Bill Crider - Dan Rhodes 09 - Death by Accident (18 page)

Mrs. West picked up the coffee cup and looked at Rhodes over the rim.  Then she took a sip and put the cup back on its saucer.  Her hand wasn’t shaking this time.

“I don’t believe I said.”

Rhodes had known that.  He said, “That’s right.  You just told me that it was someone from the church.  I think it would be a good idea if you told me who.  It might help.”

“I can’t remember.  If it would help, I’d tell you, but I just don’t recall.”

She sounded so sincere that Rhodes almost believed her.

M
ack Riley wasn’t at home, so Rhodes decided to check out another little theory he’d developed.  He drove out to the Old Settlers’ Grounds and parked his car.  Then he walked down to the swimming pools.  The water was calm but covered with leaves that the norther had blown into the pools.  Rhodes looked up in the pecan trees, squinting his eyes against the bright sun as he tried to locate the place where the limb had broken off.

It was still and quiet under the trees.  Rhodes heard a car somewhere on the road, and then there was silence except for a squirrel chattering in a tree.

Rhodes couldn’t spot the squirrel, but it didn’t take him long to locate the place where the limb had been.  The more he looked at it, the more unlikely it seemed to him that anyone would tie a rope there.  The limb hadn’t been in the best position for swinging out over the water, and there was a perfectly healthy limb not far away that would have served better.

There had been a period in Rhodes’s life when he spent a lot of time in trees.  He and the other kids in his neighborhood had climbed trees all the time, seeing who could go the highest and sometimes staying up on their favorite perches for hours.

Climbing had seemed perfectly natural to Rhodes then.  He could jump up, grab the lowest limb of a tree, and haul himself right onto it.  From there he could go on up, from one limb to the next, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.  His mother had called him a “little monkey,” a name that didn’t bother him at all.

That had been so long ago that it was mostly a dim memory now.  Rhodes had been in a few trees since, but generally only out of urgent necessity, like the time he’d been trying to escape the tree whacker that the county highway department used to cut back the branches that hung over the less-travelled roads.  That wasn’t an experience he wanted to repeat.

He walked over to the pecan tree where he thought the rope had been hanging and reached up.  The lowest limb was about a foot above his outstretched hand.

Getting hold of it would have been a cinch for Rhodes when he was a boy, but he’d weighed a lot less then.  He’d had more of a vertical leap.

But, still.  It was only a foot.  Surely he could jump a foot.

Rhodes took off his jacket, wrapped his pistol in it, and laid them on the grass.  He measured the distance again with his eyes, crouched down, and jumped for the limb.

His fingers touched it, missed any kind of grip at all, and then his feet jolted against the ground.  He didn’t remember ever having a jolt like that from such a short drop.  Maybe he’d been more shock-absorbent as a kid.

He looked up at the limb again.  “You can do it,” he said aloud, and jumped.

He went barely high enough, and his hands clamped around the limb.  For a few seconds he just hung there, dangling with his toes about a foot off the ground.  He was pretty sure he couldn’t pull himself up the way he’d done when he was a kid, but he gave it a try.

He strained until his face got hot and seemed to swell.  His arms tingled, and his palms burned.  But he didn’t move very far.

He let go of the limb and dropped back to the ground.  He was breathing hard, so he sat down for a minute with his back against the tree trunk while he waited for his pulse to slow down.  When it had slowed, he took off his shoes and socks, stood up, and jumped again.

He grabbed the limb and started climbing up the trunk of the tree with his feet, moving his hands outward on the limb as he did.  After a while he was able to hook his feet around the limb and pull himself up on it.

He had to catch his breath after that, so he sat and looked up at the limbs above him, hoping to find a few that would hold his weight.  The bottoms of his feet felt strange, as if they might be scratched, but he didn’t try to look at them.  He was afraid he might fall if he did.

While he sitting there, he watched a squirrel jump from one tree to another, grabbing branches that looked as thin as telephone wires.  It was moving with a swift confidence that Rhodes envied.  When it disappeared from sight, it hadn’t slowed down.

