Town in a Pumpkin Bash

by B. B. Haywood

  “Nope, never did, far as I heard. The stories about her continued for a few months, and then, like everything else, they eventually died away.”

  “Do you know what happened to her body?”

  Mr. Gumm rubbed at his chin. “Well, that’s the curious thing. Never heard about that either.”

  “So you wouldn’t know if she was buried around here somewhere?”

  The elderly gentleman turned to look at her then, a curious expression on his face. “You’re the second person who’s asked me that recently.”

  Candy felt a chill. “Why? Who else asked you?”

  Mr. Gumm shrugged. “Some reporter woman called me about it yesterday. I don’t know how she tracked me down—I was still over at my sister’s place—but she found me. Though I told her the same thing I’ll tell you—I just don’t know. Never heard what happened. That young dead woman just seemed to…disappear….”

  He turned his gaze back out toward High Field. “There was one thing I heard about her, though, back in those days. Can’t quite remember where I heard it. Must have been from someone around town.”

  “And what did you hear about her, Mr. Gumm?” Candy asked quietly.

  “Well, it’s funny…but someone told me she was one of the island people.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  Doc and the boys showed up at half past noon, just as a third TV truck—this one from a station in Manchester, New Hampshire—was heading out of the parking lot on its way home. They’d shot a live feed for the noontime newscast right from the pumpkin patch, and somehow Candy and Maggie had allowed themselves to be lassoed into it, talking live on the air for a minute or two. Artie got a call from a friend in Concord, who just happened to be watching the broadcast, and Doc and the boys hurried right over to the pumpkin patch.

  “It all happened so fast,” Candy told him, still sounding a little bewildered by the whole thing. “There we were, live on the air, before we knew what was happening.”

  “Candy did most of the talking,” Maggie added, pointing at her friend. “All I told them was what I saw from the tractor’s seat.”

  “The place has been crawling with reporters all morning,” Candy said, “ever since word got out.”

  “We heard about it too,” Doc said grimly. “I was out in the fields all morning and decided to run into town for lunch. Didn’t know what was going on until Finn and the boys filled me in. All this talk about a pumpkin patch killer. Sure got the business folks around here—including me—worried about the town’s reputation.”

  “They’re plenty concerned over at the police station as well,” Finn informed them.

  “Have they said anything else about the investigation?” Candy asked. “Any suspects?”

  Finn just shook his head. “Not that I’ve heard, no, though I’m sure they’re looking into Sebastian’s past and current acquaintances. My guess is it was someone he knew—someone who lured him here. But I haven’t been able to confirm that. I’ve been trying, but whatever’s going on, the police aren’t saying.”

  “They’re feeling the pressure,” Artie surmised, “especially if this latest murder puts them in the national spotlight.”

  “And like Doc said, we don’t need that kind of publicity,” Bumpy added.

  Candy tilted her head. “No, we sure don’t.” Her brow fell in thought. “So the quickest way to end this mystery is to solve it. Find the Pumpkin Patch Killer.”

  “That’s right,” Artie said, “and the sooner the better.”

  “Then maybe we can all get back to our regular lives,” Bumpy added.

  “I’m sure that’s exactly what the police are trying to do—solve this thing,” Doc said hopefully, watching his daughter, “so maybe we should leave it to them.”

  “Maybe we should, Dad,” Candy said, still thinking, “but what if there’s something they’re missing? Something that no one else knows about?”

  “And what would that be?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  Finn gave her a stern look. “You investigating again?”

  Candy turned to him. “Let’s just say I’m following up on a hunch. It could lead nowhere.”

  “But it could lead somewhere,” Doc said, “and that’s what worries me.”

  “Look,” Candy said, trying to keep the conversation light, “I just have to check something out—do a little research. And it might help us get to the bottom of all this. I promise I won’t get into any trouble.”

  “But to quote someone who’s near and dear to me, trouble seems to have a way of always finding you,” Doc pointed out, with a wry smile.

