Pumpkin Roll

by Josi S. Kilpack

  Sleeping was a bit of a joke, but Sadie managed a couple of hours between two and seven. As expected, her muscles were tight and sore when she got out of bed, so she took another ibuprofen and did her best to ignore the discomfort. Once they were all dressed and ready, she and Pete took the boys to breakfast at the hotel café, and then she left them at the hotel for a day of swimming and pay-per-view movies. They’d agreed to allow Kalan to miss school so that Pete could have the peace of mind of keeping all three of the boys in his line of sight all day. He didn’t ask Sadie where she was going after kissing her good-bye in the hotel room, just wished her luck and told her to be careful.

  Sadie asked the front desk to call her a cab that could take her to the closest rental car agency. By nine thirty she was driving off the lot in a nondescript gray Ford even though she planned to take the T as much as possible. As she’d anticipated, the roads were slick, but most of the morning traffic had cleared, and she had always been a good driver, so she wasn’t too concerned.

  She drove straight to Heather and Jared’s house. It took her nearly fifteen minutes to walk around the yard and through the house, taking in all the details and assuring herself that no one was there and nothing was out of place. It was hard to believe all that had happened there last night. After inspecting the house, she stopped at the end of the hallway where the kitchen and living room joined it. The hallway was about fifteen feet long, with one door at the end—where Pete had stayed—and two on the right—the bathroom and the boys’ room. The room she’d been staying in was directly across from the boys’ room.

  She walked slowly up and down the hallway, stopping when she was between her doorway and the doorway of the boys’ room, both of which were partially ajar. She looked between the two doors, then reached for the door of her room and pulled it closed as fast as she could.

  BAM! Definitely the same sound she’d heard last night.

  She reached for the boys’ door and pulled it shut too.

  BAM!

  But how could someone pull both doors closed and not be caught? Pete’s room was six feet away. And Sadie had been even closer.

  She opened both doors before closing them just until the latch-thingy rested on the doorjamb. She grabbed the doorknob of her bedroom door and pulled quick—BAM—then reached for the boys’ door and pulled it closed too—BAM. The sound was the same whether the door was partially open or mostly closed.

  She thought back to last night. What was the time line? She’d shot up in bed at the first banging door; the other bang had followed almost immediately. She closed the doors most of the way again and played it out again. Pull door shut—BAM—time to sit up in bed. Pull other door shut—BAM. She turned and hurried for the back door through which she’d make her escape. By the time she’d made it to the backyard, she was pretty certain both she and Pete would have been in the hall. Cutting it close.

  She left the back door open, then headed into the living room and opened the front door as well, like they’d been when they were all awakened last night. After returning to the hallway, she reset the doors, crouched down, and stretched out her arms so that she was touching both doorknobs.

  One, two, three.

  BAM, BAM, run to the . . . front door—it was closer than the back door, and she didn’t have to navigate around a table—down the steps, through the open gate, and to the sidewalk. She stopped and turned back to the house, taking a deep breath in order to recover from the impromptu workout. How long did that take? Five seconds? Six?

  She pulled her phone out of her pocket and headed back inside. She set her phone to stopwatch mode and returned it to her pocket, keeping her thumb over the button that would start the count. She took a deep breath, let it out, crouched slightly and then . . . pushed the stopwatch button. BAM, BAM, run to the sidewalk. She pulled the phone out of her pocket. Seven seconds. With another seven seconds she could be halfway to the corner.

  She reset the stopwatch and was heading back inside for another try so she could analyze the combined data when she sensed someone watching her. She looked over her shoulder and saw a man standing on the sidewalk across the street. She felt her cheeks flame as he quickly looked away and continued on his way with his hands shoved deep into his pockets.

  She ducked her head and hurried up the sidewalk, trying to imagine what he thought she was doing. Just before crossing the threshold, she glanced over her shoulder to see if the man was still watching her. He wasn’t; he was heading up the sidewalk to the house on the corner.

  Something in his posture and movements made her embarrassment disappear. Was he the person she’d seen lurking in the alley last night? Was he connected to this? She almost laughed—of course he was connected! She’d done this too many times to be lulled with the assumption of coincidence. After entering the house and closing the front door behind her, she called Pete.

  “Hey,” Pete said when he answered the phone.

  She headed to the kitchen so she could shut the back door. “Hi, sweetie. Could I talk to Kalan?”

  He was silent, and she could feel him fighting his desire to ask why. However, they both knew that would break the agreement they’d made. “Sure,” Pete said after a few seconds. A moment later, a timid voice said, “Hello?”

  “Hey, Kalan,” Sadie said as sweetly and brightly as she possibly could without sounding drunk. “It’s Aunt Sadie. I have a question for you; do you think you could help me?”

  “Okay,” Kalan said. He sounded more comfortable now that he recognized her voice.

  Sadie pulled open the front drapes, giving her a good view of the other houses. “Who lives in the brown house on the corner across the street?”

