Town in a Pumpkin Bash (7 page)

Candy nodded. “I’m afraid so. It looks like Sebastian J. Quinn made it out here to
the pumpkin patch after all.”

T.J. and the others moved aside the last few pumpkins, and they all got a good look
at the person lying beneath.

Candy hadn’t been mistaken—it was him all right.

Sebastian J. Quinn.

“Is he alive?” she asked, again strangely unable to move.

But T.J. was a step ahead of her. He’d already knelt close to the body and reached
out a hand. He held a couple of fingers to the man’s neck and felt at the wrist for
a pulse. After a few moments, his jaw tightened. Raising his gaze to her, he shook
his head.

Candy’s first thought was for the passengers and the children. She looked back over
her shoulder at the wagon, and then turned to Maggie. “We can’t let the kids see this,”
she said, the concern evident in her voice. “I think I should take them back to Low
Field.”

Maggie nodded, her mouth tight. “That’s probably a good idea, honey.” She sidled a
little closer to Candy and lowered her voice, so no one else could hear what she said.
“You
don’t think this has anything to do with the house, do you? I mean, he was supposed
to meet us here this morning to pick up the keys, right? So how does he wind up under
one of our piles of pumpkins, smack dab in the middle of High Field?”

Candy shook her head. She didn’t have an answer.

She was still recovering from the shock of seeing Sebastian’s body. For some reason,
she couldn’t seem to take her eyes off him. She’d seen a dead body before, a year
or two ago in the basement of an old house in town, but somehow this was different.

This death had taken place right under her nose.

“I don’t know,” she said finally, and with a shake of her head she started toward
the hay wagon.

But halfway there she stopped, falling into deep thought. Something was itching at
her—something didn’t feel right. After absently studying the ground for several moments,
she shook her head. She was missing something—she just had to figure out what it was.
She lifted her gaze and looked out ahead of her, toward the hay wagon and then left
to the line of trees. Through the thin screen of trunks and branches, she could see
slivers of Low Field and the cars in the parking lot beyond.

She shifted, now scanning the trees to the north, and following them around to the
west and the south, turning in an almost complete circle. She gazed up at the sky
and again down to the fields around her.

Finally she turned and walked back to Maggie, who was still standing where she’d left
her. “You know, that’s a great question,” Candy said as she approached her friend.

Maggie gave her a confused look. “Which one?”

She pointed toward the body of Sebastian J. Quinn. “How did he wind up here, under
a piles of pumpkins, smack dab in the middle of
this
field?”

“Oh,
that
question.” Maggie scrunched up her face and shrugged. “I have no idea. That’s why
I asked you. Why, have you noticed something?”

In response, Candy turned and looked back toward the line of trees and Low Field.
“I don’t remember seeing a car in the parking lot when we came in this morning. Do
you?”

“A car?” Maggie had to think about that for a moment. “Now that you mention it, no.
The lot was empty when we came in, just like it is every morning.”

“Right,” Candy said, her mind starting to work. “So if Sebastian didn’t come here
in his own car, how did he get out here? Did he walk from town? Did he take a taxi
cab all the way out here? Did he fall out of a plane?”

“Maybe the murderer brought him here,” Maggie mused.

“Murderer?” Candy looked thoughtfully at her friend. “So you think he was murdered?”

Maggie gave her a noncommittal look. “Wasn’t he?”

A determined look came into Candy’s blue eyes, and her jaw tightened. “I don’t know.
Let’s go find out.”

T.J. had edged back from the body but still crouched nearby, while the others who
had helped uncover the corpse hovered in a loose circle among the scattered, tossed-aside
pumpkins.

Candy walked up to T.J. and touched him on the shoulder. He looked up at her, a solemn
expression on his face.

“We should get everyone back away from the crime scene,” she told him, “so we don’t
disturb it any further—though granted it’s a mess as far as evidence is concerned.”

He nodded and rose, gazing back toward the wagon. “Right. And someone should probably
get those passengers out of here.”

“I’ll do it,” Maggie volunteered. She looked at Candy and added, “I think your job
is here.”

As she started off, T.J. looked at Candy quizzically. “What did she mean by that?”

“She means,” Candy said grimly, “that I’ve had a bit of experience with this sort
of thing…much as I hate to admit
it. Unfortunately, trouble seems to keep following me around.”

She waved her arm at the others who stood near the uncovered body. “Will you all please
step back? In fact, it might be better if everyone climbed back into the wagon. Maggie’s
going to take you back to your cars. We really appreciate your help, but the police
will take over from here.”

Her first concern was footprints, but if Sebastian—or anyone connected with his death—left
some in the immediate area around the body, most of them had probably already been
disturbed or destroyed, given all those who had helped move the pumpkins and uncover
the body. Still, there was no point making it worse. She took several steps back herself,
pulling T.J. with her. He came away uneasily, as if reluctant to leave the body behind.

Candy knew exactly how he felt, but for the moment, she did her best to detach herself
from her emotions and focused her gaze on the corpse of Sebastian J. Quinn. She noticed
several things right away. He was wearing brown slacks, a white shirt, and a dark
jacket, all soiled and spotted with clumps of dirt and vegetation. Seeping through
his shirt, just at the edge of the jacket’s right lapel, she could see a dark spot,
maybe two—possibly bullet wounds, she thought.

