Free Ghost of a Chance by Bill Crider Page A

he should. He was the sheriff, after all. He took another deep breath and walked down the hill.
    When he got to the bottom, though his head was still hurting, it had stopped throbbing, and he could think about as clearly as he ever could. He shined the flashlight all around the fence, looking for footprints, though of course ghosts wouldn’t leave any.
    Ghosts wouldn’t need a gap in the fence to get away, either, but that’s what Rhodes found, a place near one ofthe fence posts where two strands of wire had snapped, leaving a gap that even he could slip through with ease. It would have posed no problem at all for a ghost.
    The only things past the fence were the woods and the railroad tracks, and Rhodes had already searched that area once that day. He didn’t see any point in doing it again, considering that he hadn’t found anything the first time. Besides, as fast as the ghost had been moving, it could easily have been in the next county by now.
    Rhodes shone his light out at the trees and saw nothing unusual. He stood there for a minute, waiting for something to happen. He didn’t know what he was waiting for exactly, maybe for the mournful and far-off howl of a dog.
    There was nothing, so Rhodes turned and walked back up the hill to the county car. What he needed was a Dr Pepper and some dry clothes. In that order.
    He was driving through the cemetery gates when Hack got him on the radio.
    “Just got a call from your friend Miz Wilkie,” Hack said.
    “What did she have to say?” Rhodes asked.
    “ ‘Motorsickles,’ ” Hack told him.
    “I think you’ve given me that answer before,” Rhodes said.
    “Déjà vu,” Hack said. “That’s what they call it when that happens.”
    “Just what I needed to know,” Rhodes said.

13

    M ILSBY HAD ONCE BEEN A MORE OR LESS THRIVING LITTLE farm community, not far from Clearview. But the cotton farmers who had supported it had long since died or given up trying to make a living from the land and moved away. The old cotton gin was still there, though it was beginning to collapse inward upon itself from years of neglect.
    There were still a few houses around Milsby, and people still lived in them. One of those people was Mrs. Wilkie, and she was waiting for Rhodes’s knock on her door.
    “Are you all right?” she said, peering at him through the screen.
    “I’m fine,” Rhodes said. “Just a little tussle with some ghosts.”
    “Ghosts?”
    “Never mind. Hack said you called in to report some motorcycles.”
    “That’s right. I heard them again.”
    The porch light made Mrs. Wilkie’s face look old anddrawn. Rhodes wondered for a second what he looked like but decided he didn’t want to know. Judging from Mrs. Wilkie’s reaction on seeing him, the answer couldn’t be good.
    “Where were they?” he asked.
    “They went right past the house,” she said. “Why do they always come back here?”
    Rhodes couldn’t tell her. He couldn’t figure it out, himself. If it was indeed Rapper and Nellie she’d heard, they never seemed to learn a thing from their experiences. He would have thought they’d set up in some other part of the county. But no. Here they were again.
    Or maybe not. There was nothing to prove it had been them that Mrs. Wilkie had heard.
    “I’ll have a look around,” Rhodes said. “I appreciate the call.”
    Mrs. Wilkie smiled. “Would you like to come in for a cup of coffee?”
    Rhodes didn’t drink coffee, not that he would have accepted the invitation even if he had. He said, “I’d better go look for those motorcycles.”
    Mrs. Wilkie said that she understood. “I hope you find them.”
    “Me, too,” Rhodes said, though he really wasn’t so sure. His previous encounters with Rapper hadn’t ended very well for either of them.
    Rhodes drove around the Milsby area for a while, trying to remember which of the old farmhouses might be vacant but still in more or less good enough repair. It wouldn’t take much to make Rapper and