Of All Sad Words Read Free Page B

don’t know where Terry could’ve got off to. He has to have been in there. He wasn’t one to go wandering around.”
    “Do you have another car?” Jennifer asked.
    “Just that old Ford.” Crawford looked at the car crushed under the roof of the mobile home. “Nobody’s going anywhere in that.”
    “Terry will show up,” Ruth said.
    Crawford shook his head. “I wish he was here right now.”
    “Where will you stay?” Rhodes asked him.
    He wanted to know, because if it was determined that there had been a meth lab in the mobile home, as Rhodes suspected was the case, Crawford might be subject to arrest.
    “I got a cousin out at Obert,” Crawford said. “Jamey Hamilton. I can stay with him.”
    Rhodes knew Hamilton. He had a one-chair barbershop in Obert. He’d been written up a time or two for traffic violations, nothing serious. As far as Rhodes knew, he’d never had anything to do with drugs.
    “We’ll let you know if we find anything,” Rhodes said.
    “I just don’t believe he’d wander off,” Crawford said. “That wasn’t his way.”
    “You should be glad he did.”
    “I am. I am. But it don’t seem right to me. Something’s wrong about this, Sheriff. I mean, I can see how the propane tank might blow up, but we were always careful with it. And where’s Terry?”
    “Propane tank?” Jennifer said.
    “Sure. That’s what blew up. It had to be.”
    Rhodes almost smiled. Crawford was already getting his cover-up established.
    Jennifer questioned him some more, but Rhodes didn’t listen. He wondered himself what might have happened to Terry. He had an uneasy feeling about the whole thing. How had Terry gotten out of the house? Or, if he’d been out when the explosion occurred, where had he gone?
    Crawford left after awhile. Rhodes walked to the pickup with him. The bed was littered with junk: a tire, a hubcap, a crowbar, and a couple of wrenches. The cab wasn’t much cleaner.
    “You stay around the county,” Rhodes said. “I’ll need to talk to you again.”
    “I’m not going anywhere,” Crawford replied.
    He drove away and was soon followed by the ambulance, Ruth Grady, Benton, and the fire trucks. Only Jennifer Loam, the fire chief, and Rhodes remained.
    A man named Parker was the fire chief. He and Rhodes had worked together on a case or two before, most recently one involving a dead man whose body had been found in a burning house. Jennifer had been right there for that one, too.
    Rhodes thought that Parker looked relieved that this time there wasn’t a body, though it was hard to see his face under the helmet he wore. Parker took off the helmet and wiped his face with his hand.
    “What do you think happened to Terry Crawford?” he asked.
    Rhodes shook his head. “I don’t have any idea. What do you think caused the explosion?”
    Parker looked at Jennifer and her little recording device. “Hard to be sure at this point.”
    “You can make a guess, can’t you?” Rhodes said.
    Parker shook his head. “I don’t like to guess.”
    “I won’t hold you to it, and neither will Ms. Loam. This is off the record.”
    Jennifer gave Rhodes a look, but she nodded and turned off the recorder.
    “Could the Crawfords have been running a meth lab out of this place?” Rhodes said when he was sure Jennifer was no longer recording.
    “Well,” Parker said, “that’s a possibility, but I don’t think it’s what caused the explosion.”
    Rhodes was surprised, but then he realized he should have known it couldn’t have been a meth explosion, not if there wasn’t a lab.
    He was almost certain there hadn’t been a meth lab. He’d have smelled it if there had been any trace. For that matter, people living nearby, even someone as far away as Benton, would have smelled it long ago. No matter what Benton thought he’d seen, he hadn’t smelled anything, not that he’d mentioned to Rhodes at any rate.
    “What do you think was the problem?” he asked.
    “I think the propane tank