Town in a Pumpkin Bash (23 page)

“And it’s your birthday,” Tristan said. “Listen, I’ve been thinking. As you’ve probably
heard, my family throws a party—a masquerade ball, really—at the house on Halloween
night. It’s sort of a tradition around here. All the movers and shakers in town usually
show up, as well as quite a few of Aunt Helen’s more famous friends—artists, writers,
politicians, that sort of thing. I’d like you to come as my guest, and we can celebrate
your birthday in style.”

Candy hesitated. “Well, I…”

“I’ve already checked with your father,” he said, “and it’s fine with him.”

This surprised Candy. “You called Doc?”

Tristan gave her his half smile. “Just to check to see if he had anything planned
for you that evening. I didn’t want to cause any sort of conflict within the Holliday
family.”

“And what did he say?” Candy asked, curious to hear the answer.

“Well, I’m asking you now, aren’t I?” He squeezed her hand and then started away.
“I’ll tell you what. Talk to him about it and I’ll give you a call tomorrow to confirm,
okay? And remember, it’s a masquerade ball.”

“A masquerade ball? But…” Candy started to say, but she was speaking to a rapidly
disappearing back. A few moments later, he’d jumped into the Jaguar and driven off.

Doc was in his room, reading, so she didn’t disturb him. She locked up the house,
turned out all the lights downstairs, and went up to her bedroom, where she got undressed,
put on her pajamas, and climbed into bed. Once she was settled in, she opened the
Pruitt file she’d started going through the night before, picking up where she’d left
off.

She was only a quarter of the way through when she fell asleep with papers scattered
around her and across the bed.

Candy was up and out the door early, as she had a quick errand to run before she picked
up Maggie and headed out to the pumpkin patch.

On Monday mornings during the spring, summer, and into the fall, Candy usually worked
at the Black Forest Bakery up on Main Street. But Herr Georg had closed down his shop
for the season right after Columbus Day, and Candy was still getting used to the idea
of having her Mondays free.

Of course, she had plenty to do out at the farm helping to get the fields ready for
winter, and she and Maggie still had a few days left at the pumpkin patch. And she
still worked part-time at the
Cape Crier.

That’s where she was headed this morning.

Just after eight, she drove down Ocean Avenue and found a parking spot near the wood-and-glass
door, identified as number 21B, that led to a set of well-worn wooden stairs and the
second-floor offices of the
Cape Crier
.

The place officially opened at eight thirty, but she expected to be well out of there
by then. She’d arranged to take these few days off, now that they were on a biweekly
schedule, and she didn’t want to have to explain why she was in the office this morning.
Especially with everything that had happened out at the pumpkin patch. She knew there’d
be too many questions she didn’t want to answer right now, so she wanted to avoid
any conversational entanglements.

But there was something she wanted to check—something she’d thought of the night before
as she was going through the Pruitt file left behind by Sapphire Vine.

So she planned to sneak in early, get what she needed, and leave quickly.

As she’d expected, the place was deserted. She hurried through the rabbit warren of
hallways to her office, where she flicked on the light and closed the door behind
her with the side of her hip.

Knowing exactly what she was looking for, she dropped to one knee in front of the
filing cabinet in the corner and pulled open the bottom drawer labeled
SV
. This was the third time she’d been in this drawer in as many days, so she made quick
work of it. She dug back through the files with nimble fingers, scanning the handwritten
names on the labels, looking for a specific one.

And there it was—a quarter of the way back, a file labeled
Hobbins
, with a smaller annotation in parentheses, (
Gerald
).

She snatched it out of the drawer and dropped it into her tote bag without looking
at it further. She wanted to review it when she had time to focus on it, which she’d
have later in the day. And she didn’t want to get caught in her office right now.
Besides, she had a schedule to keep. It was time to skedaddle.

She made her next stop at the police station, where she read and signed the written
version of the statement she’d
given to Officer Molly Prospect on Saturday morning. She felt an odd vibe in the station
as an assistant took her into a side room to be fingerprinted. After they were done
with her, she drove to Fowler’s Corner, wiping at the ink on her fingers with a paper
towel.

Maggie was anxiously waiting for her in the driveway of her house at Fowler’s Corner,
bundled up against the chilly morning. She held a commuter cup of coffee in one hand
and brandished a color printed-out sheet of paper in the other. “Have you seen the
headlines this morning?” she asked, waving the sheet in front of Candy’s eyes. “I
just printed this off of Wanda’s blog. She linked to the
Herald
’s site. Can you
believe
it? We’re
famous
!”

Candy squinted and tried to focus. “What is it?”

“The front page. Look at that headline!”

“I would if you’d quit waving it around.” Candy finally snatched it out of the air
and held it steady for a few moments so she could read it.

It was a printout of the front page of the
Boston Herald
’s website. Since the entire web page was squashed to fit onto an eight-by-eleven
sheet of paper, some of the print was too small to read easily. But the headlines
stood out. The large main one in the middle column read,
PUMPKIN PATCH KILLER STRIKES IN MAINE VILLAGE
.

And in smaller type underneath that,
BY OLIVIA MARCH
.

Candy read the first couple of sentences—
Local farmers in the quiet coastal Maine village of Cape Willington were in for a
pre-Halloween surprise on Saturday morning when they unearthed a dead body from beneath
a pile of pumpkins in a popular local patch. The deceased was identified as…
—before her gaze broke off and shifted to Maggie. “Oh, no, this isn’t good. Everyone
in New England will be talking about the Pumpkin Patch Killer. We won’t be
famous
—we’ll be
infamous
!”

