Ghost of a Chance Read Free Page A

scene, but he didn’t want to do any more damage than necessary.
    “The McCoy funeral’s at two,” Ballinger said. “Not that I’m rushing you, but it’s already past eleven o’clock.”
    “Don’t worry,” Rhodes said. “I’m not rushing.”
    He sat on the edge of the grave, wondering how he’d ever get the mud out of his pants and raincoat, and slid down. He managed to land on his feet at the bottom. His shoes slipped on the slick earth, but he was able to avoid stepping on the body, which was that of a short, thin man wearing jeans, leather hiking shoes, and a camo windbreaker.
    As far as Rhodes could see there were no clues lyingthere, so he turned the body over and looked at its face.
    “It’s Ty Berry,” he said, without surprise.
    “Oh, Lord,” Ballinger said. “Tell me he died of a heart attack.”
    “I could tell you that, but it wouldn’t be the truth.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because somebody shot him,” Rhodes said.

3

    T Y BERRY WAS, OR HAD BEEN, THE PRESIDENT OF THE Clearview Sons and Daughters of Texas, a group devoted to the preservation of landmarks and the history of Clearview and Blacklin County. Berry himself had been interested in every aspect of the county’s past. No detail had been too trivial or obscure for his attention.
    Rhodes had attended a recent meeting of the county commissioners at which Berry had been accused by one of them of having far too much love for anything in the county that was old and useless.
    Berry had given him a cold look and said, “There are some old, useless men I don’t love. Some of them I don’t even like very much.”
    The commissioner hadn’t been amused, and he hadn’t done much in the way of supporting Berry’s latest project, which had been increasing the protection of all the cemeteries in Blacklin county, including the one located within the Clearview city limits.
    Berry had brought the presidents of twelve different cemetery associations with him to the meeting. Each of them represented one of the small private cemeteries that were scattered over the county, and all had the same complaint: someone had been looting their cemeteries, stealing statues, urns, and even obelisks, stelae, and tombstones.
    The commissioners were skeptical. Some of them appeared to think that the losses were due to something like the natural deterioration of materials.
    “If people stole that kind of stuff, what would they do with it?” Jay Bowman had asked.
    Bowman was a big, red-faced man who represented Precinct Four, which contained three of the cemeteries represented by the association presidents who were there.
    “Sell it,” Berry said.
    “Those markers all have names on them,” Bowman said. “Who’d buy them?”
    “They sand off the names and dates,” Berry said. “Then they sell them at flea markets.”
    Bowman shook his head as if he were having a hard time believing what he was hearing.
    “I don’t get it. Who’d want anything like that?”
    “You’d be surprised,” Berry said.
    “Probably. But what about that other stuff you were telling us about? Urns, statues, things like that. People really buy that?”
    “Yes,” Berry said. “But not always at flea markets. Some of those items are valuable as antiques. People even use them to decorate their homes.”
    “Cemetery chic,” said Jerry Purcell from Precinct Three.
    Purcell was tall and skinny and had a face webbed by a thousand wrinkles, give or take ten or twelve. His fingersworked constantly as he sat at the table because when he wasn’t smoking a cigarette, he couldn’t figure out what to do with his hands. And there was no smoking allowed in the meeting room, or any of the rooms in county buildings.
    “You could call it that,” Berry said.
    “I can see how people could take things from the county cemeteries,” Bowman said. “But the one in Clearview’s right in town. It has gates on it. And a caretaker.”
    “Makes no difference,” Berry said. “The gates are never