A Romantic Way to Die (24 page)

“I know what you mean,” Rhodes said.

Benjamin Franklin Obert, an obscure pioneer, might or might not have had a considerable ego, but he had been the first person to settle down on a particular Texas hill, and for that reason his name was attached to any number of things: to the hill itself, to the little town that grew up near where he built his home, to the college that had later been built in the town, and to the sluggish little creek that flowed around the bottom of the hill.

Or it flowed most of the time. When the summers were very dry, it occasionally disappeared altogether, leaving behind only a muddy bottom that eventually dried out, became hard, and cracked crazily.

It was now flowing about as much as it ever did, thanks to the earlier rainstorm and to several others that had passed through the area earlier in the month. The area around it was boggy and full of frogs, bugs, and the occasional snake. Rhodes wasn’t fond of snakes. For that matter, he didn’t much like bugs, either. Frogs didn’t bother him.

He wondered how Jeanne Arnot felt about them. That was another thing he could ask her when he caught up with her.

If he ever did.

“You stay here with Mr. Quentin,” he told Claude.

“If Ma and Clyde heard the shootin’, they’ll be over here before long,” Claude said. “They could take care of Mr. Quentin, and I could go with you to help out.”

“You’re not a deputy,” Rhodes said. “So you stay here. Anyway, I have another job for you. When your mother gets here, you go back to your house and call for an ambulance. Then call the jail and tell Mr. Jensen to send Ruth Grady out here as fast as he can. You got all that?”

“Yessir,” Claude said. “What about that dog? You want me to put him back in the pen?”

Rhodes looked at Grover, who was still washing Quentin’s face.

“Don’t bother him,” Rhodes said. “No need to start him barking again.”

“Right,” Claude said.

When he was still a good fifty yards from the creek, Rhodes was slogging through mud that came up to the tops of his socks. Every time he took a step, there was a loud sucking sound before the gooey muck flowed back together. He’d heard several frogs and been bitten by more than several bugs, but he hadn’t encountered any snakes.

And he hadn’t encountered Jeanne Arnot, either. It occurred to him in mid-slog that she’d outsmarted him all the way around.

Jeanne had gone down the hill, but that didn’t mean she had to stay there. If she hadn’t run across Quentin, she would probably have started back up a whole lot sooner, but Quentin had distracted her for a while.

She might have been expecting Rhodes. She might even have had the tree branch ready for him instead of Quentin, who’d fouled up her plans temporarily. But then Claude had shown up, and she’d been quick to take advantage. She let him see her running off in one direction, while planning all the time to go make a quick turn back to where she’d come from.

Either that, or she was hiding somewhere up to her nose in mud and sludge. Somehow Rhodes didn’t think that was the case. He looked back up the hill to where the lights in the dormitory showed up brightly in the darkness. He pulled a foot out of the ooze and started in that direction.

Once he was onto more solid ground, he broke into a heavy trot, but he didn’t make very good time. Not only were his feet weighed down with mud, but his pants legs were soaked and slimy. He hoped Jeanne was as big a mess as he was, though he didn’t think she would be. She was smarter than he was, and she wouldn’t have gotten as close to the creek as he did.

He was about halfway up the hill when he heard a commotion from the dormitory. He sped up his trot as much as he could, which wasn’t much.

He didn’t think he was going to get there in time, and he was right. By the time he reached the dorm, Jeanne was already there, and she still had the shotgun.

There was one other little problem, as well.

She also had Vernell.

33

V
ERNELL WASN’T HAPPY. IN FACT, SHE LOOKED SO UPSET THAT Rhodes thought she might have exploded if it had been possible for a person to do that. Her face was as red as if she had been holding her breath for four or five minutes. Maybe she had, though it didn’t seem likely. Rhodes wondered if she was still as pleased with her agent as she had been when they’d worked out whatever deal they had.

Probably not, since Rhodes doubted that at the time Jeanne had been gripping Vernell’s hair with one hand and holding a shotgun barrel under her chin with the other.

Jeanne herself looked harried but in control, while everyone else just looked surprised. Now that the fuss had died down, no one was saying a word. They were all staring at Jeanne and Vernell.

Rhodes looked at Jeanne’s legs. She was wearing denim pants, and they didn’t appear wet at all. He’d been right about her. She hadn’t gone anywhere near the creek.

