A Romantic Way to Die Read online

  Vernell’s conference was just the first of many that Chatterton hoped to host on his rejuvenated property, and he was in charge of all the arrangements. Vernell had worked closely with him, and it was really his conference as much as it was hers.

  Things hadn’t gotten off to a rousing start, Rhodes thought as he drove around the wide curve that led through the heart of Obert (a post office, a combination barbershop/feedstore, and several deserted buildings) to the old campus.

  As best as Rhodes could understand the story from Hack, whom Rhodes had called again once he got dressed, there had been a noisy fight in one of the dormitory rooms after the conference had shut down for the night. The door to the room was closed when people got there, and it was quiet inside. No one had wanted to open the door, but someone finally had, and they found Henrietta lying on the floor.

  “I’d barely got the phone hung up from that one,” Hack told Rhodes, “when it rang again. I didn’t even have time to call you.”

  “What was the second call?” Rhodes asked.

  “That was the one about the naked woman. It was Miz Appleby that called. You remember her?”

  Rhodes was acquainted with all the Applebys, including the abusive husband, Cy, who was now a resident at one of the state’s penitentiary units, thanks to Rhodes. Rhodes thought that Cy’s imprisonment had done his family a world of good. Besides his wife, there was a daughter, Twyla Faye, and twin sons, Claude and Clyde.

  “I remember Mrs. Appleby,” Rhodes said. “Why did she call?”

  “Well, she’s the one who saw the naked woman. Miz Appleby was gettin’ a breath of air when she saw something in her yard. It was pretty dark, but Miz Appleby said there was enough of a moon for her to tell it was a woman runnin’ by, not wearin’ a stitch.”

  Rhodes pulled up in front of the dormitory, a long, one-story wooden structure that sat to one side of the old main building, which was silhouetted against the night sky like the castle in a black-and-white Frankenstein movie.

  All the lights were on in the dormitory, and when Rhodes got out of the county car, a man came out of the dorm to meet him. The man was short, bald, and had a neatly trimmed white beard. He was wearing a khaki shirt and khaki cargo pants. Rhodes had never seen him in person, but he’d seen his picture in the Clearview newspaper.

  “I’m Tom Chatterton,” the man said, extending his hand. “No relation to the English poet.”

  Rhodes wasn’t sure what that meant. English poets hadn’t been his strong point in school. He shook hands and introduced himself.

  “Everyone’s a little distracted in there,” Chatterton said with a glance over his shoulder.

  Sudden death had a way of distracting people, Rhodes thought.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “Well, I don’t really know. There’s a woman in one of the rooms, and she’s dead. I do know that much. I don’t know what happened to her.”

  Rhodes thought about the naked woman that Mrs. Appleby had seen.

  “What about everyone else?” he asked. “All present and accounted for?”

  “I believe so,” Chatterton said. He seemed a little distracted himself. “Why don’t you come inside and see what you can find out.”

  “I need to see the body first,” Rhodes said. “Is there a back door?”

  “Yes,” Chatterton said, and led the way around the side of the dormitory.

  The grass was damp, and Rhodes could feel the chilly dew clinging to the bottom of his pants legs as they brushed against his socks. The yellow light from the dormitory windows threw yellow rectangles across the dark ground.

  The back door was locked, but Chatterton had a key.

  “Is this door always locked?” Rhodes asked.

  “Yes, but it’s easily opened from the inside in case of fire,” Chatterton said, as if Rhodes might be there on a routine fire safety inspection.

  They went inside into a narrow hallway. Henrietta’s room was the last one at the end of the hall.

  “Right here,” Chatterton said, pushing open the door.

  The room was small, with two single beds, not much more than cots, really, and a little dresser with a mirror hanging above it. The mirror was slightly askew, and one drawer of the dresser was open about a quarter of an inch. The door to a tiny closet stood open, and Rhodes could see clothes hanging inside.

  He looked over at the window screen. It was crooked, as if it had been opened and carelessly shut.

