A Romantic Way to Die (23 page)

He’d gotten sidetracked, however, before he could sneak back to his own room, by Tom Chatterton, who’d been leaving the president’s house and going over to the dorm. Terry Don hadn’t been to Obert in years, if he’d ever been there even when he lived in Clearview, so it was easy enough for him to go astray while trying to avoid Chatterton and wander down behind the Appleby and Quentin houses, where he’d been seen running around in his skivvies and mistaken for a woman because of his long hair and his peculiar taste in underwear. Or at least it seemed peculiar to Rhodes and to Mrs. Appleby. In his haste to get back to where he belonged, Terry Don had dropped a sock, the one Rhodes had found later, and the one Terry Don had gone back to look for when Quentin decided to ventilate him with the shotgun.

Jeanne Arnot was the one who’d argued with Henrietta and perhaps shoved her down, with the result that Henrietta had a serious depressed fracture of the skull and wouldn’t be writing any more manuscripts. Jeanne had then left by the back door and come in through the front as if she’d been at the main building all along, but Vernell had seen her leaving Henrietta’s room and used that fact to get herself a literary agent and the promise of a fat book contract in the future if things worked out.

Terry Don must have had an inkling of what happened between Jeanne and Henrietta, and Jeanne had shoved him out the window of the main building. Rhodes was sure of that part, though he didn’t yet know just why. He was planning to ask Jeanne about all that.

He should have realized that Jeanne had pushed Terry Don when he had seen the whistle on the key ring. It had been on a chain earlier, and Rhodes was betting that Terry Don had grabbed the chain and broken it as he fell, causing the burn on his index finger. And leaving a tiny link of the chain in the crack in the main building’s third floor. Jeanne had either found the link after bashing Rhodes in the head with a bucket, or she’d tried to dispose of it by blowing up the building.

Rhodes would have liked to know what had happened to the rest of the chain. Did Jeanne have it, all except for a link or two, or had Terry Don carried it down with him? If he had, someone had taken it from his dead hand.

Rhodes thought it was just barely possible that Claude Appleby might have done that. Claude had, after all, been pretty reluctant to talk about what he had or hadn’t seen, had or hadn’t done.

Or maybe Jeanne had gotten the chain back.

If he ever caught up with her, Rhodes thought, he’d ask her about that, too. But catching up with her might be a problem. Carrie had tipped her off, and Rhodes had no idea where she had gone.

When Rhodes got to the front room, it was buzzing with talk. Rhodes couldn’t make out any individual words because there were no more small-group conversations. Even though he didn’t know what was being said, Rhodes figured that people were talking about Jeanne Arnot’s sudden departure. Everyone was talking to everyone else all at the same time, except for Chatterton, who saw Rhodes and shoved his way over.

“What’s going on, Sheriff?” he yelled.

“Jeanne Arnot!” Rhodes yelled back, without explaining. “Where’d she go?”

“Outside, but—”

Rhodes didn’t wait to hear the rest. He pushed through the crowd, oblivious to the looks he was getting from those he elbowed and shoved. When he got outside, he looked around for Jeanne, but he didn’t see her anywhere.

As he tried to spot the runaway agent, Rhodes remembered the last time he’d chased down a killer in Obert. He’d been in his car for a while, zinging along the county roads, and when he’d gotten out of the car, he’d been attacked by the killer, who’d commandeered the county tree whacker. It hadn’t been a good experience, and Rhodes hoped the tree whacker was nowhere around.

It was pretty likely that Jeanne didn’t have a car, Rhodes thought. Someone would have had to pick her up at the airport in Waco or Dallas and drive her to Obert. Which meant that she must be on foot. There was nowhere she could go on foot, unless she walked to the highway and tried to hitch a ride, or unless she wandered in the wrong direction, the way Terry Don had done when he’d left Henrietta’s room. It was easy for someone from the city to get disoriented in a place like Obert’s Hill where there was only one landmark and where every direction was down.

Rhodes looked toward the road to town and saw no one. He looked at the road that ran past the main building and down the hill past Quentin’s house. He didn’t see anyone there, either.

Then he heard a dog barking, and almost immediately after that, he heard a shotgun.

