Gourd to Death

by Kirsten Weiss

I gave up on rationality and nudged Charlene. “I’m surprised you’re not getting in on this action.”

  “Revenge was that bloodsucker Marla’s idea,” Charlene muttered. “Don’t listen to the vampire,” she said more loudly.

  “Will you stop calling me that?” Marla tugged on her black jacket.

  “Who’s going to volunteer to be the clown?” Charlene asked. “He might get attacked or arrested.”

  “Only if he gets caught,” Marla said.

  I returned to the kitchen and left them to scheme. Creepy clowns and pumpkin plots paled in comparison to murder. If it got their minds off the real horror of Dr. Levant’s death, I didn’t see the harm.

  But that night, I couldn’t stop seeing that small hand sticking out from beneath the pumpkin. I lay awake in my tiny house and listened to branches scrape across my roof. Animals snuffled and shuffled outside, and I finally fell into an uneasy sleep.

  Chapter Six

  It was dark when I awoke at my usual ungodly baker’s hour. Yawning, I grabbed a Pie Town T-shirt, slipped into a pair of jeans, and brushed my hair into a ponytail. I made myself peanut butter toast, jammed it in my mouth, shrugged into a Pie Town hoodie and staggered out the door.

  The light above the tiny house’s door flipped on, illuminating the picnic table and my delivery van.

  I stumbled to a halt. The toast dropped from my mouth.

  Someone had tagged the Pie Town van in shaky black text that read: FULL OF BALONEY.

  I picked up the toast, which had naturally fallen peanut butter-side down, and walked around the pink van. There was more. The words COFFIN VARNISH Scarred the rear doors. And on the other side, VAL HARRIS IS A FLAT TIRE.

  Flat tire? What did that even mean? I checked the tires. Nope. Not flat. And coffin varnish? I vaguely remembered that had been an insult in the dark ages of the early twentieth century.

  This was the weirdest graffiti ever, and in other circumstances, I might have laughed. But this was the official Pie Town delivery van. I couldn’t drive around town with this stupid graffiti. How much was getting it repainted going to cost?

  I stomped around and cursed, because it made me feel better and no one could see.

  Beside the picnic table, I stilled, my skin crawling. Was whoever had painted my van watching?

  The automatic light over my door switched off, bathing me in darkness.

  I ran back to my shipping container/tiny home. The light over the door snapped on again.

  Heart pounding, I scanned my yard from the tiny home steps. The shadows seemed to shift, and I blinked rapidly. I must be imagining that watchful feeling. But my house was out of the way, at the end of its own winding dirt road. This wasn’t a crime of opportunity. Someone had driven here and targeted me with oddball graffiti.

  I ran back inside, grabbed a flashlight, and returned to the van. If the paint was wet, this had been done recently.

  Swallowing, I touched the graffiti.

  Dry.

  Relieved, I pulled my hand away. Black smeared my fingertips.

  Huh?

  I rubbed my fingers together. The stuff felt chalky. I ran my finger through the graffiti, drawing a pale line.

  I hurried inside and retrieved a rag from beneath the kitchen sink. The clock on the miniature stove blinked, baleful. I was going to be late.

  But I trotted to the van and scrubbed. The graffiti came off, and a rush of relief flowed through my veins. A good car wash would probably remove any remaining traces.

  I stepped from the van and studied its pink sides. No permanent harm had been done. Had the graffiti been a practical joke? But by whom?

  It didn’t seem like the gamers’ style.

  Charlene’s? But if she’d done it, she’d have stuck around to crow over my reaction.

  Locking my house, I jumped into the van and bumped down the dirt road, descending into a bank of fog.

  Soon, I was pulling into the misty brick alley behind Pie Town. A light shone through one of the small, high windows in the kitchen, and I grimaced. I hated being the last person to get to my own business.

  I hauled open the heavy, metal door and strode into the kitchen. “Sorry I’m late,” I shouted over the roar of the mixer.

  Petronella looked up from a counter full of apples in various states. With her gloved hands, she adjusted the net containing her spiky black hair. “What happened?”

