Pumpkin Ridge (Rose Hill Mystery Series Book 10)

by Pamela Grandstaff

  Melissa drove back to Rose Hill on the main roads but had trouble focusing on driving. She had made a significant commitment to buy the Foxglove Mobile Home Park and now a tiny home to put on it. She was already pretty far down a road that veered away from her path forward with Patrick and his dreams for the two of them. She wondered if their paths could cross again further along the way.

  When she got to Delia’s, Hannah was sitting in the kitchen talking to Claire. Delia and Sammy were in the living room with Claire’s little girls, watching an animated movie. Melissa greeted them but they didn’t seem to hear her, so focused were they on the television.

  “Where have you been?” Hannah said. “We were starting to get worried.”

  Melissa told them about her trip out Pumpkin Ridge to see Johnny Johnson, but she didn’t mention the instantaneous crush she had developed upon meeting him. After she was finished, Hannah leaned across the table, a grim look on her face.

  “I have loads to tell you,” Hannah said. “Fasten your seatbelt.”

  Chapter Five – Thursday

  A fter Melissa left the farm, Hannah went to pick up Sammy at school. She sat in the carpool line watching for him, her 1975 Ford pickup truck standing out like a sore thumb among the shiny SUVs in front of and behind her. He walked out with Hatch’s twelve-year-old nephew, Josh, whose bright red hair was easy to spot. Sammy, a good six inches shorter than Josh, had curls, but they were golden brown, blond in the summer. To Hannah’s dismay, he insisted on keeping them shorn back almost to the skull, just like his father’s.

  Sammy stowed his backpack in the space behind the front seat of the truck and slid into the passenger seat.

  “Seatbelt,” Hannah said.

  Sammy fastened his seatbelt.

  “Tyler says that an airbag will burn your face off if you sit in the front seat.”

  “Lucky for us then,” Hannah said, “this truck is so old it doesn’t have airbags.”

  “Tyler’s mom makes him sit in the back on a booster seat,” Sammy said. “He says parents who let their kids sit up front don’t care about them getting killed.”

  “Is that right?”

  “That’s what Tyler says.”

  “Well, you tell Tyler that we have a special seatbelt guard that makes your seat belt fit you,” Hannah said, “but if his mama wants to buy us a brand new car with airbags and a booster seat, we will be glad to make you sit in it.”

  “I don’t want to sit in a booster seat,” Sammy said. “They’re for babies.”

  “When you were little you sat in a car seat in the back of the Subaru,” Hannah said. “I had to force you into it, and you screamed for a good twenty minutes before you gave in. It made taking you anywhere kind of a challenge, like big-time wrestling.”

  “What happened to the Subaru?”

  “We drove it over three hundred thousand miles,” Hannah said. “It finally died and went to car heaven.”

  “There’s no car heaven,” Sammy said. “Is there?”

  “No,” Hannah said.

  “Is Wally in heaven?”

  “Of course,” Hannah said. “He’s with Uncle Ian and Uncle Brian.”

  “I bet they like having him up there to play with.”

  “I bet they do.”

  Hannah could see her son surreptitiously wiping a tear, but she ignored it.

  “Have you decided what you want to be for Halloween?”

  He shrugged.

  “Ninja, I guess,” he said. “Or Spiderman.”

  “We’re getting together with Claire and the girls to make our costumes tomorrow night,” she said. “You need to decide so I can buy the stuff.”

  “Do I have to go trick-or-treating with all those girls?”

  “Yep,” she said. “But Josh is going, too.”

  “Really? For sure?”

  “Hatch is going to drop him off at Delia’s on Saturday afternoon,” she said. “We’re going to have a party and then go trick-or-treating.”

  “If Josh is going then that’s all right,” he said.

  “That’s what I thought,” Hannah said. “Can you keep a secret?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tommy’s coming home for the kid party, to surprise his mama. Uncle Sean fixed it up.”

  “Awesome!” Sammy said.

  “But don’t you tell anybody.”