32

R
HODES TOOK OFF DOWN THE HILL, MAKING THE BEST TIME HE could. He was hampered both by the darkness and by the fact that he was still sore from the previous night’s adventures, but he made pretty good time since he knew more or less where he was going. Otherwise, he would have been in serious trouble, because the sky was cloudy and there were no lights to help him. The glow in the dormitory windows reached no farther than the grass just outside the building.

The shotgun boomed again, and in the silence that returned after its blast had stopped echoing, Rhodes could hear Grover barking away. Rhodes had to give Grover credit. He was always on the alert.

The shotgun thundered again, and Rhodes tried to pick up his pace. He didn’t want Billy Quentin to kill Jeanne, though considering his accuracy so far, it seemed unlikely that he was going to hit her. You never knew with a shotgun, though. The buckshot spread out quickly after a certain distance, and Rhodes had heard of cases where one little piece of shot in just the wrong place had been enough to kill someone.

So he started yelling for Quentin to stop shooting.

“This is the sheriff!” he shouted. “Don’t shoot!”

Quentin was apparently determined not to allow any more sneaking window-peepers on his property whether they were doing any actual peeping or whether they included the sheriff within their ranks. He fired off another round.

“Quentin!” Rhodes yelled. “Put down that gun or I’ll arrest you for reckless endangerment and attempted murder!”

Quentin either wasn’t paying attention, didn’t care, or figured that dead men couldn’t arrest anyone. He kept right on blasting away, and in between the shots Grover kept on barking. Half the people in Obert must have been aroused by now, or they would have been had they lived within hearing distance. One advantage of a sparse population is that sometimes your nearest neighbors were half a mile away.

Rhodes’s feet were getting heavy from mud he’d picked up as he ran, and he was slowing down more and more. That was probably a good thing, he thought, as he was getting very close to Quentin’s place. He came to a stop behind a tree, hoping that Quentin couldn’t hear him panting. It was unlikely that he could, thanks to Grover, who by this time had worked himself into a positive frenzy of barking, so Rhodes leaned forward with his hands on his knees and tried to catch his breath. He wondered why Grover wasn’t panting. He seemed able to bark continuously without ever having to pause to breathe.

After a few seconds, Rhodes realized that although Grover was still barking, Quentin was no longer shooting. Rhodes thought that was a good thing. He called out, “Quentin, this is Sheriff Rhodes. I’m right here by the house, and I’m going to show myself. Have you put that gun down?”

There was no answer. Rhodes took another breath or two and said, “Quentin? Are you still there?”

Again there was no reply. Rhodes was beginning to wonder whether Quentin was all right. He hadn’t looked like a candidate for a heart attack, being skinny and wiry, but Rhodes knew you couldn’t always tell about a man’s cholesterol level by his appearance.

“Quentin?” Rhodes said, stepping from behind the tree.

As soon as he stepped out of the dark shadow of the tree, the shotgun blasted and Rhodes heard the shot ripping through the leaves of the tree and ticking off the branches. Something tugged at his shirtsleeve.

Rhodes hit the ground and hugged it. He had a feeling he knew what had happened, but he had no idea
how
it had. Jeanne Arnot had somehow gotten hold of the shotgun.

Rhodes wondered how many rounds had been fired. Had Quentin reloaded? Rhodes tried to count back. Four? Five? Six? Rhodes wasn’t sure.

Quentin must have reloaded, he thought, but if he hadn’t, did Jeanne Arnot know how?

And if she did, did she have access to any cartridges?

At least one thing was explained. Rhodes knew now why Grover was having such a fit. Quentin wasn’t there to tell him to be quiet.

Well, Rhodes thought, that probably wasn’t quite true. Quentin was there, all right. He just wasn’t in any condition to say anything to his dog. Or to anyone else.

Rhodes started to inch forward on his stomach. There was no telling where Jeanne Arnot might be or whether she had any ammunition left, and he certainly couldn’t hear her, thanks to Grover, whose lungs must have been made of some form of highly flexible leather. He was full of energy, too. Every now and then, in the minuscule space of silence between barking fits, Rhodes could hear the jingling of a chain-link fence as Grover threw himself against it.

When he reached another tree, Rhodes stood up and took cover behind it. He pulled out his pistol and checked it. He didn’t want to shoot Jeanne, but she didn’t know that. Maybe she’d give up when she learned that he was armed.

