The Pumpkin Man Read online

  “Stop it,” she told herself, shrugging off the memory. She had neither of her parents to lean on now, and it was pointless to get sentimental about family heritage when she had a job to do. Family cleanup. She was all the family there was left.

  Someone had killed her dad. Sliced him up like a Cuisinart. Left what was left bleeding on the hallway floor while they walked away . . . with his head. Now she was here to put away the pieces of his life. Because someone else had already put away his pieces. The investigation and the funeral were all over, and now it was just the crap he’d left behind that was hers to sort and salvage before it was thrown into a Dumpster out back.

  Death made people respectful—for a day or two. Now Jennica needed to remove the final traces of her father so that the landlord could put up the FOR RENT sign.

  She sighed and stepped to the dresser. With the swipe of an arm and a plastic bag, things began to disappear. She found it almost impossible to even look at what she was throwing away: business cards and lost buttons and receipts—clues to a life she had never been part of. She found a stash of porno magazines in his closet and grimaced; the cover photo featured two blondes in fishnet, their hands crisscrossed to cover their private bits. The discovery made her feel icky inside. Of course he’d looked at naked girls; intellectually she acknowledged that. But she didn’t really want evidence of her dad’s kink. The pile slipped unopened into the bag, but the flagrant pink of a nipple flashed out at her from a glossy page inside.

  Someone from Goodwill was coming later for his clothes, so Jennica ignored everything on the closet hangers and reached above to the dusty things piled on his closet shelves. Old tax returns and their accompanying receipts bulged from folders held together by string. She hesitated at tossing those, leafing through some of the forms before finally shaking her head and throwing them atop the trashed porn. His life was over and his will was filed. There wasn’t any need for credit card receipts.

  She pulled down a shoe box that clouded the air with motes of dust when she lifted the lid and found dozens of letters and postcards and photographs. Pulling out a random photo, she saw an attractive brunette in a yellow sundress holding a child. The woman squinted at the sun, and Jennica recognized the woman’s thin nose. It reminded her of the one she saw in the mirror every morning amid pale freckles. Just as the tousled dark curls trailing across the woman’s mouth looked personally familiar. And the dark, wide eyes.

  “Mom,” Jennica whispered. Her eyes welled with tears. The little girl in the woman’s arms was her, maybe three years old, still chubby with baby fat, legs covered in white tights and her hair still sunny brown; it had darkened in grade school. She stared at the photo for a long time, leaning her thighs against the bed and thinking of those long-ago days when Mom and Dad had been together, and for a little while, at least, they’d been a typical suburban family.

  Jennica cleared her throat and shook her head. Then she shoved the photo in the box and went back to the closet. There’d be time for tearful, bitter trips down memory lane later. Right now, she needed to just get through.

  She went back to the closet and filed a bunch of odds and ends worth keeping in a large box: binoculars, a Scrabble board, an old 35mm camera, a zither . . . She wondered if anyone at her school would even know what a zither was, but she remembered picking out melodies on its taut fine strings when she was a kid.

  Pulling down a brown varnished box with a golden cross on its lid, she frowned. What the heck? Inside was a pair of candles, a bottle of holy water and a small pamphlet titled Last Rites. She’d never known her father to be religious, so why he had an antique bit of religious history like this tucked away she had no idea. She put it back in the box.

  Returning to the closet, she saw one string hung from the bare bulb. She pulled it, dousing the light. She wasn’t touching his old shoes and dress shirts. The closet was done.

  She next checked all the drawers of the oak bureau and tossed the last few pairs of musty shirts and old underwear into a garbage bag, which she left by the closet door for Goodwill. The nightstand was filled with old paperbacks, mostly adventure novels: James Bond, The Executioner, Doc Savage. Jennica smiled. Her dad’s tastes hadn’t changed since she was a kid. Or maybe he just hadn’t read since she was a kid. She put a few of the beat-up paperbacks in her “save” box, liking the idea of remembering her dad by some of his old favorite things, even if she’d never read them.

  There was an old leather book on top of the nightstand, no title on the front. She opened the cover. The inside page was a maze of faded bronze filigree, the paper yellowed and blotted. But the next page revealed the book’s purpose. Line after line of thin, slanted handwriting filled the page. At the very bottom it was signed Meredith.

