A Romantic Way to Die (7 page)

“I’m going home,” Rhodes told Ruth. “Tomorrow I’ll be back early to search those woods down there. I got interrupted tonight.”

“You never told me what you were doing there in the first place,” Ruth said.

Rhodes told her about the naked woman.

“And you think she had something to do with Henrietta?”

“Don’t you?”

“Maybe it was just some city woman who wanted to get close to nature.”

“Nobody wants to get that close to nature, not at this time of the year,” Rhodes said.

“What if she’s the one who was in the room with Henrietta?”

“I guess that’s something we’ll have to consider.”

“You think she dropped her glass slipper in Billy Quentin’s back yard?”

Rhodes smiled. “It would be a big help if she did.”

“Yeah. Well, I wouldn’t count on it if I were you.”

“I try never to count on anything when it comes to a crime like this one,” Rhodes said. “That way I’m never disappointed.”

“You’d be disappointed if Clyde and Claude were involved in this, wouldn’t you?”

Rhodes had to admit that he would. He’d tried to help the twins, and it seemed that they had their lives on the right track. He didn’t like to think that they could have had anything to do with Henrietta’s death.

“You don’t think that’s possible, do you?” he said.

“I wouldn’t rule them out. When it comes to sneaking around and peeping in windows, those two have a head start on everybody else around here.”

“They’ve changed,” Rhodes said. “At least I think they’ve changed.”

Ruth looked skeptical. She said, “Anything’s possible, I guess.”

But she didn’t sound as if she meant a word of it.

Rhodes wasn’t what he could call perky the next morning. He’d had only a couple of hours’ sleep, and his eyes felt as if they were glued shut with rubber cement. It was one of those times that Rhodes wished he liked coffee. He had a Dr Pepper instead, but the caffeine didn’t kick in enough to make any difference.

Hack woke him up, however. When Rhodes walked through the door of the jail, Hack said, “You better go talk to Mildred Cramer. She got one of those calls about the contest.”

“What contest?” Rhodes asked.

“That one about the date with Terry Don.”

“Oh,” Rhodes said, rubbing his eyes, one of which was still sore from where the tree limb had whacked him.

“What about it?” he asked.

“She says she knows who did the calling,” Hack told him.

Rhodes stopped rubbing.

“Who was it?”

“Henrietta Bayam,” Hack said.

9

M
ILDRED CRAMER AND HER HUSBAND, JOE, LIVED IN A LITTLE white frame house just outside the city limits on the road to Milsby. They had chickens in a pen and a collie dog named Hank that Rhodes wished wasn’t quite so friendly.

“Get down, Hank,” Mildred called from her front porch. “Don’t you jump up on the sheriff like that. He doesn’t want your paw prints all over his shirt.”

Hank paid her no attention at all. He kept trying to jump up on Rhodes until he saw a cat zip past the corner of the house. He left Rhodes in the lurch and went charging off after the cat, who was headed for a little sheet-metal barn out back.

“Don’t worry about Princess,” Mildred said, meaning the cat, Rhodes supposed. “She can take care of herself. Sometimes I think Hank must not be too smart. He’s never caught her yet, but he keeps on trying.”

Mildred was around sixty. She was short and stout, and she was sitting on her small front porch in a lawn chair with her left leg stuck straight out in front of her. Her left foot was in a cast that rested on an overturned bucket.

“It’s not as uncomfortable as it looks,” she said. “Sometimes it itches under the cast, though. That’s not much fun.”

“What happened?” Rhodes asked.

“I stepped in a hole on the way to the barn, broke my ankle. Teach me to look where I’m going, I guess.”

There was a TV tray beside Mildred. On the tray were a portable telephone, a battery-powered radio, and a glass of something that Rhodes guessed was water. Mildred turned down the radio, which had been tuned in to a talk show from Dallas, and reached for the glass.

“Lemonade,” she said, taking a drink and setting the glass back on the table. “Joe made it for me before he went to work. I’d offer you some, but the one glass is all I have. It’s instant, though, and you can make one for yourself if you want to. The stuff’s in the kitchen.”