  “I know, Dad, but I can’t help that. I can only do what I have to do.” And leaving it at that for the time being, she turned toward Maggie. “I hate to ask, but can you cover for me for an hour or two?”

  “Sure, boss!” Maggie saluted her. “No worries. Consider yourself covered.”

  “Thanks. You’re a saint.”

  “Hmm, Saint Maggie,” she mused. “It does have a ring to it, doesn’t it?”

  “Well, as long as you’re handing out sainthoods, I guess we can help out around here for a few hours as well,” Doc said. “Especially since you seem set on doing whatever it is you’re doing. But remember, you promised—don’t go getting yourself into trouble.”

  Now it was Candy’s turn to give him a half smile. “Dad, you know I’d never do that.”

  She glanced at her watch. Twelve thirty-five. She walked to the farm stand, grabbed her tote bag from its hiding spot behind the front counter, and flung it over her shoulder. By the time she turned back around, Wanda Boyle’s minibus was trundling up the unpaved road toward the parking lot.

  She turned lastly to Finn. “You’ll let me know if you hear anything else from the police department, right?”

  Finn nodded gruffly. “The moment I catch wind of something new, I’ll let you know.”

  She nodded gratefully. “Thanks. Now if you’ll excuse me,” she said to her friends as she started off across the field, “I have a bus to catch.”

  THIRTY

  She headed to her Jeep first and grabbed the printout of the Herald’s front page that Maggie had left laying on the passenger seat. She glanced back over it as she crossed the parking lot.

  By the time she reached the bus, all the passengers had disembarked and were headed off across the field or meandering over toward the farm stand. Wanda was the last one down the step and out through the folding door.

  She’d passed on the retro-tourist-guide outfit today and instead looked like a zookeeper, in khakis, a wide black belt, and an Aussie slouch hat with a leather chin strap, one side turned up against the crown. She saw Candy coming, crossed her arms, and waited.

  “Morning, Wanda,” Candy said as she approached.

  “Morning, Candy.” There was more than a touch of suspicion in her tone.

  Candy stopped a few feet away, cleared her throat, and continued. “I wonder if you’d mind if I asked you a few questions?”

  “Depends on what you’re asking.”

  Candy held up the printout. “I read the quote you gave to that reporter from Boston. The one where you said you thought there should be a wider investigation. I’m just wondering what you meant by that?”

  “You know exactly what it meant.”

  Candy scrunched up her face. “And what would that be?”

  Wanda frowned and waved a hand out toward High Field. “All these murders that have been going on. Something’s not right.”

  “In what way?”

  Wanda gave her an annoyed look, glanced around quickly to make sure they were alone, and lowered her voice. “You know what I mean. That article was right. We’re becoming the murder capital of Maine. There’s something going on—and I’m keeping my eye out for anything strange.”

  “Is that why you’re running these tours of yours? Keeping an eye out?”

  “Something like that,” Wanda said, nodding her head a little.

  “You’v
e done a lot of research for your tour, haven’t you?”

  Again, a look of suspicion flicked across Wanda’s gaze. “I did some reading and some day trips around the area, sure. Why do you ask?”

  Candy slid the printout of the Herald’s front page into her tote and pulled out the black-and-white photo of Emma’s grave. “Have you visited the cemeteries in the area?”

  “Of course. I’ve researched them all.”

  Candy held up the photo so Wanda would see it. “Have any idea where this particular tombstone might be?”

  Wanda glanced suspiciously at Candy before looking down at the photo. She leaned forward a little and focused in on it, finally reaching out for it, taking it in fingers with red-painted nails. She studied it for several moments before pointing at a spot on the photo with a pinky. “What’s it say down here?”

  She was pointing to the lower area of the tombstone. “I don’t know. It’s too blurred to read.”

  She looked up at Candy, handing the photo back to her. “Emma?”

