Pumpkin Patch Peril (Brook Ridge Falls Ladies' Detective Club Book 1), page 11
“Oh,” she said, rising slowly and brushing dirt from her knees. “You’re the ladies from the other day. The ones with the reckless parking situation.”
Ruth winced slightly, but Mona stepped forward with her most diplomatic smile. “We really are sorry about that.”
“And,” Helen added smoothly, “we heard from Merry Bellweather that you have a petition about pesticide regulation that we’d like to sign.”
Laura’s entire demeanor transformed as if someone had flipped a switch from suspicious to delighted. “Oh! Oh, how wonderful! I’m so glad there are people in this community who care about environmental protection.” She practically bounced on her toes. “Let me get the petition right now!”
She hurried toward the house, her charm bracelet creating a soft musical tinkling with each enthusiastic step.
The moment she disappeared inside, the ladies sprang into action like a well-rehearsed reconnaissance team.
“Quick,” Mona whispered, “check the barn windows.”
Helen scurried toward the large structure, trying to peer through grimy glass while maintaining the appearance of casual garden appreciation. Ruth headed for the potting shed, craning her neck to see inside while pretending to admire a nearby stand of fall asters.
Ida, meanwhile, had discovered a butterfly bush the size of a small tree and was practically diving into its purple branches.
“Ida, what are you doing?” Mona hissed.
“Scientific observation,” Ida replied, her voice muffled by foliage. “This bush could hide all sorts of evidence. Very thorough hiding place for—”
“Just what are you doing?”
They all froze. Laura was standing on the porch steps, petition in hand, staring at their obvious snooping with growing suspicion.
“You didn’t really come here for the petition, did you?” Laura said slowly, her earlier enthusiasm cooling rapidly.
Caught red-handed, Mona decided to abandon subtlety entirely. “Laura, we’re looking for Brenda Henderson’s missing pumpkin, and we know about the feud between you two over her pesticide use.”
“You think I stole her pumpkin?” Laura’s voice rose with indignation. “That I would stoop to theft just because I disagree with her farming methods?”
“Actually,” Mona said, reaching into her purse with dramatic flair, “we have proof you were in Brenda’s barn.”
She pulled out the small angel charm and held it up like a prosecutor presenting evidence. “We found this in Brenda’s barn right after her pumpkin was stolen.”
Mona pointed at Laura’s charm bracelet with triumph. “And unless I’m mistaken, you’re missing a wing from one of your charms.”
Laura sputtered, “That doesn’t prove anything! Anyone could have these bracelets—”
“Not with a missing charm, though,” Helen pointed out reasonably.
Mona pressed their advantage. “Things will go much easier if you just admit you stole the pumpkin. If you return it in time for the contest, no one need even know.” She gestured toward the massive barn. “Where is it? In there?”
Laura stared at them for a long moment, and something shifted in her expression. The defensive anger was replaced by something that might have been resignation, or perhaps something more calculating.
“You ladies don’t give up, do you?” she said finally.
The three women straightened proudly. “Of course not,” Mona declared. “We’ve solved many mysteries.”
“Multiple murders,” Ruth added helpfully.
“Several cases of fraud,” Helen contributed.
“One memorable ferret situation,” Ida called from behind the butterfly bush.
Laura’s demeanor changed again, but this time the shift made Mona’s confidence waver. There was something almost predatory in Laura’s sudden smile.
“Fine then,” Laura said, her voice taking on a tone that made all three ladies exchange nervous glances. “You want to see what’s in the barn? I’ll show you.”
Suddenly, Mona didn’t feel quite so confident about their detective skills.
“Well,” Ida said, finally extricating herself from the butterfly bush with leaves in her hair, “maybe we could just take your word for it...”
But Laura was already moving, grabbing Ida firmly by the elbow. “Oh no. I’m going to show you exactly what I’ve been hiding.”