  “I won’t,” he said.

  Sammy kicked at the dash as he slouched in his seat.

  “Is there something wrong?” Hannah asked Sammy. “You look like you’ve got something on your mind.”

  “Tyler said you got fired from your job.”

  “Well, technically I’m suspended without pay pending an internal investigation,” Hannah said.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means that I can’t work or get paid while they look for a legal reason to fire me.”

  “Why do they want to fire you?”

  “Because my new boss wants to hire his son-in-law to take my place,” Hannah said.

  “That’s not fair.”

  “Nope,” Hannah said. “That’s why Uncle Sean is going to sue their pants off as soon as they fire me.”

  “Does that mean we’re poor?”

  “Is that what Tyler said?”

  Sammy kicked the dash a little harder and turned his face away.

  “Hey,” Hannah said, “Is Tyler bullying you?”

  Sammy shook his head.

  “Do I need to talk to your teacher about this?”

  Sammy shook his head.

  “We’re not poor,” Hannah said. “We get money from Dr. Drew, who’s renting the old farm, and the new farm is paid for. I’m working at the Thorn part-time, and Daddy is doing some part-time computer stuff for the government. We’re not in any danger. We won’t go hungry.”

  Sammy just continued to kick the dash and look out the window.

  “Are you worried?” she asked him.

  He shook his head.

  “You don’t need to worry,” Hannah said. “But if you ever do, just tell Daddy or me about it, okay?”

  Sammy shrugged.

  The truth was Hannah was the one who was worried. She and Sammy were covered by her work health insurance. Because her husband was partially but not totally disabled from his time in the armed services, he didn’t qualify for the kind of veteran’s insurance that covered dependents. Hannah had looked into the cost of health insurance, and the steep numbers quoted made her sick to her stomach. Right now, even though her pay was suspended she was still covered by her work policy, but she had to pay her portion of the premium out of her pocket, which was just about empty. If they fired her before or on Friday, her coverage would only last until the end of the month, which just happened to be the next day, Saturday. Hannah put nothing that dastardly past her new boss, who just wanted her gone.

  She was working four nights per week at the bar her Aunt Delia owned, where her cousin Patrick was the manager/bartender. The tips were keeping food on the table and the utilities connected, but that was about it. Her husband Sam, who worked as a full-time volunteer running a rehabilitation center for disabled veterans during the day, was at night performing network security work for the government as a contractor who did not draw any benefits. They were living hand-to-mouth, with nothing being saved. While Sam worked nights in his home office, Hannah lay awake and ran numbers in her head. They weren’t talking about it, which was not unusual for them, Sam being a quiet, secretive person at the best of times, but it was creating a new tension between them that didn’t help the situation.

  Hannah thought Sam should quit the volunteer work and get a full-time job with health benefits to cover the whole family. She had agreed to be the primary breadwinner so that he could do what made him happy and fulfilled, and she had been glad to do it, it made things much easier in their marriage for Sam to be happy. But now, it seemed to Hannah that his labor of love was jeopardizing their future, and they needed to renegotiate that agreement.

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nbsp; She hadn’t brought it up because she was hoping he would see what had to be done and just do it. So far, however, he was trying to do both things. It was all she could think about, but she didn’t feel like she could talk to him about it. She was afraid of what might happen if she did.

  Sam had a history of depression. It was, as is often the case, related to his injuries, both physical and mental, contracted during his service to the country. Both of his lower legs had been blown off by an IED while he served in Iraq. Subsequently, although he was high-functioning, and so practiced at walking on prosthetics that you could barely tell, he was still vulnerable to an interior darkness that caused him to turn away from their family when things went wrong. Hannah somehow thought if she didn’t talk about how bad things were going, maybe he wouldn’t go down that dark road.

  Hannah dropped Sammy off at her Aunt Delia’s house.

  “Who are all these blond people?’ Hannah asked her when they got inside.

  Delia laughed.

  “These are my new grandchildren,” Delia said. “Aren’t they beautiful?”

