The Pumpkin Thief: A Chloe Boston Mystery (7 page)

“And now what?”

“And now I have more work to do. The city— and your boss— will simply have to be patient.”

How he loved saying that. I wanted to smack that stupid smirk off his face, but my justifiable opportunity for inflicting physical damage was past. Anyway, I had another idea. David didn’t know it, but his secretary was a snitch of mine. She actively disliked him and would share information with me whenever she could as long as it didn’t betray a client— which it never previously had. Her confidences were mainly about David’s ploys to get back in my good graces. There hadn’t been any of those since June though. I had wondered what it would take to get David to stop stalking me and now I knew; threat of arrest for kidnap and a bloody nose.

I thanked David for his consideration, decided not to mention Deborah’s other child, and cut short his smirk and gloat time. I left the office without shaking hands. Mary Grady, who is also the librarian’s daughter and a new member of the Lit Wits, anticipated my needs and David’s refusal to share any information. There was a file open on the edge of her desk right above Blue’s head.

I couldn’t read everything while I was pretending to fumble with Blue’s leash, but I got the particulars on what interested me most. Deborah Burn’s illegitimate child had been adopted in 1981 by a family named Endicott who lived in the nearby town of Roosevelt.

So, David already knew about the kid. That took care of any guilt I might have eventually developed for withholding information.

Blue and I said a warm goodbye, promised to get donuts next time we met and left without a backward glance. I was so glad that that part of my life was over. I couldn’t recall what good I had ever seen in David Cooper.

Chapter 7

I ended up with both Jeffrey and Mr. Jackman coming for dessert. That was okay, because I had a lot of frozen pumpkin pie filling that needed eating. As we listened to the rain beating on the windows, I gave an edited account of my day, glossing over how I discovered that Deborah Burns had an illegitimate child and not mentioning the incest angle at all. Both men know that I am friends with David’s secretary and didn’t need me to draw a map for them.

We ended up discussing the more minor mystery of who the pumpkin thief might be. Mr. Jackman had a green house so he could leave his pumpkins on the vine and not worry about them being hit with frost. The pumpkin thief seemed to be making weekly visits and helping himself to one of each kind of specimen squash.

“I’d put a lock on the door but the house is just two by fours and plastic sheeting.”

“The thief would just cut through it,” Jeffrey agreed.

“Exactly. And it isn’t that I mind missing a pumpkin here or there. In the garden the deer and squirrels would take their toll. It is just… well.” He paused. “I feel kind of trespassed against, having someone coming into my yard and taking my things. So far he’s left my sugar pumpkins alone— by the way, Chloe do you need any more pumpkins for pie?”

I shook my head.

“I’m good through Thanksgiving at least.”

Thanksgiving…. Thanksgiving, being a holiday about food and family, wasn’t as much fun as Halloween. Unfortunately, it wasn’t something like Arbor Day which one could mostly ignore. Aside from my bad memories of David the pustule betraying me, Thanksgiving had meant all kinds of awkward moments since Mom and Dad had separated. In fact, I think the last thing they had agreed wholeheartedly on was that David the pustule was in fact a pustule. When my family gave thanks, it wasn’t for the peace we enjoyed.

Here is the problem with this holiday— aside from getting parents together— if Dad cooks then we have barbecue. If Mom cooks then it means we have Aunt Dorothy and Althea hanging about like albatrosses and reminding me of how David had committed his infidelity on my aunt’s fur coat. If I have it then it means surrendering my house to Mom from five in the morning to who knows when at night, because if I cook and we have lumpy gravy and potential salmonella poisoning…. It’s hard to decide what to do. But in that moment the slot machine in my brain came up all cherries.

“Would you like to come for Thanksgiving?” I asked Mr. Jackman. “You too Jeffrey.”

“Not me, Chloe. Gillian is going all out this year because of the baby,” Jeffrey said. He tried to sound regretful and failed. He’s had my cooking before.

“Well I’d… I would love to, Chloe.” Mr. Jackman looked pleased.

“My folks will be here,” I warned him. “Unless God intervenes.”

Mr. Jackman chuckled.

