Ghost of a Chance (25 page)

They drove by the jail first, and Hack had good news and bad news.

“Which one do you want first?” he asked.

Rhodes looked at Ivy, who smiled. Rhodes had told her about the game Hack and Lawton loved to play.

“Give me the bad news,” Rhodes said.

“Right. Here it is. Clyde Ballinger called Faye’s kids, who were naturally all shook up about what happened to her. They’re talkin’ about comin’ down tomorrow and bringing half the reporters in Texas with ’em. They told Clyde that if a little old lady could be murdered in cold blood in a small Texas town, there must be something wrong with the law enforcement, and they’d go to the commissioners and ask for a full investigation.”

“Great,” Rhodes said. “The commissioners are upset enough as it is.”

“Yeah,” Hack said. “And that’s not all.”

“I know,” Rhodes said. “There’s the good news.”

Hack shook his head. “Not yet. We got more bad news to go with the first.”

“Tell me,” Rhodes said.

“They don’t want the cats,” Hack said.

“Cats?” Ivy said. “What cats?”

Hack feigned surprise. “He didn’t tell you about the cats?”

“No,” Ivy said. She looked at Rhodes. “He didn’t tell me about the cats.”

Rhodes thought that the time to strangle Hack had finally arrived. But he couldn’t do it, not with Ivy there as a witness. He put up his hands.

“I forgot,” he said.

“Sure,” Hack said. “It’s easy to forget three poor kitties starved for affection, who’ll prob’ly have to be put to sleep because nobody’ll take ‘em in.”

“You’d think Faye’s children would want them,” Rhodes said defensively. “Something to remember their mother by.”

“We could take them,” Ivy said.

“No, we couldn’t,” Rhodes said. “I’m allergic. And the dogs would hate them.”

“We’ll talk about it,” Ivy said, and Rhodes knew he was doomed.

“What’s the good news?” he asked. “You did say there was some good news, didn’t you?”

Hack grinned. “Sure thing. Buddy brought in that Trask fella, and he’s singin’ like Bing Crosby.”

“What’s the tune?” Rhodes asked.

“About what you thought,” Hack said. “He started talkin’ by the time Buddy got him in the car. He wants a deal. So Buddy gave him the Miranda and listened to what he had to say. Course Buddy didn’t promise him anything, but the guy talked anyway.”

“And he said?”

“He said he got the dope from Rapper. It was supposed to be a sample of the kind of thing Rapper was gonna teach him to cook up. He didn’t try it himself, naturally. Never touches the stuff.”

“Naturally,” Rhodes said, glad to know he’d been right about Rapper. “What kind of deal did he want?”

“Says he’ll testify against Rapper if we’ll let him off on the possession charges.”

“What about leaving the scene of an accident?”

“He didn’t mention that.”

Rhodes smiled. “Good. We can promise him a deal on the possession charge and then nail him on the other one.”

“Are you sure he won’t think of that?” Ivy asked.

“He may be singing like Crosby,” Rhodes said. “But he’s no Eckstine.”

Ivy looked at him blankly.

“It’s complicated,” Rhodes said. “Someday I’ll explain it.”

“I’d probably be better off if you didn’t.”

“True. Well, now that we have that taken care of, let’s go to the cemetery.”

“What’re you gonna do out there?” Hack wanted to know.

“Just call us the Ghost Breakers,” Rhodes said.

“Busters,” Hack said.

Rhodes shook his head. “Wrong movie.
The Ghost Breakers
is more my speed. Bob Hope, Paulette Goddard.”

Hack thought it over, then said, “Catchers, then.
Ghost Catchers
had Olsen and Johnson. I’d say that’s even more your speed.”

“You could be right,” Rhodes told him.

“Amen,” Ivy said.

33

T
HE WIND WAS KICKING UP BY THE TIME THEY GOT TO
the cemetery, and the clouds were getting thick. The night was very dark.

“Perfect night for ghosts,” Ivy said. “You couldn’t have planned it better.”

“You should have been out here with me the other night,” Rhodes said. “When it was thundering and lightning. And raining. That was better.”

“I think we can do without the rain.”

“Me, too. But I’d like to find those ghosts.”

“You know something?” Ivy said. “You’re just as bad as Hack in your own little way.”

“What little way?”

“You still haven’t told me what the ghost is or how you know about it.”

“That’s because I don’t know. I just suspect.”

“Whatever. You could still tell me.”

“I guess you’re right,” Rhodes said. The truth is, there’s no such thing as ghosts.”

“See what I mean? You’re just like him. You’ve been around that jail too long.”

“You might have a point,” Rhodes admitted.

“So tell me.”

Rhodes stopped the car. They were parked not far from where Ty Berry had been buried that afternoon. The canopy and chairs were gone, and the raw earth mounded over his grave was no longer covered by a carpet of fake green grass.

“Emus,” Rhodes said.

“Emus?” Ivy didn’t sound convinced. “How on earth did you get from ghosts to emus?”

“It’s hard to explain.”

“Try,” Ivy said.

The trouble was that Rhodes couldn’t really explain it, not even to himself. He worked mostly by intuition and hunches. He talked to people, he watched their reactions, he tried to observe what was going on around him. And sometimes things just fell into place.

It was like working on a jigsaw puzzle. You could look for hours, trying to locate a certain piece to fit a certain spot, and never find it. Then you could leave the table for a while, come back, and see the missing piece immediately. There was no way to explain why the piece had been so hard to find when you were looking for it and so easy to see when you weren’t. And then when you fit it into place, the whole puzzle would take shape.

