and began flipping through the magazines. The Tamerlane was there, slipped in between the Penthouse and the first Playboy. He pulled it out and held it where Ivy could see it.

  It didn’t look as old as he had expected. The paper did not have the yellowish tinge that affected most of the old paperback books he had seen in Ballinger’s office. There was a brownish tinge to it, however, and there were brown spots on it here and there. The edges of the pages were worn, and there were little chips of paper missing from them.
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br />   “Doesn’t look like much, does it?” he said. “Clyde Ballinger’s books have a whole lot better covers.”

  “And it’s worth a quarter of a million dollars?” Ivy said. “Are you sure?”

  “That’s what I was told. Depending on the condition. I don’t know how to describe the condition of things like this, though. It’s pretty old.”

  “‘By A Bostonian,’” Ivy said. “The Bostonian is Mr. Poe, I guess.”

  “That’s him.”

  “I wonder if the poem’s any good,” Ivy said. “I don’t remember reading that one in high school.”

  Rhodes didn’t either. “El Dorado” and “Annabelle Lee” were the ones he remembered. And a story about some man who got walled up in a wine cellar.

  “I guess the twins stole it, then,” Ivy said.

  “They must have,” Rhodes said. “I expect they watched Graham hide it or maybe they guessed where he hid it. I think Marty and Rolingson were frightened away by them after the hanging and that the boys found the keys and searched the office.”

  He wondered how the twins could have gotten the keys, but then he remembered that there was a ladder in the third-floor room. Claude and Clyde were pretty cold-blooded, no doubt about it.

  “What are you going to do with that?” Ivy said, reaching out and touching the Tamerlane with a fingertip.

  Rhodes thought about it. He could always white out a few words and show it to Mr. Stanley. Probably give the librarian a heart attack. But of course he wouldn’t do that.

  “I’ll keep it in the safe at the jail until we can get rid of it. I talked to Graham’s lawyers today. One of them will be here to pick it up tomorrow or the next day.”

  “Who did he leave the book to, anyway?” Ivy said.

  “The University of Texas. Something called the Humanities Research Center.”

  “What if it’s a forgery?”

  “It still won’t hurt to have it in a safe. I might not be able to find it if it gets stolen again.”

  “I suppose the picnic’s over then, now that the official business is concluded.”

  “You suppose right. You want to carry the book?”

  “No thanks,” Ivy said. “I’ll carry the cooler.” She took the handle and picked it up. “Lead on, MacDuff.”

  “That’s something else I remember from high school,” Rhodes said. “They were about to have a sword fight, so what Macbeth really said was ‘Lay on, MacDuff.’ ”

  Ivy gave him an admiring look. “An intellectual,” she said. “I’m impressed.”

  “Things like that are easy to remember,” Rhodes said. “It’s phone numbers that give me trouble.”

  They started back to the car and a bird flew up in front of them.

  “You know,” Ivy said, watching as the bird circled over their heads, “I always used to call those birds ‘feelarks.’ I must have been twenty-one years old before I knew better.”

  Rhodes smiled. He realized that his head didn’t hurt any more. “Me too,” he said.

  Author’s Note

  The process by which the paternity of the calves is proved by blood typing in this story is in reality a much more complicated and time-consuming process than I have shown it to be. I chose to sacrifice strict scientific accuracy for the sake of the story.

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