“Smart aleck,” Rhodes said.

He braced himself against the trunk of the tree and stood up on the limb, surprised to find that his knees were a little unsteady.

He took a deep breath and started to climb.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

R
hodes stood in the vee formed by a thick branch and the trunk of the tree.  He remembered now that one of the best things about climbing trees was how peaceful it seemed up away from the ground.  That, and how far you could see.

From where he stood, he could see over the top of the dance pavilion and the persimmon trees near the Burleson cabin and all the way to the county road that skirted around the Old Settlers’ Grounds.  There was a pickup parked on the side of the road, but it was too far away for Rhodes to see if there was anyone in it.  Beyond the road he saw white-faced cattle grazing in a field and farther on there was a patch of brown woods.

Practically in front of his eyes was the spiky end of the broken branch, and a foot or so below that, jutting off at a slightly different angle, was the limb that Rhodes would have tied the rope to if he had been the one tying it.

Evidently someone else had thought that limb was better, too.  The mark the swinging rope had worn in the branch was plain to see.

Rhodes had suspected something like that might be the case after Ivy had said that the limb didn’t have to fall and hit Pep on the head, but he’d had to see for himself.  Someone had killed Pep Yeldell, all right.

The way Rhodes figured it, the killer had somehow lured Pep Yeldell to the swimming pool with the intention of doing away with him, maybe by faking a drowning.  Rotten limbs fell from trees all the time, but finding one there on the ground was just luck — good luck for the killer, bad luck for Pep.  The killer had hit Pep with it, probably knocking him out.  That would have made drowning him a lot easier.

After that, the killer — or killers, Rhodes told himself, thinking that there could have been two of them — must have decided to make things look more consistent with the “accident” idea.  To do that, someone would have had to climb the tree.  The climb might have been hard in the dark, but Rhodes knew that it wouldn’t have been as difficult for a younger person as it had been for him.

Mack Riley didn’t exactly fit the profile of a tree climber, but Yvonne Bilson was certainly lithe enough to do it.  So was Grat.  And when Rhodes thought about it, he couldn’t rule Riley out completely.  He was pretty agile for an older man.

Rhodes looked down at the river.  The turtles were on the log again, or maybe they were different turtles this time.  They stayed where they were and enjoyed the sun, completely unaware of Rhodes’s presence.

Rhodes was thinking about climbing down when the trunk next to his cheek exploded.  The explosion was followed almost instantly by the crack of a rifle, which Rhodes heard but didn’t worry about at first because the pain caused by the splinters of wood that stuck in his face was too intense.

A second shot clipped off a small branch just above Rhodes’s head.  Rhodes froze.  He didn’t know whether to go up or down or stay right where he was.  Blood ran down his cheek and onto his shirt collar.

He was completely defenseless.  His pistol was on the ground, wrapped up in his shirt.  He could see that the shots were coming from the persimmon trees, but the shooter was too well concealed for Rhodes to get any impression of who it was.  It might have been a man or a woman or a goat for all Rhodes could see.

He moved around to the other side of the trunk just before a bullet thunked into the wood where he had been.  The trunk saved him that time, but it wasn’t going to save him much longer.  He was no longer as slender as he had been when he was ten years old, and the trunk could hide all of him.  Besides, the slugs that were slamming into it were big enough to chop it in two if they hit it often enough.

 Rhodes thought about the .30-.30 he’d seen in Mack Riley’s gun cabinet.  It was a powerful gun.  Rhodes wondered if he’d live long enough to dig any bullets out of the tree.

A bullet tugged at the shirt that covered one of his love handles.  Rhodes put a hand on the spot.  There was a tear in his shirt, but no blood.  There might be the next time, however, and he knew that he had to do something.  He wished he knew what.

One thing was for certain:  No one was going to come to his rescue.  Out here in the country, rifle shots weren’t all that uncommon, even if there was anyone to hear them.

Rhodes looked down at the swimming pool.  There was always the chance that he could jump.  He wondered how high he was.  Thirty feet?  Forty?  Not that it mattered.  If he stayed where he was, he was most likely going to get killed.

