Town in a Pumpkin Bash

by B. B. Haywood

  Together they cleared away a few more pumpkins, and Candy began to see portions of a face—a dirt-stained cheek, part of the forehead, matted dark hair. She had a pumpkin in her hand, about to toss it away, but something about the face looked familiar. She came to a standstill, trying to figure out what had caught her eye.

  “Here, let me help you with that.” The man in the bee costume appeared by her side. He took the pumpkin from her hands and tossed it away, then leaned forward to move more of them.

  T.J. and the man in the bee costume were working side by side now, and they were making progress. Only a final layer of pumpkins remained. The body’s arms, legs, and part of his chest were visible.

  Candy stepped back, an expression of deep thought clouding her face.

  “You okay, honey?” Maggie asked, coming over to stand beside her, brushing dust and dirt off her clothes. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “I think I have,” Candy said, and pointed.

  Maggie saw it then—the face, and the beard.

  She gasped, and her hand went to her mouth. “You don’t mean…?”

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

  SEVEN

  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.”

  EIGHT

  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 w
hatever 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.

  Just to make sure she hadn’t missed anything, she walked back around the car again, but nothing jumped out at her, and she knew there wasn’t much else she could do at the moment, other than alert the police to the car’s location.

  She heard the sound of a distant siren then, signaling that the ambulance and police were on their way. Unfortunately, they’d arrive far too late to save Sebastian’s life.

  Before she walked away from the car, she took a final look inside. There was nothing in the backseat except a folded jacket, an umbrella, and a few old magazines. And nothing in the driver’s seat.

  But in the passenger’s seat she spotted what looked like a manila folder. She edged in closer to the window for a better look.

  The folder appeared to have a few documents inside, though she couldn’t tell what they were, since she could see only their edges poking out of the folder. However, she could just make out a single word someone had written on the folder’s tab with a heavy black marker.

  It read, in all capital letters, EMMA.

  NINE

  “Well, Ms. Holliday, here we are again,” said Daryl Durr, Cape Willington’s chief of police, in a particularly calm, controlled, almost disinterested manner that told Candy he was anything but.

  She nodded, arms folded across her chest. She didn’t quite trust herself to talk just yet. She’d noticed on the walk back across the field that her hands were shaking, which was why she now stood with her arms crossed, her hands tucked away at her sides. The full force of what had happened—that there had been another murder in Cape Willington—had shaken her. Once again, the victim had been someone she had known. And once again, she somehow found herself smack dab in the middle of a murder mystery.

  She stood perhaps a dozen paces from where Sebastian J. Quinn’s body still lay in the pumpkin patch. A couple of police officers were cordoning off the area around the crime scene with stakes they’d found and yellow police tape, while another stood nearby in a conversation with two EMTs. And a dark-haired female officer was talking to T.J. and the man in the bee costume. Off to the right, the flaring lights of three patrol cars and an ambulance, parked along the same dirt farm road the tractor and hay wagon had followed into High Field, cut across the darkening day.

  The whole scene had taken on a surreal aspect, causing Candy’s thoughts to scatter, despite her efforts to focus them.

  Chief Durr must have recognized her discomfort, for his expression softened just a bit. “I know this is difficult for you, Ms. Holliday,” he told her, his eyes allowing a trace of sympathy, “but you and I have been through this drill before, haven’t we?” His forced smile looked almost genuine.

  Candy returned it as best she could. “Yes, Chief, we have.”

  The chief had arrived at t
he pumpkin patch ten minutes earlier, wearing aviator sunglasses and a chocolate brown bomber jacket over his standard police-issue uniform. He’d first walked around the crime scene, studying it from all angles with a practiced eye and talking briefly with a deputy, several of the officers, and a few hayride passengers before spotting Candy and heading over to her. He’d greeted her with a tip of the hat, his expression grim.

  “So, you want to tell me what happened?”

  She nodded, took a deep breath as she collected her thoughts, and then told the whole story, from the beginning, as carefully and factually as possible. Her voice was hesitant and strained at first but grew steadier and more assured as she talked. She told him that Sebastian had contacted Maggie a few weeks earlier about renting Sapphire Vine’s old place, and how he’d failed to show for a scheduled meeting that morning, and how they’d loaded up the hay wagon, making their regular rounds of the two fields, and found and uncovered the body. She mentioned the flashlight she’d spotted in Sebastian’s grip, and her guess about the time of his death the night before, and the car she’d found parked along a dirt road beyond the edge of High Field.

  She left out the part about the folder labeled Emma. She was sure he’d find that himself when he searched the car. Whether or not it had anything to do with Sebastian’s death, she couldn’t say—though deep down she felt it could be important.

  The chief listened to her carefully before grunting and turning back toward the activity surrounding the body, his eyes peering out from beneath his hat’s bill. “And do you think it’s a coincidence,” he said after a few moments, “that the body was discovered here, in a field you happened to be working in?”

  Candy let out a long breath at the question and shook her head. “To be honest, Chief, I just don’t know. I agree it looks suspicious….”

  “It looks a lot more than suspicious, Ms. Holliday.” His tone wasn’t accusatory, just matter-of-fact.