The Pumpkin Man (36 page)

Captain Jones tossed and turned in his bed across town. His dreams were filled with images of Meredith Perenais kissing a dead man back to life. He saw her dancing beneath a rain of blood, and laughing as she danced and stripped off her dark-stained clothes, dropping first her blouse and bra to the mud and then kicking off her skirt before disappearing into a grove filled with jack-o'-lantern scowls.

Blood thunder cracked overhead and the wicked grins went on and on, thousands of pumpkin smiles. They were laughing and threatening to bite. Flames lit their orange pumpkin skin fangs like hellfire, and those mouths slowly opened and closed, laughing at him. Jones backed away from the flickering smiles, but those teeth only crept closer, floating dangerously through the dark like burning ghosts.

Travis Lupe felt something. The hair on his arms stood on end, and inside . . . inside he could feel pain. Not his own, though. He felt the life of someone else being drained. It was like being a voyeur to a murder, only he couldn't really see the act. He lay awake in the dark and felt his body react, and knew that something was happening somewhere near. Something bad. Something related to the Pumpkin Man.

He stayed awake for a long time, staring at the tree branch shadows swaying across his ceiling. Eventually, the phantom burning faded in his brain and his eyes closed and acquiesced to a troubled sleep. But behind that he knew he had to take action. He just wasn't sure how yet.

Something woke Jennica. She had a sense of something moving in the house, a clattering, some kind of noise. Struggling her way up from a heavy sleep, she rolled over in bed and reached out instinctively for Nick, automatically expecting him to be there. How easily that had come.

She found his shoulder, cold to the touch above the sheets. He responded, slipping his arm beneath the covers and around her waist.

“I had a dream you were gone and I was all alone,” she murmured.

His hand rubbed her lower back and he said, “Well, I'm here now.”

“Is it going to be okay?” she whispered.

“Everything will be fine,” he promised. “Just sleep.”

Moments later she did.

In her basement, far away from the others of the town, Emmaline Foster lay bloodless and cold, her newly carved pumpkin face staring up in toothless rapture at the mummified remains of her long-dead husband. The last of the Perenais family blood soaked into the earth around her. The air hummed with the power of her ancestors. Whether they laughed or cried was hard to tell.

Scott woke to the sound of the police radio bleeping in his car. When he leaned forward to answer, the light of the sun blinded him. Instead of grasping the receiver, he batted it away and had to wipe tears from his eyes before he could open them again to find it.

“Yeah,” he finally answered, thumbing the responder.

“Didja get eight hours, or only six?” the captain's voice asked.

“Maybe three,” Scott admitted.

Jones laughed tiredly. “Well, thank God you protected those kids. Can you see from there if they're up and around?”

Scott blinked away the last of his tears and stared at the Perenais house. Nothing moved.

“Negative,” he answered.

“Well, go on up and give them a morning check-in. Then get over to Emmaline Foster's house as fast as you can. We just got a call that something's up over there.”

“‘Up' how?” Scott asked.

“Her neighbor was out walking the dog and said she saw a stack of pumpkin pieces piled on her stoop.”

“Oh shit,” Scott breathed.

“That's what I said. Make sure those kids are all right and get down the hill. I'll meet you over there in ten.”

Scott opened the car door and levered himself out of the seat with an abundance of groans. He wiped a french fry from a fold of his shirt and stretched with his hands pressed against the
hard-shell top of his car; then he walked up and knocked on the door of Jennica's house.

Nick answered, eyes still swollen with sleep.

“Just wanted to make sure you guys were good,” Scott explained. “Going off watch.”

Nick nodded slowly, looking more drunk than conscious, and closed the door without saying a word. It was always nice when people were grateful.

Captain Jones was waiting when Scott pulled up in front of Emmaline Foster's bungalow. Before Scott put his car in park, the captain was out of his cruiser and on the porch. Scott got out and hurried up the walk.

“She hasn't answered the doorbell,” the captain announced. A pile of pumpkin fragments was strewn across the porch near his feet.