“Hello, Sheriff,” Jeanne said when Rhodes walked up. “I was hoping it might take you a little longer to get here.”

“I rushed,” Rhodes said. “You aren’t planning to shoot Vernell, are you?”

“I’d hate to have to do that,” Jeanne said. “But I suppose it’s all up to you.”

“How’s that?”

“It depends on what kind of deal we can work out,” Jeanne said.

Vernell chose that moment to try to wriggle loose. She jerked her head to the left and twisted her body in the other direction. It might have worked if Jeanne hadn’t been expecting something. As it was, Vernell just got her head jerked back into place and got her chin jabbed by the shotgun.

“You shouldn’t do that,” Jeanne said. “My finger might slip, and that would make a mess all over everything.”

“I’m afraid there wouldn’t be any deal if that happened,” Rhodes said, though he didn’t think there would be one in any event.

“True,” Jeanne said, “but there might be some satisfaction in it. I really get tired of people who try to take advantage of me.”

Rhodes wondered who she might mean, aside from Vernell, that is. Maybe she felt that way about all her clients.

“What is it that you want?” he asked. “Exactly.”

“I don’t suppose you’d just let me go.”

“No,” Rhodes said. “I’m pretty sure we couldn’t work that out.”

“So it’s really hard for me to decide what to do,” Jeanne said. “Things don’t look too good for me right now.”

Rhodes didn’t have anything to say to that. She had summed up the situation pretty well.

“So I guess I’ll have to tell you the truth,” she said. “The problem is that I didn’t do what you think I did. That’s why I think you could let me go and not worry about it.”

“How do you know what I think you did?”

“Carrie hinted at it. I figured out the rest. I know I should have told you, but I didn’t think you’d believe me. By the time I figured everything out, it was too late to try to convince you. Now I have to try.”

“Go ahead, then,” Rhodes said. “If you didn’t kill Henrietta, who did?”

“I should think that would be obvious,” Jeanne said.

“Not to me.”

“Why do you think I took this woman prisoner?” Jeanne asked. “Because I wanted a hostage?”

“The thought had crossed my mind.”

“Well, you can forget it. She’s a killer. And I’m holding her for you.”

Vernell gave Rhodes a wild look, and Rhodes pretended to think things over for a few seconds. Then he said, “You know, I can see how it could’ve been that way. Vernell has been covering up. I’m going to ask everybody to go inside except for you and me and Vernell. Then we can talk things over. Does that sound fair?”

Jeanne said that it did, and Rhodes told everyone to go inside. He had to tell them twice before anyone would move. Rhodes thought they were all a little disappointed that Jeanne hadn’t pulled the trigger, and they were hoping that if they stayed, she might do it.

But finally Claudia took over. She said, “Come on, now, everybody. Let’s do what the sheriff says and let him work things out. It’s not any of our business.”

Rhodes could tell that at least half of them did think it was their business, especially Serena, Belinda, and Marian, who must have been hoping for some good specific details for the mystery novels they were planning to write in order to escape being pegged as romance writers. And Chatterton, who looked stricken by the whole thing. But after a few seconds of grumbling, everyone went back into the dorm, where most of them stood peering out the door and windows.

“Now what?” Jeanne asked.

“Now you tell me how Vernell killed Henrietta,” Rhodes said.

The way Jeanne explained it, things had happened just about as Rhodes had suspected, except that it had been Vernell who got into Henrietta’s room, scared off Terry Don, and got into some kind of argument with Henrietta.

“It had something to do with a radio contest,” Jeanne said. “I’m not sure of the details.”

All through the recounting of the story, Vernell got redder and redder. By the time Jeanne had finished, Vernell’s face was roughly the color of a wild-cherry cough drop. But she couldn’t do or say anything because the shotgun was pressed so firmly against her chin that she couldn’t open her mouth. Rhodes had a feeling that Jeanne was going to pull the trigger accidentally any second now if he didn’t do something to prevent it.

“What you say all fits,” Rhodes told Jeanne. “Now that you’ve explained it, I can see that I was wrong about just about everything. But that still leaves one question. Who killed Terry Don Coslin?”

“I don’t know the answer to that,” Jeanne said. “But then I’m not the sheriff here. You’ll have to figure it out for yourself. Maybe it was Vernell.”