  Abril switched off the heavy mixer. Her brown eyes widened with concern. “You’re late. Is everything okay?”

  My face warmed. It was the first official day of the pumpkin festival. Tardiness was a high crime, or at least a misdemeanor. “Someone graffitied the van. Fortunately, they used chalk.”

  “What a lame prank,” Petronella said. “Who would go all the way to your house to chalk a van?”

  “Maybe Charlene’s up to her tricks.” Abril angled her head toward the flour-work room. Odd mechanical noises emerged from behind the closed, metal door.

  “Yeah.” My brow furrowed. The language on my van had recalled flappers and ragtime. But I couldn’t see Charlene doing something so pointless. Not on the first day of the festival.

  I knocked on the metal door. “Is everything okay in there?”

  The whirring fell silent. “I’m fine,” Charlene called. “Busy. Aren’t you?”

  “Yes, but did anything odd happen last night?” I pulled open the door.

  “You’ll ruin the temperature control,” she shouted.

  I released the handle as if scalded.

  “And what do you mean by anything odd happening?” she called through the door. “What do you think I get up to after I go to bed?”

  “Nothing, but—”

  “Nothing? There could be something. I’m not a monk, you know.”

  Ugh. “Never mind.”

  I snapped on a hairnet, tied on an apron, and ran a round of dough through the flattener. Roughly, I slipped it into a pie tin and turned it, pinching the dough around its edges. A murder had been committed yesterday. Was there a connection between that and the graffiti? It didn’t seem likely I’d become a target because I’d found the body. Two different criminal minds were likely at work—one deadly, one dippy.

  At six, I hauled the coffee urn to the dining area and turned the sign in the glass front door to OPEN. I set the day-old hand pies on the counter.

  Aged regulars trickled into Pie Town for self-serve coffee, cheap snacks, and gossip.

  As much as I wanted to hear what they thought about Dr. Levant’s murder, I had about a dillion autumn pies to bake. I’d decided to go heavy on the pumpkin, for obvious reasons. But there were other fall favorites, such as apple-cranberry, mincemeat, sweet potato, and pecan. The festival menu also included Wisconsin harvest pie, tart cherry, a maple-pumpkin with salted pecan brittle, and pumpkin chiffon.

  Insides jittering, I hurriedly filled piecrusts. This would be one of our biggest days of the year. There was no margin for error.

  Gordon and three uniformed cops presented themselves for duty at nine. The tables were already nearly full of early festival arrivals grabbing coffee.

  Tally-Wally sat beside the urn. He explained how the self-serve basket worked, ensuring there were no java scofflaws.

  Outside, the fog had begun to lift. It blanketed the rooftops and revealed giant black spiderwebs strung across Main Street.

  I explained our system of numbered tent cards to the cops. The cops would take the orders for people standing in line and speed things along. I just hoped we were busy enough to justify the system.

  “A word, Val?” Gordon nodded to the hallway. Even Gordon was in uniform blues today. He looked even hotter in them than in his usual detective’s power suit.

  “Sure.” Who can resist a man in uniform?

  Gordon followed me into the hallway and stopped me with a hand to my arm. I turned, and he was close, so close I could smell his bay rum cologne. He lowered his head, his emerald eyes intent.

  My heart beat more rapidly. “
Maybe we should go into the office,” I said in a low voice. His colleagues might see.

  “You’re right,” he said. “And we need Charlene.”

  Charlene? “Um, what exactly did you have in mind?”

  Gordon’s handsome brow furrowed. “What did you?” His expression cleared, and he laughed shortly. “Oh. Not that.”

  Kissing me quickly, he zipped into the kitchen, the door swinging in his wake, and returned with my piecrust specialist. Charlene looked like an autumn leaf in her orange tunic and brown leggings.

  So much for a romantic interlude. I followed them into my utilitarian office.

  Gordon shut the door behind us, and the VA calendar on its back fluttered. “Thanks for sending me those crime scene photos, Charlene.”

  “You took crime-scene photos?” I sat against the metal desk and folded my arms. “When?”

  She shrugged. “When you weren’t looking.”