She practically dragged Ida toward the barn, with the others hurrying along behind, their earlier bravado evaporating rapidly. Laura pulled open the heavy doors with surprising strength, revealing a dark interior that could have contained anything.
“In you go,” Laura said, her voice carrying an edge that made Mona wish they’d brought backup.
Or weapons.
Or Jack.
The inside of the barn was dim and musty, filled with shadows that could hide any number of secrets. As their eyes adjusted to the darkness, Mona could make out various shapes covered with tarps, tools hanging from walls, and what might have been agricultural equipment lurking in the corners.
“You’re right,” Laura said from behind them, her voice echoing in the cavernous space. “I was in Brenda’s barn.”
“AHA!” Ida exclaimed, though her triumphant tone was somewhat undermined by the nervous quaver in her voice.
Ruth squinted into the gloom. “I don’t see any pumpkin.”
“That’s because,” Laura said, moving to a pile of tarps in the center of the barn, “I didn’t take a pumpkin.”
With a dramatic flourish, she whipped away the coverings to reveal not a giant orange gourd, but dozens of bags of chemical fertilizer, pesticide containers, and what appeared to be enough toxic agricultural products to supply a medium-sized farm operation.
“That’s what I took,” Laura said with grim satisfaction. “Every bag of poison I could carry. Saturday night, I knew Brenda would be at the bean supper, so I went over with my posse, and we took every container of chemical death we could fit in our truck. Didn’t touch a pumpkin. Didn’t even see one.”
The ladies stood in stunned silence, staring at the small mountain of confiscated agricultural chemicals.
“So you see,” Laura continued, “while you’ve been chasing me around as your prime pumpkin thief, I was actually conducting environmental protection operations. Those chemicals are going to be properly disposed of instead of contaminating the ecosystem.”
Mona felt her detective theories crumbling around her. “But... but the charm...”
“Must have broken off when I was loading bags,” Laura said matter-of-factly. “These bracelets aren’t built for heavy lifting.”
Twenty minutes later, they sat in Ruth’s Oldsmobile at the end of Laura’s driveway, staring at the peaceful farmhouse and processing their complete failure.
“So,” Ruth said finally, “that was our last suspect.”
“Our only remaining suspect,” Helen corrected morosely.
“We’ve never run out of suspects before,” Mona said, slumping in the passenger seat. “This case is harder than any murder we’ve solved.”
Ida leaned forward from the backseat. “Either there’s someone not on our list...”
“Or we missed one of the clues,” Mona finished grimly.
They sat in contemplative silence, watching bees buzzing around Laura’s wildflower gardens, each lost in their own thoughts about how four experienced amateur detectives could have gotten so thoroughly stumped by a missing pumpkin.
“So what now?” Ruth asked finally.
“Now,” Mona said with more confidence than she felt, “we go back to the beginning and figure out what we missed.”
“Tomorrow is the contest, and we need to figure this out once and for all, even if we have to stay up all night to do it!”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The first thing Mona became aware of was the persistent chirping of her alarm clock, which seemed to be coming from somewhere far away and underwater.
The second thing was the unmistakable sensation of having a whiteboard marker permanently fused to her right hand.
She opened one crusty eye and found herself face-to-face with their evidence board, which now resembled something a deranged mathematics professor might have created during a caffeine-induced breakdown. Red marker streaks covered not just the whiteboard, but somehow had migrated to her cheek, the dining room wallpaper, and what appeared to be Ruth’s forehead.
“Did we... did we solve it?” Mona croaked, trying to peel the marker cap from where it had embedded itself in her palm.
A muffled snort came from the direction of the pastry plate. Ida’s head popped up from where she’d been using a half-eaten apple turnover as a pillow, bits of glazed sugar stuck to her silver hair like festive dandruff.
“Five more minutes, teacher,” Ida mumbled, then focused on Mona with bleary eyes. “Oh. Hi. I was having the most wonderful dream about winning the lottery with my bingo frequency analysis.”