At that, Vernell tensed. Rhodes hoped she wouldn’t struggle because Jeanne’s finger was even more tense than Vernell. Rhodes was sure that Vernell was within a millimeter of getting her head blown off while trying to escape.

Then he saw headlights approaching. There was no siren, no lightbar flashing, so it wasn’t the ambulance, though that would be coming along any minute. It was Ruth Grady, who stopped her county car and got out.

She looked the situation over and said, “Need any help here, Sheriff?”

“I don’t think so,” Rhodes told her. “We’re going to have to arrest Vernell for murder. That’s about it.”

“Who did she kill?”

“Henrietta,” Rhodes said. “And maybe Terry Don.”

“What about that shotgun?”

“Ms. Arnot’s just about to give that to me,” Rhodes said, reaching out. In the distance he heard the ambulance siren yowling.

Jeanne heard it, too, and she took her eyes off Rhodes for a fraction of a second.

As soon as she did, Rhodes took two steps forward and grabbed the shotgun just as Jeanne pulled the trigger.

34

V
ERNELL FELL BACKWARD, JEANNE’S HAND STILL TANGLED IN her hair. Luckily for Vernell, Rhodes had managed to jerk the shotgun from under her chin, so Vernell’s head was still attached to her body.

Rhodes had also wrenched the shotgun from Jeanne’s hand, and he was afraid he might have broken her finger with the trigger guard. He wasn’t too sorry about it, however.

Vernell had dragged Jeanne down with her. Rhodes tossed the shotgun to Ruth and knelt down, straddling Jeanne. He untangled Vernell’s hair from Jeanne’s fingers while Jeanne writhed under him like a snake having a seizure. It wasn’t easy, but he managed to keep her pinned.

When her hair was free, Vernell sat up and took a few deep breaths, all the while rubbing herself under the chin. Ruth Grady covered her with the shotgun, and the ambulance whined past, gravel spinning under its tires and lightbar flashing, headed for Quentin’s place.

“You have some handcuffs?” Rhodes asked Ruth.

“Sure,” Ruth said. “But who am I supposed to use them on?”

“This one,” Rhodes said, nodding down at Jeanne. “You can put the gun away. She’s not going anywhere.”

Ruth lowered the shotgun and handed Rhodes a pair of plastic cuffs.

“Help me out,” he said.

Ruth laid the shotgun down and took hold of one of Jeanne’s arms that was trapped by Rhodes’s knee. Rhodes slid back and grabbed the other arm. Jeanne thrashed and screamed, but Rhodes and Ruth got the cuffs on and drew them tight.

Rhodes stood up and looked over at Vernell, who was sitting on the grass, still rubbing under her chin and staring wide-eyed at Jeanne Arnot.

“You want to tell me what’s going on?” Ruth said. “I thought we were going to arrest Vernell.”

“Nobody was going to arrest Vernell,” Rhodes said. “Ms. Arnot was going to kill her.”

Vernell took a deep, gasping breath. Rhodes didn’t blame her.

“Why?” Ruth asked.

“Because Ms. Arnot’s the one who killed Henrietta and Terry Don Coslin. She was trying to put the blame on Vernell by claiming to be an eyewitness to Vernell’s leaving Henrietta’s room.”

“I get it,” Ruth said. “It’s hard to contradict anyone when you’ve been killed while struggling with your captor.”

“That’s right,” Rhodes said.

“But you didn’t believe her,” Ruth said.

“No. She might have been able to explain Henrietta, but she couldn’t have explained Terry Don, and she couldn’t have explained her missing whistle chain.”

“Whistle chain?”

“Vernell borrowed the whistle,” Jeanne said, talking fast from her awkward position on the ground. “She said she broke it. I don’t know what happened to it.”

“Nice try,” Rhodes said. “But I don’t believe you.”

“A jury will believe me.”

She sounded so convinced that Rhodes almost believed her himself.

“Believe you about what?” Ruth asked. “About the chain?”

“It’s a long story,” Rhodes said.

Jeanne Arnot changed her story later, after she had been a guest of Blacklin County for about ten hours in one of the few jail cells reserved for female prisoners. In Jeanne’s new account, Terry Don was the one who had killed Henrietta. Jeanne claimed that she had no idea what they were arguing about but that she had opened the door just as Terry Don pushed Henrietta into the dresser. She said that she knew it was wrong to protect Terry Don, but he had cried and begged her.