“If you are seriously looking for a holiday buffer, I believe Agartha is at loose ends.” Agartha Graves is another Lit Wit, a retired accountant who writes mysteries that actually get published in magazines sometimes. Tara Lee, who hasn’t sold a book in years, is very jealous.

“I’ll call her.”

“And would you perhaps like some help with the cooking?” Mr. Jackman asked. He is a good cook. He does a twice baked potato casserole that makes people moan.

“I’d love it. If Mom helps she’ll rearrange my kitchen and I won’t be able to find anything for weeks.” As a reward for his heroism I added: “I was going to stop by the turkey ranch and reserve a bird. What size should I get?”

“You’ll want leftovers—so say at least fifteen pounds.”

“Okay. I really can’t thank you enough.”

Mr. Jackman waved a hand and reached for his coffee.

“I find your family highly entertaining.” He added: “That is because they are not my own family.”

*  *  *

Some poet— not Althea— once described the town of Roosevelt as having shaggy feet and a craggy brow. This was certainly true in fall when the wild grasses at the mountains foot have dried and become tangled in the wind. And the peaks are always bare and craggy because the soil eroded away years ago.

Roosevelt— formerly Miner’s Gulch— is a dead end, physically and I think in terms of evolution, built on the east side of a deep gully (the west being sheer cliff) that somehow cleft a small part of the Cascades. Its main street runs along the side of a white water stream that periodically floods. The town has a post office, a diner, a bakery, a one-room schoolhouse and three churches. It’s very pretty when decked out for the holidays, but four-wheel drive country especially in winter. The gentlest slope in town is twenty five degrees and some are closer to thirty-five. If I needed to go anywhere off the main drag, it would be on foot. There are only about three hundred homes there, but an almost constant fog which rises up from the river and obscures them in the fall and winter.

In some ways, Sunday is not the ideal time to visit Roosevelt. People tend to be in church or with their families. But there are always a few misfits who don’t care for their hearth and home and I figured these would be the kind of people who would be most likely to talk to me.

I did not go in blind. I looked up the name Endicott in the phone book but found no listing. That was annoying, but in a small town like Roosevelt someone would have a forwarding address for the family.

Bad weather had followed me. Clouds sagged so low with their load of rain that they snagged on the top most houses and began leaking in places. The light was gray and dingy and my enthusiasm for investigation was waning. However, a detective wouldn’t last long if they only detected things in good weather, so I took a deep breath and got out of the car. I put Blue on a leash though it was hardly necessary. There was no traffic.

The bakery was open. They also had a sort of screened deck with a gas heater where Blue could wait while I ordered. Normally I would have eaten outside with her, but that morning there were no fresh air nuts for me to question. Everyone was huddled by the potbelly stove.

I ordered a cinnamon roll with coffee and then struck up a conversation with the man at the nearest table. This is still very hard for me. I have practiced a lot the last couple of years since my departmental evaluation said my interpersonal skills needed work, but I still find talking to strangers to be hard going.

Since I had nothing to hide I just asked straightforwardly if anyone knew where the Endicotts were. The immediate silence that followed told me that either I was about to hear a torrent of town gossip or else I had made a grave misstep and every one would clam up. I was expecting it to be the last thing— the misstep— but I was wrong. The people in the bakery had a lot to say about the Endicotts and little of it nice.

Ryan was adopted by Ruth and Samuel Endicott, the late proprietors of Endicott Grocer and Sundries. Ruth and Samuel, God fearing Christians though standoffish with the Methodists in town, had become ‘late’ when there was a tragic (and to me suspicious) gas leak in their kitchen two Thanksgivings ago.

Ryan, miraculously away from home that night, had waited around only long enough to collect the insurance money— a small policy intended only to cover burial expenses— and then skipped town, still owing the undertaker for the couples’ funeral.

The story was hazily familiar. I hadn’t paid that much attention at the time because that was the same Thanksgiving that I had discovered David having sex with my underage cousin and was distracted with crying and breaking up and other personal things.

A kinder jury of peers would have said that Ryan had a troubled youth. Unhappy and unable to conform to his parent’s strict moral standards, he was always in trouble—at school, at church and with the law. As the man at the next table put it: “That one is demon seed. If he ain’t sold his soul to the Devil it’s only ‘cause the Devil ain’t met his asking price.”

