Rest In Pieces (12 page)

Danny Tucker, as Hercule Poirot, scooted next to Mrs. Hogendobber. His was the enormous pumpkin.

“Danny, why didn’t you inform me that you grew this . . . fruit?” Mrs. Hogendobber demanded.

“Well, Mom didn’t want to upset you. We all know you want that blue ribbon.”

Pewter arrived to sit between the two huge orange pumpkins, the finalists. Mrs. Hogendobber, talking to Danny, still didn’t notice her. Pewter was insulted.

Jim picked up Miranda’s pumpkin. He quickly put it back down. “These damn things get heavier every year.” Miranda shot him a look. “Sorry, Miranda.”

Pewter smelled pumpkin goo, as though the insides had been removed for pumpkin pie. She sniffed Miranda’s pumpkin.

“See, the cat likes my pumpkin.” Miranda smiled to the crowd.

“I don’t like any pumpkins,”
Pewter replied.

“Do I want to pick this one up? I might fall over from the size of it.” Jim smiled but put his large hands around Danny’s pumpkin anyway. The enormous pumpkin was much heavier than the other pumpkin, oddly heavy. He replaced it. Puzzled, he lifted it up again.

Pewter, never able to control her curiosity, inspected the back of the pumpkin. A very neat, very large circle had been cut out and then glued back into place. If one wasn’t searching for it, the tampering could easily be missed.

“Look,”
she said with forcefulness.

Danny Tucker was the only human who paid attention to her. He picked up his pumpkin. “Mayor Sanburne, I know my pumpkin’s heavy, but not
this
heavy. Something’s wrong.”

“That
is
your pumpkin,” Miranda stated.

“Yes, but it’s too heavy.” Danny picked it up again.

Pewter reached up and swatted the back of the orange globe. This led Danny’s eyes, much sharper than Jim’s or Miranda’s, to the patch job in the back.

“Jim, we’re waiting. We want a winner,” Mim called out impatiently.

“Yes, dear, in a minute,” he replied and the crowd laughed.

Danny pushed the circle and it wiggled. He reached into his jacket, retrieved a pocketknife, and slid it along the cutting line. The glue dislodged easily and he pried out the big circle. “Oh, wow!” Danny saw the back of a head. He assumed one of his buddies had done this as a joke. He reached in, grabbed the head by the hair, and pulled it out. A wave of sweet stink alerted him. This was no joke, no rubber or plastic head. Not quite knowing what to do he held the head away from him, giving the crowd a fine view of the loathsome sight. What was left of the eyes stared straight at them.

Danny, now realizing what he held, dropped the head. It hit the table with a sickening splat.

Pewter jumped away. She ran down to the squashes. If this was what the job of playing Halloween cat entailed, she was resigning.

People screamed. Jim Sanburne, almost by reflex, handed the ribbon to Miranda.

“I don’t want it!” Miranda screamed.

BoomBoom Craycroft fainted dead away. The next thud heard was Blair Bainbridge hitting the ground.

Then Little Marilyn screeched, “I’ve seen that face before!”

21

Therapists in the county agreed to work with the students at Crozet High to help them through the trauma of what they’d seen.

Rick Shaw wondered if they could help him. He disliked the sight of the decayed head himself but not enough to have nightmares over it. When he and Cynthia Cooper collected the head, the first thing they did, apart from holding their noses, was check the open mouth. Not one tooth remained in the head. No dental records.

Cynthia led Little Marilyn away from the sight and asked her to clarify her statement.

“I don’t know him but I think that’s the vagrant who was wandering around maybe ten days ago. I’m not certain as to the date. You see, he passed the post office and I walked to the window and got a good look at him. That’s all I can tell you.” She was shaking.

“Thank you. You’ve had more than your share of this.” Cynthia patted Little Marilyn on the back.

Fitz-Gilbert put his arms around her. “Come on, honey, let’s go home.”

“What about Mother?”

“Your father’s taking care of her.”

Meekly, Little Marilyn allowed Fitz to shepherd her to their Range Rover.

Cynthia stuck her notebook back in her pocket. As Rick was talking to other observers, the press photographer fired off some shots.

