The Pumpkin Thief: A Chloe Boston Mystery (4 page)

Even when I am busy detecting, I try not to stick my nose out beyond reasonable limits. Althea, the gossip hound, doesn’t know the meaning of ‘reasonable’. Or ‘limits’, come to think of it.

“Oh thank goodness you’re here. I’ve been so frightened out here all alone!” I shouldn’t have to tell you that that was Althea being breathless and clingy, not me. Nor was she addressing her comment to me, a mere female.

Even if I had been mindless with terror, I never would have admitted it to the boss. Or anyone. Women who want to be taken seriously as detectives don’t do breathless and clingy. However, sometimes we roll our eyes to show disgust.

When I remained silent, the chief took a stab at being reassuring while Althea fluttered her lashes. The chief is single. Althea can’t help herself. She wants to marry—preferably someone with money— and is trying to take that first step. Because I don’t like her, I am inclined to think that it isn’t a man she wants so much as that symbolic piece of crystallized carbon set in a fashionable platinum band that a man usually gives a woman when they are plighted. The chief was too tired for games though (and flirting around a corpse is just tacky) and I was just tired of Althea.

“Go home and lock your door before someone cuts your head off,” I advised when the chief paused to draw breath. “Then you won’t have to be afraid anymore and I won’t worry so much about you, dear.” The ‘dear’ was gratuitous. She is always calling people ‘dear’ and ‘sweetie’ so they would excuse her impolite comments and nosy wheedling. Why do people let Althea get away with being bitchy when she adds an endearment? It seemed so stupid to me.

Really, I needed to introduce her to Lardhead Gordon. It had occurred to me more than once that they would be perfect together. Dale Gordon was one of the officers who had hated my father and really hates me.

Althea might have argued against my sound advice, but Dad and Mr. Jackman joined us at last and my fellow Lit Wit, after taking a quick read of the situation, did the honorable thing and offered to escort Althea home. I considered sticking my foot out as she walked by me, but I refrained. The present situation was calamitous enough and there is a statute of limitations on getting even for past Halloween pranks played on younger cousins.

“If you assault her, I’ll have to run you in,” the chief said softly, but he was amused.

“My attacks are strictly verbal,” I assured him. There had been only one exception, and that was when my former fiancé had kidnapped me. That time my better nature failed to triumph over baser instincts and I had bloodied his nose.

“I wonder if the gates were locked all day. It would help narrow down the time frame for the murder,” Dad said when Mr. Jackman’s car pulled away. Dad was no fan of Althea’s either.

The coroner would figure out time of death eventually, but everyone knows that time is of the essence in a homicide. Dad and the chief both looked at me, one with expectation and one with curiosity.

I thought back to my several trips past the house during the day.

“No. Shut but not padlocked.” They usually were locked because the city didn’t want vagrants in the house, but I was willing to bet that they hadn’t been consistently locked up for weeks. “It would have been inconvenient for the 4-H kids going in and out with decorations. And anyway, there is a way into the grounds through the hedge from the corn maze. The grounds aren’t secure.”

“I called the inn after they found his wallet and got a name for the deceased—Hector Sayers,” the chief said. “You were right. The deceased was registered at the inn. He arrived four days ago. Nothing suspicious about him but he did go out a lot at night. I’ll send someone to Harley’s tomorrow and see if he was hanging with anyone in particular. No one in the crowd came forward to say they knew him or had seen him anywhere, but pretty much everyone here was….”

“Wholesome and law abiding,” I supplied. Our limited criminal element was not drawn to events where no liquor was served.

The town didn’t have a lot of places that stayed open late. Harley’s Bar and Grill was one of them. I used to work there and knew the owner would be less than thrilled to have the police around, but it had to be done.

My dad’s brow creased and smeared his skull paint. It was already looking a little droopy. He’d been perspiring.

“I know that name.”

“Deborah Burns ran off with a Sayer, didn’t she?” I asked. Living in a small town, we know more than our immediate family’s genealogy.

“That’s right,” Dad said. “Alonzo Sayer.”

I looked up at the chief and explained: “Elijah and Theresa Burns used to own the haunted house. Deborah was their daughter. There was a son too, I think, but he was younger.”

