“How was the Sir Roger de Coverley?” she asked me eagerly.
She would know the terrible truth soon enough, but I would not spoil our dreams this evening. Dorcas could not perceive the ambiguity of my words. “As usual,” I said. “The best of all finishing dances.”
A Cozy for the Jack-o’-lanterns
by James Powell
© 2007 by James Powell
Author of some 150 short stories of a mysterious and humorous sort, James Powell is one of our most valued contributors. Elements of fantasy occur in his tales, but always in the context of a mystery — often, as here, a whodunit. His stories have appeared in Best Detective Stories of the Year and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror.
When she’d gouged out their eyes, Kate O’Lantern dropped the peeled potatoes into the water in the iron pot. They settled on the bottom, staring up at her like the ghosts of pumpkin children. Kate saw her own reflection, too, her hollowed-out head worn witch-wise with the stem pointing forward above the saddest of smiles. She began to cry again and turned away to mourn for her murdered husband.
The small basement window over the sink framed the Halloween night. It was always Halloween in Shocksville out Gourd County way. Pumpkins grinned from every porch, all cats were black, belfries scattered their bats across the yellow moon, and the town’s young witches flew among them, using their binder-twined corn-sheaf bodies for broomsticks. Once Kate had flown up there, too, before Jack, her scarecrow husband, took her to their wedding bed. And now he was dead.
An hour ago she’d brought mulled cider up to his third-floor office: a mug for Jack, another for Sam Spook, the private eye and pest exterminator. (Most townies held two jobs. Kate was witch and boardinghouse keeper. Jack was scarecrow and taught high school history.)
Alarmed by the locked door and the smell of burnt pumpkin juice through the open transom, Kate used her key to get in. She found Jack lying across the desk, his pumpkin head broken into large pieces, the candle stub inside extinguished but still warm. Papers burned in the fireplace.
In tears, she phoned the town constable and went back down to buzz him in. (All Shocksville had installed these buzzers after a magic-spell overload crashed the witch-hazel hedgerow that kept the Outside out. The few minutes it was down allowed an aluminum-siding salesman who took a wrong exit off the freeway to find them. His going door-to-door terrorized many until the ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties who clerked at the local Things-That-Go-Bump-in-the-Night-R-Us store ran him off. Shocksville had been having terrible dreams ever since.)
Constable Hubbard arrived promptly. A tall many-sheaved young man with a badly carved face set low on a knobby dark-green head, he’d pinned his tin badge up high, perhaps in the hope people would mistake his steep forehead for a bobby helmet.
Kate led the way upstairs, explaining how she’d found Jack’s body and about his visitor. The O’Lanterns had run into Sam Spook, all trenchcoat and fedora, at that morning’s walkabout, when the whole town turned out to visit and chat while their corn sheaves swept the sidewalks clean. Jack had asked him to look into their bat problem. But Spook said he was too busy hunting the Phantom Sapsucker.
For several springs now, someone had earned that nickname at maple-sugar time by raiding the sap buckets in the surrounding woods. Last year outraged farmers armed with torches and pitchforks had marched through town. (At first everyone thought the Living Dead were making another demonstration for a living wage.) The farmers demanded the thief face rural justice, a punishment involving harrows, balers, and pigsties. Then they marched out again, leaving the sidewalks filthy with tracked-in mud and manure. The town quickly posted a hefty reward for the Phantom Sapsucker, dead or alive.
Then, as Jack and Kate were strolling away, Spook reconsidered. “Hey, bats in your attic, you say? Maybe I’ll drop by later.” And he did.
“But Spook’d left before you brought up the cider?” asked Hubbard.
“I guess,” said Kate uncertainly. “Can’t say I heard him go. I usually do. The front door closes hard.”
She left Hubbard to examine the crime scene. Visiting her boarders, she told them her sad news and, as Hubbard requested, asked them to assemble in the kitchen. Then she returned to her potatoes. Dead husband or not, boarders had to be fed.
Kate was determined that Jack’s killer would be brought to justice, so she resolved to keep her eyes open and her wits about her. She’d known Constable Hubbard since he was a shy little schoolboy. “Poor Doug,” the other kids called him. She never knew why. He did his constable job well enough. But a murder investigation was another matter.
Corn sheaves whispered on the kitchen’s narrow staircase. The Grim Reaper entered. Repeating his regrets at her loss, he sat down at the table where the boarders ate and leaned on his scythe handle. Shocksville’s most famous resident, the Grimmer, as the townies called him, wore a black cloak over his sheaves, its hood pulled far down over a head no one had ever seen. Some even said it wasn’t a gourd at all. The Grimmer traveled a lot. The Outside, where he did much of his work, held no fear for him.
“I hate murderers and suicides,” he grumbled in a sturdy voice. “You wouldn’t believe the forms I have to fill out when people die before their allotted hour.”
The Grimmer wasn’t a boarder. He’d knocked on the door leading down from the garden while Kate was mulling the cider, come to see Anna Rexia, the musical skeleton who’d moved to town awhile back, renting Kate’s second-floor hall closet. Anna and the Grimmer always did a quick run-through of their Dance of Death, the leadoff to Shocksville’s Halloween Parade. It was quite a sight, he marching ahead, high-stepping and using his scythe handle like a drum major’s baton, she following on a bicycle behind a bass drum which she played with big drumsticks attached to her knees while pounding her various bones with xylophone mallets.
Heel-bone clatter on the stairs announced Anna’s arrival. The cornhusk skirt and matching bra she wore for decency’s sake made her look like the poster girl for some starving Cannibal Isle. She got right into helping set the table. At Kate’s instruction, she added a place for the Grimmer and another for Constable Hubbard, which she put beside her own, eligible bachelors being her hobby.
The doorbell brought Kate to the other basement window. The coroner’s people had come to collect Jack’s body as Hubbard said they would. She buzzed them in.
With a heavy clump-clump Mr. Elmer Tree, who rented her second-floor back, edged himself sideways down the staircase. Blasted by lightning in the forest, Tree’d gone barking mad. When a farmer out for kindling buried an axe in him, Tree fled to town where he shuffled around at night frightening the shrubbery until a wise old owl chose to nest in his hollow trunk, restoring him to his senses. Tree and W. O. Owl owned The Bird and Bough, an English-style pub serving alcoholic spirits.
Owl’s big eyes rolled right and left. “Who...” he began. Tree completed the question “...isn’t here?”
Who? Kate turned to take the meatloaf from the brick oven. She didn’t care much for her third-floor back boarder, a professor of scarecrow science down from Bogeyman A&M. No corn sheaves or pumpkins for this city gentleman: He wore chinos, tweed jacket with elbow patches, and a feed-sack head all stuffed in the fashionable portly style. His head was decorated with the ears, nose, lips, and hat from a Mr. Potato Head kit.