by Al
His fists clenched tighter.
“Detective? We’re gonna roll now.”
Schneider looked up to see Fran Morrison, one of the fresh-faced uniformed cops, standing in front of him. Behind the tight cluster of trees, in a small clearing, a work crew was loading shovels and other tools into a truck: an emblem on its door, in orange letters on a black background, read TOWN OF ORANGEFIELD, PUBLIC WORKS.
As Schneider watched, one of the crew opened the door, climbed into the truck and yanked it closed behind him.
Morrison was waiting for him to say something, so Schneider let out a long breath and said, “Yeah, Fran, we’re done here. You might as well go, too.”
“You need a ride back?”
Schneider looked down at his shoes, which were covered with mud. “No, I’m good.”
Morrison, almost sighing with relief, turned and was gone. A few moments later Schneider heard his patrol car spitting leaves from its tires as it followed the truck out of the road they had made and hooked up with a dirt road a quarter of a mile away.
He was alone, now.
But he knew he wasn’t. He felt it.
“Dammit!”
His voice echoed through the forest.
He couldn’t blame Morrison and the rest of them if they thought he was obsessed. He knew he was. But there was no way he wasn’t going to do everything he could to find Jody Wendt.
And Jody Wendt was here, somewhere.
Whoever had taken him had a lair here, somewhere.
Schneider knew it.
For a moment, Jerry Carlton’s smirking face rose into his memory, wearing those goddamned mirror shades.
“Not this time,” Schneider said out loud.
~ * ~
“My party, this time,” Grant said.
The bar itself was crowded, but the booth area, at three o’clock in the afternoon, was nearly empty. Bill Grant placed a fifth of Dewars gently on the table, as if setting down a piece of porcelain, and sat as he produced two eight ounce glasses, one with ice, one empty. He hesitated as he pushed the empty one toward Len Schneider.
“This is the way you like it, right? Neat?”
Grant had already lit the first of what would probably be a hundred cigarettes.
Schneider nodded. “I didn’t think you were paying attention last time.”
Grant gave a slight smile and pushed the empty glass to the other side of the table.
Schneider was working at the cap on the bottle, and twisted it open with practiced ease.
He poured for himself, then reached across and studied the amber liquid as it trickled over the ice in Grant’s glass.
“I thought we should talk outside the office,” Grant said.
Schneider’s ears immediately pricked up; already he detected a focus in the man he hadn’t seen before.
Len replied, still looking at the scotch in Grant’s glass, “You here to give me the fatherly pep talk? I’m sure Franny Morrison and the rest of them think I’m nuts.”
He looked up from Grant’s glass to meet the other detective’s eyes. To his surprise, Grant had pulled his cigarette from his mouth and was smiling.
“You think I’m nuts too?” Schneider asked.
Grant’s smile widened. “As a matter of fact, I do. But I understand. Thing is, I know now that this isn’t…weird shit.”
Schneider had downed one scotch, and refilled his own glass. Grant’s new attitude had begun to irk him just as much as his old one.
“This isn’t weird enough for you?” he said. “Did you hear what Jody Wendt’s mother claims happened to her two days ago? That a pumpkin-headed robot appeared on her back stoop and spoke to her in Jody’s voice?” Schneider let out a bitter laugh. “You don’t find that strange?”
“Frankly, I find it charming. She told me the same story.”
“You interviewed her?” Schneider said with sudden anger.
“On my own time,” Grant added quickly. His smile faded a bit, and he actually looked apologetic. He lit another cigarette, blew smoke, and said, “It has nothing to do with you, Len. I just had to know.”
“Had to know what?” Schneider’s voice had risen—a few of the patrons at the bar, one of whom was a cop they both knew, looked around before turning away. Schneider finished his drink and poured a third.
Grant put his hand on Schneider’s arm. Schneider looked at the hand, still angry—but his anger drained when he saw that the familiar haunted look had returned to the other detective’s face. Grant’s skin had the yellow pallor of the tepid cloud of smoke from his cigarette.