  “That’s right.” Candy slid the photo into the tote bag.

  “Who’s she?”

  Candy wasn’t quite ready to answer. Instead, returning to the original subject, she asked, “So, have you seen the tombstone?”

  Wanda was silent for several long moments. “What if I have?”

  “You mean you have?” Candy’s voice rose in excitement.

  But her enthusiasm disappeared the next moment as Wanda gave her a smirk. “No, I didn’t say ‘I have.’ I said, ‘What if I have?’”

  “So you haven’t found it?”

  “I’m not saying I have and I’m not saying I haven’t.”

  Candy sighed. “Then what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying I might have seen it. I’m not sure. I’d have to check it out.”

  Again, Candy’s hope grew. “Where do you think you saw it?”

  “There’s only one place it could be.” Wanda tilted her head toward the bus. “Buy a ticket and I’ll show you.”

  Candy nodded. She’d planned on taking Wanda’s tour anyway. “Okay, so how much is it?”

  “For you, ten bucks.”

  “Ten bucks! But what about the discount you promised?”

  Wanda gave her a vengeful smile. “Lady, that is with the discount.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  The passengers were soon back on the bus, and Wanda drove off to the next stop, talking as she went. “As you may have noticed, we’re a little ahead of schedule,” she told her riders over the bus’s PA system, using a surprisingly pleasant and professional-sounding tone. “So as an added bonus, before we head to our final stop on the tour, I thought it might be fun to take a brief detour to one of Cape Willington’s hidden cemeteries. Who’s up for that?”

  There was some scattered applause and a few ragged cheers around the bus, prompting Wanda to continue. “Now this particular cemetery we’re headed to is located a few miles outside of town, off a little-known back road, among the ruins of an old settlement that existed there back in the eighteen hundreds.”

  As she talked, Wanda spun the steering wheel, and they turned left from the dirt farm lane onto the paved road, heading northwest, away from town.

  “Not many people know about it, but it was called Notch Town, because as you’ll see, it sits near a notch between two low hills separated by a stream. On an interesting side note, the fall color won’t be quite as wonderful in that area as it was a week or two ago, the last time I was up there, but it should still be a beautiful spot.”

  As they drove farther out of town, turning onto one of the narrow back roads that wound up through the cape, she continued, “This place we’re about to visit is mentioned in only one or two old histories of the town, which I found on a back shelf at the Cape Willington Historical Society while I was conducting research for an educational project with my son. We love doing historical research together. He’s such a smart kid, and it’s such a wonderful way for a mother and son to bond.”

  She went on to explain how she had found the old histories wedged behind several books on a back shelf, misplaced and forgotten years earlier. “I’m afraid I have to report that this sort of thing has happened several times up in the archives at the Keeper’s Quarters,” she told her passengers. “We’re still in the process of getting everything organized. But because I’ve been digging around so much, I’ve made a number of interesting discoveries, which you can always read about by visiting my community blog, the Cape Crusader,” she added, giving herself a plug. “It’s your best source for local news and events.”

  Sitting near the back of the bus, Candy knew some parts of Wanda’s speech were intended as digs at her, but she let them pass. The idea of finally tracking down Emma’s grave made her temporarily immune to minor slings and arrows.

  But in the end, the whole side trip turned out to be just another wild-goose chase, as the cemetery in question—a small plot of land surrounded by a rusted vine-covered iron fence, containing no more than a dozen gravestones in the midst of a few worn-down foundations—was not the one she sought.

  Wanda parked nearby and gave the passengers a few pointers before turning them loose to look around. She and Candy found a gate into the cemetery, and Wanda pointed to a tombstone in the corner. “If it’s any one of them, it’ll be that one.”

  It was certainly the right size and shape, with an arched top, and it looked to be even the right color—a dark smoky gray (though it was difficult to be certain of the tombstone’s color in the black-and-white photo). “I remembered seeing it on an exploratory trip out here a few weeks ago,” Wanda told her, “but I don’t recall the name on it.”