  “I need your help,” he said. “I can’t get anywhere near this case—not officially.”

  Charlene leaned against the closed door, rumpling the VA calendar. “It goes without saying, the Baker Street Bakers are at your disposal.”

  “Great.” He looked around the office. “Have you got a whiteboard?”

  “Why would we have a whiteboard?” Charlene asked.

  “It’s fine.” He grabbed paper from the printer tray and rummaged in my desk.

  “Can I help you?” I asked, bemused.

  “Got it.” Extracting a roll of tape, he taped five sheets to the wall behind my desk. “I know you haven’t had time to take those PI courses, so I’m going to give you a crash course.”

  “PI courses?” Charlene asked, looking intrigued.

  He wrote across the five sheets of paper and tapped the first page that said EVERYTHING. “One, you need to document everything in your murder book.”

  “We do keep case files,” Charlene said. “We’re not total noobs.”

  “Everything.” He underlined the word and pointed to the next sheet: TIMELINE. “Next, we need to nail down the timeline. When exactly did Dr. Levant die? Where were all the suspects at the time?”

  “Her partner, Tristan Cannon, was setting up their festival booth that morning,” I said. “But we don’t know when Dr. Levant died or when exactly he arrived.”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” he said.

  Charlene straightened off the door. “But you asked about the suspects.”

  “Before we decide who the suspects are, we need to talk to potential witnesses.” He numbered that three on the paper. “And that includes talking to everyone who was on the street at the time the body was discovered.”

  “Everybody?” I squeaked. That seemed like a lot of work. And speaking of work . . . I surreptitiously checked my watch. I needed to get back to the kitchen.

  Charlene yawned. “Boring.”

  “This is how an investigation is conducted,” he said.

  “That’s how the police conduct an investigation,” she said, “not us.”

  “We need to follow every lead.” He turned to the wall and marked that number four. “And treat everything you discover as evidence.” He wrote EVIDENCE on the final sheet of paper.

  I folded my arms. One of the benefits of having your own business is there’s no one above you to tell you what to do. I wanted to help Gordon. Being taken off the case was obviously bothering him. But, well, Charlene and I had been in charge of the Baker Street Bakers too....

  Charlene squinted at the wall. “Everything, timeline, evidence . . . ETE? What kind of acronym is that? You work for the government. You people are supposed to be coming up with acronyms all day long.”

  “It’s not an acronym,” Gordon said.

  “It should be,” she said. “If you want us to remember anything, you need an acronym like SNOT or WHAM or BANG or something. Whiteboards. Huh! I’ve got to get back to my crusts.” She strode from the room. The door banged shut behind her.

  “We’ll help in any way we can,” I said. “Like we always do.” I could think of him as a client.

  “She’s right. This is wrong.” He scraped his hands through his hair. “What am I doing?”

  “Educating us. It’s interesting.” Okay, that was a lie. “We can stand to be more organized in our amateur investigating. It’s just that . . . organization and Charlene aren’t really the peanut butter and chocolate of the investigation world.”

  He scrubbed his hands across his face. “Crazy. I’m going crazy. That’s all. And why wouldn’t I be? I’m San Nicholas’s only detective, and yet I’m the only detective in Silicon Valley who never detects.”

  “That’s not true. You’ve solved all sorts of crimes.”

  He glared. “Yesterday I stopped a surfer stampede.”

  “A what?”

  “They were trying to knock down the new gates a spoiled techie put up. They were blocking public access to the beach.”

  “That’s . . . that must have been interesting.”

  “It was a job for a beat cop.” He blew out his breath. “And not your problem.”

  I rested my hand on his arm. “Gordon, if it’s your problem, it’s mine too. Consider yourself our number one client.”

  “Client?”

  “Charlene and I will let you know everything we discover. But I’m going to be working this festival all weekend. And my stepmother turned up, so I’ll probably be spending time with her on Monday if she’s still around.”

  “Your stepmother?”

  “She surprised me yesterday.” I laughed weakly. “But she seems nice.”

  “How are you doing with it?”