  Jennica raised her eyebrows. This must have been her aunt’s journal. Meredith had died just before the holidays, and her dad had flown out to California and done exactly the same thing Jenn was doing now: sorting through what was left. He must have been reading this just before he died. She shivered involuntarily at the thought. Weird. Or at least sad. She took the journal and set it by her purse in the living room.

  A pile of boxes waited by the front door for her to take to the car. A coffeemaker, some pots and pans and containers she could use from his kitchen, a few lamps, a DVD player and a couple dozen movies from the living room. A bunch of framed photos and posters. Some candles and a nude silver statue of a mermaid from the shelf above the TV. An entire box of lightbulbs and extension cords from the hall closet. The novels and other memory trinkets from his bedroom. She didn’t want most of his furniture. It was mainly cheap stuff, and not her taste. He hadn’t had much use for expensive wood or antiques. She didn’t know where he’d spent most of his time, but it probably hadn’t been here. At least, she hoped not. The sad part was, she didn’t really know.

  Jennica stared at the boxes and frowned. So, this was all that fifty-odd years of life boiled down to: a few boxes of knickknacks and worn-out junk. And blood on the floor.

  The thought came unbidden, and she couldn’t help but look at the spot on the floor where she knew he’d lain dying, bleeding, alone with his killer.

  “I hope they catch you,” she said to herself, but the room seemed to hear. The whisper seemed to bounce off the silent walls, and Jennica suddenly felt strange. This empty space was not her sanctuary. Not her home. She was an intruder on whatever mysteries remained hidden in the shadows behind the doors. She would never know what had occurred here in the dark. And she didn’t want to.

  She bent to pick up the first box to take to the car when something caught her attention out of the corner of her eye, something lying against the baseboard beneath the decorative, thin hall table. Setting her box back down, she knelt. Then she felt around beneath the bottom shelf until her fingers came in contact with a cool bit of . . . something. She closed her hand and dragged it out into the light.

  It was shriveled. One side was blackened with mold. On the other, its skin looked dusky orange and warty. The desiccated triangle looked like something left over from Halloween. It looked like the shard of a pumpkin.

  What it was doing lying against the baseboard of her dad’s apartment, she had no idea. Nor, at this point, did Jennica particularly care. Raising an eyebrow, she flicked it back onto the floor and rubbed her hands on her jeans. Then she began the strenuous task of marching more than a dozen boxes down five flights of stairs and through the uncaring torrents of winter rain to her car.

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  Simon Tobler wasn’t afraid of the dark; he was afraid of the people who walked in the dark, twisting its cloak around them for their own ends. That’s why he kept a baseball bat under his bed. Not that there was a lot of crime in River’s End, California, population 452. There had been that double murder in 2004 that some people thought was a final reprise from the Zodiac Killer, but in general the loudest sound out of River’s End was the barking of the sea lions from the estuary at the end of the Russ
ian River.

  Dark was a part of River’s End, though. The night came down early on the edge of the ocean; the sound of the tide breaking against the black rocks of the shore was one of the few sounds you could hear after six p.m. That and the occasional rev of an engine passing on Route 1, most likely hurrying back toward shelter in Bodega Bay or the highway to San Francisco. There were no streetlights here. And at two a.m., it felt as if there were no human beings for miles, though Simon knew that the Perrys were just a few hundred meters down the road. Probably snoring comfortably in their beds. They had a really pretty daughter, Jeda, about fifteen, whom Simon liked to watch when she came down the gravel trail in the late afternoon after school. She’d take the junk mail from the mailbox and close the wooden tractor gate behind her before running up the rutted path to the old farmhouse on the top of the ridge. Simon wondered if she had a boyfriend, and if she was really as innocent as those thin, fast-moving legs looked.

