The Pumpkin Man (18 page)

His arms drew her tight. His mouth moved to meet hers and their tongues touched, first in furtive exploration and then
with more energy. He began to move her step by step backward toward the bed, but just before they both fell onto the mattress, she pushed him back a step, and took a deep breath.

“Wait,” she said, and fished into her jeans pocket. At last she came out with a key and walked to the door to the basement. “I'd really like to be sure this is locked tonight,” she explained. Then she dropped the key on the dresser and with both hands stripped off her T-shirt.

She let the garment fall to the floor and turned to hug him. His hands slipped up the smooth skin of her back, and he kissed her again. She felt strangely calm as his hands fumbled with the clasp of her bra. Usually when she was with a guy she grew icy cold with fear, worried that she wouldn't be what he wanted, worried that he would be disappointed when he saw her for what she really was—when he realized her breasts weren't as full as he liked, when he realized that her hips were too wide. With Nick, she didn't feel that. She felt easy in a way she'd never been before.

His knuckles slid inside the waistband of her jeans and then back out to pull the lip of her belt through its metal clasp. Jenn only smiled and whispered, “No locks here.”

He finished unbuttoning her jeans and pushed them down to the floor. Then he slipped his palms into the back of her panties, cupped her body tight against his.

“No,” he breathed between kisses. “The door is definitely open.”

January 1, 1986

It's a new year. A new chance to try to undo what I've done. To take back—

No, you can never take back what you've given. I wish there was a time travel machine so I could go back and change things, but that's unfortunately more of a fantasy than any stories of ghosts and ghouls. There
are
ghosts, and I hope to never meet a ghoul.

George is lost to me. But I will bring him back. If it's the last thing I do, I'll bring him back.

Morning light streamed across Nick's bare shoulder, and Jenn smiled as she gazed at his skin.

She pulled the sheets close and shifted her body just slightly, pressed herself against his hip. He looked to be deep asleep, his mouth slack against her pillow, and she didn't want to wake him. But the memories of his touch, his gentle pressure against her in the darkness just a few hours before made her crave to feel his skin against hers again.

As she slipped an arm across his shoulders, he stirred and one eye trembled open. It closed again, briefly, before opening wider. For a second he looked disoriented and surprised.

“Hey,” he whispered.

“Hey back.”

“What's for breakfast?”

“Cherry pie?” she offered, snorting as she said it.

Something soft and yet hard pressed against her inner thigh, and she levered herself closer, pressing it tighter to her most secret flesh and—

The morning was broken by a ghastly scream.

“That was Kirstin,” Jenn gasped, rolling away.

She tossed off the covers and bolted from bed, grabbing her robe from the back of the bedroom door on the way. Behind her, Nick leaped to his feet and pulled on his jeans, neglecting to even look for his underwear. The scream came again, but this time it sounded more like a cry of anguish than one of fear or pain.

Jenn ran down the hall to Kirstin's room and rapped once at the door with her fist, not waiting for an answer before turning the knob. She pushed the door open and stepped inside to see Kirstin in bed, holding a blood-spattered sheet over her naked chest. Tears streamed down her face and her mouth hung open, and she sucked in air with great hyperventilating gasps. Lying next to her was the body of her boyfriend.

The body. Not the head. Jenn saw the ragged wound of Brian's neck and the gore spattering the hair of his broad chest, but his head and face were gone. The sheets were stained a deep and still-wet red.

Jenn stepped around the bed to hug her roommate from behind. Both girls stared helpless at the corpse.

“Sweet fuckin' Jesus,” Nick said as he entered the room. “Brian,” he whispered, and then looked hard at the sobbing Kirstin. “What the fuck happened?”

Kirstin shook her head. “I don't know,” she said. “We fell asleep together. . . . I know he got up at some point to go to the bathroom. When I woke up . . .”

Jenn felt something cold and slimy against her toes. Looking down, she saw she'd stepped on the fleshy part of a carved triangle. A small jumble of other pumpkin pieces were piled just beyond at the foot of the bed. Their orange skins were again smeared darker. Blood.