Rhodes didn’t want to. He liked lemonade just fine, in the summertime, but it wasn’t summer, and he wasn’t thirsty.

“No, thanks,” he said. “You called about Henrietta Bayam.”

“Poor thing. I heard about her this morning from Annie Floyd. I couldn’t believe it, and I’d just talked to her yesterday.”

“About some radio contest?”

“That’s right. A date with Terry Don Coslin.” Mildred laughed. “Be my luck, I’d win. With this foot, I couldn’t go anyway. I can walk on it, but it’s not easy, and I have to use a cane.”

Rhodes saw that there was a wooden cane hooked to the arm of the lawn chair.

“About that phone call,” he said.

“I knew it was a joke right off,” Mildred said. “Imagine Henrietta trying to fool me like that.”

“She called several other people,” Rhodes said. “And none of them recognized her voice.”

“Well, I did. I’ve been in her writing group for so long that I’ve heard her read all kinds of things. I’d know that voice anywhere.”

Rhodes heard barking back in the barn and looked in that direction.

“Princess is probably up on a couple of hay bales where Hank can’t get at her,” Mildred said. “Like I said, you don’t have to worry about her.”

“I was worried about Hank,” Rhodes said.

Mildred laughed. “He’ll be all right. When he gets himself all barked out, he’ll come and lie down in the shade till he recovers.”

“So you’re sure it was Henrietta who called,” Rhodes said, getting back to the purpose of his visit.

“I’m sure, all right. As soon as I caught on, I said, ‘Henrietta, you ought to know better than to try to fool an old woman like me.’”

“Did she say why she was doing it?”

“No. She just hung up. But it was her, all right. I remember when she was reading from
Love’s Wild Deception,
she used a voice like that.”

“That’s a book?” Rhodes asked.

“Yes. One of her better ones, too, even if it hasn’t ever been published. Or maybe it has. Some people think Vernell stole the plot from it for her own book.”

“What do you think?”

Mildred took another drink of lemonade, set the glass back down, and leaned slightly forward in her chair.

“Do you read romance novels, Sheriff?”

“I read Vernell’s.”

“Is that the only one?”

Rhodes admitted that it was.

“Well, then you don’t know. But the truth is that they’re a lot alike. I don’t mean there’s a formula or anything like that. But I’m working on one myself, and it’s a whole lot the same. In quite a few romance novels, you have the same situation. There’s a woman who’s got some kind of problem, and she meets this man that really irritates her, or seems to. The readers all know that the two of them were meant to be together, but things keep getting in the way. There’s usually another man, and we all know he’s definitely the wrong one, but it looks like he’s going to get her by fair means or foul, and the troubles just keep piling up. I’d say that Vernell’s book is like that. So was Henrietta’s. But then so are a few hundred more.”

Rhodes asked why Mildred wasn’t at the conference. She pointed to her foot.

“If it weren’t for that ankle, I’d be right there. I’d love to meet that Jeanne Arnot. She’s sold more books than anybody in New York.”

Rhodes said he was sorry about the ankle and about Mildred’s having to miss the conference. Mildred didn’t seem the type to write romance novels, but apparently there wasn’t a type. He should have known that.

Rhodes had another stop to make before he went out and visited Billy Quentin’s woods. He wanted to have a look at Henrietta Bayam’s house. She had lived only about six blocks from downtown Clearview, and Rhodes drove through town to get there.

He noticed that the rubble from some recently-collapsed buildings had been cleared away sometime within the last few days, but the sight of the vacant lot on what had been one of the busiest corners in the town didn’t do much to cheer him up about Clearview’s prospects for the future.

He turned left at the corner and drove past two more blocks of what had once been called “the business district.” There wasn’t much business being conducted there now. There was still a fairly prosperous bank on one corner, but most of the rest of the buildings in the block were vacant.

On the other side of the street there was one store, a vacant building, and a parking lot. The building where one of the town’s biggest grocery stores had once been was empty now, the store having moved into larger quarters out on the highway near the Wal-Mart. Rhodes figured that in another year or two there wouldn’t be a business left in the business district, with the possible exception of the bank. He wondered if anyone would come up with a new name for it then.