Cynthia took statements from Harry, Susan, Herb, Carol, Market, just everyone she could find. She would have interviewed Pewter if she could have. Market held the cat in his arms, each of them grateful for the reassuring warmth of the other.

Holding his wife’s hand, Cabell Hall mentioned to Cynthia that she and Rick might want to call the video stores and have them pull their more gruesome horror movies until things settled down.

“Actually, Mr. Hall, I have no authority to do that but as a prominent citizen you could, or your wife could. People listen to you all.”

“I’ll do it then,” Taxi Hall promised.

It took Cynthia more than an hour to get everyone out of there. Finally, Cynthia and Rick had a moment to themselves.

“Worse than I imagined.” Rick slapped his thighs, a nervous gesture.

“Yeah, I thought we’d find the head, if we found it at all, back in the woods somewhere. It would be something someone would stumble on.”

“You know what we got, Coop?” Rick breathed in the cool night air. “We got us a killer with a sick sense of humor.”

22

Firelight casts shadows, which, depending on one’s mood, can either be friendly highlights on the wall or misshapen monsters. Susan, Harry, and Blair sat before Harry’s fireplace. The best friends had decided that Blair needed some company before he returned to his empty house.

The Harvest Fair had rattled everyone and Harry found another surprise when she opened the door to her house. Tucker, in a fit of pique at being left behind, had demolished Harry’s favorite slippers. Mrs. Murphy told her not to do it but Tucker, when furious, was not a reasonable creature. The dog’s punishment was that she had to remain locked in the kitchen while the adults talked in the living room. To make matters worse, Mrs. Murphy was allowed in the living room with them. Tucker laid her head between her paws and howled.

“Come on, Harry, let her in,” Susan chided.

“Easy for you to say—they weren’t your slippers.”

“Actually, you should have taken her. She finds more clues than anyone.” Susan cast a glance at the alert Mrs. Murphy perched on Harry’s armchair. “And Murphy, of course.”

“Is anyone hungry?” Harry remembered to be a hostess.

“No.” Blair shook his head.

“Me neither,” Susan agreed. “Poor you.” She indicated Blair. “You moved here for peace and quiet and you landed in the middle of murder.”

The muscles in Blair’s handsome face tightened. “There’s no escaping human nature. Remember the men put off the H.M.S.
Bounty
on Pitcairn Island?”

“I remember the great movie with Charles Laughton as Captain Bligh,” Susan said.

“Well, in real life those Englishmen stranded on that paradise soon created their own version of hell. The sickness was within. The natives—by then they were mostly women, since the whites had killed the men—slit the Englishmen’s throats in the middle of the night while they slept. Or at least historians think they did. No one really knows how the mutineers died, except that years later, when a European ship stopped by, the ‘civilized’ men were gone.”

“Is that by way of saying that Crozet is a smaller version of Manhattan?” Harry reached over and poked the fire with one of the brass utensils left her by her parents.

“Big Marilyn as Brooke Astor.” Susan then added, “Actually, Brooke Astor is a great lady. Mim’s a wannabe.”

“In the main, Crozet is a kinder place than Manhattan, but whatever is wrong with us shows up wherever we may be—on a more reduced scale. Passions are passions, regardless of century and geography.” Blair stared into the fire.

“True enough.” Harry sank back into her seat. “How about Little Marilyn saying she recognized that head?” The memory of the head made Harry queasy.

“A hobo she saw walking down the tracks while she was inside the post office.” Blair added, “I vaguely remember him too. He was wearing old jeans and a baseball jacket. I wasn’t that interested. Did you get a look at him?”

Harry nodded. “I noticed the Mets jacket. That’s about it. However, even if these body parts belong to the fellow, we still don’t know who he is.”

“A student at U.V.A.?”

“God, Susan, I hope not.” Harry allowed Mrs. Murphy to crawl into her lap.

“Too old.” Blair folded his hands.

“It’s a little hard to tell.” Susan also called up the grisly sight.

“Ladies, I think I’ll go home. I’m exhausted and I’m embarrassed that I passed out. This is getting to me, I suppose.”