Schneider let a long breath out.
Grant had finished his own scotch and was pouring a new one. He drained half of this past its ice, which had mostly melted from the natural heat of the liquor, then put the glass down. He coughed.
“Remember when I said there were worse things than a kid getting killed?”
Schneider’s anger was back in an instant, but Grant pushed immediately on:
“I know how callous that sounded. Believe me, I do.” He stopped for Scotch and then a fresh cigarette, which he chain-lit from the remains of his current butt, only half devoured. “But I’ve seen things much worse than anything you can imagine.”
“Like what?” Schneider replied, not hiding his mood.
“I don’t want to talk about that,” Grant said. His voice became a near whisper, and Schneider was once again reminded of the vague, haunted man in the office the day he had taken this assignment. “I don’t ever want to talk about that.”
He looked straight at Schneider, who was working on his own Scotch. “But there are other things I will talk about. There was a local beekeeper named Fred Willims. He was involved in the Peter Kerlan case with me. That was the children’s book author you’ve heard about.
“We had a closed door session with the district attorney at the time, who sealed the case shut. His name was Charles Morton. He warned Willims never to say anything about what we’d seen happen on Halloween to Peter Kerlan or his wife. Me, he didn’t have to tell, though I’m telling you now that Kerlan and his wife were both killed by hornets. As far as I know, Willims never said a word. But some time later Willims was found dead, hung from a tree with his eyes gouged out. The eyeholes were filled with hornets. Morton died, too, the same day, of anaphylactic shock from a hornet sting. And then there was a girl named Annabeth Turner—”
“I read that case after I got here,” Schneider said. “Tried to hang herself in a park—”
Now it was Grant’s turn to interrupt. “That’s what the report said. There were two other suicides, both of them successful, at almost exactly the same time. There was more to it than just a bunch of suicides, Len.”
Again, Schneider asked, “Like what?”
Grant shrugged, looking suddenly deflated. “Never mind. But here we are again at that special time of year in Orangefield, when the pumpkins get sold, Pumpkin Days come, the farmers get rich and weird shit crawls out of the woodwork. Only this year, my friend, for once it’s just plain old crime.”
Schneider said nothing.
Grant leaned forward and said earnestly, “What do you believe in, Len? What do you really believe in?”
Grant’s question was so unlike him, so unlike his meticulous procedural ways and evidence building, and his manner so suddenly needy, as if some sort of dam had burst within him, letting out all the fears he’d tucked away, that Schneider said nothing. He looked at his scotch, then drank it. He started to get up.
“I believe in not fucking up a second time, Bill. That’s what I believe in.”
Grant grabbed his arm and urged him back into the booth. His eyes pinned Schneider in place, like a butterfly to a board. When he spoke again his voice was level and harsh. “Take me seriously, Len. The good news is that you don’t have to worry about weird shit. At least not this time. The bad news is I think you just might fuck up again, if you’re not careful. I think you should let me have this case, after all. It was a m
istake for me to let you take it to begin with. You’ve got that mess in Milwaukee so tied up with this that you’re liable to screw up. I’ve seen it happen. It happened to me, and just like you I was concentrating on payback instead of doing my job—”
It was Schneider’s turn to be level and harsh. He leaned forward in the booth. “That bastard Jerry Carlton sat there during his trial taking his watch apart and putting it back together. He never glanced at the jury, not once. At the end of the trial, he looked up from his watch and mouthed the word ‘Ted’ at me. That was the kid in Milwaukee’s name.” His voice was shaking. “I could have saved that kid, Bill.”
“Maybe,” Grant answered.
There was another two fingers of scotch in Schneider’s glass, and he drained it, poured again. Tears abruptly filled his eyes. “I could have saved him.”
“Like I said, maybe. Then again, maybe not. Maybe you still would have gotten there too late. Maybe Jerry Carlton would have killed him earlier, if he saw you coming. Maybe—”
Schneider drained his glass and gripped it so hard he could feel it getting ready to break. He looked at Grant, who was studying him; Grant’s pallor had assumed it’s yellow, haunted tinge.