“What happened?” the chief asked, knowing there was a story and that gossip can sometimes be relevant.

“The Burnses died in a motor home fire back in 2007 while they were camping in Oregon. The propane tank on the stove exploded. The circumstances were kind of suspicious but the investigation never got pursued. Hope Falls got the house because there were no heirs and the Burnses owed taxes to the city. I think it’s called escheat.” I was hazy on the last point. I had been interested in the Burns case because of the potential for it to be homicide, not for arcane tax law. We didn’t get many killings in Hope Falls and I sometimes looked beyond the town limits for cases to investigate— only in my mind of course. To do anything else would be to trample on someone else’s jurisdiction.

“But what about their kids? Why wouldn’t they inherit?” The chief asked.

Dad took up the story. “There were none left. Elijah and Theresa had two children, Carl and Deborah. Carl got killed in a motorcycle accident in ‘88. I thought at the time it might have been a suicide. Kid went right off a cliff without ever slowing down.”

“Drunk?”

“No. No alcohol, no drugs. Elijah took it especially hard. It was a pride thing— losing their son. Deborah wasn’t that important to them.”

“So she got fed up and ran off?” the chief guessed.

“Yeah, eventually. She got sent off to some girls school some place right after the accident and then about a month after she came home she ran off with Alonzo.” A dark thought stirred at these words, like an alligator poking its nose out of a swamp and then re-submerging. Dad went on: “The kids had been tight in high school and no one was surprised when she left. Except Elijah. He disowned Deborah— stood up in church and renounced her.” Dad shook his head. “It was a big scandal at the time. Deborah and her husband opened some kind of custom leather place in San Francisco. They were both killed in a robbery in 2006. I was the one who broke the news to Elijah and Theresa. Theresa was sad but Elijah didn’t seem to care. Deborah had a kid, I think, but he went to live with one of the Sayers in Oregon. I get the feeling that neither Deborah nor Alonzo wanted the kid to have anything to do with her parents.”

“Any other Sayers left here in Hope Falls?” The chief asked my dad.

“Nope. Alonzo’s parents moved to Arizona two years ago. There were no other children to keep them here and old man Sayer’s daddy finally passed away leaving them some money. They were looking for some place warmer in the winter. Ginny Sayer had the bronchitis.”

“I wonder if Alonzo and Deborah had a son named Hector.”

 I nodded at the chief, thinking the same thing. It would be fairly easy to check. They would also be looking for a wife or next of kin anyway.

“Her father renounced Deborah in church,” I said. “But I wonder if he actually wrote her out of the will. If there was a will.” I tracked down the next thought. “And I wonder if there is money to go with the house. Would the bank be holding it in trust?”

The chief nodded back.

“Good point. I wonder who handled the estate.”

“David Cooper,” I said immediately. David, the pustule, was my former fiancé and the only attorney in town that did estate planning. We had had a parting of the ways when he was caught sleeping with my underage cousin. By my parents. On Thanksgiving. “It might be best if someone else asked him about this though. We don’t speak.”

The chief raised a brow but I didn’t volunteer anything.

“Why would Hector be in Hope Falls?” Dad muttered. “Surely not for auld lang syne. Especially not with one set of grandparents dead and the other gone. Unless it was about the property? Maybe someone finally tracked him down and he’d come to see it.”

“The haunted house was in the newspaper,” the chief said. “But that’s strictly local.”

Uh oh. Someone was going to have to talk to David for sure. I hoped it wouldn’t be me. I’d rather interview Harley.

“What I can’t figure is who would gain from his being dead.” This was the chief again. He was being very tolerant about our speculating. One might even think that he wasn’t going to tell us to butt out and leave things to the real police.

“You’re thinking gain since he is a stranger here,” I said and it made sense.

The city would gain, but I didn’t say it because it seemed very improbable that the city council had gotten up to murder in order to save an eyesore that required costly maintenance and brought in no property tax. Though, come to think of it, they did rent out the estate sometimes for weddings and other events. I would never have a party there, but some people like creepy things.

“Why hasn’t the town sold off the house?” I asked.