“Ruth?” Mona called, looking around the disaster zone that had once been her tidy dining room. Coffee cups sat abandoned at various stages of consumption, creating rings on every available surface. The good china was somehow scattered from the kitchen counter to the living room floor.
A weak groan emerged from beneath the mahogany table.
“I’m not dead,” came Ruth’s muffled voice. “But I wish I were. Why does everything hurt? And why does my mouth taste like dry erase marker?”
Mona peered under the table to find Ruth sprawled on her back, squinting up at them with the expression of someone who had stared too long into the abyss of unsolved mysteries. Her orange “burnt sienna” scarf was wrapped around her head like a turban, and she appeared to have used her iPad as a pillow, which explained the keyboard marks pressed into her cheek.
“Because you were chewing on the marker caps around three AM,” Ida informed her cheerfully, now sitting up properly and picking pastry crumbs out of her hair. “You kept saying it helped you think.”
The bathroom door opened with its familiar squeak, and Helen emerged looking like she’d just stepped out of a spa. Her silver hair was perfectly styled, her clothes unwrinkled, and she carried the subtle scent of the lavender hand soap Mona kept for guests.
“Good morning, ladies,” Helen said brightly, settling into her chair as if finding three friends unconscious in various states of investigation-induced stupor was perfectly normal. “Lovely morning, isn’t it? I see you all had quite a productive evening.”
The other three stared at her in various degrees of dishevelment and disbelief.
“How?” Mona managed, trying to smooth down her hair, which had apparently achieved the structural integrity of a bird’s nest. “How do you look so... human?”
Helen smiled serenely. “I went to bed at a reasonable hour. You three were still arguing about probability matrices and pumpkin transportation logistics when I excused myself around midnight.”
“Traitor,” Ruth grumbled, finally crawling out from under the table. She sat up slowly, looking around at the chaos. “We swore we’d solve this together. All for one and one for all night!”
“And did you?” Helen asked mildly, settling at the table and surveying their whiteboard masterpiece. “Solve it, I mean?”
The question hung in the air like the lingering smell of too much coffee and late-night desperation.
Ida suddenly straightened, her eyes lighting up with the fervor of someone who’d had a mathematical revelation. “Wait! I’ve got it!” She jumped to her feet, sending pastry crumbs cascading to the floor. “We should treat this like a math problem!”
The room fell silent except for the persistent chirping of the alarm clock.
“The suspects,” Ida continued, gesturing wildly at the whiteboard, “they all add up to zero!”
Everyone stared at her in the kind of silence usually reserved for profound moments or complete mental breakdowns.
Ruth finally broke the quiet, waving her hand in a “continue” gesture while still squinting from her position on the floor. “And...?”
Ida’s triumphant expression slowly deflated like a punctured balloon. She looked at the whiteboard, then at her friends, then back at the whiteboard.
“And... nothing,” she admitted. “I don’t actually know what that means.”
All four ladies turned to stare at the whiteboard, where their night of frenzied investigation had produced what could generously be described as organized chaos. Names were crossed out, re-written, circled, and connected with lines that formed patterns resembling either a complex mathematical proof or the work of someone who’d inhaled too many marker fumes.
Mona’s mind began to race, the caffeine-fogged gears slowly turning as she studied their work. Something was there, just out of reach, like a word on the tip of her tongue or a melody she couldn’t quite place.
“Wait,” she said slowly, the marker still clutched in her hand. “We saw Gertie’s pumpkin still on the vine. It was the largest by far in her field—”
“And could grow even larger, she said,” Ruth cut in, finally hauling herself up from the floor and brushing off her clothes.
“Exactly!” Mona pointed the marker at Gertrude’s name on the board. “The point is, we’d know if she tried to submit Brenda’s pumpkin since she’d have two big pumpkins in her possession.”
“And since we haven’t found any smashed pumpkin bits anywhere,” Ida added, picking the last of the apple turnover glaze from her hair, “we should assume that thing is still around somewhere, intact.”