  Henrietta Bayam was lying on the floor. Her head was near the dresser, and her neck was turned at an odd angle. There was a small pool of blood under her head. Rhodes stepped into the room and bent down over Henrietta. There was no question in his mind that she was dead, but he felt for a pulse nevertheless. There was none, of course. Henrietta’s flesh felt only slightly cool to his touch.

  Rhodes stood up and sighed.

  “Let’s go back around to the front,” Rhodes said. “I have a few calls to make before I talk to anyone else.”

  He and Chatterton walked back through the clammy grass and crossed the yellow rectangles.

  “It won’t take long,” Rhodes said when they reached the front. “You can just wait here.”

  Chatterton stood outside the dormitory while Rhodes got Hack on the radio and asked him to send out Ruth Grady to do a crime-scene investigation of the room.

  “Send the justice of the peace, too,” he said. “I’ll have Ruth call for the ambulance later.”

  “Ten-four,” Hack said.

  Rhodes got out of the car and walked over to where Chatterton was waiting patiently.

  “All right,” he said. “Let’s go in.”

  Chatterton didn’t say a word, just turned and went back into the dormitory. Rhodes followed him.

  As soon as they got inside, Rhodes knew what Chatterton had meant about distraction. There were at least thirty women crammed into the dormitory’s sitting room. Some of them were dressed, some of them were half-dressed, and some of them were wearing robes. All of them were talking at once. Rhodes had no idea how any of them could make out what the others were saying. He certainly couldn’t.

  He looked at Chatterton, who shrugged, raised his eyebrows, and held up his palms.

  Rhodes wished he had a police whistle, but he’d never needed one before and didn’t carry one around. He thought for a second that he might have to fire his pistol to get their attention, but it turned out not to be necessary. Someone else was better equipped for the situation than Rhodes was.

  There was a shrill, piercing blast, and the room got quiet immediately. Rhodes looked to the side of the room to see a very short woman, shorter than Chatterton, putting a police whistle on a silver chain back into her purse.

  “I always carry one,” she said in a New York kind of voice. “You never know when you’ll need help, and they’re good for hailing taxis.”

  “And you are?” Rhodes said.

  “Jeanne Arnot. And you?”

  “I’m the sheriff. Dan Rhodes.”

  “Where’s your badge?”

  Rhodes always wore civilian clothes, and his badge was clipped to his belt. He pulled it off and held it up so that everyone could see it.

  “Well, it’s about time you got here,” Jeanne said. “New York’s finest would have been on the scene in under five minutes.”

  “He had to come from Clearview,” Vernell Lindsey said in Rhodes’s defense. “It’s a long way.”

  Vernell was wearing a pink robe and pink slippers. In fact, Rhodes noticed, pink was the dominant theme in sleeping attire for the entire crowd. Jeanne Arnot was wearing gray slacks, but she had on a pink blouse, and two women wore pink dresses. One woman had on fuzzy pink bunny slippers. Rhodes couldn’t remember having seen anything quite like them.

  “Long way or not, there’s a dead woman in that room back there,” Jeanne said, and by the time she’d finished the sentence everyone in the room was talking again.

  Some were talking to Rhodes, some were talking to each o
ther, and some were just talking to keep from being the only ones who weren’t talking. Rhodes held up his hands for quiet, but he didn’t get it. He was thinking of his pistol again when the shrill of the whistle cut the air.

  “I never heard such a bunch of hens cackling,” Jeanne said into the sudden silence.

  Though he’d been thinking along the same lines, Rhodes was glad she’d been the one to say it. If a man had made a crack like that, he’d have been in big trouble.

  “Keep it down and let the sheriff do his job,” Jeanne went on. “This is not a time for yakking.”

  There was no response, and Jeanne said, “It’s all yours, Sheriff.”

  “Thanks,” Rhodes said. “Let’s take this one step at a time. Who can tell me what happened?”

  Chatterton raised his hand. “I can. Or at least I think I can.”

  “Fine,” Rhodes said. “Why don’t you give it a try.”

