The Pumpkin Man (33 page)

“No,” Nick said. “But a Pumpkin Man will.”

Emmaline's face was unreadable. “Perhaps.”

The conversation paused. Jenn looked sideways at Nick, who still appeared to be eyeing the dark line of the older woman's cleavage. When his eyes flicked her way, he smiled—a little falsely, she thought.

“Some people in town obviously thought the Pumpkin Man killer was my uncle,” Jenn said. “Your brother. Do you think that's true?”

Emmaline shrugged. “If his body did the killing, George wasn't in it at the time,” she said.

“What? What do you mean?” Nick asked.

“George was shy and quiet. He would never have hurt a fly. He hardly seemed to belong in the family, actually. The rest of us . . . well, let's just say the Perenais line is strong-willed and outspoken.” She smiled and sipped her drink again. “George? He was the quiet one. Artistic. That's how he got into pumpkin carving. When he was a boy, he was always painting and sculpting something.”

The woman paused and looked around the room, pointed to a clay figurine on the fireplace mantel: a man and woman merged at the groin but bending backward away from each other with their hands and heads. “That's one of his pieces there,” she said. “He would never have killed anyone. Now if Meredith got him possessed, I suppose it's possible.”

“Possessed?” Jenn repeated.

“Your aunt was very interested in talking to spirits,” Emmaline explained. “She used a witchboard quite often and tried to seek the counsel of spirits. But, talking to the dead is dangerous business. I warned her of that many times.”

“How did she get into that stuff?” Jenn asked. “I remember meeting her when I was little. She seemed normal to me then.”

“How? Look around you,” Emmaline said. “This house is filled with books on magic. My family has always been a center for the mystical; the house has always been a lodestone for people with such interests. Townies always knew you could come to the Perenaises and pay for simple charms and spells, they knew it long before your aunt. As woman of the house, Meredith took on that responsibility. She wanted it.”

“But how did she learn? Who taught her?”

“I did,” Emmaline admitted. “Some. Other things she learned from books or came to on her own. It's not exact, magic. Much of what people call sorcery is simply learning to invoke your will on the unseen. There's no recipe for that. And some people simply don't have the knack. But . . . your aunt was a natural.”

“Would you be able to teach me?” Jenn asked.

Nick glanced up. “Are you crazy?”

“No,” Jenn said. “It seems like a prerequisite to living here.”

He rolled his eyes and shook his head. Emmaline looked surprised herself.

“If you have any of your aunt's affinity, then yes, I'm sure I could. But I wouldn't recommend it. Magic isn't something to be trifled with. It's a lifelong study. Your aunt came to it late, already an adult, and I'm afraid it ultimately ruined her. And if George truly was the Pumpkin Man killer . . . well, then, she ruined him as well. Stay away from this stuff. For your own good and for the good of everyone you love.”

As Emmaline looked pointedly at Nick, a timer went off in the kitchen. Jenn jumped up and said, “I think dinner's about ready.” She darted into the kitchen to check.

Nick found himself alone with Emmaline.

“Have you found the witchboard?” the woman asked. She was staring hard at him.

Nick hesitated, not knowing if he should admit to it. Finally, he nodded.

“Has she used it?” Emmaline's eyes were piercing. She eyed him over the lip of her bloodred glass as she waited for his response. Again, he nodded.

“That's what I feared,” Emmaline said. “Did someone answer?”

“Yes,” Nick said.

“Was it Meredith?”

“That's what it claimed,” he said. “But it threatened that we were all going to die.”

“Using the board only brings you to the attention of things that want to climb back into this world,” Emmaline said. “By using it, one puts oneself in the spotlight. It's like painting yourself pink and walking through the streets: everyone looks at you. They can't help it. And the things that look . . . well, great danger awaits.”

“Great,” Nick said. “I've always wanted to be pink.”

Emmaline didn't smile.

From the kitchen, Jenn announced, “Dinner's ready!”

