Bill Crider - Dan Rhodes 09 - Death By Accident
“Death By Accident Chapter Twenty-Eight Rhodes stood in the vee formed by a thick branch and the trunk of the tree. He remembered now that one of the best things about climbing trees was how peaceful it seemed up away from the ground. That, and how far you could see.From where he stood, he could see over the top of the dance pavilion and the persimmon trees near the Burleson cabin and all the way to the county road that skirted around the Old Settlers’ Grounds. There was a pickup parked on the side of the road, but it was too far away for Rhodes to see if there was anyone in it. Beyond the road he saw white-faced cattle grazing in a field and farther on there was a patch of brown woods.Practically in front of his eyes was the spiky end of the broken branch, and a foot or so below that, jutting off at a slightly different angle, was the limb that Rhodes would have tied the rope to if he had been the one tying it.Evidently someone else had thought that limb was better, too. The mark... the swinging rope had worn in the branch was plain to see.Rhodes had suspected something like that might be the case after Ivy had said that the limb didn’t have to fall and hit Pep on the head, but he’d had to see for himself. Someone had killed Pep Yeldell, all right.The way Rhodes figured it, the killer had somehow lured Pep Yeldell to the swimming pool with the intention of doing away with him, maybe by faking a drowning. Rotten limbs fell from trees all the time, but finding one there on the ground was just luck — good luck for the killer, bad luck for Pep. The killer had hit Pep with it, probably knocking him out. That would have made drowning him a lot easier.After that, the killer — or killers, Rhodes told himself, thinking that there could have been two of them — must have decided to make things look more consistent with the “accident”MoreLess
Write Review:
User Reviews: