The Pumpkin Murders

by Judith Alguire

  “My biting you wasn’t near as bad as you trying to run over me with Nora’s car,” I said. “You were practically a grown-up when you hurt me. You could have killed me. Aren’t you even a little bit sorry for doing that?”

  “It was an accident,” said Pete.

  “Honest?”

  “Yes.”

  It was what I wanted to hear, more than anything. So I believed it.

  “You know Nora’s dead,” I said and poured the last of the wine into my glass. It wasn’t going to be enough. I threw the empty bottle toward the rubble of the garage, wanting it to smash. But it just landed damply on the blackened grass.

  He didn’t acknowledge my mention of our mother.

  “Being called Assface wasn’t great,” he said, “but really, it was just a bunch of letters run together to make a sound that wasn’t all that unpleasant. Assface, Ashface, Assfish, Ashes.”

  I wanted to ask him about his new way of talking, in those even dead tones. But I stayed quiet.

  “And it added to the sympathy that came my way, by adults especially, and even some of the kids, mostly girls.”

  Sitting back in my camp chair, I listened to him tell me that my whole life had been a mistake, based on his lies.

  “I got so good at not seeing you,” Pete said, “that I swear to Christ I didn’t see you a lot of the time. I really didn’t see you the night of the car accident, for instance, although I don’t think anyone would have, with the light being off and all.”

  Mitzi Widener barked in her high-pitched voice. I welcomed its familiarity.

  “I decided to be able to hear you,” Pete went on, “because I was interested in what you said and also, I didn’t want to work that hard.

  “Not speaking to you was easy.” He smiled. “I could pick and choose behaviours.”

  The absinthe wasn’t making Pete drunk. He seemed to me to be in a state of calm lucidity. But I knew I couldn’t count on that lasting.

  “Dr. Bondurant told Nora that the trauma of having my sister bite me was compounded by Murray’s death. The doc was a smart guy. A lot of the time he knew I was lying, but he couldn’t get me to tell the truth. He felt powerless to help me. He told Nora that continued help would be good for me, that I should always have someone to talk to about my feelings so that I wouldn’t act out in inappropriate ways. He even gave Nora the names of other psychiatrists, in case she or I wanted to try someone else, but she didn’t bother. I seemed okay to her. My not seeing my sister didn’t seem like a big deal to her. And yeah, I know she’s dead. She let me know when she went into the hospital for the final time. She figured I should know that she was going to die.”

  “So she was in touch with you at Matsqui.”

  “Yup.”

  “She gave you her journal.”

  “Yup.”

  “You sent it to me this summer.”

  “Yup.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I thought you might find it interesting, I guess.”

  “Why now?”

  “I was getting out.”

  “So?”

  “I wanted to put you in the picture before…”

  “Before what?”

  “In case we lose touch.”

  I laughed. “Heaven forbid we should lose touch,” I said.

  “A nurse phoned me on the night that Nora died. Nora had confided in her about my being in jail and all. So she phoned to let me know.”

  “Dougwell didn’t know about your situation,” I said. I needed to be sure.

  “No. Of course not.”

  It pissed me off when he said of course not, as if I could possibly take anything for granted.

  “Why were you in jail for so long?” I asked. “The time seems long for the crime—selling drugs to kids, wasn’t it?”

  “That’s what I got sent up for, but it’s not what happened. I was buying, not selling.”

  “So Nora said in her clever code.”

  Pete chuckled. “Yeah, I knew you’d be able to figure it out.”

  “Why was the sentence so long?” I asked again.

  “I became a full-fledged junkie in prison,” Pete said. “That kind of promotes bad behaviour.” He shivered.

  The wind had calmed and the night was quiet without it. The atmosphere in the yard, where there had been fire so recently, was heavy like a dead weight, killed by the flames. I love quiet but not like that. It was like the calm before…what…Pete’s next death?

  “I phoned you that night,” Pete said, “the night that Nora died.”

  “You did?” I was startled. “I remember the phone call I got that night.”

  “Do you remember what I said?”

  “Yes.”

  “What was it?”

  “You asked to speak to a nun.”

  Pete smiled and I did too.

  “Sister Mary somebody or other.”

  “Mary of the Five Wounds,” Pete said.

  “Yes. That’s it.”

  “That’s Myrna’s influence,” he said. “We used to fool around on the phone all the time. She had some great lines.”

  A boatload of wine made an about-face and splashed up my esophagus to the back of my throat. I swallowed it.

  “Myrna?”

  “Yeah. We hung out for a couple of years before I went west.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I said.

  “No. You weren’t supposed to know. No one was. She was five years older than me and Eileen was my official girlfriend for part of the time, and Myrna thought you would kill her if you knew. There were lots of reasons for keeping it a secret.”

  “Pig.”

  “Who?”

  “Myrna. You. Lying pigs.”

  Pete closed his eyes.

  There were so many more questions I wanted to ask him, but they lost their importance next to Myrna.

  “Did Myrna know you were alive all this time?” I asked.

  But Pete was out; he’d gone limp.

  In my basement I found a length of rope and I tied Pete to his chair. Then I tied the chair to the hose reel. He wasn’t going anywhere.

  He vomited in his sleep, coughed till his throat was clear. I waited for this to be over, to make sure he didn’t die. I looked at the new wound on his face and the old scar higher up; it was barely there. Then I tied more knots to ensure that he would be there in the morning. That’s when I’d call Frank.

  I hadn’t asked Pete about Duane, if he’d set me up to be hurt. Maybe I would; maybe I wouldn’t.

  The car accident was an accident. That was important.

  CHAPTER 32

  I slept and dreamed that a Canada goose flew across the full moon. It seemed significant but I didn’t know why. Its wings made a creaking sound as they flapped their way across. First I thought it was real and then I lay awake till I knew that it wasn’t.

  In the morning, I was up at first light. I wanted to take care of Pete before anyone walked down the lane and saw him. But I was afraid to look out the window, in case he was on fire or being eaten by wild dogs or worse.

  I called Frank, not sure what to say.

  “Pete is here.” I settled on vagueness.

  “I’ll be right over,” said Frank. “Just give me a minute to straighten things out around here.”

  “Okay.”

  I waited on the front lawn, shivering in the morning chill. He showed up within ten minutes.

  We walked through the front hall to the kitchen, down the steps to the landing and out the door to the back stoop. Frank led the way.

  “Oh my God,” he said.

  The first thing I saw was Pete’s empty chair. It didn’t seem possible to me that he could have freed himself. Then I remembered how he had put on magic shows in the neighbourhood. He could untie any knot anyone ever made. Pete was an escape artist, a magician. How could I have been so dull as to not think of that?

  Then I saw a Green Guys truck parked in the lane with the engine running. A flash of anger darted th
rough me as it always does when I see vehicles idling unnecessarily. Often they belong to the same people that won’t allow smoking within one hundred yards of their dead relatives.

  I didn’t want to follow Frank’s gaze. I didn’t want to know why he had said, oh my God. But I looked and I saw an impossible embrace—green coveralls wrapped around and lifting up a limp scruffy body. The coveralls let go quickly as the man inside them realized what he was hanging on to.

  The scarecrow was left to swing in the brittle wind.

  It was made from the rubble of my garage and from armfuls of old vegetation, encased in bits of cloth. Glancing around my yard, I could see there was no shortage of junk to fashion this type of decoy. Pete could have built a family of scarecrows.

  “I thought,” stuttered the Green Guy, “I’m sorry, I thought someone was…”

  He blushed as though he had made an unforgivable mistake.

  “No. Don’t worry,” Frank hurried down the steps and over to where the Green Guy stood. He put his hand on the man’s shoulder. “Don’t apologize. You did the right thing. I thought the same thing as you did when I saw it.”

  I stepped down into the yard. “Here, sit,” I said, and offered him my camp chair.

  He dropped into the chair. “I was driving down the lane and I seen someone hanging.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  He looked straight at me. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  It was the same Green Guy who had tried to trick me into having my lawn aerated. The same guy I had decided to hate for his underhandedness. I’ve made that kind of mistake before—despising someone who gave of himself in an entire kind of way. Misplaced hate. Hate with a shallow reason.

  The scarecrow had a noose around its neck. When I looked closely I saw that Pete had made it out of the rope that I had bound him with. And he had used the hose and toppled Dougwell’s chair.

  I realized that the creaking of the goose’s wings in my dream was the sound made by Murray’s hose winder.

  Pete had fashioned a pocket on the scarecrow’s burlap shirt and attached a pen, the way both Murray and Dougwell used to do. The way Frank does. There was a piece of paper in the pocket, torn from a small ringed notebook, the kind Pete always used to carry for his haiku. I guess he still did. There were a few words written in my brother’s awkward hand:

  four ewe

  in morning light

  only 4 u

  That’s what he wrote: a fucked-up haiku.

  I pocketed the poem without showing Frank. He saw me do it but didn’t ask. He knew it was between my brother and me.

  The Green Guy left. Frank stuck around for a while, cut down the scarecrow. We talked some. I told him about my visit to Pete at the Chalet, our scuffle.

  “He tried to bite me,” I said.

  “Jesus.”

  “Yeah.”

  I told Frank about my brother’s admission that he had hurt Henry and that got him moving.

  “He didn’t intend to kill him,” I called after Frank as he crossed my front yard.

  That brought him to a stop and he turned around.

  “He said so,” I said.

  Frank nodded and continued down the block.

  I made coffee and sat with the crumpled scarecrow as the dewy morning heated up.

  Somehow, Pete knew that his repeated deaths were the best way to get to me. My life was a ghastly treasure hunt that I was on against my will. Pete’s dead body was the prize, but it was a booby prize; it was never real.

  Frank called soon after to tell me that Pete was no longer registered at the Chalet. He asked if I had any other ideas. I gave him Eileen’s address. Not Myrna’s. I still didn’t believe what my heart knew was true.

  CHAPTER 33

  By the time I got up to see Henry in the afternoon he had been moved to a private room on another ward. He had already told his story twice, once to a young cop in a uniform and once to Frank, who was there shortly before I was.

  Henry was ghostly white underneath his tan and that made him look old, but he insisted that he felt okay.

  “Just tired,” he said. “I can’t seem to get over wanting to roll over and go back to sleep.”

  I didn’t want to push him, but I was desperate to hear what had happened.

  “Pete came to see me,” he said. “I would have said last night, but apparently it was the night before. I lost a day in there.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  “It’s not your fault,” he said. “Anyway, it was late. I was already in bed. So were Dougwell and Gina. They didn’t wake up, thank goodness.”

  “Maybe it would have been good if they had,” I said.

  “No.”

  Of course not. Henry didn’t want his kids tainted by Pete Ring. Would we be able go on from here at any level? I wondered. The same blood runs through me as through the guy that could have killed Henry.

  “He wasn’t trying to kill you,” I said. My brother’s advocate.

  “I know. The doctor said it wasn’t enough to even hurt me. I guess I’m extra susceptible or something. I just slept an extremely deep sleep for a very long time.”

  “How did Pete know where to find you?” I asked.

  “He just looked me up in the phone book.”

  I smoothed his hair back from his forehead. “You should have an unlisted number, Henry, being a teacher. Don’t you have students phoning you all the time?”

  “No, not really. Sometimes. It’s never bothered me.”

  “Okay, so what next?”

  “He asked if we could go for a ride in the Volvo. He was a little wild-eyed, so I figured that would be better than inviting him in. I didn’t want the kids to see him.”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “Cherry? Are you okay?” Henry took my hand.

  “Yes.”

  His fingers were chilly and I rubbed them briskly and kissed them and put them down.

  “Saying no to him didn’t seem to be an option,” Henry said, “so I got dressed while he stood outside in the yard. I was hoping he’d be gone by the time I got back, but he was there, all right. He had a jacket on, which I thought was unusual because it was a warm night. It didn’t occur to me that that’d be where he was hiding all his stuff: the iron, the fixings.”

  “The iron.”

  “Yeah. That’s what he hit me with.”

  I pictured the small iron attached to the bathroom wall at the Norwood Hotel. Had he stolen it in order to use it on Henry? Or was there a similar iron situation at the Chalet? I hadn’t noticed. It didn’t matter.

  “So we cruised around for a while. I drove. I thought he would talk, but he didn’t. And I couldn’t think of anything to say. There were things I was curious about: jail, being a drug addict, faking death. But they didn’t seem like appropriate topics.” Henry chuckled. “That sounds ridiculous, I know.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” I said.

  “So, anyway, he finally told me to drive down Archibald to where Canada Packers used to be. He wanted me to pull right onto the site, which I did, by driving around to the back. There was a section where the fence had collapsed. By this time I was getting a little uneasy.”

  Henry sipped water through a straw. I wondered why the straw was necessary. It made him seem so frail.

  “Remember how the air in Norwood used to smell like… livestock sometimes,” he said, “if the wind blew in a certain way?”

  “Yes. Dead livestock, I think.”

  “Maybe. Anyway, I could smell it there. It was very unnerving. It probably would have seemed less so if there had been some conversation but he was so quiet. And every time I spoke my voice got higher and higher so I shut up. I parked where he told me to and then caught a glimpse of the iron when I turned toward him. That’s all I remember.”

  Henry touched his head gently where he had been hit.

  I thought about how knocks on the head sometimes killed people and I shuddered.

  “Oh, Henry. No one deserv
es to be hit with an iron less than you do.”

  He smiled and reached for my hand again.

  “Pete’s ’s in terrible shape,.” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I think the next time he dies it might be for real.”

  “Where is he, Cherry?”

  “I don’t know. The cops are looking for him though. They’ll find him soon. He doesn’t try very hard to hide anything anymore.”

  There would be time enough in the days to come to fill Henry in on all the things that Pete was no longer hiding.

  “Frank said that a man out walking his dog found me. I guess Pete dragged me out of the car and left me there. They found the car on Des Meurons, so he must have driven it that far.”

  “Yes.”

  “I feel as though I’m going to drift off again,” said Henry. “I don’t want to. I keep dreaming about my heart.”

  “Your heart?”

  “Yeah. Like it’s burning up or frozen solid or melting or running away.”

  Henry was asleep again.

  “Is his heart okay” I asked a nurse who stopped in to check on him just as I stood up to leave.

  “Whose heart?”

  “Henry Ferris’ heart,” I said and pointed to him in the bed.

  She assured me, after scanning all his paperwork and Henry himself, that yes, his heart was fine.

  I hoped she wasn’t lying or mistaken.

  After a dish of butterscotch pudding in the hospital cafeteria I checked on Henry again. He was still asleep, so I left him a note and caught a bus home.

  CHAPTER 34

  It was 6:30 p.m. and I stared into the open fridge. There wasn’t much to choose from. Finally I chose a small can of beans from the pantry, put them in a pot and set them on the stove to heat.

  The phone rang.

  It was Myrna. I turned the heat off under the beans.

  “Can you come over?” she whispered.

  “Why are you whispering?” I asked.

  “I think you’d better come over.”

  “Why?”

  “Pete’s here.”

  Paranoia swept through me. Everyone knew more about my brother than I did. I couldn’t bear Myrna being in this picture.