  These things all crossed Simon’s brain as he, on the way to the bathroom, creaked across the center floorboard of the hallway in the middle of the night. Usually that’s where such idle thoughts were left. But tonight, as Simon released the night’s recycled Anchor Steam into the toilet, he thought more about the Perrys. He wondered about the manner in which Erin, the thin little blonde mother, preferred her thick-hewn husband Clint to bed her. They seemed a physical mismatch, her so slight to her husband’s bulk. He wondered whether Jeda had ever been kissed by a boy, and if she had, if she’d liked it. He wondered what it would be like to walk through their house in the dark and look in their bedrooms—

  That’s when he heard it: a scraping sound. He shook himself off, pulled up his boxers and tiptoed into the hall. The noise came from the spare bedroom; steady, fast and repetitive. As if someone was dragging a piece of metal across the floor again and again and again.

  Simon backed into the master bedroom and reached down under the bed without taking his eyes off the shadowy hall. His hand easily found the smooth wood of the bat, and he brought it up into a swinger’s rest on his shoulder. Then he moved again toward the bath and the spare bedroom.

  Screeeeep, scraaaaaape. Screeeeep, scraaaaaape. The noise continued.

  Simon’s chest pounded. Moving his feet was like pushing a concrete boulder up a very steep hill; they did not want to go. A voice in the back of his head screamed, Duh! When you hear the killer in the house, you don’t go chase them, you get out! But the logical half of Simon’s brain insisted there was no killer in the spare bedroom. More likely, a squirrel or raccoon had somehow gotten in from the attic.

  The hardest thing that Simon Tobler ever did was to round that corner at two a.m. to the spare room on the second floor of his tiny house in River’s End, California. It was also nearly the last.

  He flipped the light switch on the wall, and the overhead fixture threw a blaze of light across the blue comforter-covered spare bed. It was what lay on the bed that puzzled Simon, however. His eyebrow rose, and he thought hard about exactly where or how he had come to acquire a large orange pumpkin.

  The gourd weighed down the center of the bed. Simon stepped forward, bat ready. From somewhere nearby, the scraping sound still came, like a knife moving back and forth across a file. Screeeeep, scraaaaaape.

  Frowning at the pumpkin, Simon stepped slowly around the bed toward the small door that led into the eaves. His thumb was on the handle when it moved of its own accord. The small door pulled inward, and a bone white hand appeared and gripped the door frame. A figure stepped out of the shadows.

  Simon sprang back. He caught a flash of white teeth before his eyes focused on the figure’s long curved blade. Then Simon made the biggest mistake of his life. It’s not as if he wasn’t prepared. He had kept his bat at the ready for over twenty years beneath his bed in preparation for any stranger who broke into his private haven. He held the bat now.

  Instead of using it, he looked at the figure and said, “You? How did you get—”

  He never completed the sentence. Instead, a flash of silver cut the air and met Simon’s throat, and he fell to the ground gargling blood. Two snow-white hands reached past him and grasped the pumpkin, pulling it closer, positioning it near the edge of the bed near Simon’s still-twitching body. Without saying a word, the figure held his knife aloft for just a moment, as if the motion held some power, some solemn ceremony. Then it began to carve.

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  “It’s Friday, girl, and you are NOT staying home again!”

  Jennica stopped in the middle of the high school hallway, reached up and gently pried the fingers of her best friend, roommate and fellow teacher, Kirstin Rizzo, from her shoulders. “I have papers to grade,” she insisted. “I’ve gotten way behind with everything over the past couple weeks. I need this weekend to catch up.”

  Kirstin dipped her head until long blonde strands fell and obscured her eyes—partly. You could still see the intensity of those ice blue irises, and the expression on her lips left no doubt of her humor. “No,” she corrected. “You need to relax and put the past behind you. You’re coming with me.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Jenn promised, though anyone could tell from her tone that she would most likely be thinking about it from the comfort of her couch, her pen marking grades on papers.

  Kirstin rolled her eyes. “The Tender Trap needs you. There are lonely boys there. You should come and pick out one to take care of. Boys make nice pets, you know.”

  Jenn raised an eyebrow. “I’m sick of trying to housebreak one. It’s not worth the mess.”

  “Well, you can always just go back to their kennel,” Kirstin suggested. “Sometimes they even try to cook breakfast!”

  “‘Try’ is no doubt the operative word. The last thing I want the morning after is a plate of runny eggs.”