That seemed to confirm Maggie’s suspicion that Sebastian had been murdered.

But how had he wound up buried under a pile of pumpkins? And what had he been doing
out here in the first place?

Candy also noticed that he still clenched a flashlight tightly in his left fist. The
flashlight was either turned off or the batteries had died out.

That might be a clue to his time of death,
she thought. She guessed that he must have been killed sometime during the night—otherwise
why would he have a flashlight with him?
If he’d been shot out here and buried under the pile of pumpkins, how long would it
have taken for the flashlight
batteries to die out?
she wondered.
That could help establish a more precise time of death, couldn’t it?

Her gaze swept the body again. She noticed the outline of a cell phone in Sebastian’s
front pocket, so whatever had happened, he didn’t have time to call for help.

And then there were the car keys clutched in his right fist, held so that several
of the keys protruded from between his fingers, looking like shorter versions of Wolverine’s
claws. Why the heck had he held them like that?

She looked up, scanning the area. She noticed nothing more out of sorts than a stray
pitchfork stuck into a pumpkin not too far away.

Hadn’t that been part of one of the displays? The one with the ghostly couple? How
that got there, she had no idea.

Perhaps Sebastian had moved it.

Or someone else.

“What are you thinking?” T.J. asked, breaking into her thoughts.

She looked over at him. He was watching her closely.

With a gentle shake of her head, she turned back to the body and pointed. “Something’s
not right about this.”

“What do you mean?”

But Candy wasn’t quite sure. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but she sensed something
odd about the body, as if it were trying to tell her something—as if it had been arranged
that way.

She turned, her gaze shifting out toward the surrounding fields and woods. “I’m going
to have a look around,” she said to T.J., and on an impulse started off toward the
far end of High Field.

“Need some company?” he called after her, a trace of concern in his tone.

Turning, she walked backward as she spoke. “It’d probably be best if you stayed by
the body—to keep people away and make sure no one else disturbs the scene.” When she
saw his skeptical look, she managed a weak smile and
added, “I’ll be okay. I just want to check something out. I’ll be right back.”

With that, she turned forward again and walked toward the distant trees.

As much as she hated to admit it, she did have experience with these sorts of things—probably
more than anyone else in town, except for a few folks in the police department—and
maybe Finn Woodbury, a local friend who had once been a big-city cop. Over the course
of the past few years, Candy had somehow tracked down and exposed several murderers
in town, mostly by simply following clues and asking the right questions of the right
people. And she’d come to realize that she had an odd knack for this sort of thing.
She wasn’t quite sure why. She’d never set out to be an amateur detective. But somehow
these mysteries kept showing up on her doorstep, and in solving them, she’d come to
trust her instincts and allowed her curiosity to take her in the right directions.

It was her curiosity that had her walking across High Field now, toward the woods
on the far side. The question on her mind at the moment was a simple one. It was the
same one Maggie had asked: How had Sebastian J. Quinn wound up in this field? More
specifically, how did he get out here?

Candy could think of only a couple of ways. He’d either been brought here and dumped,
or he’d arrived in his own car and had been murdered here. The first scenario was
certainly possible, but Candy had a hunch he’d come here under his own power.

The keys in his hand—that was the clue that had caught her eye.

If his body had been dumped here by someone else, why would he have his car keys clutched
in his hand?

He wouldn’t, she realized—which meant he must have arrived here in his own car.

So where was it?

When she and Maggie had first taken over the pumpkin patch at the end of the summer,
she’d taken a few minutes one morning to study the property on Google maps, just to
get a lay of the land. She recalled that, at the far end of High Field, a dirt access
road headed off in the opposite direction, back to a paved rural road that eventually
wound its way out to Route 192, which led up to Route 1.

Could that have been how Sebastian got here? Had he come in the back way?

If so, that would present a new set of questions, but for the moment she tabled those
and concentrated on the issue at hand.

It didn’t take her long to find the car. In fact, she practically walked right to
it as she followed a narrow footpath through a screen of thick shrubbery and trees,
and turned to her right.

An older-model white Audi sat by the side of a narrow dirt road. It looked as if it
had been abandoned. The car hadn’t been washed in a while, and bore Massachusetts
license plates. That would make sense. The last she’d heard, Sebastian still taught
at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, halfway across the Bay State.

But if the car was his, why had he parked it back here?

As she approached the car, Candy could see there were no passengers inside. Still,
she moved toward it cautiously, just in case someone might be sleeping in the backseat—or
lying in wait. But once she looked in the windows, she saw that it was indeed empty.

She walked the entire way around the car, just to make sure, and then tried the door
handle on the passenger side. Locked.

She tried the other door handles as well. All locked.

In a fleeting moment, she was tempted to walk back to Sebastian’s body and retrieve
the keys in his hand to see if they fit this car. But that would be highly inappropriate,
she knew, and more than likely unnecessary. Somehow, she was
certain the keys in Sebastian’s hand would fit this car. It had to belong to the man
who now lay dead in the pumpkin patch.