The Pumpkin Man

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. Beneath 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.

Today I called George home from the market for a bit of play. He thought I was just aching for him, and I let him think that—men are happier when they feel like we’re starving for their thrusts and groans—but I found this entry in an old book from a plantation voodoo priestess in Georgia and I’ve been anxious to try it. I lay in bed and feigned exhaustion when he finished, but as soon as the front screen slammed I moved to the bathroom to gather what he’d given.

Yesterday I gathered the spider plant leaves and the fish. This morning I visited the Muldaurs and bought two hens. The full ritual calls for a fire with the bones of an innocent at the hottest point of its core. I don’t know if an innocent animal will do, but it can’t hurt to try. I’m only going to use the result to improve our garden this season.

I’ve set the fire pit in the backyard with the bones of one of the chickens and some white birch logs. The next step is to combine the fish eyes in a broth of freshly blooded fowl, the consummated secretions of a lover (hence my tryst today) and the spider plant. The whole mess must boil from dusk to midnight, and only then should the words be said and the circle danced around to invoke the . . .

Jenn glanced up from the journal with images of her silver-haired aunt dancing naked around a campfire through the California night and shivered. The picture in her head was ludicrous. It was not a picture she wanted to maintain. She peered out at the class, who were mostly quiet and reading. A couple paper-ball fights were going on surreptitiously in back, but she ignored them. Then she looked at Rudy’s desk. The chair was still empty and the puddle still there.

Bastard! she fumed. He’d never come back. You’d think she’d have learned after all these years. Boys like Rudy played you to get exactly what they wanted and then . . .

She took a deep breath and stilled her anger. It was her own fault for giving in. She should have made him sit there the whole period, or better yet, written him a detention. She was too easy on these kids and knew it.

The end-of-period bell rang, and the room emptied faster than a fire drill. But when they were all gone, there was still someone standing in the doorway: Sister Beatrice.

Crap. Had the nun found out she’d lost Rudy? What kind of trouble had the delinquent gotten himself—and now, consequently, her—into?

Sister Beatrice walked slowly into the classroom, her eyes surveying all as if considering how to redecorate. Or demolish. Jennica shrank a little at her approach. She might have moved to the front of the class, but she would always be a little afraid of nuns. And, unlike most, Sister Beatrice still wore her black-and-white habit.

“How are you doing, Jennica?” the older woman asked.

Jenn shrugged. “Okay, I guess.”

“I saw that the police are still looking for clues. It was on the news again last night.”

Jenn nodded. “They don’t seem to be getting anywhere.”

The sister put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed. “Our prayers are with you, always.”

Jenn smiled.

“Please ask them to keep the name of your school out of the reports when they mention you, though. If you could,” the sister added.

So, the PR aspect of her tragedy, not concern, was the real reason for the sister’s visit.

“We have been getting calls from parents concerned that the person who did this horrible thing to your father might be a threat to their children at Holy Name—because he might be after you, they think. I’ve told them that there is absolutely nothing to worry about, that you’re not in any trouble. So there’s no danger. But . . .”

Jenn almost choked. “I’ll do what I can,” she promised, and looked away from the principal to begin gathering up her papers. Leave it to Sister Beatrice to show the compassion of a killer.

“Thank you,” the sister replied. Turning to leave, she was almost out of the room before she thought to offer, “God bless.”