Ghost of a Chance (2 page)

“You got one of those lightning spike protectors, don’t you?” Lawton asked.

Hack nodded.

“Then what’re you afraid of?”

“Nothing,” Hack said. “Come on over here and have a look.”

Lawton walked over to the dispatcher’s desk. When the two of them were close together, they seemed to Rhodes to have a strong resemblance to the old comedy team of Abbott and Costello. Hack was tall, with slicked-back hair, a thin gray mustache, and a skeptical look, while Lawton had the smooth round face of an altar boy who was about to snatch the halo off a cherub.

“Just let me call up a search engine,” Hack said.

“Is that like a car engine?” Lawton asked.

Hack didn’t deign to answer. Rhodes got up from his desk and strolled over to the desk to watch Hack type “jail ghost” into the blank on the search engine’s home page.

“Now watch this,” Hack said, clicking on the go button.

He got only one response, a link to something called the Sydney Institute of Technology. Hack clicked on the link
and a new screen appeared, revealing that the Sydney Institute was apparently holding classes in the old Darlinghurst Gaol, way Down Under.

“That supposed to be
goal?
” Lawton asked.

“It’s the way they spell
jail
in Australia sometimes,” Hack said. “See? It says it right there. J-a-i-1. They have to put that in for people who never took much English in school.”

Lawton looked skeptical. “If they wanted to spell
jail
, why didn’t they just do it in the first place? Doesn’t make any sense to me.”

“There’s a lot of things don’t make any sense to you,” Hack said. “See what it says there? You can take a class and find out about the convicts and gamblers.” He gave Lawton a significant look. “The gallows, too.”

“Maybe so,” Lawton said. “Don’t see anything about ghosts, though.”

Rhodes figured it was time for him to step in. If he didn’t, the two old men would argue all day.

“It mentioned ghosts on the other page,” he said. “The first one we looked at.”

Lawton shrugged. “Could be. Doesn’t say anything here, though, does it? Besides, who’d want to go to classes in a jail if they didn’t have to?”

“Maybe somebody that wanted to learn something,” Hack said. “Somebody that didn’t want to stay ignorant all his life.”

“Maybe we could offer some classes here,” Lawton said. “Tell ’em about that ghost we got.”

“Good idea,” Hack said. “We could build us a gallows and hang somebody as a demonstration.”

It was pretty clear who he had in mind. So Rhodes changed the subject.

“I haven’t seen any ghost,” he said.

“Me neither,” Lawton said. “I don’t believe in ’em, myself. It’s an ignorant superstition.”

“Doesn’t matter whether you believe in ’em or not,” Hack said, and Rhodes had a strong feeling that this was where he’d come in.

So before Hack could say anything about what “those fellas back in the cells” believed, Rhodes said, “Has anybody seen the ghost lately?”

Lawton straightened up. “Just Lank Rollins.”

Rollins, whose habit of passing hot checks made him a frequent resident of the jail cells, was the one who’d started the whole thing. He claimed to have been sleeping soundly in his bunk when he was awakened by a cold breeze across his face. When he looked up, he saw a dark shadow moving across his cell. He tried to call out, but his throat “closed up like somebody stuck a rag down it.” And when he tried to get out of the bunk, his blanket wrapped itself around him until he was “swaddled up like one of those Egyptian mummies.”

That was the way Lawton had found him in the morning, lying rigidly in his wrappings, flat on his back on the bunk, unable to move.

Rhodes figured that Rollins had simply had a restless night and tangled himself in his blanket, not that it made any difference in the long run.

“Once one of them fellas gets an idea in his head,” Hack said, “you can’t get it out. And then ever’body else catches it.”

Rhodes nodded. It was easy for rumors to get started in a jail, and the other five prisoners had picked up on the idea that a ghost was roaming around in their midst in about ten minutes after Rollins told Lawton the story. Before long, everyone was seeing or hearing the apparition.

One man swore he saw it in the showers. Another said that he heard it moaning in the corner of a vacant cell. And one said that it had walked right through the bars and stared at him.

Rhodes had asked what it looked like.

The man said, “A big black shadow,” which was the way that everyone described it.

Rhodes thought they were seriously lacking in imagination.

“One thing I got to give that ghost credit for,” Lawton said, leaning on the doorframe. “It’s got all those fellas readin’ their Bibles like crazy.”

“Even Tobin,” Hack said.

Andy Tobin, who had a drinking problem that landed him in jail fairly frequently, was the current jailhouse lawyer. Before the appearance of the ghost, he had been a consistent troublemaker, the kind of prisoner who spent most of his time filing grievances and going through law-books to prepare suits against the county, against the commissioners, against Rhodes, against Hack and Lawton, and, for all Rhodes knew, against the president and the Congress.

“Tobin’s the worst one of all,” Lawton said. “He hasn’t had his nose out of that Bible for the past five days.”

Rhodes went back to his desk. It was nice to know that the ghost was having a good effect on the prisoners’ spiritual lives, which could probably use some improvement.
But he was afraid any improvement that resulted would be only temporary. Before long, they’d find something else to distract them, and the ghost would be forgotten.

“The latest is, they’re sayin’ it’s the ghost of old Ham Walker,” Lawton said.

“Ham Walker,” Hack said. “How in the world do they know about him?”

“Nearly everybody knows about him,” Rhodes said. “I heard about him when I was just a kid.”

It was a story that mothers in Blacklin County had for years told their children in an attempt to encourage better behavior. According to the most popular version of the tale, Walker had been found hanged in a cell only a few weeks after the jail opened more than seventy years before.

There was a persistent rumor that the hanging had not been a suicide. Walker supposedly had been assisted on his way to the afterlife by the sheriff and his deputies, all of whom had alibied each other. Rhodes didn’t believe that part of the story in the least, though the part about Walker having hanged himself was true enough. It was in the jail records.

