Of All Sad Words Read Online Free

Of All Sad Words
Book: Of All Sad Words Read Online Free
Author: Bill Crider
Tags: Mystery
Pages:
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blew up,” Parker told him.

Chapter 3
    THEY WOULDN’T KNOW FOR SURE ABOUT THE PROPANE TANK until after a complete investigation, which Parker promised would be done the next day.
    “You’d better chain the gate when you leave,” he told Rhodes. “That’ll keep people away from here. I’ll leave you a padlock. We always carry a spare, and there was plenty of slack in the chain.”
    He got Rhodes the lock and left. Rhodes put the lock in his car, then stood on the hill and remembered the last time he’d been there, years earlier, when he was just a boy. The mobile home hadn’t been there, but an old frame house had been. It had long since been torn down.
    Rhodes’s father had told him that a hill by a creek was a good place to look for arrowheads, and Rhodes had ridden his bicycle out of town to this very place. He’d found a couple of arrowheads, too, and he still had them stuck away somewhere or other.
    It was too hot to walk around and look for arrowheads now, but Rhodes had to do some walking anyway. It wouldn’t do to leave the scene and not give it a careful going-over. What was left of the Crawfords’ house would be examined by the fire department’s inspector, but Rhodes wanted to check out the surrounding property. Besides the fact that it was standard procedure, Rhodes couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling he had.
    Not that there was much to see. The grass was mostly dead, and the weeds, though they still stood tall in places, were brown and dry. The good news was that the dryness wasn’t good for chiggers, and even the fire ants would be somewhere underground and out of the way. After a good rain, the ant mounds would pop up everywhere, and the chiggers would be out in force, but it had been so long since it had rained in Blacklin County that Rhodes wasn’t in any danger of getting bitten or stung that day. He thought the ants might appear soon, however, at least on those parts of the ground that had been soaked by the fire department.
    Off to Rhodes’s left were the road and the bridge. The trees were thinner there, but downstream on the right, they were much thicker, a regular little woods that covered several acres. The Crawfords must have owned at least ten acres in all, and only about half of it was cleared.
    The cleared part was peppered with mesquites, some of them nearly as high as Rhodes’s head. If they weren’t dug up or poisoned, the entire hillside would soon be covered with them. Even in the heat and the drought, their leaves were green. It took more than a drought to kill a mesquite tree.
    The weeds whisked and husked as Rhodes walked down the hill, and grasshoppers flew up all around him. Some of them hit him and bounced off. Others flew on by. Unlike the chiggers and fire ants, they didn’t seem bothered by the lack of rain. They were like the mesquites that way.
    Occasionally, Rhodes looked down to see a piece of the mobile home, a twisted bit of blackened metal that the explosion had tossed a long way from its origin.
    Rhodes ignored the grasshoppers and the bits of metal and looked for a sign of something or other that might be a clue. He wasn’t quite sure what he was looking for. Nothing in particular, that was for sure.
    But even with his uncertainty, he ran across something almost at once, not far from an old well that had served the house originally built on the property. It’s probably dry now, Rhodes thought, but broken and flattened weeds showed that someone had passed that way not too long before, headed in the direction of the creek.
    Rhodes followed the fresh trail down toward the trees that lined the creek. From the side of the hill, he could see that only a thin stream of water, hardly more than an inch deep and less than a foot wide, trickled through the creek bed. Rhodes remembered a time not so long ago when the water had run deep and swift enough to expose the bones of a mammoth. A lot more was exposed before that episode was over, he thought, hoping that he
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