The Pumpkin Thief: A Chloe Boston Mystery

Chapter 1

Officer Bill had risen from the dead. I noticed him standing by a hay bale as I drove my cart by the closed gates of the 4-H haunted House on Harris Street, doling out a few chalk lines as I raced through the town at a blistering 4 mph. Of course, no one called it the 4-H house. Everyone in town knew it as the old Burns Mansion and that it was truly haunted. Who it is haunted by is unclear. Some said it was the previous owners, Elijah and Theresa Burns, though they had only died in a motor-home fire in 2007 and the place had a reputation long before that. Personally, I think it is haunted by bad taste and worse memories of the unpleasant people who lived there. A gothic revival building has no place in Hope Falls and you’re just begging for spooks if you build one.

Blue whined, but she never had liked Officer Bill. Seeing the police mascot resurrected did not cause me a qualm because he wasn’t my problem any more.  Besides he was looking quite at home with the helium balloon and cheesecloth ghosts, the witch on the broomstick that had splattered herself against the wall and the vampire peeking coyly out of the attic window. It was mid afternoon; vampires should be coy. This haunted house was PG-13 which is about how scary poor Bill was looking. He had once been an aid in public service safety lectures, but someone (okay me) had had a couple accidents with his giant
papiermache
head last spring that caused him to develop leprosy and to lose a couple of ears when he got his giant head jammed in a door and then fell in a fountain. The new chief of police had been upset about this but it led to me solving the Skate Park murder, so all has been forgiven.

My name is Chloe Boston and I am a parking enforcement officer in the town of Hope Falls. I work Monday through Friday and every other Saturday from nine until five. Even on Halloween if it happens to fall on any of those days, which this year it did.

Blue, my female Rottweiler, rides with me everywhere. She is quite elderly and I am determined that we will enjoy every moment we have together. Blue loves riding in the electric cart while I’m on duty, and is also delighted with my trike—a bike with a sidecar that my dad built for me because Blue tends to get carsick in a regular automobile. That day we were both wearing costumes. I was in the grim reaper cape with plastic scythe and Blue was in a witch’s hat. We had a plastic pumpkin filled with mini Abazabas which we handed out to the children we passed on the street. School was out and kids were beginning to trick-or-treat the merchants downtown. We live in a hilly town and going house to house is too grueling for the youngest children, so the custom of trick-or-treating downtown had been initiated.

At six o’clock there would be a costume contest in the park with a pumpkin walk and some games like bobbing for apples and donut on a string. At seven they would have the pumpkin lighting ceremony where someone would be awarded the best jack-o-lantern prize. Then
The Good Time Ghouls
, a fifties all-girl tribute band, would be performing. Those willing to brave a twisted ankle could dance in Court House Park on the root-encumbered lawn. I couldn’t wait!

The haunted house and corn maze were on the other side of the courthouse. The maze had been open for the last two weekends and was doing a brisk business after sundown. There was no charge as long as you picked ten ears of corn which would be given to the food bank. Normally being located near a cemetery would be considered a bad thing for a business, but for Halloween it made perfect sense and the corn harvested from the field, planted for the occasion, had been welcome at a time when donations were down. Both attractions could be seen for five dollars on Halloween, the money going to the 4-H club. The Odd Fellows and Kiwanis and Rotary clubs had various booths outside the maze selling cider, candy apples and hotdogs also raising money for their sponsored charities. There were pony rides and a petting zoo. Everyone wore costumes. Hope Falls liked Halloween and killjoys were not welcome.

Halloween is my favorite time of year and I was so excited that I was singing along to Monster Mash. Blue likes music so she doesn’t mind if I keep a boom-box in the cart. We were ignoring our regular route in order to police downtown and make sure that it was safe for the costumed pedestrians. The locals were very considerate of the holiday tradition and detoured down side streets, but recent publicity had attracted a lot of tourists to the event. The out-of-towners were not always so careful with those on foot, or about not parking in front of entertainment venues which were a major fund-raiser for neighborhood charities.

I turned off of Joy Street, so named because there had been a bordello there once, and onto Main. Mrs. Everett was on the corner, dressed as Snow White and handing out candy outside her shop, What Lies Beneath. The window was full of black and orange lingerie. The black bras and panties were probably new, but the orange corsets were less popular and I thought I recognized them from last year. I waved and yelled “Happy Halloween!” Blue woofed until we got a smile and wave back. Mrs. Everett is a member of the Lit Wits, a writing group I belong to, and she is also an amateur sleuth who helps me sometimes.
Esprit de corp
runs high with us.

Other Lit Wits were about. Mrs. Graves was working in the Krazy’s Kettle Korn booth who always donated money to the animal shelter. She was dressed as a scarecrow and looked nice and warm. The smell was delicious and I promised Blue we’d get some later. I saw Mrs. Smith at the edge of the courthouse green. She was dressed as a gypsy and was reading people’s palms. Her charity was the library’s adult literacy program. She noticed me right away and called: “Come have your palm read!”

“I will,” I called back.