“Be careful, Len,” Grant almost whispered. “Do your job and don’t let things get out of hand.” He paused to light yet another cigarette. “Advice from an old fart. Someone named Riley Gates, my mentor, once gave the same advice to me. He also saved my life by not shooting me when I was about to fuck up big time.” He gave a short, bitter laugh that ended in a cough. “He also saved my career, such as it is.”
The anger was back and this time when Schneider stood up Grant didn’t try to stop him.
“This case is mine, Bill. Stay the hell away from it. And I don’t need a goddamn mentor—especially not a burned out lush who’s seen the boogeyman one too many times.”
As Schnedier stalked off, Grant stared straight ahead, unconciously pulling another cigarette from his pocket. He didn’t look at it as he lit it from the one already in his mouth, which had barely burned.
“Careful…” he said.
6
Boring.
Here it was, almost time for the Pumpkin Days Festival, and Scotty Daniels was bored silly. He was sick to death of little kid stuff. In his kindergarten class, they’d already done their pumpkin cutouts for the windows, and made their “special designs” for the school projects display during the festival. They had already taken their bus trip to Mr. Frolich’s farm to pick their own pumpkins.
They had tied yellow ribbons for Jody Wendt to one of the sycamore trees in the field behind the school, and Scotty himself, who had been one of Jody’s best friends, had picked out a special pumpkin at Frolich Farm, which now sat on Jody’s empty desk. There was a bulletin board in the back of the room with cards and balloons remembering Jody thumbtacked to it.
And now, there was nothing to do but wait for the festival to begin.
Or:
Think about hunting the Pumpkin Boy.
Scotty had first heard about the hunt from his older brother Jim, but the story had traveled like wildfire through all of the schools in Orangefield. One of Jim’s friends, Mitchel Freed, claimed he had seen a boy made out of silver stilts with a pumpkin head walking through one of the fields at the edge of town; Mitchel’s older brother was a police officer and claimed that the Pumpkin Boy had visited Mrs. Wendt after Jody disappeared. Soon there were Pumpkin Boy sightings everywhere, so many that the Orangefield Herald had carried stories about it, which Jim read out loud to him.
But when he asked if he could go with Jim when he and his friends went looking for the Pumpkin Boy tonight, Jim had only laughed and ruffled his hair.
“No, way, little man! Mom would kill me if I took you.” He looked suddenly serious and said, “And anyway: Mitch and Pete and I might get killed!”
Then he laughed and walked away to use the phone.
Scotty could hear him using it now, arranging for Mitchell to come by in ten minutes and that they’d go in Jim’s car.
Bored.
Scotty wandered into the family room, where his younger sister Cyndi was watching the Cartoon Network. He sat down grumpily next to her on the couch and tried to wrestle the TV remote from her hands. She clutched it tightly and said, “Hey!” Finally he gave up and threw himself into the far end of the couch, among the sofa pillows, and folded his arms, feeling ornery.
He glanced out the window to the street, where a passing car’s headlights momentarily blinded him. He continued staring, and when his sight came back he was staring at Jim’s car at the curb.
The trunk was open.
A sudden idea formed in his mind.
At that moment he heard Jim get off the phone, yell down to the basement to tell his father that he’d be going out for a little while. After his father answered with a grunt, he heard Jim, loudly as always, go into the bathroom in the hallway, slamming the door behind him. In a moment there was water running, and the sound of Jim’s bad singing voice.
Scotty got up off the couch and walked past Cyndi, who didn’t even look his way, her eyes glued to the television screen.
Scotty went quickly to the hallway, removed his jacket from its hook and put it on.
He eased open the front door and slipped out, closing the door with a quiet click behind him.
It was chilly out, and there was a breeze. Scotty zipped his jacket all the way up to his chin, and ran to Jim’s car.
The trunk was indeed open. Inside were the bundled old newspapers that Jim was supposed to bring to the recycling center. There were three bundles, thrown in carelessly.