Henrietta had lived in an old brick house with a neatly trimmed yard. The house had belonged to her parents, who had died about ten years previously when Henrietta was barely out of high school, her father in a car accident and her mother of cancer. As far as Rhodes knew, she didn’t have any other relatives. She was the last of the Bayams. She’d been married once, just after her graduation from college, but the marriage hadn’t lasted very long. Rhodes didn’t know why. After that, she had moved back to Clearview and started working as a secretary to the town’s only optometrist. She’d been there ever since.

Rhodes pulled the county car into the driveway and got out. He stood for a minute and looked the place over. There was a walled concrete porch on the front, with short brick pillars on either side of the steps. The windows were all covered with screens painted black, and there was a black screen door in front.

Rhodes went up on the porch, opened the screen, and tried the front door. It wasn’t locked. Most people in Clearview still trusted their neighbors and didn’t bother to lock either their houses or their cars, though more and more of them were beginning to do so.

Rhodes went inside. The front room was chilly. It smelled musty and looked like something out of a nineteenth-century novel. There were a couple of old chairs and an overstuffed couch with lace doilies on the arms. To the right was another room that connected to the living room by what Rhodes thought were called French doors for some reason he’d forgotten, if he’d ever known.

Henrietta had been using the room as an office. Bookshelves overflowed with paperback romance novels, fat ones, thin ones, and medium-sized ones. A computer desk stood against one wall and held a monitor, keyboard, and printer. The computer box was on the floor underneath. It seemed that every house Rhodes looked into in the course of an investigation had a computer these days, convincing proof to Rhodes that the computer revolution had touched everyone in the world.

Rhodes opened the French doors and went into the room. There was a cardboard box beside the printer, and Rhodes opened it up to have a look. What he saw was the title page of a manuscript. Rhodes picked it up to read it, then put it back down. If he left it in the box, he could just about read it without having to put on his glasses.

The title page said:

A ROMANTIC WAY TO DIE

A Mystery Novel

BY

Henrietta Bayam

Ivy must have been right, Rhodes thought. Everyone who wasn’t writing a romance novel was writing a mystery, and Henrietta was writing both.

He got his reading glasses out of his pocket and took out a few pages of the manuscript to read. The very first sentence grabbed his attention.

Bernell Kidsey was a bitch,
it said.

Uh-oh, Rhodes thought. Then he read the next two sentences:

She was also a thief. That’s why I had to kill her.

Rhodes forgot about going to the woods to look for clues. He took the manuscript into the other room, turned on a light, and sat on the couch, which was a lot more comfortable than it looked.

Then he started to read.

10

A
FTER READING AS FAST AS HE COULD FOR A COUPLE OF HOURS, Rhodes put the manuscript aside. It had become clear to him after only a few pages that the book was based mostly on people in and around Clearview, and a few from out of town, with the character of Bernell Kidsey being only the first of many examples.

The plot was simple: an aspiring romance novelist writes a book that all her friends tell her is a cinch to be published just as soon as the manuscript is polished and ready, but an envious friend steals the plot idea and pitches a much inferior version of the book to a sleazy agent named “Jane Arnold,” who isn’t above sleeping with editors (either men or women; Jane wasn’t particular) to increase her sales records.

The book’s narrator, the practically saintly (except for her murderous tendencies) was “Loretta Seaham,” and she managed to kill the treacherous Bernell and get the crime blamed on Arnold, who conveniently committed suicide, thus convincing the slightly stupid redneck county sheriff (“Don Street”) of her guilt and allowing Loretta to get on with her life and her interrupted writing career with no one the wiser.

Rhodes folded his glasses and put them back in his pocket. His only consolation was that Henrietta had made him somewhat younger, trimmer, and better-looking than he actually was. Well, younger anyway. Ivy had been keeping him pretty much on a healthy diet since their marriage, and he’d shed a few pounds. Maybe he’d gotten more handsome, too, though that seemed a bit more doubtful. But he was sure he hadn’t gotten any younger. In fact, after reading Henrietta’s manuscript, he felt about ten years older.