Sheriff Dan Rhodes couldn't sing very well.

It wasn't that Rhodes didn't like music. He did, and he could hear songs perfectly well in his head, every note in tune, every tone rounded and full. When he opened his mouth and tried to sing, though, the sounds that came out didn't match what he heard in his mind. They sometimes came close, but not in a good way.

Which explained why Rhodes had never before been asked to join a musical group. He'd been asked to join just about everything else: civic clubs, book groups, political parties, record clubs (that had been a while back), and even a softball team or two. Lately AARP had been making persistent overtures.

Rhodes, however, wasn't much of a joiner, and he'd resisted all the opportunities presented to him so far, including the latest one, as he explained to Hack Jensen, the Blacklin County dispatcher.

"Well, you oughta think about joinin' the barbershop chorus, anyway," Hack said. "It's a kind of thing that might get you some votes. There's an election comin' up, whether you want to admit it or not."

Rhodes didn't want to admit it. He didn't like elections, and he especially didn't like campaigning.

"It's more than a year until the election," he said. "Besides, nobody's announced to run against me."

"You think it'll be easy, then?"

Rhodes wondered if Hack knew something he didn't. It was possible. Even likely. For a man who hardly ever seemed to leave the jail, Hack knew a lot about what was going on in the county.

"It's never easy," Rhodes said.

"If you lost the election, you'd miss this place," Hack said, waving a hand to indicate the big room they were in.

Rhodes spent a lot of time at the jail, all right, more than he should have, he sometimes thought. The room where Hack sat at the dispatcher's desk was as familiar to Rhodes as his own living room. That might not have been such a good thing.

The open area was also the room where people were booked into the jail and where most people came if they were looking for help from the county's law enforcement. There wasn't a lot to recommend it, but Hack was right.

"I'd miss it," Rhodes admitted, "but I could get used to being a private citizen."

Hack snorted. "I bet. You been sheriff for so long, you wouldn't know how to do anything else. And half the county'd still be lookin' for you to take care of 'em."

"Which half? The half that voted for me?"

"You wouldn't get half the votes. You lost, remember?"

Things had moved fast, a little too fast for Rhodes. The election was more than a year away, Rhodes didn't even have an opponent, and he'd already lost.

"What does all this have to do with me joining the Clearview Community Barbershop Chorus, anyway?" he said.

He and Hack had been arguing about the chorus off and on for more than a week, and Rhodes was getting a little tired of the whole thing.

Hack gave Rhodes an exasperated look. "Like I said. Bein' in the chorus gets you some votes. Lets folks know you're a part of the community that's havin' a good time and that you're not just out on the street arrestin' people who have overdue parkin' tickets."

"When's the last time I arrested anybody for an overdue parking ticket? Or even gave a parking ticket?"

"That ain't the point."

"Anyway," Rhodes said, ignoring him, "arresting people is my job. I'm the sheriff, not a barbershop singer."

"Well, you oughta be glad they asked you to join the chorus. They might get their feelin's hurt if you turn 'em down."

Something in Hack's tone clued Rhodes in to the real subject under discussion. He said, "I think they should've asked you to join. You have a nice baritone voice."

Hack nodded. "I sure do. You'd think they'd have invited me, but they invited you, instead."

"You don't need an invitation, you know. They don't have tryouts or anything. You can just go down to the community center and join. They'd be lucky to have you."

Hack grinned. "Yeah, but who'd run this dispatch board? The county needs me."

"But not me?"

"You got plenty of deputies." Hack paused. "You ever think they might have a reason for askin' you to join the chorus besides your singin' abilities?"

As often happened, Rhodes knew he'd been wrong at least twice now about the actual direction of the conversation.

"What would the reason be?" he asked.

Hack shook his head. "I don't know. It was just somethin' in the way Berry asked you."

Lloyd Berry was the director of the chorus, and he'd come by the jail a bit earlier to talk to Rhodes about joining the group. Berry was a local florist, and singing was his hobby. He'd been enthusiastic about the benefits of belonging to the chorus. He'd also seemed a little nervous, as if he might be worried about something, though he'd said nothing about what that might be.

"Could be he wanted you there to referee any fights that broke out," Hack said.

"Why would there be fights at a chorus rehearsal?"

"Well," Hack said, "there's some strange folks in that bunch."

Rhodes knew who Hack meant: C. P. Benton and Max Schwartz, both of them relative newcomers.

Benton, better known as Seepy, was one of the bass singers in the chorus. He played guitar and drove a Saturn. That qualified him as strange by Clearview and Blacklin County standards.

Max Schwartz sang baritone. He'd given up his law practice in Kentucky and moved to Clearview with his wife, Jackee, to open a music store. He was devoted to the music of the Kingston Trio, not a group known for their barbershop arrangements. Rhodes didn't know why Schwartz was in the chorus. Maybe he just liked to sing harmony. At any rate, a man who'd give up a law practice to open a music store in a small town would certainly be considered odd by most people in the county.

Then lately he'd gotten into the restaurant business. Nothing strange about that, at least Rhodes hoped not. The last man who'd had the restaurant hadn't come to a good end.

Schwartz and Benton had a few other peculiarities, too, but that didn't make them troublemakers. Both had been involved in one of Rhodes's previous cases, but they'd been on the side of the angels.

Hack wasn't talking about those two, though.

"It's Cecil Marsh and Royce Weeks that'd worry me if I was the director of that bunch," Hack said. "Those two never have liked each other, and now they're both singin' tenor in the chorus. They're on opposite sides in the chicken deal, too. Could be a problem."

Marsh and Weeks currently had two problems, including what Rhodes liked to call "neighbor trouble." Others might have called it an ongoing feud. It had started when Weeks had moved next door to Marsh more than twenty years earlier. Weeks insisted that Marsh move three or four ornamental shrubs that were over the property line. Marsh said they weren't over the line, and he wasn't going to move them. Weeks called a surveyor, who found that the shrubs were indeed on Weeks's property, by about six inches, seven at the most. Weeks told Marsh to move the shrubs or he'd chop them down.

That was the beginning. Over the next twenty years, Rhodes or one of his deputies had been called to one house or the other to settle problems with barking dogs, uncut lawns, rogue sprinklers, suspicious smells, terroristic threats, garbage that was improperly disposed of, allegedly stolen newspapers, disturbances of the peace, and any number of other things that Rhodes couldn't recall at the...