Scotty pushed two of them aside, snugged himself into the trunk, and then worked the trunk lid partway down.
He hesitated.
From around the corner, someone appeared, walking briskly.
It was Jim’s friend, Mitch.
Scotty held his breath and snuggled down.
Whistling, Mitch bounded past the car and up the steps to the front door of the house.
Scotty peeked out.
At that moment the front door opened, swallowing Mitch.
Without further hesitation, Scotty closed the trunk all the way.
He heard the solid click of the latch, but immediately saw the glowing escape bar that Jim had showed him when he’d bought the new car. Of course Jim had showed him how it worked—then told him a few gruesome stories about older cars that didn’t have the device, and what had happened to the kids who had been trapped inside. One of them, which Scotty didn’t believe, involved a baby that had accidentally been locked in the trunk of a car one summer day in 1960: “…and when they opened the trunk that night they found the baby cooked alive, looking just like a roasted pig!”
Scotty began to think about that baby. His heart pounded, and he was just about to reach for the glow bar and sneak back into the house when he heard the front door of the house open. Almost immediately, the car rocked on its shocks as Jim and Mitch jumped into it.
In another second the car pulled away from the curb, the two older boys laughing.
Almost immediately, they started to talk about girls.
They made one other stop, and Scotty heard one other boy, who he guessed was Pete Henry, get into the car. The talk was still about girls, but then it eventually turned to the Pumpkin Boy.
“You think he’s real?” Pete Henry’s voice asked.
Mitch immediately answered, “It’s real, man. I told you what my brother said. It’s a fact that it went to Jody Wendt’s house, scared his old lady half crazy. Dragged her into the house after she fainted, then left. And my brother said a couple of tourists from Montreal were picking pumpkins out at Kranepool’s Farm and saw it walking through the woods. Just taking a stroll. My brother talked to them himself. He says there are at least ten other reports on file. One guy said he threw rocks at it, but he was drunk so the cops didn’t take him too seriously. The Pumpkin Boy’s real, all right.”
“What
if we really find it?” Jim said. There was uncertainty in his voice.
“If we find it, we kill it!” Pete Henry said. “Then we get the reward money!”
“There isn’t any reward money,” Mitch replied immediately. “Use your head, Pete! If we bring it in in one piece, we’ll get in the papers. Then maybe somebody will write a book, and we’d be in that, too. If there’s a book we could probably get some money out of it.”
“I still say knock it to pieces!” Pete answered. “I ain’t letting that thing near me!”
“You bring the camera, Pete?” Jim asked idly.
There was silence for a moment, then Pete Henry’s dejected voice mumbled, “I forgot.”
Jim and Mitch roared with laughter.
Jim said, “That’s okay, Pete. I brought my kid brother’s camera. You’re covered. Here, take it. And don’t lose it.”
Scotty almost shouted out with annoyance, but kept his tongue.
“Good,” Pete said. “If we get a picture, that would be almost as good as capturing him. I bet the Herald would pay us for that.”
Mitch laughed. “I heard they’ve already gotten a bunch of phoney pictures. One of them was a scarecrow with a pumpkin for a head.”
Jim chimed in. “There was a story in the paper today. Another photo they got was of some guy’s kid with a costume on, holding a pumpkin in front of his face!”
They all laughed. In the trunk, Scotty smiled. Jim had read him that story.
Suddenly the car moved from smooth road to a bumpier surface. It was harder to hear what the boys were saying with the added noise. One of them—it sounded like Pete—said, “How much farther?”
“Couple miles,” Jim answered. “I want to get as close to the site as we can. You sure the police won’t bother us, Mitch?”
“My brother said they packed up and moved out. Dug a bunch of holes but found nothing.”
“You really think this Pumpkin Boy snatched Jody Wendt?”
Mitch replied, “Who knows? Most of the places he’s been seen are around this spot. You got a better idea?”
Again there was silence.
“I still say we should kill him,” Pete Henry said.