  “It’s family, I guess. The more the merrier, right?”

  He pulled me against his chest. “Thanks for putting up with my temporary insanity.” He drew me into a bone-melting kiss, his hands exploring the hollows of my back.

  We broke apart, breathing heavily.

  “Oh,” I said, my lips burning.

  He grinned. “And thanks for doing this. Helping the Athletic League, I mean.”

  I forced my breathing to steady. “Did I mention you’ll have to wear an apron?”

  He quirked a brow. “You think that bothers me?”

  I laced my fingers behind his neck and leaned against him. “No. I’m sure your manhood will remain intact. Plus, they’ve got pockets for your tips.”

  “Always thinking.”

  “I may have another non-murdery case for you.” I ran my hands down the front of his pressed shirt. “Someone put graffiti on my van last night while I was sleeping. It all came off, but it’s kind of weird.”

  “It came off? Did you take any photos?”

  “Uh, no. I was so freaked out about having to take the van to the festival with that stuff on it, I forgot.”

  “What did it say?”

  I told him.

  He laughed. “Charlene?”

  My glance flicked to the dented office door. “I don’t think so. It made me late, and she wouldn’t do that on the first day of the pumpkin festival.”

  “No, she wouldn’t.” His brow furrowed. “I don’t like that someone made the trek all the way to your house. You’re pretty isolated on that bluff. But it sounds like a prank. It could have been kids trying to get to that cemetery.”

  “What cemetery?”

  “The one behind your house.”

  I stared. “What cemetery behind my house?”

  “You know, behind your place, down the hill. It dates from the eighteen-hundreds. Now it’s so covered in brambles and poison oak, most people don’t bother with it.”

  “You’re pulling my leg,” I said flatly. It had to be a Halloween joke. “Did Charlene put you up to this?”

  “You didn’t know?”

  “No!” He really wasn’t kidding. “I never go down that hill. I don’t want to get poison oak.” And why the devil hadn’t Charlene mentioned a graveyard when she’d rented me the house?

  “It’s just an old cemete
ry.”

  “Right.” I stepped away from him and pulled some aprons from a box. “Your uniforms. Excuse me. I’ve got to have a chat with my landlady.”

  I stormed into the kitchen and yanked open the door to the flour-work room. “A cemetery? Behind my house?”

  A ghost of cold air flowed into the kitchen.

  Charlene patted dough into a round and dropped it onto a metal tray. “Oh, yeah. It’s real historic.” Stooping, she brushed flour from her brown-and-orange striped socks.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “What does it matter?” she asked, arch. “You don’t believe in ghosts, remember?”

  “That’s not—” I sputtered. “You should have disclosed!”

  “California law only requires disclosures of deaths on the property within the last three years. Those corpses are over a century old, and they’re not on my property.”

  “Oooh!” But there was no point being mad. The only real surprise was freewheeling Charlene hadn’t held a ghost hunt in my backyard. But not even Charlene fooled around with poison oak.

  Abril poked her head into the flour-work room, her white net puffed high with her thick hair. “They’re coming,” she squeaked. “It’s a mob. I’ve never seen so many—”

  “We’ll talk about this later,” I said to Charlene. “Abril, breathe.”

  She bent, taking deep, gusty breaths.

  Charlene shrugged.

  I hurried into the kitchen. A roar of voices flowed through the order window, and I looked out.

  A maelstrom of pumpkin-starved festivalgoers flooded into the dining area.

  If it hadn’t been for the cops, there might have been a riot. But our new system for taking orders in line seemed to work. I wasn’t sure if the customers were charmed or cowed by the aproned police officers. But there was no shoving or sniping.

  I worked harder than I’ve ever worked—we all did. Even Charlene stayed beyond her usual piecrust-making hours to run the cash register.

  Around three o’clock, Charlene whistled through the order window into the kitchen. “Val, you got a visitor.”

  The kitchen’s swinging door bumped and swayed but didn’t open.

  I jammed a plate of pumpkin chiffon pie through the window. “Who is it?”

  Charlene set the pie on the counter. A cop grabbed it, whisking it to a table.