Harry walked him to the door and bade him goodnight before returning to Susan. Mrs. Murphy had taken over her chair. She lifted up the cat, who protested and then settled down again.

“He was distant tonight,” Susan observed. “Guess it has been right much of a shock. He doesn’t have a stick of furniture in his house, he doesn’t know any of us, and then they find pieces of a body on his land. Now this. There goes his bucolic dream.”

“The only good thing about tonight was getting to see BoomBoom faint.”

“Aren’t you ugly?” Susan laughed at her.

“You have to admit it was funny.”

“Kind of. Fair had the pleasure of reviving her, digging in her voluminous purse for her tranquilizers, and then taking her home. If she gets too difficult I guess he could hit her up with a cc of Ace.”

The thought of BoomBoom dosed with a horse tranquilizer struck Susan as amusing. “I’d say that BoomBoom wasn’t an easy keeper,” she said, using an equine term—quite accurate, too, because BoomBoom was anything but an easy keeper.

“I suppose we have to laugh at something. This is so macabre, what else can we do?” Harry scratched Mrs. Murphy behind the ears.

“I don’t know.”

“Are you afraid?”

“Are you?” Susan shot back.

“I asked you first.”

“Not for myself,” Susan replied.

“Me neither, because I don’t think it had anything to do with me, but what if I fall into it? For all I know the killer might have buried those body parts in my cemetery.”

“I think we’re all right if we don’t get in the way,” Susan said.

“But what’s ‘in the way’? What’s this all about?”

Mrs. Murphy opened one eye and said,
“Love or money.”

23

Sunday dawned frosty but clear. The day’s high might reach into the low fifties but not much more. Harry loved Sundays. She could work from sunup to sundown without interruption. Today she was planning to strip stalls, put down lime, and then cover and bank the sides with wood shavings. Physical labor limbered up her mind. Out in the stable she popped a soothing tape into the boom box and proceeded to fill up the wheelbarrow. The manure spreader was pulled up under a small earthen bank. That way Harry could roll the wheelbarrow to the top of the bank and tip the contents over into the wagon. She and her father had built the ramp in the late sixties. Harry was twelve. She worked so hard and with so much enthusiasm that as a reward her father bought her a pair of fitted chaps. The ramp had lasted these many years and so did the memory of the chaps.

Both of Harry’s parents thought that idle hands did the Devil’s work. True to her roots, Harry couldn’t sit still. She was happiest when working and found it a cure for most ills. After her divorce she couldn’t sleep much, so she would work sometimes sixteen or eighteen hours a day. The farm reflected this intensity. So did Harry. Her weight dropped to 110, too low for a woman of five foot six. Finally, Susan and Mrs. Hogendobber tricked her into going to the doctor. Hayden McIntire, forewarned, slammed shut his office door as they dragged her through it. A shot of B
₁₂
and a severe tongue-lashing convinced her that she’d better eat more. He also prescribed a mild sedative so she could sleep. She took it for a week and then threw it out. Harry hated drugs of any sort but her body accepted sleep and food again, so whatever Hayden did worked.

Each year with the repetition of the seasons, the cycle of planting, weeding, harvesting, and winter repairs, it was brought home to Harry that life was finite. Perhaps LIFE in capital letters wasn’t finite but her life was. There would be a beginning, a middle, and an end. She wasn’t quite at the middle yet, but she endured hints that she wasn’t fifteen either. Injuries took longer to heal. Actually, she enjoyed more energy than she’d had as a teenager but what had changed the most was her mind. She’d lived just long enough to be seeing events and human personality types for the second and third time. She wasn’t easily impressed or fooled. Most movies bored her to death, for that reason as well. She’d seen versions of those plots long before. They enthralled a new generation of fifteen-year-olds but there wasn’t anything for her. What enthralled Harry was a job well done, laughter with her friends, a quiet ride on one of the horses. She’d withdrawn from the social whirl after her divorce—no great loss, but she was shocked to find out how little a single woman was valued. A single man was a plus. A single woman, a liability. The married women, Susan excepted, feared you.