“They can’t,” Dad said. “There is some kind of statute about due diligence in searching for an heir.” The chief grunted. He and Dad were probably of the shared opinion that no one had been very diligent about anything. The town had few resources and this wasn’t an urgent case. “One thing is for sure. Someone hated this guy.”

Dad was right. For most killers, stabbing would have been sufficient. Hanging wasn’t added on unless A) you were being killed in a medieval execution or B) someone really didn’t like you. Or maybe C) someone sick really wanted attention. The last one made me nervous. Of the three, I would prefer to avoid option C. A psycho would be hard to catch and would probably kill more people while we were trying to find him.

“Guess this one isn’t an accident,” the chief said, alluding to my last big case which had turned out not to be a homicide.

I shook my head and noticed my last candle had gone out. Storm clouds were covering the moon. Halloween was in every way over.

“I wonder how strong you have to be to string someone up,” I muttered. Dad and the chief looked at me. They weren’t disapproving of my question, merely startled. “Just wondering if a woman or a kid could have done it.”

“Do you think it’s a woman who did this?” the chief asked, perhaps beginning to wonder about a really angry wife with a really big insurance policy.

“No. I don’t think anything. But I might have to experiment just in case.” Like with a bag of sand. The requirement for getting onto the Hope Falls police force was being able to lift a hundred pound bag of sand. I didn’t think there was any specification on the books about how one lifted it, so if tackle worked…. “Was there tackle?”

“Yes. Old and used. No fingerprints and I’m betting stolen. We’re asking people to check their garages. Maybe we’ll get a lead that way.”

A lot of people in Hope Falls have boats, and garage rafters were a favorite place to store kayaks and canoes. Every third house could have tackle in it, and doors were rarely locked.

Dad and I both yawned suddenly. We tended to rise and set with the sun and it was past our bed time.

“Get some rest,” the chief said. “Boston— Chloe— you did great work tonight. And you, too, Henry. I appreciate everything you’ve done. We could have had a real panic on our hands if you hadn’t calmed everyone down, and I doubt we would have gotten so many names of people at the haunted house if you hadn’t been here.”

The chief offered his hand and Dad took it. If I had been less exhausted I might have gotten teary eyed, but I was too tired and hungry for sentiment.

Chapter 5

Once home, I made cinnamon toast in the erroneous belief that my tongue would be fooled into thinking that it had had pumpkin cake. Apparently I am not real good at lying to myself.

Alex called around eleven to wish me a happy Halloween. I figured he would since he had called every hour since eight o’clock and left messages on my machine. Alex Lincoln is my sometimes boyfriend. We had met last spring when he was hired to investigate a cyber crime on a case I was also investigating— in an unofficial capacity, of course. He lived in California and only made it up to Washington on key holidays or for major outbreaks of criminality. Since I am great with animals but not up on the proper care and feeding of a full time relationship, it was probably good that he was away more than not.

He also came with some local baggage, an aunt who sold door to door cosmetics and was considered a domestic terrorist by many stay at home moms in her neighborhood. Mary Elizabeth had popped round after she knew Alex and I were seeing each other and given me a makeover. The results were horrifying. I’d looked like I’d been done up by the undertaker. To keep the peace I’d bought some bath salts from her, but I knew she would be back soon. I wondered if there was some polite way to ask Alex to get his aunt off my back. Probably not. And even if he asked, it wouldn’t do any good. Mary Elizabeth’s knee transplant had been entirely too successful and she was feeling feisty as well as mobile.

“Chloe, want to tell me about your hot date?” he said first thing. Alex knows I don’t like being out late but will make an exception if I have a date.

“Well, you know how it is. The streets are strewn with the bodies of my victims. I can hardly count them all.”

“Really. Are you seeing someone? Cause it would be okay. I just want to know.” Alex sounded a bit jealous. We had never discussed exclusivity, so the argument could be made that such feelings were out of line, but when were feelings ever that tidy? I tend toward the virtuous, but find my moral fiber unraveling when he is near. Perhaps he thought I was that way with everyone.

I sighed to myself. “My charms, though enormous, have their limits. I haven’t managed to seduce anyone since we talked on Wednesday. I can get to work on that though if it’s what you expect.”