This was probably overstatement but it made the point. Ryan Endicott had not been a model child.

Unfortunately for me, no one had heard from him since he skipped town and no one, in the bakery at least, wanted to.

I finished my roll and coffee though I hadn’t much appetite left after the locals’ brisk walk down a vandalized memory lane. I was thinking hard. Even someone not given to seeing patterns would have to admit that there were a lot of suspicious deaths around the Burns and the Sayers families— Elijah and Theresa in a motor home fire (caused by a gas leak), Deborah and Alonzo in a burglary, Ruth and Samuel in a kitchen fire (again caused by a gas leak) and poor Hector, whose death was way beyond suspicious even without any gas being involved. Could any two— well, three, counting the Endicotts— entwined families have that much bad luck in such a short space of time? I didn’t think so, not unless it was manufactured misfortune.

Could Ryan Endicott have known the facts of any of these deaths? Was that why he had run?

After the stuffy, overheated bakery, the fog and drizzle were actually refreshing. I collected Blue and we walked back to the car. I shut her inside first and then came around to the driver’s side door.

I had seen a lot of Halloween masks the last few days so I knew the creature who lurched at me was not a real zombie. That did not mean that he was not a monster. My first craven reaction was normal, I think. I spun away from the reaching arms and ran into the fog.

A voice screeched after me, “Ryan’s gonna getcha if you don’t watch out!”

My sense of self-preservation is as developed as anyone’s and I had no urge to demonstrate conspicuous bravery if it meant getting killed by a crazy man in a mask, so I hid in the nearest oleander bush. Great things those oleander bushes. Poisonous, of course, but dense enough to hide in without being too thick to penetrate when one is in a hurry.

 I actually hated to leave that oleander. It was so nice and shadowy and I hadn’t seen any spiders. But Blue was barking her head off and I had belatedly recalled that I was no longer eight and that I had self-defense training and a shriek alarm to summon help. Crouching in shrubbery was undignified. Out of the bush I came, finally ready to kick zombie butt, but the foggy street was empty.

No one was hiding in the car— even a zombie would have better sense than to get in the car with a barking Rottweiler— and I left town without incident, though I drove slowly because I was half-expecting the stupid zombie to come lurching out of the mist again.

Once the first rush of adrenaline had passed, I was able to think calmly about what had happened and found it interesting.

Someone had warned me off of searching for Ryan Endicott. It might just have been some bored teen thinking it would be fun to terrorize a woman with a warning about the local boogieman. But then again, it might be something much more interesting.

Chapter 8

Caesar’s Turkey Ranch was a wonderful place, if you didn’t think too much about how all those beautiful white and old fashioned black turkeys roaming the hills were going to end up on the holiday dinner table.

Most turkeys are surprisingly affectionate. They are also terribly stupid which is why they would approach me even with Blue in tow, not that Blue doesn’t know her manners. I met a few of the birds at the fence and obliging scratched their chests and under their wings while they gobbled at me. Around us the wind shrilled and I noticed that most of the trees were bare. It would be an early winter.

I was the only visitor that morning, though the Sunday quiet would be broken after church let out. A Caesar turkey costs more than anything you’ll get at the market, but it is worlds better tasting and therefore very popular. The birds are raised on a strict vegetarian diet, certified organic and after the first few weeks living in a barn until they are too big for hawks to pick off (actually it’s a high-tech brooding facility that looks like a barn) they are allowed to roam free for the next six months while they develop their flavor. Caesar’s doesn’t have a website and won’t take phone orders, so if you want a turkey then you have to come in and select one. Not that they make you go out and hunt down your own turkey, but you fill out a form stating weight and whether you want a tom or a hen, black or white and then make a down payment. You come back the week before Thanksgiving and pick up your plucked and boxed bird which is tied up with a big red ribbon.

I was waited on by Caesar Moreno’s eldest son, Diego. He seemed promising— in a professional sense. Aesthetically, he was unappealing. Protuberant muscles are not my thing. Perhaps because I am jealous of people who can clearly lift a number of hundred pound sand bags without even trying.