Town in a Pumpkin Bash (3 page)

“There’s a curse on that house, I’m sure of it,” Maggie Tremont said, the exasperation
evident in her voice. “There’s no other explanation. And I’m not the only one who
thinks so. Just the other day I was talking to Sally Ann Longfellow, who lives three
doors down, at the end of Gleason Street—she drives by there all the time, and she
says the place is haunted.”

Candy Holliday checked her watch and looked askance at her friend. “I wouldn’t trust
everything Sally Ann says. She keeps goats in her house, you know.”

“Only in the winter,” Maggie responded blithely, as if it were a perfectly normal
thing, “and not in the entire house—just the kitchen. She makes a little pen for them.
I’ve heard they’re relatively well behaved…for goats.” She paused, regrouping. “Besides,
Sally Ann’s not the only one I’ve heard it from. There’re others who agree with me.”

“Who?”

Maggie made a face.
“Others.”
Playfully she jabbed her friend in the side with an elbow. “You must have heard
people talking about that house. It’s all over town. That place has a bad history.
But I don’t have to tell
you
that, do I?”

She glanced back over her shoulder, giving the comment a moment to sink in. A hay
wagon and tractor sat behind them in the middle of the pumpkin patch, across a tumbling
field of orange and greenery. A small crowd had formed behind the wagon—parents and
kids, mostly, waiting to get on board for the first ride of the day. So far no one
seemed to mind the delay, but that wouldn’t last much longer.

“I have to be honest with you,” Maggie said, turning back to Candy, “I’m starting
to think there’s a reason behind it all. Something else must have happened there before,
well, that thing with
you-know-who
.” She said the last words in an exaggerated whisper and wiggled her hand in the air,
as if that explained everything.

And indeed it did. Candy knew exactly who she meant.

Maggie was referring to the woman known around town as Sapphire Vine—a beauty queen,
gossip columnist, and blackmailer who had been murdered here in Cape Willington, Maine,
two summers ago.

“At first, in the months after she died, it was just all those little things around
the house,” Maggie continued, leaning in closer to Candy and lowering her voice as
a family passed by. The parents cradled smaller pumpkins in their arms, the two kids
hauled a red wagon filled with several larger pumpkins, and the grandparents trailed
along behind with a few smaller pumpkins as well. They all nodded politely and exchanged
a few words as they passed. After they were out of earshot, Maggie picked up where
she’d left off.

“I’d notice that something had been moved around, or something else wasn’t where it
was supposed to be. Lights turned on and off randomly at all hours of the day and
night. I saw it happen myself. Faulty wiring, they said. It’s an old house. Things
like that just happen, they tell me.
Humph!
I wish it were that simple. Someone once said they heard music in there—and whispers.
We searched but couldn’t
find anything. We had the Coopers living there back then. Remember them? They lasted
five whole weeks. That’s the longest…well…”

She didn’t have to finish. Candy knew the rest of it.

After Sapphire Vine’s unfortunate passing in a particularly violent manner, and the
discovery of her true identity, her old house on Gleason Street had passed into the
hands of her only living family member, Cameron Zimmerman, who just happened to be
dating Maggie’s daughter, Amanda. In the months that followed, there had been endless
discussions about what to do with Sapphire’s old place. For a while they’d had it
up for sale but received no offers. They tried renting it out but couldn’t get anyone
to stay for long. It sat dark and unlived in for more than a year, dust filming the
windows and spiderwebs gathering in the corners.

So, after examining various options, Maggie had offered to personally take over the
management of the house as a seasonal rental. It was a good fit for all concerned.
Maggie had expertise in insurance, finance, and small-business affairs, and an agreed-upon
commission would help her budget and funnel some pocket money to the house’s current
owner until the local real estate market improved.

She took easily to the challenges of property management. She’d even signed up for
an online course, which gave her a certification of sorts that looked good on a business
card, and had subsequently taken on two additional properties over the summer—coastal
rentals that remained fully booked through Labor Day and into the fall, thanks to
Maggie’s efforts.

But while most of the other seasonal rentals around town were sought-after properties
with no open rental spots and lengthy waiting lists, Sapphire Vine’s old place on
Gleason Street, a few blocks northwest of downtown Cape Willington, sat largely empty,
which only fueled its growing reputation as a haunted house, to Maggie’s dismay.

“Word gets around, I guess, what with the Internet, travel sites, social networks,
and all that texting stuff these days,”
she said with a resigned shrug. “It’s too easy to find out information about anything.
Just a few taps on the computer keyboard. I’ve seen the comments about the place.
It’s even been posted on a website dedicated to New England ghost stories.”

“Well, at least it’s not a total loss,” Candy said, doing her best to sound positive.
“You had those ghost hunters who rented the place a few months ago.”

“Yes, but that’s the problem.”

Candy saw what she was getting at. “You think the house’s reputation is scaring normal
people away?”

Maggie raised her hands in an exaggerated gesture. “Whatever the reason, we just haven’t
had enough renters, even after drastically reducing the price. I don’t know what to
do with the place. We can barely cover the property taxes and utilities, and it’s
starting to show its age. The past couple of years have taken their toll. It needs
some work, but Cameron and Amanda don’t have the time to do it, and they don’t want
that house anyway—not with what’s happened there. The Zimmermans are happy in their
own place, so they’re not interested in moving. And
I
certainly don’t want to live there—since it’s, you know, cursed.”

“In your opinion.”

“In my opinion,” Maggie agreed, “but it’s more than that. There’ve been those sightings.”

“There’s been only
one
sighting,” Candy corrected her, “and we investigated. We didn’t find anything, remember?”