“Maybe that explains why the prisoners are bein’ so well behaved,” Hack said. “They’re afraid you’ll slip back there some night and hang ever’ last one of ’em.”

“Wouldn’t be a bad idea,” Lawton said. “I’m gettin’ tired of seein’ that Andy Tobin in here all the time.”

He was about to expand on that idea when the telephone rang.

Hack answered and then listened for a while to someone with an excited voice that Rhodes could hear all the way across the room, though he couldn’t make out the words. Hack wrote down all the information he was given and
assured the caller that the sheriff was on the way.

“On the way to where?” Rhodes asked when Hack hung up.

“To the cemetery. That was Clyde Ballinger on the line. He says there’s a dead man in one of the graves out there.”

“Now, there’s a surprise,” Lawton said.

2

T
HE RAIN STARTED COMING DOWN HARD JUST AS RHODES
left the jail, and he ran to the county car with his raincoat flapping around his legs.

The sky was black as night until another bolt of lightning flashed, backlighting the jail and making it look to Rhodes a little like the Castle of Frankenstein. The slam of the car door was drowned out by a whip-crack of thunder.

Rhodes started the car, then turned on the wipers and the headlights. The wipers sluiced water off the windshield, and Rhodes wheeled off toward the cemetery with his headlights reflecting off the slick and shiny street.

To get there he had to drive through downtown Clearview. As depressing as the day was already, a drive through downtown wasn’t going to improve things.

For one thing, there wasn’t much of a downtown left. Rhodes looked out at the buildings from the car. Most of them were deserted, and a couple had recently collapsed as a result of age and neglect. The noise, according to those
who’d heard it, had been louder than the thunder that was presently booming overhead. One of the walls had fallen across the sidewalk and into the street, blocking passage for two days until the rubble could be cleared away. Rhodes suspected that the buildings would never even be repaired, much less restored.

Clearview had been a thriving place when Rhodes was a boy, or so it had seemed to him. He could remember Saturday afternoons when the sidewalks of the main street were so crowded that you could hardly walk. Everybody was in town, including all the farmers who had then lived in the surrounding countryside.

On the street corner near one of the drugstores there was always a skinny Pentecostal evangelist who wore a suit and tie even in the middle of the summer and preached to the passersby through a cheap amplifier that sat on the hood of his car. Hardly anyone ever stopped to listen to him, but he stayed there all day, preaching until well after dark, since the crowd didn’t begin to thin out until the stores closed around eight o’clock.

There had been three movie theaters in Clearview then, three five-and-dime stores, five or six department stores, four drugstores, a shoe store, four grocery stores, a furniture store, two jewelry stores, a bookstore, and a couple of cafés, one of which served the best hot roast beef sandwiches Rhodes had ever eaten. He remembered the brown gravy that covered the open-face sandwich, and the mashed potatoes with more brown gravy that were served on the side.

Now there were no cafés downtown, and no theaters at all. The skinny evangelist was long gone. If you wanted to
see a movie, you rented a video or drove to a city; if you wanted to see an evangelist, you just turned on your TV set. And if you wanted a hot roast beef sandwich, well, in that case you were completely out of luck. As far as Rhodes knew, there was no place left in Texas that served them.

There were a couple of drugstores in town now, but they were nothing like the ones Rhodes remembered, places where he had bought hand-packed ice-cream cones, comic books, cherry phosphates, and chocolate malts that you could turn upside down without spilling a drop.

There was still one grocery store near downtown, but no jewelry stores, furniture stores, or shoe stores. There was no bookstore. There were two department stores, but they were barely hanging on. The place had almost become a ghost town, which Rhodes supposed was appropriate, considering that the jail was now being haunted.

That didn’t mean there was no life or commercial activity in Clearview. There was plenty, and most of it was at the Wal-Mart, located out on the highway, where its parking lot was full at all hours. It seemed to draw people like flypaper drew flies. Not that anyone would remember what flypaper was.

Rhodes drove past the collapsed buildings. One of them was mostly just a pile of rubble. The streetlights were on, and in the ghostly blue glow the building looked as if it had been hit by a bomb. Bricks were still lying all over the sidewalk, which was blocked off by a single strand of yellow plastic with the word
CAUTION
printed on it in black every few inches.

When Rhodes had been much younger, the building had
housed a tire and appliance store. He could remember the strong smell of the rubber when he stood in the back of the store to watch Noah Elarton balance tires, mark them with chalk, and hammer the lead weights onto the rims.

There was no one standing anywhere around now, and Rhodes didn’t even see any other cars on the street.

He drove on to the cemetery and went straight in through the wide-open gates. The road was lined with crepe myrtle trees that had been severely trimmed. They’d be blooming in another few months, but now they were stark and bare. The cedars farther from the road were green, and so were the oaks, but they looked black in the gloom of the day. A lightning flash threw shadows on the road, and thunder shook the car.

Rhodes didn’t know exactly where the grave he was looking for was located, but he thought it would be easy to find. And it was. There was a canopy set up off to the right, and Rhodes turned in that direction.

He stopped the car behind a black Cadillac from which Clyde Ballinger emerged, raising a huge black umbrella over his head. Rhodes got out and joined him.

“Nice day,” Ballinger said.

Ballinger wore a black suit, a white shirt, a black tie, and shiny black shoes that had just a little bit of mud on them. He was smiling and cheerful, as he usually was, and he didn’t look like an undertaker, or a funeral director, as they were called these days. Or maybe that was out of fashion, too. For all Rhodes knew they were called “grief managers.”

“Perfect,” Rhodes said. “It just doesn’t get any better than this.”