“I know! I don’t know whether to be thrilled or horrified!”
Maggie said, and she looked both. “I’m quoted in the third paragraph.” She pointed
at the sheet of paper, then jabbed at it farther down. “Wanda’s in there too. What
a terrible way to get your name in the
Herald
.”

“I’m sure it makes good copy though,” Candy said, and she passed the paper back to
her friend. “They’ll probably sell out on the newsstand, especially with a story like
this right before Halloween. It’s custom-made for papers and the Web. The story might
even go viral, given Sebastian’s quasi-celebrity status.” She put the gearshift into
reverse and looked back over her shoulder. “Read it to me while I drive.”

The quotes were fairly accurate, and Olivia provided some decent background about
Sebastian. She also mentioned the fact that the murder was the latest in a string
of deaths that had occurred in town over the past few years, and questioned whether
they could be connected. She then quoted Chief Durr’s response when asked if Cape
Willington was becoming “the murder capital of Maine,” and provided a few more details
about the investigation, although there was nothing Candy hadn’t heard already.

More importantly, no mention of Emma. No mention of a body found in that same field
twenty years earlier.

Maybe those points aren’t relevant,
Candy thought.
Maybe they have nothing to do with the murder of Sebastian J. Quinn. Maybe it’s something
else entirely.

Or maybe, she told herself, Olivia simply hadn’t discovered all the details yet. Maybe,
like Candy, she was still digging around.

The story ended with a few quotes from Wanda Boyle about all the recent murders, and
how the latest crime wave in town had to be stopped. She concluded by suggesting that
a wider investigation might be in order—though she stopped short of officially criticizing
the work of the local police department.

Given the prominence of the story in the Boston paper, Candy and Maggie weren’t quite
sure what to expect out at
the pumpkin patch. But despite their newfound fame, and a mention of the patch’s location
in the paper’s story, traffic at the pumpkin patch was fairly light that morning,
giving them time to set up shop before they had a small rush of customers around nine,
many of them asking about the story.

Wanda Boyle showed up in her minibus a little after nine thirty, hosting the first
Halloween Mystery Tour of the day, but Candy noticed the bus was less than half full.
A little later on, the reporter from Bangor, who introduced himself as Denny Brite,
drove up with a photographer in tow. Denny asked a bunch of questions, but Candy could
barely remember how she answered them, since the photographer kept snapping shots
of her, Maggie, the farm stand, and the fields, distracting her.

They left just about the time Wanda showed up with her second load around ten forty,
and this time Candy was surprised to see the bus was nearly full. As the passengers
spread out across the field, more vehicles started showing up—including a TV truck
from Bangor and, a little later on, one from Portland.

The word is spreading,
Candy thought as she watched the activity and answered more questions than she wanted
to.

“If I’d known there were going to be cameras around,” Maggie told her at one point,
“I would’ve had my hair done yesterday.”

“You and me both,” Candy said, looking down at her farmer’s clothes. “I would’ve worn
clean jeans.”

During a lull in the action, after the bus and TV trucks had departed, Candy spotted
a battered old white van coming along the unpaved road, its springs creaking. Blue
letters on the side of the van announced
GUMM’S HARDWARE
.

The van drove up the field’s access road close to the farm stand and the engine shut
off. The driver waved. Candy waved back.

“Mr. Gumm’s here,” she said, and went out to greet him.
Maggie, who was helping a customer, just nodded in acknowledgement.

Augustus Gumm, the eighty-something owner of the pumpkin patch, and the proprietor
of the hardware store in town that bore his family’s name, was shaking his head and
gazing out at the patch as he climbed out of the van’s front seat. “It’s a real shame,”
Candy heard him say as she approached. “Just a real shame.”

“What’s that, Mr. Gumm?”

“Ohh”—he pointed out toward High Field—“just all that trouble you had out here a few
days ago. With that body and all. And now that story about the Pumpkin Patch Killer
in that Boston paper. Terrible thing.”

“It’ll give the town a bad reputation, that’s for sure,” Candy said, “and that’s something
we don’t need right now.”

“Nosiree bob, nosiree,” Mr. Gumm said, still shaking his head. He looked over at Candy.
“I would’ve been here sooner but I was out of town—visiting my sister down in Kittery.
She isn’t feeling too well these days. Legs are bothering her. But I came back as
soon as I could. Can’t believe it’s happening again.”

“Again?” Candy said, emphasizing the word. She knew the story but wanted to hear Mr.
Gumm’s take on it.

“Yup, happened twenty years ago or so, I guess, sort of just like this latest death…mysterious
and everything, and even right around this same time of year, if I remember correctly,
sometime in the fall. We had the police out here to the field back then, too, and
a reporter or two, if I remember correctly. She had no ID on her, and they said they
could never match her fingerprints to anyone. They called her The Woman Without a
Name—no one knew who she was.”

“How did she die?” Candy asked, to clarify the information she’d already heard.

Mr. Gumm had to think about that for a moment. “Don’t know if I ever heard the whole
story,” he said, “but word
was she just died of exposure. It was mighty cold around that time, I seem to recall.
Early hard frost. Think we had an early snow that year too.”

“And they never found out who she was?”

“Nope, never did, far as I heard. The stories about her continued for a few months,
and then, like everything else, they eventually died away.”

“Do you know what happened to her body?”

Mr. Gumm rubbed at his chin. “Well, that’s the curious thing. Never heard about that
either.”

“So you wouldn’t know if she was buried around here somewhere?”

The elderly gentleman turned to look at her then, a curious expression on his face.
“You’re the second person who’s asked me that recently.”