  5

  ACCORDING TO CHATTERTON, THE EVENING HAD GONE ALONG just fine, at least at the beginning. Most of the conference participants had arrived at the campus between noon and five o’clock, and around seven they’d had dinner in the main building.

  “There’s a nice room on the first floor that I had converted to a dining room,” Chatterton said. “The dinner was catered by the Round-Up, and—”

  “And there was no vegetarian plate!” a woman said loudly.

  “I’ve already apologized for that,” Chatterton said. “The Round-Up’s management doesn’t exactly understand vegetarians, but there will be something for everyone from now on, I assure you.”

  “There’d better be,” the woman said, clearly quite angry.

  She was a willowy blonde with startling blue eyes. She wore a dark green robe, and Rhodes was sure she’d put on makeup before coming into the sitting room, or else hadn’t yet taken it off. Rhodes wondered what kind of person worried more about what she ate and how she looked than about some dead woman in another room of the same building.

  “Never fear,” Chatterton told the blonde in a placating tone. “At any rate, Sheriff, after dinner we had our first general session, sort of a welcome aboard, and then Ms. Arnot gave us some insights into the kind of books she’s looking for at her agency.”

  “Good ones,” Jeanne said. “That’s what we’re looking for.”

  “Yes,” Chatterton said. “After that, some people had appointments with Ms. Arnot to discuss their manuscripts. Everyone else was free to mingle and talk either in the dormitory rooms or in the main building. There’s no television here. I believe in the value of reading and conversation.”

  Rhodes was sure that was commendable, and he felt a little guilty for having watched The Comancheros instead of reading a few chapters of David Copperfield.

  But he had other things to worry about, like where everyone had been when the commotion had started. It took him a while to get it all sorted out. Jeanne Arnot had been in the main building, meeting with prospective clients one after the other at thirty-minute intervals, and though the meetings had been over before the disturbance began, she had remained in the main building.

  “Because there’s no smoking in here,” she said. “Can you believe that? I could use a cigarette right now.”

  Rhodes said he didn’t make the rules and asked who else was in the main building.

  “Serena was there,” Jeanne said. “She might be a vegan, but she doesn’t mind if I smoke.”

  “That’s because you got so much money for her last book,” someone said, and Jeanne laughed.

  “You could be right. How about it, Serena?”

  The willowy blonde smiled enigmatically and said, “Anything’s possible, Jeanne.”

  “With you, I’d say that was an understatement. Anyway, she’s the only one I can vouch for, Sheriff, but that’s just because I don’t know many of the others. There were still quite a few people there.”

  “What about here?” Rhodes asked. “Who was in the dormitory?”

  “I was,” Chatterton said. “I was checking to make sure everything was all right and that everyone had everything she needed before I went to the president’s house for the night. That’s when the screaming started.”

  “It wasn’t screaming, exactly,” Vernell said. “I was here, too, Sheriff, in my room, with Carrie Logan. We were getting ready for bed. Isn’t that right, Carrie?”

  Rhodes recognized Carrie, who worked at the Clearview post office. She was tall and heavy and one of the most efficient people behind the counter. Rhodes would never have guessed that she was a romance writer.

  “That’s right,” Carrie said.

  Her voice was a little shaky, as if she might be nervous. If she was, Rhodes didn’t blame her.

  “We were just about to go to bed when we heard Henrietta,” Carrie went on, her voice getting stronger. “It was more like yelling than screaming.”

  “Did you notice what time it was?” Rhodes asked.

  “It was just about eleven-thirty,” Carrie said. “I have this little travel clock that I brought with me, and it was on the dresser.”

  “How do you know it was Henrietta who yelled?” Rhodes asked.

  “Well, she’s the one who was lying on the floor when we looked in,” Carrie said.

  “And that’s when the real screaming started,” someone else put in.

  Carrie said, “You walk in on a dead woman that you’ve seen two or three times a week for the last ten years, and you’d scream, too.”

  “Who was sharing the room with Henrietta?” Rhodes asked.