  “Um . . . by my house?”

  “Yes,” Sadie said. “Mrs. Wapple lives right across the street, and then on one side there’s a white house. Two houses down the street on that same side is a brown house on the corner. It has a chain-link fence around the front and . . .” She scanned for something that would make this house stand out to a six-year-old. “There’s a blue mailbox stand out front, but no mailbox on it.”

  “That’s Mr. Forsberk’s house.”

  “The one whose dog got run over?”

  “Yeah,” Kalan said. “His dog’s name was Bark.”

  “Bark the dog?” Sadie asked.

  “Yeah, Mom thought it was funny.”

  “It is funny,” Sadie said, smiling about it. “Maybe he’ll get a cat and name it Meow.”

  “And a bird named Chirp.”

  Sadie laughed. In her mind she was considering why Mr. Forsberk would be outside at midnight. And then her thoughts went even further—could he be the person slamming doors and breaking in? But why? Sadie hadn’t even met him.

  Kalan’s laugh was so cute that Sadie hated to change the subject, but there was work to do. “Kalan, when did Mr. Forsberk’s dog die?”

  “Um, it was the day Mom had to go to school.”

  Sadie frowned, and yet the fact that Kalan remembered it at all meant that it might not have been as long ago as she’d originally assumed. She turned and hurried into the kitchen, heading for the calendar Heather kept by the phone. She used her finger to scan backward along the dates, stopping when she read PTC 3:20. Having been a schoolteacher for more than twenty years, Sadie knew education acronyms almost as well as she knew the properties of baking soda.

  “Parent-Teacher Conference?” Sadie asked, moving her finger so she could read the date and calculate how long ago it had been. “Two weeks ago yesterday.”

  “I guess,” Kalan said. “She took us to McDonald’s on the way home.”

  “Did she go to the school to talk about you with your teacher in a special meeting? Did you give her some papers you’d done, and maybe some pictures you colored?”

  “Yes,” Kalan said, sounding impressed that Sadie knew this. “And Mrs. Call talked to her about tests. I’m ahead of abrage.”

  “I have no doubt you’re above average,” Sadie said.

  “
And I got chocolate milk at McDonald’s, too!”

  “Maybe Grandpa will take you there for lunch today.”

  “Really?”

  “You should ask him,” Sadie said, feeling conspiratorial but needing to get off the phone now that she had the information she needed.

  “Okay.” She could tell from the way his voice was suddenly muted that he’d abandoned the phone entirely. She could hear him begging Pete for lunch at McDonald’s and smiled as she heard the other boys join in the chorus.

  Pete came on the line. “Thanks a lot,” he said gruffly.

  “Oh, come on, as long as you find one with a PlayPlace, it’s good physical entertainment for the price of a hamburger.”

  He grunted and they both went quiet. There were so many things they couldn’t ask and wouldn’t answer.

  “So,” Pete finally said. “I got a text from Heather right after you left. She headed for the airport after I texted Jared about going to the hotel, and she caught a red-eye flight. She lands at 11:14. The boys and I are picking her up.”

  “Oh,” Sadie said, but it was a loaded one-word answer. “She texted you instead of calling? Does that mean she’s mad and didn’t want to talk?”

  “That’s exactly what I thought.”

  “I’m so sorry I’m not there to help explain,” Sadie said, wondering if maybe that was a better place for her to be than here.

  “A detective also called me; they want me to come in. I explained about Heather, and they said I could wait until she was back.”

  “Did they say what they wanted to talk to you about?”

  “They weren’t specific,” Pete said. After a moment, he said, “Please be careful today, Sadie. Okay?”

  “You’ve told me to be careful several times,” Sadie said, unable to smile for all the wishing he were here. “I haven’t forgotten.”

  Pete let out a breath. “That’s good.”

  “Call me when you finish with the police,” Sadie said. “Assuming we don’t run into one another at the police station.” But she hadn’t heard from the police about her follow-up interview yet. Apparently Pete was the priority today.

  “I will,” Pete said. “Good luck.”

  “Thanks. You too.”

  She returned to the living room window, staring at Mrs. Wapple’s house as she tapped the phone against her chin.

  Her eyes drifted to the corner house, and she allowed her thoughts to move away from Pete and settle on something different. Mr. Forsberk’s dog had been run over two weeks ago; well, fifteen days to be exact, but Mrs. Wapple had been attacked on the two-week anniversary of the dog’s accident.

  Without wasting another minute, Sadie headed outside—locking the door behind her—and crossed the street, walked down the sidewalk, and went through the gate in front of Mr. Forsberk’s house. She could see his TV through the missing slats of the mini-blinds that covered his front window as she marched up the front steps and knocked sharply on the door—ready for . . . something. Preferably not a fight, but if it came to that, she was ready.