“Get out of the bed,” Jenn whispered.

“But I'm not wearing—”

“I don't think that really matters right now.”

She helped Kirstin up and took her to the bathroom. Nick stood silent by the bed, pulling back the sheet to view the full remains of his friend. He didn't know whether to hate Kirstin and Jenn or be afraid for them; for the moment all he knew was that his best friend was gone. Deluged by memory, he had no problem with letting the tears flow.

Jenn helped Kirstin get dressed and then dragged Nick out of the bedroom. She sat them both down in the front room and put on a pot of coffee. Then she called 911. The response was not what she'd expected.

“River's End Police Department,” said an old woman on the other end of the line.

“Hello,” Jenn said. “There's been a murder.”

Instead of immediately asking the circumstance, the woman paused. “Another?” Then she recovered and asked for the details.

Ten minutes later, two officers arrived. Kirstin hadn't fully stopped crying. Jenn answered their knock.

“Captain Harlan Jones,” the taller of the two men announced, extending a hand as she opened the door. He looked much older than his partner, his face lined by decades of salt breeze. His grip was strong. “We're with Sonoma County, but we handle calls for River's End, Jenner and a couple other towns near here.”

“Officer Barkiewicz,” the younger officer said. He didn't extend his hand but instead stepped past Jenn, tilting his head quickly from side to side, as if he intended to take in every detail of the house in a moment.

Jenn introduced herself and then pointed to Kirstin, who wiped her eyes. “That's my friend Kirstin. We just moved here from Chicago a couple weeks ago.”

Nick stepped forward. “And I'm Nick Feldman. My friend
Brian Tamarack and I were up here visiting for the weekend from San Francisco.”

The younger officer nodded and looked toward the kitchen, as if expecting someone else. “And Mr. Tamarack is . . . ?”

“Dead,” Nick finished.

The younger cop blanched, clearly embarrassed. His captain took over. “Can you tell us what happened? From the beginning?”

“There's not much to tell,” Kirstin spoke up, sniffing. “We went to sleep together last night, and when I woke up . . .”

“Were you fighting? Did you have any words before bed?” Officer Barkiewicz asked.

“No,” Kirstin snapped. “If you must know, we were fucking like animals. And it was
amazing.
”

The younger cop shut up.

“Did you hear anything? Noises in the house during the night?” the captain asked. “Where was his body found?”

Kirstin shook her head, tears welling up in her eyes again. “In the bedroom. And, no. We were wiped. Yesterday was a long day. After we had sex, we both pretty much crashed. At one point, I know he got up to go to the bathroom—”

“Did you hear him come back?”

Kirstin shook her head. “No. I didn't. The next thing I knew, I was waking up and I felt something wet on my arm . . .”

“His body was in bed with you?” The captain looked surprised as Kirstin nodded.

“His body was,” Nick spoke up. “But not his head.”

The captain sighed. “Let's take a look.”

Jenn led them down the short hall to the bedroom. At the doorway, Officer Barkiewicz held up a hand. “The fewer of us that walk through the scene, the better,” he announced.

“We've all already been in there,” Jenn said.

The captain entered, hunched down at the foot of the bed
and picked up a pumpkin shard. “I don't think they're going to mess up the evidence, Scott. We've seen this before.”

He stood up and walked around the side of the bed to get closer to the corpse. Silently gritting his teeth, he knelt and stared at the wounds of the neck. They were clean. The flesh had been cut by an extremely sharp knife. The spinal column was notched with fine shavings of bone; a knife had sawed wrong once or twice before finally biting deep.

“He wasn't killed here in bed with you,” Jones announced to Kirstin. He pointed to the walls and floor near the bed. “If he had, there would be a lot more mess.”

“Then where?” she whispered. “And how did he end up back in bed?”

The captain shrugged. “Maybe he was killed outside? Maybe somewhere else in the house. We'll need to do a full search.” He looked at Barkiewicz. “Did Edie call the coroner?”

