The Pumpkin Man

CHAPTER

TWENTY

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.”

He wrapped his hand around the stub and lifted the top of the pumpkin off, stumbled backward when he saw what was inside. A thick black tuft of hair. Human hair.

Jones gagged audibly for a second but then recovered. He took a deep breath and reached inside to grab the hair, which was attached to the blue-white skin of a forehead; foggy blue eyes forever open in death; a purpled and twisted nose and a slack mouth, yellowing teeth exposed in a silent scream. The ragged flesh of the severed neck looked almost black. The room filled with the reek of carrion.

Kirstin screamed and looked away. Jenn shook her head and stifled a cry.

Nick screwed up his nose and whispered, “What the fuck.”

“Who is that?” Jenn whispered.

“Erik Smith,” the captain said. “We found his body last month. Just not his head. I guess that mystery’s solved. We didn’t expect to look here.”

Jones set the head back in the pumpkin and replaced the lid. Then he lifted the next lid and removed another grisly find. This one was female.

“Teri Hawkins,” he said. “She was found dead in her basement a couple days ago. Or at least, the rest of her was found.”

He lifted the last lid and pulled out a head topped with blond hair. The eyes looked frozen in fear. The nose was spotted with freckles of dried blood. The base of the neck still dripped fresh crimson.

“Jesus Christ,” Nick whispered. Jenn hugged him, but she couldn’t take her eyes from that ghastly, silently screaming face.

Kirstin screamed and fell to her knees.

Brian.