“Jeanne!” he said, careful to stay behind the tree. “This is Sheriff Rhodes. I know the shotgun is out of shells. Put it down, and we can talk.”

The part about knowing the gun was out of shells was a lie, but Rhodes was willing to take the chance that Jeanne would believe him.

She didn’t. There was a roar, and buckshot ripped into the tree trunk, tearing away the bark and several sizable chunks of wood. Jeanne was a definite hazard to the environment, and she must not have been very far away. And she clearly didn’t plan to talk to him.

Rhodes would have to wait her out, and he would have, except that he wasn’t very good at waiting in certain situations. This was one of them.

He saw another tree not far away, maybe ten feet, so he ran for it, arriving safely and with no shots being fired.

Grover didn’t like it, though. The rapid movement seemed to irritate him exceedingly and to give him a second wind. He barked and carried on even more than before, if that was possible, hurling himself at the fence with renewed enthusiasm.

Rhodes looked out from behind the tree. He didn’t see anyone, but there were so many shadows that someone could have been standing within a couple of yards of him and he might not have known it.

Grover knew it. He barked and rattled the fence fiercely. Rhodes was tempted to tell him to calm down, but it wouldn’t have helped, and it would have revealed his position if Jeanne Arnot hadn’t figured it out yet.

Rhodes was still trying to decide what to do when he heard someone calling his name. It wasn’t Jeanne. It was Claude Appleby.

“Sheriff, are you around here somewhere?”

“Over here,” Rhodes said. “But be careful. There’s a woman out there with a shotgun.”

“Not anymore,” Claude said. “She’s gone.”

“What about Billy Quentin?”

“He’s here,” Claude said. “He looks like he might be dead, though.”

Rhodes sighed, holstered his pistol, and stepped out from behind the tree.

“Let’s have a look,” he said, walking over to where Claude was looking down at something on the ground.

The something was Billy Quentin, who was lying on his back, his eyes closed. He looked dead, all right, but there was a thick tree branch lying nearby, and Rhodes thought that maybe it had been used on Quentin the way the bucket had been used on Rhodes. Jeanne Arnot had a way of sneaking up on you.

Rhodes knelt down and checked for a pulse in Quentin’s neck. It was beating strongly.

“He’ll be okay,” Rhodes told Claude, speaking loudly so as to be heard over the sound of Grover’s constant barking. “Unless he has a skull fracture or a concussion. What are you doing here?”

Claude looked down at his shoes as if they were very interesting, although they were only cheap running shoes that he’d most likely bought in the Wal-Mart shoe department.

“I was out walking around,” he said. “And I heard the shooting. I started not to come over here, but then I figured I’d like to know what was going on.”

“And you saw the woman,” Rhodes said. “Did she happen to see you?”

“I’m not sure.” Claude looked up. “She ran off, though, and she was carrying a shotgun.”

“I have to find her,” Rhodes said.

“What about that dog?” Claude said. “If we let him out, maybe he’d track her down. He seems pretty upset about everything.”

“He might track her,” Rhodes said. “Or he might just bite us.”

“Naw, not old Grover. He wouldn’t hurt a fly. He just likes to make noise.”

“You seem to know him pretty well.”

“You know how it is,” Claude said. “You make friends with a dog, and he won’t bark at you.”

“If you happen to be going for a walk after dark, you mean.”

“Yessir.”

“Well, never mind that. Let him out. We’ll see what happens.”

Claude went over to the pen, which got Grover even more excited than before, if that was possible. When Claude opened the gate, Grover flew out of it like a furry ballistic missile, nearly knocking Rhodes down. He was shaggy and of indeterminate ancestry. It looked to Rhodes as if he had somehow inherited the least attractive aspects of all their appearances. But he didn’t bite anyone.

And he didn’t go after Jeanne Arnot. He went straight to Quentin and started licking his face.

“I guess he likes him,” Rhodes said.

“Looks that way,” Claude said. “He’s not going to be much help in tracking that woman after all. But maybe you won’t need him.”

Quentin was beginning to stir around under Grover’s lapping tongue. He hadn’t opened his eyes, however, so Rhodes couldn’t hold up two fingers to test him for a concussion.

“Which way did the woman go?” Rhodes asked Claude.

Claude pointed west and said, “Down toward Obert’s Creek. That’s why you might not need the dog.”