Helen straightened in her chair and pointed to another name on their chaotic evidence board. “What about Doris? Unless she used Brenda’s prize pumpkin to bake all those pumpkin goods she had.”
Ruth nodded vigorously, then immediately regretted it as her hangover-like symptoms kicked in. “She could have been lying to us about that. And remember—she borrowed her nephew’s car because it was black and good for surveillance. Or so she claimed.”
“Maybe that wasn’t the reason at all,” Mona said, her marker hovering over Doris’s name. “Maybe she was hiding her car because it had a giant pumpkin in it.”
“Or it got damaged from carrying the pumpkin,” Ruth added. “She only has that little Volkswagen Beetle...”
“Can a small car even handle a pumpkin that size?” Ruth wondered aloud.
“How big would that pumpkin actually be?” Helen asked practically.
Ida’s eyes lit up with the same fervor she usually reserved for bingo probability calculations. “I can calculate that!” She jumped up and grabbed a small decorative pumpkin from Mona’s fall display on the kitchen counter. “Let’s weigh this one and measure the circumference, then we can extrapolate out to what a five hundred and twenty pound one would be!”
Ten minutes later, after commandeering Mona’s kitchen scale and a measuring tape, Ida had covered half the whiteboard with mathematical calculations that would have impressed a physics professor.
“According to my computations,” she announced with scientific authority, “a five hundred and twenty pound pumpkin would be approximately four feet in diameter. There’s no way that would fit in Doris’s little Beetle, not without some serious structural damage to the vehicle.”
“What about the Knowles?” Mona mused, studying their names on the board. “There’s something funny there. It would have been so easy for them to steal it. They could have just rolled it right down the hill from Brenda’s field!”
“And Ivy had those charms,” Ruth added, squinting at their notes. “Maybe the one in Brenda’s barn was actually from her and not Laura.”
“Speaking of Laura,” Mona said, circling back to their environmental activist, “she admitted to being in the barn to steal the pesticides last week... but claimed she never saw the pumpkin.”
Mona stood back from the whiteboard, studying their chaotic investigation web with the intensity of someone trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle in the dark. She tilted her head to the right, squinting at the connections between suspects and clues. Then she tilted it to the left, as if a different angle might reveal the pattern they’d been missing.
Finally, she straightened her head and stared directly at the board.
Then she spun around to look at the others. “We’ve been thinking about this the wrong way!”
Her gaze shifted to the clock on her mantel, and her face went pale.
Mona’s phone rang, cutting off her declaration. Brenda’s name appeared on the screen, and all four ladies froze.
“Oh no,” Helen whispered. “It’s starting.”
“Brenda?” Mona answered, putting it on speaker with trembling fingers.
“Mona!” Brenda’s voice was high-pitched with panic. “Where are you? The judging starts in thirty minutes! Thirty minutes, and I have nothing to show them!”
The four ladies stared at each other in horror. Ruth mouthed, “Thirty minutes?” while Ida frantically started shoving papers into her purse.
“I’m standing here at the fairgrounds watching everyone else wheel in their entries,” Brenda continued, her voice cracking. “Gertrude Hartwell just arrived with a pumpkin that looks enormous, and people keep asking me where mine is. I can’t keep making excuses! Will you ladies be here to support my claim that it was stolen? Please tell me you’ll be here!”
Mona looked around at her three friends—all of them disheveled from their all-night investigation, Ruth still wearing yesterday’s clothes, Ida’s hair sticking up at odd angles. They looked as exhausted and stumped as she felt.
But then something shifted in Mona’s expression. A spark of certainty that hadn’t been there moments before.
“Yes, Brenda,” Mona said firmly. “We’ll be there. And I know exactly what I’m going to say.”
“You do?” Brenda’s voice filled with desperate hope. “But what? Who stole it? Did you figure it out?”
Ruth, Helen, and Ida all stared at Mona with expressions of surprise and hope.