  Although Pixie begged Sammy to play a game with her, Bluebell and Sammy took their mitts to the backyard to throw a baseball. While Pixie pouted, whined, and clung to Delia’s skirt, the two older girls, Daisy and Lily, reclined on the sofa and listened to music through earbuds while they texted on their phones.

  “You talked to Melissa?” Delia asked Hannah.

  “Uh huh,” Hannah said. “Thanks to you babysitting, I’m off to solve the crime.”

  “Do you think you can?”

  Hannah put her hands on her hips.

  “I’m the Masked Muttcatcher,” she said. “I always get my dog.”

  Hannah went first to the fire station to talk to Fire Chief Malcolm Behr.

  “Here comes trouble,” he said when he saw her.

  “I brought you coffee and donuts,” Hannah said.

  “I’ve given them up,” he said, “on account of my blood pressure.”

  “More for me then,” Hannah said.

  “I know this isn’t a social visit,” he said. “What’s up?”

  “The night of the coal truck wreck,” she said. “What happened?”

  “The driver was drunk, also high, I think; his pupils were pin dots.”

  “And the white SUV?”

  “It showed up on the fire station security camera,” Malcolm said. “Twice.”

  “Can I see?”

  “Don’t see why not,” Malcolm said.

  He used his PC to show Hannah the footage.

  A white SUV passed the camera, which was mounted above the front door of the station. There was no sound so they couldn’t hear the crash; Hannah counted thirty-one seconds until the white SUV passed the camera again, going in the opposite direction. There was a long dark gash down the side of the vehicle.

  “I can’t make out the driver,” Hannah said.

  “Too dark,” Malcolm said. “Can’t see the license plate, either.”

  “So the truck driver wasn’t lying about it.”

  “No,” Malcolm said. “Plus there was white paint on the side of his truck. Lucky for him we got this; it’s bound to make a difference at his trial.”

  “What about the stiff?”

  “You’d have to ask Scott who he is,” he said. “He was dead when we got to him.”

  “Head injury, I heard.”

  “Yeah,” he said, but then he paused in a meaningful way.

  “What?” Hannah said.

  “Just something the medical examiner told me,” Malcolm said. “We were just shooting the shit, you understand, yesterday; he hasn’t done the official yet; he’s got bodies stacked up, waiting, he says, on account of this opioid crisis, you know.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Hannah said. “I get it, all unofficial and off the record.”

  “The corpse had bruising on the throat consistent with being strangled.”

  “No way.”

  “I can’t see any way he’d get that being hit by a truck, do you?”

  “He landed on his back?”

  “Knocked him clean off his feet,” Malcolm said. “Landed on the back of his head.”

  “Yikes,” Hannah said. “Any ideas?”

  “My people didn’t intubate; they used the bag and CPR, but he was gone. I can tell you without a doubt that nobody on my team touched the victim’s throat with enough force to leave a bruise. Why would they?”

  “Interesting.”

  “Patrick said he didn’t see the victim until he was up in the cab checking on the driver.”

  “Did he check him out then?”

  “Said he was trying to get the keys away from the driver so he wouldn’t try to leave.”

  “Are there any other cameras in town that might have caught this?”

  “Patrick has a camera on the outside of the Thorn,” he said. “He said it wasn’t on that night.”

  Malcolm raised his eyebrows at Hannah.

  “Then it wasn’t,” Hannah said.

  “I hope he’s telling the truth.”

  “Why would Patrick strangle someone he didn’t even know?”

  “Well, we don’t know who the man was, now do we?” Malcolm said. “Maybe Patrick did know him.”

  “My cousin is not a killer,” Hannah said.

  “I didn’t say he was,” Malcolm said. “But if Patrick didn’t do it, surely he saw who did.”

  “You’re not spreading this gossip.”

  “Nope,” Malcolm said. “This was just the medical examiner and me talking and now you and me talking. I haven’t even mentioned it to Scott. When the postmortem comes out, then we’ll discuss it.”