  She felt the vibrations of his footsteps on the wooden porch before she heard his approach, and moments later the door was pulled open. Mr. Forsberk was tall, but his shoulders curled inward, making him look reduced. He had a receding hairline that amplified his already prominent forehead, but the hair he had left was scruffy and unkempt, a dull brown-gray color. His glasses were rimless, and his lips were too full for his face and the fact that he had no chin. “Hello?”

  “Mr. Forsberk,” Sadie said. “My name is Sadie Hoffmiller. I’ve been staying with the Cunningham children across the street, and I’d like to talk to you for a minute if I could.”

  Chapter 25

  Mr. Forsberk invited her inside, but it was obvious he wasn’t entirely comfortable having her there. The house was sparse and dusty and without a lick of femininity anywhere. The air smelled like coffee and bacon. The TV she’d seen through the window was paused on a tire commercial. No family photos or smiling couple portraits stared at her from the shelves of his mammoth entertainment center. The only thing on his wall was a poster of the original Star Wars movie. What ever happened to the actor who played Luke Skywalker, anyway?

  There were all kinds of wires and things on the kitchen table, and bundles of cords and miscellaneous gadgetry covered all but one of the kitchen chairs. All those details added together meant that Mr. Forsberk was single and lived alone.

  He didn’t invite her to sit on the gray-black velvet couch, a throwback to the early 1990s, so she simply stood in the middle of the cluttered living room. He looked nervous, which, if he had nothing to hide, would make no sense.

  “I’m sorry about your dog,” she said to get things started, shoving her hands into the pockets of her coat and rocking back on her heels.

  His eyes widened behind his glasses and his big lips parted before he looked down at his beat-up sneakers. “Thank you.”

  “Did you have him, or her, for very long?”

  “Him. Yes. Eight years.”

  Sadie frowned. “What a difficult loss.”

  He nodded and scuffed his shoe on the carpet as though rubbing something into the floor.

  “You were outside late last night,” Sadie said, fast-forwarding to the reason she was here. “What for?”

  His head snapped up and he blinked at her. She could fairly hear the gears in his head spinning as he tried to make up a lie. She smiled again—a warm, soft, trust-me smile. “I’m not trying to get you in trouble, Mr. Forsberk, but after the police drove around the corner last night, I saw you come out of hiding behind the car. I just want to understand the context of you being out so late and ask if you saw anyone else while you were out, that’s all.”

  “Um, it musta been someone else, I don’t—”

  Sadie cut through his halfhearted response. “It was late and raining and cold—so your reason must have been important.”

  He didn’t say anything, and she took that as a good sign even as she held him tightly in her no-nonsense-stare-with-a-smile that had sent many a second-grader into sniveling confessions for a variety of petty elementary crimes. “I already told you that I’m not trying to get you in trouble, I’m really not, but some strange things have been happening at the Cunningham house these last few nights. Last night those events sent us to a hotel. If you were outside, maybe you saw something or someone that will help me get to the bottom of the situation we find ourselves in.” She was careful not to accuse him of the strange events; she didn’t need him to be any more defensive than he already was.

  He simply blinked at her again, but he looked scared, which meant he was hiding something. Her stare was working its magic; she could feel his resolve to play dumb crumbling as the seconds ticked by.

  “What kind of strange things have been happening?”

  Sadie hadn’t expected that question, and it took her a moment to come up with an answer and determine there was no reason not to share it. “Well, um, lights going on and off, doors slamming, kitchen utensils laid out on the kitchen floor—someone’s been getting into the house.”

  “Um.” Mr. Forsberk pulled back and looked at his clasped hands. He mumbled something Sadie couldn’t hear.

  “Excuse me? I didn’t catch that.” She glanced at the clock on his DVD player, noting that he had a nice TV, extra speakers, and several game consoles.

  He cleared his throat and spoke more clearly. “She’s a witch. She can make things like that happen.”

  “With all due respect, Mr. Forsberk, and despite my sincere regrets about your dog, I don’t believe that. Mrs. Wapple may have problems, but a supernatural power isn’t one of them.”

  “She wanders around in the middle of the night. She killed Bark.”

  “You think she cast a spell on your dog and caused it to be hit by a car?” Her tone pleaded with him to listen to how crazy that sounded.

  He didn’t take the opportunity for reflection. “We were across the street when Bark suddenly starte
d whimpering and running circles, like he was hurt. I tried to calm him down but as soon as I let go of the leash to pick him up, he ran right into the street.” He paused and looked at the wall behind Sadie’s head, his eyes far away and full of pain. His non-chin trembled. “It was awful.”

  Sadie didn’t doubt that. She reached out and touched his arm, which startled him. “But a spell, Mr. Forsberk?”

  “Something made Bark run into the street like that,” he said, and even though his timid voice wasn’t strong, clearly his convictions were. “He was always calm and well-behaved. He didn’t even bark when the postman came to the door. Something done happened.”

  “And he’d never behaved that way before?”