Nick leaped up, eager for the interruption, but Emmaline didn't rise. She gave him one final look and said, “Make her go home if you care about her. Make her leave this house—tomorrow, before it's too late.”

“That was delicious,” Emmaline said after sopping up the last bit of gravy with a crust of Italian bread.

She was a font of local history, it seemed. The trio had spent a half hour talking about mashed potatoes, the early sunsets and most of all the history of the River's End library, which oddly enough had been born out of a shipwreck just up the coast in Delilah that left behind two crates of wet but otherwise usable books. One of River's End's founders had brought those books back and started a loaning library out of his home. When he died, he left the house and all of the books to the town.

Jenn smiled. “Thanks. It was my dad's recipe. I'm amazed we didn't all get to be two hundred and fifty pounds growing up the way he cooked. I mean, he didn't drain the grease when he fried bacon up for a recipe, he put the rest of the food in right on top of it.”

Emmaline laughed. “I think the most common spell people wanted from your aunt was something to help them lose weight. You'd think it would have been something to help them find true love, or a potion like that, but no, people are always concerned with their looks. Vanity.” She shook her head.

“What exactly did Meredith do for them?” Jenn asked.

Emmaline's face was stern. “I'm sure she mixed some hot peppers and the ground-up bones of something foul and told them to put it in their refrigerator.”

“Would that work?”

“That's the kind of curiosity that got your aunt in trouble,” Emmaline replied.

“Well, I can't help but be curious,” Jenn said. “There's some kind of supernatural serial killer that's been stalking me for the past two months. My aunt had something to do with magic, and so I'd kind of like to know what. It seems like the best way to protect myself.”

“Getting away from this house would be a good start,” Emmaline announced. “The evil draws its power from here.”

“That didn't stop it from coming to Chicago and killing my dad,” Jenn complained. “And leaving signs for me as well. The Pumpkin Man—supernatural or not—was in my apartment just before I flew out here. There were pieces of pumpkin at the foot of my bed! I'm not safe anywhere.”

Emmaline opened her mouth to say something but then thought better of it. There was an uncomfortable silence at the table until Nick broke it.

“I'm taking her to San Francisco in a couple days, but the last time we were there her best friend vanished. We . . . we'd like to think she just wandered off, but that doesn't seem very likely. We think the Pumpkin Man probably came for her. So, if you know of a way to keep Jenn safe, tell me. Even if it's that she never comes back to this place again. I want to protect her, and I'll do whatever I have to do.”

Jennica looked at Nick in shock and happiness. He'd just said the words of someone who genuinely cared. Not that she hadn't realized he cared, but in some ways she'd felt like maybe he'd been staying with her out of pity. This sounded very much like love. He'd do
anything?

“We have to stop the Pumpkin Man,” Jenn told Emmaline. “How do we do that? It sounds like you don't want me to follow in my aunt's footsteps, but how can I protect myself if I don't? Running away just isn't going to work.”

Emmaline stared at her. Finally she said, “I don't know, because I don't know what Meredith did to bring him here. But I do believe this is a supernatural being and not a serial killer, and I promise I will try to find a way to bind him and keep him from hurting you. But . . . promise me that you'll leave here no matter what. This house rests on generations of darkness. So long as you are here, you are vulnerable to the pull of that history. If you stay, you will become a Perenais just as your aunt did. You'll become everything bad that I barely escaped. I cannot caution you enough.”

The heat of summer was coming; he could feel it in the air. Not that it was that hot yet, but as the twilight descended Scott Barkiewicz could taste the coming warmth. It tasted fine. River's End would never be a beach town, like so many places along the coast to the south, but he had been here many times in the summer, and he enjoyed the heat of the sun mixed with the salt air and the privacy of life in a small town. Read: miles of sand and blue water all to yourself.

Driving along Route 1, Scott drank in the air. He had just done a circuit of River's End, looking for teens getting into trouble or other problems, then took a drive up the coast. Now he was heading back to the station. Patrols in the tiny town were perfunctory for the most part, but they still had to be done. That's what taxes were paid for. Taxes that paid for his supper.