  “Thanks,” Hannah said. “That gives me a few weeks to work out what happened.”

  “When are you getting licensed?”

  “I haven’t had time to study for the exam,” Hannah said. “Maybe next year.”

  “You’ll be a good one,” he said. “I’d hire you.”

  “Thanks, Behr,” she said.

  “Just don’t you go investigating me,” he said. “You gotta promise.”

  “You’re going to have to lead a more interesting life,” Hannah said. “You’re too boring to do anything worth investigating.”

  “Afraid so,” Malcolm said. “Be sure to remind my wife of that if she ever calls you.”

  Hannah picked up a pizza from PJs and carried it to the police station. All she knew about the accident was the brief account that had been in the Pendleton paper on Tuesday, and that was very little. She was counting on Scott’s police deputy to fill in the details without realizing he was doing so.

  “Oh, no,” Skip said as she came in. “I don’t know anything, and if I did, I couldn’t tell you.”

  “Can’t a friend just bring a pizza to another friend without all this suspicion and bad vibes you got going on in here?”

  “Whatever it is, I can’t, Hannah,” he said. “Scott will skin me alive.”

  “I already know everything,” Hannah said. “I’m here to give you some information; make you look good to your boss. Meanwhile, we’ll eat a few slices.”

  “It smells delicious,” Skip said. “I did miss lunch.”

  Hannah opened the box so that the steamy smell of garlic and oregano wafted his way.

  “Is that what I think it is?” he asked.

  “Extra garlic, just like you like,” she said. “Feta, anchovies, olives, mushrooms, hot peppers, and onions. They call it The Stinkaroonie.”

  Hannah held out the box and he accepted it, closing his eyes and inhaling as he did so.

  “Get some paper towels out of the break room,” he said. “We have to sit out here in case Scott checks up on me.”

  While Hannah was in the break room, she checked to see if the filing cabinets they kept in there were locked, and unfortunately, they were. When she went back out to the main room, she brought paper plates as well. She waited until he had inhaled three pieces before she broached the subject.<
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  “I know you took the accident victim’s fingerprints and photograph,” she said. “I also know that you’ve received information in return.”

  “Guy was a private investigator from Pennsylvania,” he said. “You knew that, right?”

  “Of course,” Hannah said. “I’m way ahead of you on all this. He was legit; I checked it out.”

  “So you know he rented a car in Besington, Pennsylvania on Monday,” Skip said.

  “Sure,” Hannah said. “I already talked to the guy who rented it to him.”

  “But did you know that car has been found?”

  “Sure I did,” Hannah said. “Everybody knows that.”

  “So don’t you think it’s weird that it was found at the bus station in Besington, with the guy’s keys and IDs in it?”

  “Totally weird,” Hannah said. “And I guess you know the rest of it. Even weirder, if you ask me.”

  “For real,” Skip said. “I don’t know what that guy was investigating, but it must have been here in Rose Hill.”

  “I’m following up on a few leads in that direction,” Hannah said. “Are you guys?”

  “No crime was committed,” Skip said. “She said his home office wasn’t ransacked or anything.”

  “I knew that,” Hannah said. “What else did his girlfriend say?”

  “There’s a girlfriend?” Skip said. “I thought it was his sister.”

  “That’s right,” Hannah said. “I meant sister.”

  “She called last night, said she saw it in the paper,” Skip said. “She went to his apartment and said it looked as if nothing had been touched. She seemed real nice; said my voice had a real quality of authority.”

  “Did you get her address and phone number?”

  “Sheesh, Hannah, of course, I did; I also got her to agree to come down here next week to answer some questions. She’s got to work, but she’s going to figure something out and call me. She said we could maybe get coffee afterward.”

  “Which would be entirely inappropriate.”

  “She’s not a suspect or anything,” Skip said. “I don’t see why not.”

  “Did she tell you about the other guy?”

  “If you mean his landlord, then, yeah. We called and left a message,” Skip said. “He hasn’t called us back.”