“Honestly, I almost felt guilty after I read it,” Ivy said, laughing. “I wondered if I were doing the wrong thing. Thank goodness I came to my senses before I resigned my job and gave up my campaign.”
Rhodes laughed with her, then got up and walked over to the counter in response to Eslick’s call. “Burgers up, Sheriff.”
The hamburgers were warm in their grease-spotted paper wrappers, and the wedge-shaped home fries almost burned Rhodes’s fingers through the thin cardboard of their box. He hustled them back to the table, almost overwhelmed by the smell. He hoped that his mouth wasn’t watering.
Ivy again impressed him. She made no small talk but went right about unwrapping her burger and taking a healthy bite, and he followed suit. Plenty of mustard, just the right amount of sweet white onion, and a generous portion of fried meat.
It was probably terrible for your heart, but it did the soul good. Rhodes took a paper napkin from the holder on the table, wiped his mouth, and continued eating.
Only then did he remember that he’d forgotten to order drinks. He was saved embarrassment by Eslick, who came to the table carrying two large paper cups.
“Dr Pepper, right?” Eslick asked.
“Thanks, Lonnie,” Rhodes said. “I guess I was in a hurry to eat.”
The short counterman grinned. “That’s fine with me. I always take it as a compliment when someone wants to eat my cookin’.”
“These really are delicious hamburgers,” Ivy said. Eslick didn’t quite blush.
“Thank you, ma’am,” he said, then scurried back behind his counter.
After they had eaten, Rhodes and Ivy drove around Clearview. Ivy brought up the killings once more. “What about Ralph Claymore?” she asked, referring to the information she had given Rhodes earlier. “Don’t tell me if you think I shouldn’t know,”‘ she added hurriedly. “I don’t want you to gossip about your job. It’s just that I’m curious about what I’d heard.”
“There’s no confidential information involved,”‘ Rhodes said. “‘I don’t think Claymore had anything to do with Jeanne’s death, but you were right. He had been seeing her.” He went on to tell her about Hod Barrett, Barrett’s wife, and Elmer Clinton’s grief.
“I’ll bet Hod Barrett did it,” Ivy said. “The way you describe him, I can almost see it. Why, I think he could even have staged the robbery of his store to put you off, to make you think of something else instead of him.”
“That’s possible, I guess,” Rhodes said. “I’ve thought about it. And of course Mrs. Barrett’s an unusual woman.” He had mentioned only Mrs. Barrett’s cleaning habits, not her views of sex.
“She surely is,” Ivy agreed. “Anyone who is that clean must be putting a lot of energy into house and yard work to avoid putting it somewhere else. If she directed it toward Jeanne Clinton, who knows what might have happened? She sounds a lot like the woman who wrote that letter I mentioned.”
Rhodes figured that he knew exactly what energy Mrs. Barrett was putting into her physical labor, but he didn’t say anything. He wasn’t quite ready to talk with Ivy about intimate things like that. He changed the subject. “How did you ever get a name like Ivy?” he asked.
She looked at him. “What?”
“How did you get a name like Ivy? I mean, I like it. It’s a nice, old-fashioned name. These days I find myself having to deal with grown women named ‘Fawn’ or ‘Sharamee.’ Not long ago,I had to deal with one named ‘Rainbeau.’’” He spelled it. “I’m not making this up,” he added.
Ivy laughed. “I believe you,” she said. “Remember, I work in an insurance office. I’ve probably heard a few that you haven’t heard.
“For example?”
“How about ‘Winsey’?”
“‘Winsey’?”
“Her father’s name is ‘Winston,’” Ivy said.
“OK, but I still think ‘Rainbeau’ wins the prize,” Rhodes said. He noticed that somehow Ivy had gotten closer to him. In fact, she was very close. Feeling almost like a teenager, Rhodes put his arm around her, and his heart chugged as she settled against him.
Rhodes woke up the next morning thinking that it was a good thing he was no longer a teenager, even if he had briefly felt like one. As he remembered his teenage years, the hormones, or whatever they were, had been coursing through his veins at such a rate that Ivy Daniels would not have been safe within half a mile of him. As it was, he didn’t know exactly what he might be getting himself into. He knew that he had strong feelings for Ivy, but he didn’t know just what she felt about him. Oh, she liked him. That much was pretty clear. But whether she was beginning to think of him as something more than just a friend was a question that Rhodes couldn’t answer.
Still, he could hardly keep a sort of half-grin off his face as Kathy scrambled eggs for their breakfast. It was to her credit, he reflected, that she said nothing at all about it.
After breakfast, he called the jail to check in and found that nothing out of the ordinary had happened overnight; everything was under control, and there was no need for him to go in. He could relax, read his Sunday paper, and think about the bad part of the afternoon ahead. Hack had told him that the autopsy on Jeanne had been completed-she had died of a broken neck and had not been raped. Her funeral would be that afternoon at two o’clock.
Even the thought of the funeral didn’t bother Rhodes. For some reason, he had the confident feeling that things were going to start going his way and that the case would take a turn for the better soon.
He was wrong, however. That afternoon at the funeral, all hell broke loose.
Chapter 13
Things started out as well as anyone could expect. The church service, held at the Thurston Baptist Church, was quietly dignified. Only one hymn was sung, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” which surprised Rhodes. He hadn’t thought anyone in Thurston, particularly Elmer Clinton, had the good taste to choose something other than a traditional weeper like “The Old Rugged Cross.” The minister painted Jeanne as a fine young woman, who if not a pillar of the church had at least “reformed” since her marriage to Elmer and had no longer sought the “bright lights and glamour” of the “world of the flesh,” a reference which Rhodes took to mean that she’d given up participating in wet T-shirt contests at the Paragon.
The mourners, of which there were a goodly number for Thurston (about fifty in Rhodes’s estimation), were silent and respectful. In the pews near the back were Hod Barrett and his wife. Rhodes recognized Larry Bell and a few others as well. Elmer sobbed quietly and alone in the front pew.
It was at the graveside that things got bad. The rain had made digging easy, and Rhodes could see the backhoe machine parked at a discreet distance behind some trees at the edge of the Thurston cemetery. The mound of muddy earth scooped from the grave was covered with something resembling Astroturf. The mourners were seated under an open-sided tent in wooden folding chairs. Almost everyone from the church had come to the cemetery.
Elmer’s sobbing was louder in the tent, and the vague outdoor sounds of the winds in the trees and the insects in the grass did nothing to drown him out. The minister seemed to have decided to make up for the lack of sentimentality in the previous service by making his opening remarks about “a beautiful young woman, struck down in the prime of her life,” at which a number of women began digging in their purses for tissues and handkerchiefs. One of the women so engaged was Mrs. Barrett.