Of All Sad Words Read Online Free Page A

wouldn’t make any grim discoveries.
    But he did. He was almost to the creek when he found Terry Crawford. He lay on his back, his dead eyes staring up at nothing. He wore a T-shirt identical to his brother’s, except that the arrow pointed to the right.
    And except for the blood, quite a bit of it, almost obscuring the arrow and the wording.
    Rhodes always felt a hollow sadness when he saw a dead body. Maybe it was pity. There was something about the absence of light in the eyes that affected him. Terry Crawford might not have been of much account, but he didn’t deserve to be killed for no reason and left to lie in a dry field for the buzzards to find. Or the sheriff.
    Rhodes looked away, first down to the dry creek bed and then up at the cloudless sky. No buzzards yet, but they’d be along soon enough if he didn’t get the body moved. That couldn’t be done until the crime scene had been worked.
    A grasshopper hummed past. Rhodes swatted at it and missed. Then he started back up the hill.
     
     
     
    “Well, it’s obvious that he didn’t die in the explosion,” Ruth Grady said.
    Rhodes nodded. He’d called Ruth on the radio and told her to come back because he wanted her to work the scene.
    “The JP should be here in a few minutes,” Rhodes said. “The ambulance is on the way back, too. You see what you can find out here, and I’ll go tell Larry about his brother.”
    “He’s not going to take it well.”
    “You think?” Rhodes said.
     
     
     
    Rhodes could have driven to Obert on the county road, but he went back to the highway and took that route. He’d worked a few cases in Obert, the most recent one involving the rock crusher that had moved into town, blasting away at the limestone hill where Obert sat, the highest point in the county. As a result of a murder and a conviction, the rock crusher had been shut down. It would eventually be sold, and the blasting would start again, but that would take quite some time. Meanwhile, the residents of Obert had a little break from the noise, dust, and disruptions.
    Obert, as even its residents would have had to admit, wasn’t much of a town. Its population was around four hundred, and only a few buildings and stores remained. Most of them faced the highway that was the town’s main street. One of the buildings was Jamey Hamilton’s barbershop. Rhodes parked in front of it and got out of the car.
    A short red-and-white barber pole hung on the brick wall, and a sign that said CLOSED hung on the inside of the glass door. Rhodes rattled the doorknob and tapped on the glass, but nobody showed up. He peered through the glass and saw only a barber chair and a couple of regular chairs for the customers.
    Rhodes went next door to Michal Schafer’s Antiques Emporium. A black-and-white cat slept, unmoving, in a window display that included a couple of old school lunch boxes with Disney cartoon characters on them, a few dishes with designs that might have been hand-painted, a couple of motors for ceiling fans, a board with samples of different kinds of barbed wire attached to it, and three lightning rod arrows with colored glass where there would have been feathers on an actual arrow.
    Rhodes opened the door and went inside, causing an overhead bell to jingle. Michal was in the back of the large, dimly lit room, standing behind an old candy counter that held baseball cards, some paperback books, a stack of 45 rpm records, and a pile of eight-track tapes, but no candy.
    “What can I do for you, Sheriff?” she asked when Rhodes made his way back to her through the crowded aisles. “Could I interest you in some baseball cards?” She tapped with a fingernail on the glass top of the candy counter. “I have a Jeff Bagwell rookie card here.”
    Michal was a short blond woman of indeterminate age. The first time Rhodes had seen her name on the window of her store, he’d thought it was misspelled, but she’d explained that it was the name of Saul’s daughter in the