The tiny police station was quiet as he walked in. Silent like a tomb. Well, Scott could hear the old clock on the wall ticking away the seconds, so maybe he was being melodramatic. But where was Captain Jones?

Through the small front office he walked, past three empty desks, and switched on the lamp on his own. The light was on in the captain's office, he saw, so he crossed the room to look inside. Jones was there.

The captain was sitting in his chair, staring out the window. The case files for the DeVries and Smith murders were open on his desk. Scott recognized the crime scene photos, even if the bodies were unrecognizable. It's amazing how much of a
person's identity was wrapped up in his face. And when the head was missing . . .

“Captain?” he asked.

Jones started. “I didn't hear you come in.”

“All's quiet out on the street.”

“Mmmm,” the captain answered. “I don't think that it's going to stay that way.”

Scott got a whiff of alcohol.
What the hell?
he thought. That wasn't like the captain at all. Lax, maybe. Tolerant, yes. A drunk? No.

“What's the matter?”

“The Pumpkin Man is back,” Jones said.

“Yeah, he's been back for months,” Scott reminded him. “And it's high time we trapped him and put him behind bars. I wish they would have caught him and locked him up twenty-five years ago, so we weren't cleaning up the mess today!”

“I don't think there's anything more we could have done the first time around,” Jones said, turning to stare at him. His eyes were bloodshot. “And now, something's different. He's broken the pattern. He's not killing kids at Halloween now. And he's not just killing parents of the kids he killed in the past. He killed Meredith's brother in Chicago. He killed a kid from San Francisco last week. Now apparently he's taken Jennica Murphy's friend from Chicago. I don't know how to even look for where he's going to strike next.”

“Well, that's the challenge in investigating a string of murders,” Scott said. Man, the captain was really unraveling. “There
is
a connection, though, even if it's not the same man. The two latest victims were friends of Jennica Murphy's, and they stayed at that house. So did her father.”

“Okay, fine,” Jones slurred. “But how are we going to get rid of him?”

Scott laughed. “We catch him and lock him up. Isn't that what we do with bad guys?”

“Your police academy didn't deal with how to catch the devil.”

“We're not
dealing
with the devil,” Scott answered, shaking his head. “This is a guy who's flesh and blood. He uses knives to cut people up and he's got some kind of pumpkin fetish, and he thinks it's amusing to play on the fears that this town picked up a generation ago. But it's just a guy with a knife. A guy we can catch—who we need to catch before someone else gets hurt. Have you heard anything more from the lab work?”

“From the Perenais house?” Jones asked. “Nothing. No prints, no identifying traces of anyone outside of the kids who are living there.”

“So the guy wears rubber gloves and a hair net,” Scott said. “Or he's bald.”

Jones grimaced. After a moment he said, “I know you talked to Emmaline Foster. You must have gotten some background on the Perenais family.”

“Sure,” Scott said. “Superstition and old wives' tale stuff. Though, she did make me nervous for the lives of those kids. Obviously that place is a focus for whoever is behind this, and I think they should get out of there as soon as they can.”

“They went one hundred miles away and something followed them,” Jones said. “I told you what has apparently happened to Jennica Murphy's friend Kirstin. You don't suppose that she just went for a long walk and got lost down there in San Francisco, do you?”

“Someone followed them, not some
thing,
” Scott reminded his captain. “And I think it's time we filed a missing-persons report on her behalf. There could be evidence in that boy's apartment that would help our case here, so we should get the SFPD involved.”

Jones nodded, running a hand through his hair. “I'll talk to Jennica about reporting it tomorrow. It's probably better if it comes from her, considering what happened with that Tamarack
kid. Plus, she'll know the details. It's going to look mighty odd to San Francisco regardless. Don't need to make it worse.”

Scott smiled. Maybe he was getting the captain back on track. He didn't like to see him so vulnerable. Captain Jones was a nice enough guy, if a bit lenient.