The junior cop nodded.

“All right,” said the captain. “Let's clear the room.”

They went back to the front. As they waited for the coroner, the captain asked for more details about who they all were and what they had done the previous day.

“Well, for one, we found out that this place has a direct line to the cemetery,” Nick volunteered.

“What do you mean?” Jones asked.

“The basement of this house,” Nick explained. “We went down to check it out and found an old passageway that leads under the backyard. It ends inside a mausoleum. When we went up another set of stairs to go out, we found ourselves in a private cemetery.”

The captain nodded. “This is an old house,” he said. “A lot of the homes of the early settlers of this area had their own private cemeteries. When the first people came to live here, they were the only folks in the area, for miles sometimes. So they kept their families close.”

“Do most of them have a direct passage from their master bedrooms? Or pumpkin scattered everywhere?” Nick asked.

The captain shook his head. “No, I'd guess not.”

There was a knock at the door, and Officer Barkiewicz got up to answer. He let in the county medical examiner and a special crime scene investigator who'd driven over from Santa Rosa. Both were older men, tall and thin. The examiner, who shook the captain's hand, introduced himself to Jenn and her friends as Cody Dresner. He carried a black briefcase, presumably filled with the tools of his trade, but was in plainclothes: dark Dockers and a pale lemon polo. The cop from Santa Rosa, Officer Behrens, was in full uniform. Jenna wondered what some of the symbols stitched to his shirt actually meant.

“Show them the scene,” the captain instructed Barkiewicz, and the three men disappeared down the hall. Then he turned back to Jenn. “I'd like to know more about the pumpkins you found.”

Jenn shrugged. “We can show you. The whole reason we went down into the basement in the first place was because I woke up a couple days ago and found pieces of pumpkin there at the foot of my bed. That's when I realized that the door in my room was unlocked. We were worried someone had come in through it.”

“What did you do with the pumpkin?” the captain asked.

Jenn shrugged. “I threw it out.”

“Are they still in your garbage?”

She thought a minute and nodded. “Yeah. We haven't taken the trash out the past couple days.”

“I'd like to get a sample before I leave,” the captain said. “But right now let's take a look at the basement.”

Jenn picked up a couple of candles from the fireplace mantel to light their way, but the captain shook his head. “Wait,” he said. “I have a flashlight in the car.”

He returned with a long, black-tubed flashlight, and she led the way to her bedroom and retrieved the basement door key
from her dresser. This time, she easily found the string tucked beneath the old banister and pulled it to light their way.

When they reached the basement floor, Kirstin pointed at the jars filled with blood and frogs and fingers. “There's a lot of gross stuff in those.”

The captain nodded, as if he expected nothing less, and simply said, “Meredith.” He picked one off the shelf and twisted it so that its contents moved gently inside. He aimed his flashlight at the jar, and a handful of eyeballs looked back at him, swirling in the silent maelstrom he'd created. He set the jar back without a word.

Jenn led them quickly to the end of the basement and the passageway under the backyard. Captain Jones aimed his light at the stonework and nodded.

“This looks pretty old,” he said.

“But why was it built in the first place?” Nick asked.

The captain shrugged. He had no answer for anything that the Perenais family did. They had lived on this hill for as long as River's End existed, and rumors of their strange activities were legend before Meredith ever came to town.

With Jones's flashlight, they walked much quicker through the narrow passage than they had the day before with candles, and soon they arrived in the crypt. Jenn unlocked the door and they filed through. The captain immediately walked to the coffin that dominated the room. While light from outside streamed in through the outer door, he still used his flashlight to look closely at the coffin and the plaque in front. He knelt and nodded.

“This is Meredith's husband,” he announced. “They used to call him the Pumpkin Man.”

“Your uncle,” Kirstin whispered to Jenn.

The captain reached out for one of the pumpkins and touched the greenish gray stub at its tip. The gourd was extremely large. “They look like someone picked them from a field,” he said. “But these aren't real.”