  The engraved name, as it turned out, read, ALBERT TILSBURY, B. 1857, D. 1925. BELOVED BY FAMILY AND FRIENDS.

  Candy turned away, disappointed. “It’s not the one.”

  “Then there’s nowhere else it can be,” Wanda told her, “at least not that I’ve seen. And I’ve been to every known cemetery on the cape. If it’s not that tombstone in the corner there, then I haven’t seen it, because no place else looks like that graveyard in the photo you showed me. Which leads me to think it’s not around here. You’re looking in the wrong place.”

  You’re looking in the wrong place.

  Those words echoed in Candy’s mind as they drove back toward town. Along the way, she stared out the window, lost in her thoughts, watching the late October scenery slide past her in all its fading glory.

  If Emma’s not buried in Cape Willington, then where is she?

  The answer, Candy thought dismally as the minibus pulled up in front of Sapphire Vine’s house on Gleason Street, was a simple yet discouraging one:

  The tombstone could be anywhere. Anywhere else in the state.

  Or anywhere else in the country.

  She was following a dead end.

  Wanda parked along the curb and, out of respect for the neighbors, didn’t let the passengers roam around at this stop. But she told the story of how Sapphire Vine, a former community columnist for the local newspaper and a onetime reigning Blueberry Queen, had been murdered in the front living room of her home, struck down in fury by an assailant wielding a red-handled hammer.

  Something about the story struck a nerve in Candy, and she rose suddenly from her seat, grabbed her tote bag, and made her way up the aisle, excusing herself to the passengers she bumped along the way. At the front, Wanda scowled and waved her back. “No passengers off at this stop. You’ll have to return to your seat.”

  “Wanda, I’m getting off. Open the door.”

  “The tour’s not over.”

  “It is for me.”

  They locked gazes for a few moments, but Wanda finally relented, after she realized that all the passengers were staring at them. “Oh, all right,” she said reluctantly, flipping the handle that opened the folding door. “But no reentry! Once you’re off, you’re off.”

  “Fair enough,” Candy said, and with a good-bye nod of her head, she walked dow
n the step and around the back of the bus. Wanda closed the door with a quick slap behind her.

  A few moments later, as Candy walked up onto the porch of Sapphire Vine’s old house, the minibus drove off with a snort of sound.

  Candy waited until it was around the corner and out of sight before she made her way down off the porch and around to the back of the house. When Sapphire was alive and living here, she always left a key outside, hidden on top of one of the rear window frames. A few years ago, Candy and Maggie had used that key to “break in” to Sapphire’s house to help solve the mystery of her death. They’d put it back when they’d locked the place up, and as far as Candy knew, no one had disturbed it since.

  So she wasn’t surprised to find it still there.

  Maggie had a key to the place, of course, but she was out at the pumpkin patch, and Candy had decided on an impulse, while listening to Wanda tell Sapphire’s story, that the clues she sought had to be here, hidden somewhere within the house that had once belonged to the former Blueberry Queen.

  She resolved to search it from top to bottom until she found what she sought.

  After unlocking the back door and replacing the key, she dropped her tote bag on the kitchen table and glanced at her watch. It was a little past one in the afternoon. She figured she’d take a couple of hours and dig around, and then give Maggie a call, asking her to swing by in the Jeep to pick her up.

  She started back at the very top of the house, in the secret hideaway Sapphire had established for herself beneath the home’s peaked roof, and retraced the steps she and Maggie had made two days earlier, searching back through all the boxes, shelves, drawers, cubbies, files, and anywhere else she could think to look for the missing diary. She double-checked each book, flipping through its pages to make sure Sapphire hadn’t cut out a hiding spot inside one of them.

  She also paid attention to the book titles, looking for any clues there. She found a lot of romances and mysteries, in both hardback and paperback, as well as a decent collection of historical novels by popular authors.