“We didn’t look very hard.”

“We checked every room, plus that secret hidey space in the attic.”

“Not the basement.”

“No, not the basement. I’m sure there’s nothing down there.”

Candy didn’t like basements much, since she’d found a body in one once.

Maggie frowned up at the gusty sky, blowing in dark rain clouds. “I don’t like the
looks of that,” she said. Her gaze
dropped to follow a scattering of brown leaves that blew across the parking lot. She
let out a deep sigh. “I guess he’s not coming then.”

Reluctantly, Candy had to agree.

They were expecting a visitor, but he was fifteen minutes overdue, and they couldn’t
wait for him any longer.

The call from Sebastian J. Quinn had come out of the blue a couple of weeks earlier.
The award-winning poet, who had been involved with the Sapphire Vine murder case,
had contacted Candy at her office at the paper one afternoon, apologizing for calling
her first, since he’d only just learned of the house’s availability and didn’t have
Maggie’s number. “Can you put me in touch with her? Is the place still for rent?”
he’d asked. “If so, I’ll take it for two weeks, and perhaps through the Thanksgiving
holiday.”

That had been good news all around. Sebastian needed a place to “get away from the
rat race” for a while to work on a new book of poetry, and the “inspirational beauty”
around Cape Willington in the fall and early winter was just the thing he needed,
he’d told Maggie when they’d talked, and she had promptly passed on the details to
Candy. Both of them questioned Sebastian’s explanation for renting the place—“It just
sounds a little contrived to me,” Candy noted at the time. But neither of them could
see a legitimate reason to turn down the offer, as generous as it was.

A deal had been quickly finalized, with occupancy to take place the weekend before
Halloween and continuing into early November, with a week-by-week option after that.
Sebastian had agreed to pay three hundred per week for the place, a particularly good
rate for the off-season, though it included all utilities and heating oil, which could
become costly if the weather turned cold, so it seemed a fair-enough arrangement to
Sebastian. To Maggie’s astonishment, he’d offered to pay in advance. A check for six
hundred dollars, plus an additional one hundred fifty for a safety deposit, promptly
arrived two days later by special delivery. A few
other papers were exchanged by two-day mail, and they were in business.

Even though Maggie had offered to meet him at Sapphire’s place to hand over the keys
and conduct a walk-through, Sebastian told her he’d prefer to stop by the pumpkin
patch that morning to conduct their business. “I don’t want to put you out,” he’d
said to her over the phone, and she’d relayed the message to Candy, “but I just want
to get my hands on the keys and get settled in. That place has a lot of memories for
me. I prefer to make the first visit alone, if you know what I mean. I’m just not
quite sure what my reaction will be, after all that happened there. I’ll see you at
ten on Saturday morning.”

And here they were. Ten fifteen on the agreed-upon morning, and no Sebastian J. Quinn.

“What do you think this means?” Maggie asked, trying not to sound despondent. “Do
you think he got scared off by all the stories about the house and backed out of the
deal? And what if he wants his money back? I’ve deposited the check, gave the kids
most of the money, and already spent some of my share.”

“Let’s not jump to conclusions,” Candy said calmly. “Maybe he’s just been delayed.”

Maggie shook her head and pulled out her phone, one last time, to check for new messages.
There were none. She sighed. “We can’t wait any longer,” she said, slipping the phone
back into her pocket. “The natives are getting restless. We have to get this show
on the road.”

To prove her point, she turned and waved toward the folks gathered around the hay
wagon. “Sorry for the holdup!” she called out to them. “We’ll be right there!”

Looking back at Candy, she added, “You ready?”

“Let’s do it.”

“Good,” Maggie said as she started off, and to the crowd she called, “It’s time for
the Pumpkin Hollow Haunted Hayride’s first trip of the day!”

They’d pulled the hayride operation together in record time, though they’d been working
in the pumpkin patch since late August. That’s when Maggie had approached elderly
Mr. Gumm, who ran the local hardware store, about managing the field for him that
fall.

It had been a fairly simple idea, the result of a conversation over salads and glasses
of iced tea at Melody’s Café one warm afternoon, when Maggie was feeling down in the
dumps. She was still working at the dry cleaner’s in town, but her hours were limited
and the pay was low. She’d been looking around for a scheme to make a little money
on the side, but she hadn’t had much luck.

“I’m not a baker or a writer like you, so I can’t make pies to sell or write stories
for the local newspaper,” she told Candy without a hint of jealousy, “and I’ve tried
creating little thingamabobs to sell at the craft fairs but, to be honest, I’m not
much of a quilter or a knitter. I’m too old to try landscaping or lumberjacking. I
suppose I could waitress,
but I don’t think anyone is hiring around town this time of year.”

She was right about that. Though the tourist season had been relatively strong this
year, few businesses hired in the late summer, when they were usually starting to
let people go. There might be a few end-of-season jobs around, vacated by college
and high school students heading back to their classes, but most local businesses
ran lean into the fall, and were looking to wind down in the weeks after Labor Day,
rather than staff up. They’d all stay open through October, of course, in anticipation
of the annual busloads of leaf peepers who swarmed over New England during the month,
following peak foliage from north to south. As soon as Halloween passed, though, and
the trees turned dull, the leaf peepers would head home, taking their tourist dollars
with them, and businesses up and down Main Street and Ocean Avenue would begin to
cut hours drastically or shutter for the season. After that, it was just a matter
of finishing up the remnants of the harvest, bringing in the lawn furniture and garden
tools, preparing the flower beds and fields for cold weather, winterizing the cars
and boats, and getting the snow shovels and bags of rock salt out of the back corner
of the garage.