“Give her a minute.”

Jones shook his head. “I rang and went back to the car before you got here.”

“Oh,” Scott said. “Maybe she went to the store.” He really didn't want anyone else to be dead.

Jones nodded at the side of the house. “Car's in the garage,” he said. “I looked.”

“Maybe . . . she went for a morning walk?”

“We're going in,” Jones said.

“Without a warrant or an order?” Scott asked. “Are you crazy?”

“If I'm right, nobody's going to even think to question us.”

“What if you're not?”

The captain sighed. “You know I am.”

As Scott held the outer screen door off his superior's back, Jones pulled out a skeleton key and began working on the front
door. The lock gave easily, and Jones pushed the door open. The house was quiet and shadowed, but enough morning light filtered into the hallway that he could see the pumpkin piece that lay just a few feet away near the baseboard. He walked over and picked it up, and he rubbed his thumb across the warty orange skin. When he held it up, it was coated in red.

“She's dead,” he whispered.

“You don't know that,” Scott growled.

“Yes,” Jones said. “Yes, I do.”

They made their way down the hallway from the kitchen to the bedrooms and confirmed quickly that Emmaline's bed had not been slept in. “The basement door's open,” Scott pointed out as they walked back.

The captain knelt down to stare at the white vinyl tile of the kitchen floor in front of it. “And there's blood here,” he announced.

They found Emmaline two minutes later, after gingerly navigating the basement steps. When Jones saw her abused body stretched out nude on the mud floor, head missing and replaced by a face carved in a pumpkin shell, he almost threw up. Nobody in town had ever seemed to care for Emmaline Perenais Foster, yet she was one of them. And she was a Perenais, which really made things confusing.

“Who's next?” was all he could think to say.

Only a few seconds after that, he finally grasped that there was a man's body hanging from the ceiling. Jones looked at the horrified expression of the man, and at the marbles that had replaced the dead man's eyes. Still, there was no mistaking who he had been.

“Holy shit,” he breathed.

“What?”

“This is Harry,” Jones explained. “Harry Foster. I'm sure he helped lynch the Pumpkin Man—er, Emmaline's brother George—all those years ago. He was the first one of the mob to
die, but not from murder. Someone dug him up and moved him here. Was it Emmaline? It must have been.”

“That's fucked-up,” Scott whispered.

“Tell me about it.”

“Just do me a favor and call the coroner,” Jones muttered.

After Scott ran up the stairs to comply, the captain stared at Emmaline's body. He shook his head and whispered, “I can't believe they took you, too.” He glanced at the ghastly expression of the mummified Harry and then at the blood that soaked like dark water into the earth around Emmaline's neck. “What did you do with her head?” he whispered to no one in particular.

When Scott's feet clattered back down the stairs, Jones was leafing through the
Book of Shadows
on the small table near where Emmaline died. He couldn't read any of it, but his fingers were drawn to shuffle through the pages, what with its strange words and symbols. As he did, he felt a tight spot clutch at his chest. The book frightened him to the core.

“You sure Jennica Murphy and her boyfriend were okay?” he murmured.

“Yeah,” Scott said. “Well, I talked to Nick, not Jenn. But he seemed fine.”

“Go home and get some sleep.”

“Huh?” Scott looked puzzled.

Jones shook his head and grimaced. “You slept through last night. Tonight I want you up there and alert. You're keeping an eye on them again, and this time I'd like you to actually stay awake.”

The rookie scowled but didn't have an answer for that. He skulked away to another corner of the basement, ostensibly looking for clues, but Jones knew he was just embarrassed.

Jones didn't waste the opportunity. He picked up the book and walked with it up the stairs. With a quick look behind to make sure that Scott wasn't following, he walked to the squad car and opened the door, slipping the book into the empty glove
compartment. He had a feeling that the book might be valuable, though not to the police. This was something outside of law and order. Scott could stake out the old Perenais place as much as he wanted; he wasn't going to be of any use to the people inside. This was a matter of the spirit.