As I mentioned, I get off work at five. The pumpkin lighting wasn’t until seven, so I would have plenty of time to go home and get my jack-o-lantern. I had nursed my pumpkin patch along all summer, Blue and the cats sacrificing our little square of grass in the front of our duplex so that I could grow what I hoped would be an award winning squash. And I did have what I thought would be a winner. I had put my largest pumpkin on the bathroom scale and it weighed in at 119 pounds (it was a Mammoth Gold variety and I got my seeds from Mr. Jackman, another Lit Wit). The pumpkin was a couple inches wider than the yardstick I tried to measure it with, maybe forty inches in diameter though only about eighteen inches high. My dad had already helped me load it into my car since it weighed more than I did. He would meet me at the park a little before seven and help me off load it safely. Probably I could roll it down the blanketed plywood ramp he had rigged up on my own, but if it slipped there could be injuries. Just imagine getting written up in the newspaper for injuring someone with a squash. TOURIST ASSAULTED BY VEGETABLE! I’d never hear the end of it. And an unplanned escape wouldn’t do my pumpkin any good either.

For those who have never grown really large pumpkins, let me warn you that there is a downside to having one get that big. The walls of the squash get so thick that only the largest knife can cut all the way through and it limits you to simple faces. Unless you know someone who has a lot of tools and doesn’t mind you borrowing their coping saw. It wasn’t the preferred use of the saw of course, but Dad has a knife sharpening business— forced on him after he was made to retire from his job as chief of police— and he said that I was less likely to shed blood with a saw than hacking away with the butcher knife I’d borrowed from my mom. Mom and Dad are separated and there is sometimes a bit of rivalry over who spends more time with their only child.

Some years, summer holds on forever, but this year autumn had wrestled for honors and won. There had been one hard frost already and I was glad that I had loaded my other pumpkins onto an old bed sheet and dragged them under cover of the porch last weekend. Perhaps that is why I was spared a visit from the pumpkin thief that had hit several of the pumpkin patches. Jeffrey Little, a fellow parking enforcement officer, thought it was just kids messing about, but since only large pumpkins were taken, I thought it was someone who really wanted to win the pumpkin contest and wasn’t adverse to cheating. There was also some grumblings about an out of town pumpkin thief who was raiding people’s gardens for souvenirs, but I had doubts about it being a tourist. I was certain our pumpkin pilferer was local since he knew where the patches were.

I turned onto Bryant and noted that the sky was still clear, so we were probably good for the night, though the weatherman said rain was on the way and it was getting colder by the hour.

Blue and I returned to the station and I plugged in my cart so the battery could recharge and we took my trike and Abazabas and headed for home. I saw my friend Jeffrey (dressed as a hobo) in the parking lot talking to the new chief (dressed in Armani. He isn’t the kind to wear a costume). I hoped Jeffrey wasn’t in trouble again. He is not fond of our new chief and I fear that the animosity is mutual.

My duplex is done in the bungalow style (small and squat with pretty windows). My side has been renovated extensively so it is really only half authentic bungalow. The owner has never gotten around to fixing the other half so I have no neighbors. This suits me fine.

I prepared dinner for Blue and the cats as I sang along to Sheb Wooley’s
Shudders and Screams
. I didn’t eat myself. I was holding out for some mulled cider and pumpkin cake downtown. Blue likes pumpkin cake, too, but she has a tricky tummy and shouldn’t have spicy food. I, on the other hand, have an excellent constitution and need not go in fear of cinnamon and clove.

The cats, Apollo and Aphrodite, had no desire to come to the pumpkin lighting and rub shoulders with the hoi polloi, but Blue enjoys all social events, so I loaded her up in the car with all the windows down and then checked one more time on my jack-o-lantern. The face was a bit Picassoish, cut half with a knife and half with a saw, but the size was magnificent. And I had three large candles to make sure the face was good and bright because it would be really dark by seven. Usually I don’t like real candles, but the battery ones weren’t bright enough, so I made do. I tried fitting a seatbelt around the pumpkin but it wouldn’t stretch that far, so I resolved to drive extra slowly and carefully.

The breeze had a bite to it and shifted the fallen leaves around with a delightfully creepy rustle that suggested something sly was hiding in the drifts that built up in the street gutters and ditches. The stray leaves ran recklessly into the street and were flattened by the tires of my car. Blue hung her head out the window and sniffed for all she was worth.

I stayed off the main street where children were still trick-or-treating. That meant driving by the cemetery and Burns Mansion whose thoroughfare was rather steeply pitched and ill-lighted when the haunted house isn’t in use. The mansion wasn’t scheduled to open for another hour and the gates were still closed. I noticed that it was still being kitted out with last minute scares by teens in hideous costumes. The latest edition was a corpse— Officer Bill, in fact— twisting from the oak tree in the front lawn. He was surrounded by a flock of live crows who watched it closely, rather like dignitaries at an execution. I couldn’t understand this because they should have been afraid. The scarecrow body under Bill’s giant head seemed a bit more realistic than the other ‘monsters’ and I hoped it wouldn’t frighten any of the young children who knew Officer Bill from visits to their school. Frankly, I wouldn’t bring very young children to either the haunted house or the corn maze. The hay bale maze was smaller and more on a kid scale, but truthfully I didn’t like it either. Enclosed spaces bother me. This was my Cousin Todd’s fault. He had terrorized me with monster stories when I was young. Since no one told me that Todd was a liar, I believed him about the monster in the closet and alligators under the bed.

I saw Dad was waiting under a street light wearing a glow-in-the-dark skeleton shirt and pulled over at the edge of the park. His face was painted like a skull and I wondered if it was itchy. We would have to carry the pumpkin in a blanket down a short flight of stairs, but it was the only parking space available on the block and Dad and I had already practiced this maneuver in reverse.

“Chloe, Blue— how are my girls?” he asked, giving me a hug. He leaned over and gave Blue a pat since she was a girl too. “Your jack-o-lantern made the trip okay?”