  “You are soooo not open to fun,” Kirstin pouted. “Turn around a minute?”

  “Why?” Jenn asked.

  “Just do it.”

  Reluctantly, Jennica turned.

  “Uh-huh. I see it now.”

  “See what?” Jenn asked.

  “The stick up your ass.”

  “I’m walking away,” Jenn answered, and she kept her word.

  Kirstin’s voice followed. “Friday night. The Tender Trap. Boys older than sixteen. Be there!”

  The sixth-period bell rang, and Jennica hurried to take her spot at the front of room 231. Her classroom. Filled with sixteen-year-olds. A smile touched the edge of her lips. It wasn’t so long ago that she’d been sitting at a desk like the thirty-five seats spread out before her. She’d doodled boys’ names in notebooks and gotten caught skimming sex passages in Judy Blume’s Wifey, which someone behind her had conveniently highlighted with yellow marker. Back then, she’d never thought for a moment that she’d be “Ms. Murphy” at the lectern of a similar room. She had been the mousey girl two seats from the back. The one that the teacher always called on when she didn’t know the answer. She’d been the one that the boys teased, but never kissed. Now, here she was standing at the head of the class. And she was still shaken by the sound of the bell when it rang and she was outside the classroom instead of in.

  Sixth period was study hall, which meant she could catch up on paperwork. Maybe she would go out with Kirstin if she got far enough.

  “Okay, take your seats,” she called. “Midterms are coming up, and I think a few of you might want to really use this time to study for once. Trust me, you need it!”

  “Ms. Murphy?” called Rudy Rogers. The kid looked like a thirty-year-old linebacker with a bad case of acne. Inside, she cringed. The kid never gave her a break. He was always messing around.

  “Yes, Rudy?”

  “What I need is a hall pass. I gotta pee.”

  She smiled sweetly. “No, you don’t.”

  “Oh, but I really think I—Oh.” He gave a look of horrified surprise as something splashed onto the white tile floor near his desk. Behind him, kids started laughing. Ben
eath his chair, a yellow puddle spread near his beat-up gym shoes.

  “Oh, grosssssss!” Natalie Sopher yelled from a seat behind him.

  Rudy looked up with a mortified expression that kept threatening to break into hysterical laughter. “Too late,” he gasped.

  Jenn stifled the urge to laugh herself, and instead scribbled a note on a small yellow pad. Then she ripped off the sheet and held it out. “It’s amazing how you could have an accident like that and not actually get your pants wet,” she said. “You want to go to the bathroom? Fine. Be back in five minutes with paper towels to clean that up.”

  He grinned and started out of the room, but she stopped him.

  “Rudy?”

  “Yes, Ms. Murphy?”

  “Take your trash with you, would you?” She pointed to the overturned lemonade can tucked behind the leg of his chair. “The rest of you hit the books,” she added, and settled down to grade the fourth-period geography tests.

  It didn’t take long before she was shaking her head in frustration. How did you grow up in Illinois and not know that the capital was Springfield? And who would have guessed that Ontario was a country in South America? After a few more answers of the same caliber, Jennica pushed the tests aside and reached into her bag for the worn leather book she’d rescued from her dad’s.

  She’d been reading through her aunt’s journal a couple pages at a time. It was strange to read the words of a dead woman, especially one who was related to her, one who had held her as a baby but whom she’d never really known. Meredith had moved out to California—someplace north of San Francisco—right after college, and had only returned to the Midwest on a few occasions for brief visits. Jennica had always gotten the impression her dad disapproved, but he’d rarely spoken of her. The more she read of her aunt’s journal, the more she saw why. His sister had been a witch!

  She probably wasn’t the usual “black hat and broomstick” kind of witch, Jennica figured, not like kids thought of them, but Meredith Perenais’s journal was not your typical “Today I got my oil changed and the kid at the supermarket asked me for my ID even though I’m fifty” kind of thing. She did note some of the more mundane things she did, but most of her activities seemed to revolve around going out to the estuary where the Russian River met the ocean to meditate, or to gather a certain type of fish scales, or to climb the surrounding hills in search of some rare herb. At the end of such passages, she would offer recipes for the materials she’d been gathering.