Was the pool deep enough for such a high dive, or would he hit the bottom too hard and break a leg?  A broken leg wasn’t much compared to his life, but what if he hit his head and drowned?  Or he might hit his head on a limb on the way down and break his neck.

If any of those things happened, he’d be just another death by accident.  It occurred to Rhodes that another death by accident was just what the killer wanted, and he was likely to get it, too.

After all, who was going to climb the tree to look for bullet marks if Rhodes was found lying dead on the ground below?  Or drowned in the pool?  People might wonder what the sheriff had been doing up in a tree, but it was possible that no one would climb up to see.

Ruth Grady probably would, Rhodes thought.  She was thorough, and she would wonder about the splinters in his face.

The thought didn’t give Rhodes much comfort.  Although the day was cold, he was sweating heavily.  He had to make a choice.  He could stay in the tree, or he could jump for the water.

He looked down again.  There were only a couple of limbs that looked threatening.  He might be able to avoid them.

Or he might not.

A bullet whacked into the tree and gouged out a large chunk of wood about six inches from Rhodes’s fingers.  The idea of losing his fingers chilled him.

The idea of jumping didn’t appeal to him much, either.  For just the fraction of a second an image of Johnny Weismuller flashed through his mind — Tarzan swinging on a movie-jungle vine.

There weren’t any vines for Rhodes, but he was able to move himself a little farther out on the branch, far enough, he hoped to avoid hitting the bank.

Another shot cracked the wood hear his head.  He took a breath and jumped.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

I
t had been a long time since Rhodes had done a cannonball off the high board at the Clearview swimming pool, but there were some things the body never forgot.  He hiked his knees up to his chin, or as close as he could get them these days, and wrapped his arms around his shins.

A limb slapped him in the face as he passed it, driving one of the splinters a little deeper into his cheek.  He ignored the pain and tucked his head down to his knees as he tried to concentrate on landing just right.

If he hit just below the base of his spine, he would send water geysering high into the air.  He would also be less likely to break any bones than in any other kind of dive.

He didn’t have time to think about it much.  He hit the water with a tremendous impact and a very satisfying explosion of noise.  He was sure that anyone on the bank of the pool would have been drenched.  There would have been more enjoyment in the performance if he hadn’t struck the water so hard.

And if the water hadn’t been so cold.  Rhodes hadn’t thought it would be so cold.  He felt like a block of ice, but not as buoyant.

The water slowed his fall, though not as much as he would have imagined, and the pool was not as deep as he’d hoped.  He plummeted all the way to the bottom, and his tailbone hit the hard concrete with a numbing force that sent a shock wave all the way up his spine.

He writhed around like a stunned octopus, accomplishing about as much as the octopus would have.  Several seconds elapsed before he was able to make his legs work, and by that time his lungs were burning and threatening to burst.  Just as he thought he might be found lying on the bottom of the pool or floating on top like Pep Yeldell, he managed to plant his feet and shove himself upward.

The way to the top seemed a lot longer than the way down, but he eventually made it, breaking through the surface and sucking in air with great, heaving gasps as frosty drops of water flew from his head.

He didn’t have time to enjoy the luxury of being able to breathe, however, because he had to swim for the bank.  He didn’t want to be caught in the middle of the pool if the rifleman came after him.

There was a small chance that the shooter would think he’d hit Rhodes, shot him right out of the tree like a squirrel, or that he’d think Rhodes couldn’t survive the fall even if he wasn’t shot.

But Rhodes couldn’t count on that.  He had to consider the strong possibility that the shooter would come to have a look to make sure the job had been done right.  And if it hadn’t, to finish it.

Rhodes’s fingers scraped the bank and he pulled himself out in a rush of water.  He tried to stand, fell to his knees, got up into a sort of crouch, and stumbled over to where his jacket lay.  He fell down beside it, pulled it to him, and unwrapped the pistol.

There was no one coming that he could see, but he couldn’t see very well.  Water was running out of his hair and into his eyes.  His hearing was of no use to him.  He couldn’t hear a thing except a high roaring in his ears.