Thinking about how he’d gotten that piece of news turned Rhodes’s mind into channels of thought that were considerably more pleasant, if still somewhat puzzling and complicated. He hadn’t really thought of women at all, as women, since the death of his wife. He’d dealt with women on both sides of the law, seen them at stores and in restaurants, talked to them in the course of his re-election campaign (such as it was); but he had not until the night before thought of one of all those women-certainly not someone like Mrs. Wilkie-as being of a different sex from him. It was as if he had been neutralized in some way, had lost his sexual feelings completely.
Now he realized that those feelings hadn’t been lost. They’d just been in mourning, or storage, or hibernation, or wherever it was that such things went after the death of a wife that you’d loved long and deeply. Now, stirred by Ivy Daniels, they were back.
Rhodes wasn’t sure just what the attraction was that she held for him. She was a good-looking woman, of course. There was that. But there was more to it. There was something about her that he liked: her self-sufficiency, her competence, something like that. Anyway, he thought, it did no good to try to explain it; the feeling was there, and that was that. What he would do about it was something else again.
Last night he had taken her home and walked her to her door. There was no adolescent heavy breathing, no panting good-night kiss on the order of the latest romance novel’s description; yet both of them knew that there was something between them, a feeling that neither was quite ready to acknowledge in words but which was nevertheless obviously present.
Rhodes had followed through on his earlier hint, to which Ivy had responded so positively, and asked her to have dinner with him again. They would be going out Saturday night. He found himself wondering whether he should buy a sports jacket for the occasion. He hadn’t had much need to dress up lately.
Well, he wouldn’t worry about it yet. Maybe they could just go somewhere and get a hamburger. Ivy looked like the kind of woman who didn’t demand that you make a big impression on her. Besides, they’d already been to the fanciest restaurant in Clearview. It was all downhill from Jeoff’s.
Rhodes’s pleasant thoughts were interrupted by his arrival in Thurston. The town was clearly dying, and before long it would probably go the way of Milsby. There was only one paved street, and that was actually a farm-to-market road leading on to another little town. The only businesses left in Thurston were on the paved street-Hod Barrett’s grocery, the post office (the only new building in town), the bank, a hardware store, a tavern (“beer joint” the residents called it), another grocery store even smaller than Barrett’s. There had been other stores once, but they were now almost forgotten. A local resident had bought their buildings, torn them down, and sold the brick. On graveled streets and dirt roads leading off the paved one were the homes and churches.
Looking at one of the latter off to his right, the First United Methodist Church, a white frame structure with a black shingle roof badly in need of replacement, Rhodes happened to think of Barrett’s remark about his wife. “She goes to bed and reads her Bible. . ” That was what Hod had said. Thinking about it, Rhodes decided to pay Mrs. Barrett another call, even before he visited Bill Tomkins.
The Barrett house wasn’t like every other house in Thurston. It was what Rhodes’s mother used to call “spruce.” It was more than that; it was immaculate. Funny he hadn’t really noticed that the first time. The lawn looked as if it had been edged with a ruler. The bushes might have been trimmed by an artist; there was not a single twig above the proper level. There wasn’t even a leaf out of place, for that matter. Rhodes remembered Hod’s standard joke about buying his wife the best yard equipment money could buy. She certainly deserved it; she knew just how to use it.
As Rhodes parked his car in the drive, he noticed that Mrs. Barrett’s passion for order extended beyond her lawn. Rhodes had heard of houses that were so clean you could eat off the floor-the Barrett house was so clean that he had no doubt you could eat off the driveway. He recalled the spic-and-span room he had sat in before, the coaster he had been provided for his glass of tea. Mrs. Barrett was a woman whose desire for cleanliness and order was far out of the ordinary. He wondered just how far that passion did extend.
When she answered his knock at the door, Mrs. Barrett was wearing a plain housedress. Her hair was caught up in a sort of turban fashioned from a faded pink towel, and she held a brush in one hand.
“Oh, it’s you again, Sheriff,” she said. “I was just cleaning the light fixtures.” She gestured with the brush. “Sometimes I take them down and wash them in the bathtub, but I thought they could go for another week without that.”
Rhodes wondered vaguely if his own light fixtures had ever been washed in the bathtub. He was pretty certain that they hadn’t even been dusted since his wife’s death, unless Kathy had done it and not mentioned it to him. Somehow, he didn’t think that had happened.
“I was in town to see someone else,” Rhodes said, “and I thought of a few more questions that I wanted to ask you.” He paused. “If it wouldn’t be too much of an interruption.”
Mrs. Barrett looked at him calmly. “I suppose not,” she said, stepping back from the doorway and holding the screen door open for him.
She asked Rhodes to have a seat, but she didn’t offer to bring him any tea. “I’m really very busy, Sheriff. There’s a lot of cleaning to be done in a house this size, though most people wouldn’t think so. I hope this won’t take too long.”
“No,” Rhodes said. “Not too long. You see, I was talking to Hod the other day, and he told me that you and he were. . well. . having some sort of difficulty. He seemed to me to imply, even if he didn’t really say it, that the problem might have something to do with your religious beliefs.”
Mrs. Barrett’s back stiffened, though Rhodes wouldn’t have thought that it could have gotten any stiffer than it already was. He was sorry to have to talk about these things with her. He was small-town enough to dislike some of the things he had to do, but that had never stopped him from doing them.
“I don’t know what you mean,” Mrs. Barrett said. “Of course I’m a believing woman, but so should we all be believers.”
She wasn’t going to make it easy, Rhodes thought. “What I mean is,” he said slowly, “what I mean is that he seemed to imply that you read your Bible an awful lot, even at night. That you. . uh. . that you even read it in the bed.”
That was as much of a hint as Rhodes was going to allow himself, but Mrs. Barrett got it. Her face turned almost as red now as her husband’s had been on the morning Rhodes had been investigating the robbery of his store, just before Jeanne Clinton’s body had been found. And for the same reason. Mrs. Barrett was filled with what she would no doubt have called “righteous anger.”
“I don’t believe that when or where I read my Bible is any business of yours, Sheriff Rhodes,” she said in the same tone an elementary teacher might use to scold a particularly troublesome pupil.
“Generally speaking, I’d agree with that,” Rhodes told her. “But this isn’t a general thing. Some bad things have been happening here in Thurston lately, and some of them seem to involve your husband. So I try to find out about things that will help me do my job.”
“I can’t believe that.”‘ Mrs. Barrett’s hand gripped the handle of her brush so hard that the knuckles whitened. It was a strong hand.
“It’s true enough, though,” Rhodes said. “Hod could even be in trouble.”
Mrs. Barrett looked down at her immaculate rug. “All right,” she said in a furious voice, her head shaking. “All right.”
Rhodes said nothing.