Between the Living and the Dead Read Free Page A

heart attack but that he’d been killed and mutilated with an ax. Another said that his pet dog had eaten part of his body to avoid starvation.
    The stories were magnified in some cases because Moore had died on a Halloween weekend, and trick-or-treaters had horrified each other for years afterward with tales of how they’d stood on Moore’s front porch ringing the doorbell while the dog had been munching on his body parts inside the house.
    Another thing that added spice to the stories was the fact that Moore was supposedly an unpleasant character. In an era when teachers felt free to deal out corporal punishment, Moore, at least according to rumors, had dealt out more than his share and enjoyed doing it. He’d been known to sit on his porch with a pellet gun and shoot at dogs and cats that wandered into his yard. And even at the occasional youngster who happened by.
    There were other stories, but Rhodes didn’t remember them. Once, not long after he’d first been elected sheriff, he’d looked into the musty old reports on Moore’s death, just out of curiosity. There hadn’t been much of an investigation, but the sheriff at the time hadn’t thought there needed to be one. As it happened, Moore didn’t even have a pet dog. He had a small aquarium with a few fish, but they hadn’t escaped to feed on him. He hadn’t been mutilated, either. The only marks on the body were a few bruises that had probably resulted from Moore’s having fallen when he had the heart attack.
    Not that anybody would believe the facts. The rumors were a lot more fun.
    As for the stories about his pellet gun and his doling out of spankings at school, no record of those things remained.
    Moore’s only kin had lived in some other state. Rhodes couldn’t remember which one. Colorado, maybe. Or Wyoming. Somewhere out west, anyway. They hadn’t wanted the house, but they hadn’t wanted to sell it, either. They’d never come to see it or remove any of Moore’s things. The half block of property it sat on had little value to them or to anyone, but as far as Rhodes knew someone was still paying the taxes on it to keep it from being sold at auction on the courthouse steps. So the old house had stood there, surrounded by its wrought-iron fence, deserted, while people speculated about it and told stories of strange noises and spectral faces at the windows or lights moving past them.
    Over the years the stories had become fewer and less often told, until now the house just crumbled away on a lot that was so overgrown with trees and weeds that most people who drove past it probably didn’t give it a glance. Some of them might not even have known the house was there, but every now and then someone would notice something amiss, and the sheriff’s office would get a call.
    Like the one tonight. Hack hadn’t been too clear about what the problem was, and Rhodes wasn’t sure whether that was because of Hack’s typical behavior or because Ruth Grady hadn’t known exactly what it was and hadn’t been able to tell him. “Disturbance” was all the information Rhodes had been able to get out of Hack. Rhodes was a little suspicious because of Ruth’s involvement with Seepy Benton, and the old Moore house was clearly the kind of place that Benton would like to prowl through in his new capacity as a paranormal investigator. If there was anywhere in Clearview that was likely to have a few ghosts, the Moore house was the place.
    Rhodes saw Ruth’s county car from several blocks away. It was parked at the curb in front of the Moore house, its light bar flashing. Rhodes pulled to a stop behind it, turned on his own light bar, and got out.
    The house sat well back from the street. The lot took up most of the block, so no other houses were very close. Across the street was the city water tower, and it had the entire block to itself. The other houses Rhodes could