Free Bill Crider - Dan Rhodes 09 - Death by Accident by Bill Crider

stuck the handkerchief back in his pocket and put his cap back on.
    “If you think that was a hard question,” Rhodes said, “how about this one: who called you?”
    “I suppose I can tell you that.  It was Mack Riley.”
    Rhodes knew Mack.  He was a cranky old codger, too ornery to join either the Sons and Daughters of Texas or the Historical Society because neither of them would let him run the show.  When he was younger, he had by all accounts been a real hellion, getting into one fight after another.
    But age or wisdom or both had supposedly reformed him, and now the only fights he got into were fights that used words.  He was a self-appointed expert on the history of Blacklin County and a frequent contributor to the Clearview Herald ’s letters-to-the-editor column.  His letters usually condemned either the Society or the Sons and Daughters for some misguided project or what Riley saw as a distortion of history in an article written by one of their members.
    “Mack’s on your side?” Rhodes said.
    “This time he is,” Berry said.
    “OK.  I’ll take your word for it.  Now, tell me why the city park.”
    “Mack says it’s because the county commissioners would never allow anyone to just set the cabin on the courthouse lawn and get away with it.  They’d have it hauled off the next day.”
    Rhodes worked closely with the commissioners.  They could be as cranky as Mack Riley when the occasion demanded it, and he didn’t imagine they’d be any too happy to see the Burleson cabin parked on the courthouse lawn.  Riley was probably right about their reaction.
    “But the city council’s different,” Berry said.  “Mack says they haven’t done a thing for that park in years except let it to go to hell in a handbasket.  They’ll hardly even pay for someone to cut the weeds in the summer.  If the Society puts the cabin there and promises to take care of the upkeep, maybe even keep up the whole park, the council will let them leave the cabin for as long as they want to.”
    That too sounded about right to Rhodes.  The council would do just about anything to save money, even the little bit of money they spent on mowing the park two or three times a year.
    “Where did Mack get his information?”
    “He didn’t say.  But he knows a lot of people, and he’s a good listener.  People like to talk to him.”
    Rhodes figured that Berry would have mentioned the drowning to Riley, so he said, “Did Mack have anything to say about Yeldell?”
    Berry took off his cap again, but he didn’t wipe his head.  He just put the cap on his knee and left it there.
    “He thinks the same thing I do.”
    “What’s that?”
    “That it would be just like Faye Knape to put that rope in the tree and then suggest to Yeldell that he go swimming out there.”
    The rope’s being tied to a rotten limb could be explained by the fact that someone wanted the limb to break, but Rhodes found it hard to believe that Faye Knape was that someone.  And he didn’t think that Faye and Pep Yeldell moved in the same social circles.
    “Are you making an accusation?” he asked.
    Berry looked down at his cap.  “I don’t know,” he said.
    “It seems pretty unlikely to me that Faye Knape would know someone like Pep Yeldell,” Rhodes said.  “And depending on a rotten limb to break and kill someone seems a whole lot more unlikely than that.”
    “It’s not so unlikely if the someone was drunk.  Yeldell liked to drink.”
    “Let me see if I’ve got this right,” Rhodes said.  “Faye Knape doesn’t want the Old Settler’s Celebration to be a success, so she climbs one of the tallest pecan trees on the grounds.  Then she ties a rope to a rotten limb in the hopes that some intoxicated man, or a woman would do, I guess, will come along, swing on the rope, get hit in the head by the falling limb, and drown in the pool.”
    Hack made a sound that might have been a cough or a laugh, and Berry looked over in his