  “That would be me, Sheriff,” Lorene Winslow said.

  Lorene was a teller at the First Union Bank, where Rhodes had a checking account. She had bright red hair, though Ivy had assured Rhodes that particular shade of red was rarely seen in either the plant or animal world except on Lorene. It was the color of embarrassed orange. Lorene had been married three times, two of them to the same man.

  “But I wasn’t in there with her,” Lorene went on. “I was over in the main building with Claudia and Jan.”

  A woman with short blond hair and blue eyes nodded. Standing next to her was a short, scholarly-looking woman with black hair. She nodded, too.

  “So you can see that I didn’t kill her,” Lorene said. “And I have no idea who did.”

  “Who was in the room across the hall?” Rhodes asked, but it turned out that no one had been in that room, either. The closest occupied room had been the one shared by Vernell and Carrie.

  “What did you hear before the screaming?” Rhodes asked.

  “Yelling,” Carrie said. “It was more like yelling.”

  “Right. And before the yelling, what did you hear?”

  “That’s the funny part,” Carrie said. “I didn’t hear a thing.”

  “How about you, Vernell?”

  “Not a thing,” Vernell said quickly, a little too quickly to suit Rhodes.

  “You’re sure about that?”

  “I’m sure,” Vernell said.

  While he was talking and asking questions, Rhodes moved around the room, trying to see if anyone’s shoes or robe or pants were damp, but he really couldn’t tell. Besides, any dampness would most likely have had time to dry before he arrived. Of course the bottoms of Chatterton’s pants were wet, and so were his shoes, but Chatterton had been standing outside when Rhodes arrived, and then he’d walked around the building with Rhodes to show him Henrietta’s room.

  Rhodes continued asking questions, and it was beginning to appear that everyone had an alibi, or claimed to. Everyone had been talking to someone else, or within sight of someone else, when Henrietta had begun to yell. That was the appearance, at least. Rhodes wasn’t sure how closely it matched the reality. With that many people milling around, it was possible for someone to have slipped away unnoticed and then returned.

  And while everyone seemed appalled at Henrietta’s death, two of the women were talking quietly together about motive, means, and opportunity. They seemed to know quite a bit
about police work.

  Rhodes paid special attention to them. It turned out that they were two of the writers, Marian Willoughby and Belinda Marshall, both of whom told Rhodes that they were hoping to write mystery novels.

  “Janet Evanovich broke out of the romance ghetto with mystery novels,” Marian said. “That’s why it’s so exciting to be involved with a real murder. It might be material for a book.”

  Marian was short, with brown hair and brown eyes, and a determined chin. She was the only one there wearing jeans. She looked like a normal person, but Rhodes knew better. He was pretty sure no normal person would look at someone’s death as material for a book.

  “In the first place, we don’t know that there’s been a murder,” Rhodes said. “It might have been just an accident.”

  “Maybe,” Belinda Marshall said. She was a tall woman with an elongated face and very long hair that hung down her back in a heavy braid. “But maybe not. A writer has to be alert to all kinds of things. Maybe we can even help you find out who did it.”

  All Rhodes needed was a dormitory full of people trying to help him solve a murder.

  “I’ll have plenty of professional help,” he said. “Were both of you in the main building when the problem developed?”

  “Is that what you call it?” Marian asked. “A problem?”

  Rhodes almost expected her to start taking notes.

  “It’s not a technical term,” he said.

  Marian considered his question. “I was in the other building so I didn’t hear anything,” she said. “I don’t know about Belinda.”

  Belinda looked surprised. She said, “Yes you do. I’d just been talking to you when someone ran over to tell us that there’d been a murder.”

  Marian shrugged. “If you say so.”

  Belinda looked as if she’d like to take Marian aside and shake her. Rhodes thought she might have done it, but they were interrupted just then by the arrival of the ambulance and Ruth Grady, who had hardly stepped inside the dormitory when someone else showed up, someone about whom Rhodes had nearly forgotten.