“It started with a couple of feathers,” Rhodes said.

He told Ivy about the two feathers he’d picked up at Ty Berry’s funeral.

“I thought they were just part of some flower arrangement, but then this afternoon when I drove by Nard King’s place, I remembered hearing about the emu business and how it hadn’t worked out for a lot of people. Some of them have had so much trouble paying for feed and upkeep that they’ve just turned the emus loose. Nard’s place is rundown, and his emu pens looked empty. So I figured—”

“Hold on,” Ivy said. “You mean to tell me that from just a couple of feathers and an empty pen, you came to the conclusion that the ghost was an emu?”

“That’s not all,” Rhodes said. “When I saw Nard at Rapper’s place, I knew he was trying a new way to make money, and I was sure he’d turned his emus loose. He’d rather learn to make drugs than pay for their feed. He was on the shady side from the start, and it’s the sort of thing he’d do. I’ll have to check, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he had the emus insured. If he did, he’ll have filed a claim. He might even say they were stolen.”

“And that’s it?”

“No,” Rhodes said. “What else can move as fast as the ghost does? Remember, I’ve had a glimpse of it myself. No human being can run that fast, but an emu can. And they’re about the right size and shape. Put some teenage kids in a cemetery at night, get an emu on the move, and you’ve got something that looks a lot like a ghost.”

Ivy thought about it for a while and then said, “You could be right, I suppose. How are we going to find out?”

“I figured we’d just wait around and see what happens. I don’t know much about emus, but I don’t think they’re nocturnal. Something must be disturbing them and causing them to move around.”

Ivy thought about that, too.

“Trains,” she said. “What time does the Amtrak come through?”

Rhodes looked at his watch and said, “In about fifteen or twenty minutes if it’s on time. You think it’s the train, then?”

“Why not? Trains make a lot of noise, and there’s that flashing light on the engine besides. What else could be stirring them up?”

“I don’t know,” Rhodes said. “A ghost?”

“You said there wasn’t any such thing as ghosts.”

“I might have been lying.”

“In that case, I’d better move over a little closer to you. We have a few minutes to kill, and maybe you can think of something to do.”

“Maybe,” Rhodes said.

The train was on time. It rattled over the tracks, whistling at every crossing, and its big headlight roved from side to side in front.

“What if it wasn’t the train?” Ivy said. “What if it was the wind and the rain and the lightning?”

“We’ll find out,” Rhodes said.

They sat very still and waited, until the last note of the train’s lonesome whistle had faded away into the night and distance. And then they waited some more.

For a long time nothing happened. Then Ivy said, “What’s that over there?”

She pointed, and Rhodes looked through the windshield. Something was moving along the fencerow, but it was too dark to tell what it was.

There was a flicker of lightning back in the north, and
in a few seconds Rhodes heard a faint crack of thunder.

“That must be our ghost,” Rhodes said. “Right on cue. The train woke it up, or scared it.”

“Don’t you have a spotlight on this car?” Ivy asked.

Rhodes did, and he turned it on, swiveling it by the handle. The light swept across grass and gravestones and obelisks, and then it hit the fence.

The ghost was startled into a run, but Rhodes was able to get a good look at it. It was definitely an emu, a big one, and it was running along the fence faster than Rhodes could follow it with the light. Rhodes knew that if he and Ivy had been outside the car, they’d have heard the grunting sound that emus sometimes made in stressful situations.

Rhodes switched off the light.

“Another mystery solved,” he said.

There was more lightning and more thunder. The rain was coming closer.

“You’ve solved the mystery, all right,” Ivy said. “But what about the emus? What are you going to do about them?”

“I’m going to delegate that job.”

“Who gets it?”

“Ruth Grady. She’s the champion roper of the Sheriff’s Department.”

“She won’t hurt them?”

“Nope. They’ll be fine.”

“What’ll you do with them after she catches them?”

“Maybe somebody will buy them. If not, we’ll see if there’s a zoo that wants them. You don’t have to worry about them. I already have something in mind for them.”

“But you’re not going to tell me what it is, are you?”

“Not until I see what I can work out.”

The first light drops of rain started to pop against the car top and hood.

“What about tonight?” Ivy asked. “Do you have anything worked out for them tonight?”

“A little rain won’t hurt them,” Rhodes said. “They’ve been in the rain before. They’ll probably get in the trees down by the railroad tracks.”

“Good,” Ivy said. “Now let’s talk about those cats.”

34

T
HE RAIN HUNG AROUND OVERNIGHT IN THE FORM OF A
dark gray sky and a heavy mist that made the morning air thick and wet and covered everything with tiny droplets of water.

Rhodes went by Faye Knape’s house and fed the cats. He still thought of them as Faye’s cats, though he was afraid they were well on the way to becoming his. He hadn’t quite figured out how he was going to explain things to Speedo and Yancey. Maybe, he thought, he wouldn’t have to. Maybe the Knape heirs wouldn’t want the cats to go to anyone in law enforcement. Maybe they had some adoptive parents in mind already.

Fat chance, he thought.

The cats were glad to see him, but only because he was feeding them. They hadn’t suddenly developed an undying affection for him overnight.

He gave them food and fresh water and left. For some reason, his eyes weren’t itching nearly as much as they
should have been, and he sneezed only once on the way to his car.

Melva Keeler was standing out on her porch in her robe and fuzzy slippers. She was holding her morning newspaper and looking across the street through the mist.

Rhodes wiped water off his face and thought about going over and talking to her, just to see if she’d break down and confess to Faye’s murder, but that would have to wait. He had other things on his mind.