Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 130, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 793 & 794, September/October 2007

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.

The meatloaf on a platter, Kate answered the question. “Professor Hayford Strawfoot,” she said.

“Call me Spud, dear lady,” came a voice on the stairs.

Kate shook her head. She swore the man tiptoed around the house, his big ears cocked, listening for the mention of his name so he could make a grand entrance. Strawfoot and her Jack had been banding crows to collect more data on the professor’s new theory of scarecrowery, up for this year’s prestigious Cowbell Prize in Agriculture with its million-dollar stipend.

Strawfoot appeared at the bottom of the steps, loose-legged and leaning on a golf putter. He tipped his little bowler hat to the ladies just as the front door slammed and Kate saw the gurney taking Jack’s body away.

Shortly after that, Hubbard arrived and she and Anna began putting the meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and succotash on the table, and Owl left his hollow nook to perch atop one of Tree’s broken limbs so his friend could shovel in the food.

Pulling up his chair, Hubbard saw the Grimmer and gave a start. “Not here in any official capacity, I hope, sir?” he asked. (People got polite when speaking to the Grimmer.)

“Merely a social call,” came the reply. “Jack wasn’t down in my book for dying today, at least not by accident or natural causes.”

Kate and Anna sat down and the meal began. The table ate in silence until Hubbard turned to Kate and asked if Jack had been depressed lately. “I mean, any chance of him standing up, rolling some paper into a tube, sticking one end in his mouth, the other in his nose hole, and blowing his own candle out, smashing his pumpkin on the desk when he fell?”

“He’d been mutter-muttering around about things not adding up,” admitted Kate. “But suicide’s the coward’s way out. Jack came from nobler stock. The O’Lanterns were kings of Ireland.”

Modesty prevented Kate from mentioning her own forebears. The Macmalkins of Gray were old vaudevillians, counting among their number the Three Weird Sisters who appeared in command performances before Macbeth himself. Not that they came away much richer for it. The Macmalkins claimed the farthing had been invented so that Macbeth could tip.

“Did Jack have any enemies?” asked Hubbard, turning quickly from Kate to look around the table.

“Well, the crows sure as hell didn’t like him,” she replied sharply, adding a softer, “My Jack was a friend to all. A Double Boo and licensed to scare anybody he damn well pleased, he saved it all for the crows.”

“But, dear lady,” insisted Strawfoot, “our figures show Jack’s crows always came back. And why not? Raggedy-ass is so yesterday, so unscientific. No way to win a crow’s respect. With me, the crows know they’re dealing with a serious adversary.” He raised a glove of limp fingers. “When Strawfoot chases a bird it stays chaste. By which I mean not only do my crows go away and stay away, they get out of the breeding business altogether.”

Hubbard broke into the ensuing silence. “Okay, folks, who was the last to see Jack alive?”

When no one volunteered, Anna said, “Maybe me. I noticed one of my bass drumsticks had a loose cover. The big parade was coming up fast. So I went up to borrow Jack’s duct tape. He fixed it for me on the spot.”

“Was he alone?” asked Hubbard. When she nodded he said, “See anybody in the hall or on the stairs?”

She shook her head. “Only old Grimmer there, waiting by my door when I got back.”

While Kate and Anna cleared things away in preparation for dessert, Owl whispered something to Tree, who rose, saying, “Got to take my friend here out for his evening mouse or two.” Unbolting the garden door, he added a boarder’s savvy, “Save me a piece of the pie, okay?”

When they’d gone, the Grimmer leaned forward and said, “I send a lot of groceries the turkey vultures’ way, so they fill me in on the bird-land poop. They tell me the crows got so fed up with Jack running them off they put out a contract on him.”

“Could you have misheard, sir?” wondered Strawfoot. “If the crows wanted anybody rubbed out it’d be me. The Strawfoot Method means their total extinction.”

“The vultures say otherwise, Spud,” insisted the Grimmer. “ ‘Make sure you get Jack,’ they say the contract went, ‘not the la-di-dah windbag.’ ” He nodded at the door. “Maybe Owl there’s our hit man. He’s at the controls of one big piece of heavy equipment. He maneuvers Tree around behind Jack, shifts him into kill drive, and wham-o, Tree clubs Jack with the blunt end of his axe. Then Owl parks Tree out in the hall, locks the door from the inside to make it look like suicide, replaces Jack’s key, and flies out the transom. A perfect locked-door murder.”

Suddenly Tree burst in through the door with Owl clinging to him, eyes wide with terror. “Who’s the body up there?” they demanded.

Armed with candles, the kitchen emptied up into the garden. Between the path and the house they found Sam Spook’s body, his head crushed in. Hubbard turned to the Grimmer. “You must’ve seen him when you arrived, sir.”

“Am I a suspect, Constable? I assure you, when it comes to death I only do wholesale. If I didn’t see the body, perhaps it wasn’t there.”

“What the...?” said Anna, as people in mystery novels do, picking up a raw parsnip next to the body.

Stepping closer, the Grimmer pulled a heavy wooden mallet out from under the dead private eye. Looking up at the third-floor windows he asked, “Is this the murder weapon? Did Spook kill Jack then fall to his death trying to escape?”

Hubbard collected the parsnip and mallet and herded the others into the house.

But Kate hung back. Something had rolled into the grass when the Grimmer pulled the mallet free. Bending down, she found an apple, a wax apple, her wax apple, late of the bowl of artificial fruit on her dining-room table. She recognized it by the two tooth marks in the wax. She’d shown them to Jack to prove they had a fruit-bat problem. Maybe he’d given it to Spook.

With a frown, Kate put the apple in her apron pocket and returned to the kitchen, where Hubbard and Strawfoot were having a heated exchange.

“You make it sound like I creep the halls listening at keyholes,” said the professor, shaking a clutch of limp fingers in the constable’s face. “I was on my way down the hall to the gents’ to wash up before dinner. Through the transom I heard a voice ask Jack’s permission to check the attic for the Phantom Sapsucker. Jack said, ‘Be my guest, Shamus.’ Then I passed out of earshot.”

Strawfoot nodded at the parsnip and mallet. “Isn’t that how you kill a vampire fruit bat? You catch him sleeping in his lair and all turned back into his human form. Then you drive a parsnip through his heart.”

“If so, Spook was playing a dangerous game,” said the Grimmer. “Now that there’s a reward, the Phantom Sapsucker must be sleeping with one eye open.”

“How about this,” suggested Strawfoot. “Spook creeps up to the attic, mallet and parsnip at the ready. But the Phantom Sapsucker wakes, grabs the mallet, chases Spook, and slugs him on the stairs. The commotion brings Jack out into the hall. The Phantom Sapsucker strikes him down, too, drags his body back into the office, locks the door, replaces Jack’s key, changes into his bat form, and flies out the transom. Back in his human form, he tosses Spook’s body, murder weapon and all, out the window.”

“Wow,” said Anna.

“But why go to all that trouble?” asked Kate.

“To make it look like suicide,” said Strawfoot.

Hubbard nodded. “Sounds good. I found fresh pumpkin juice on the attic steps. What say we visit the scene of the crime?”

During the trooping up to the third floor Kate recalled some Shocksville gossip about Hubbard’s mother. After five boys, people said, old Mrs. Hubbard had really wanted number six to be a ghoul to follow in her husband’s footsteps on the graveyard shift at the cemetery. To help things along, she’d given baby Doug beef tea instead of mother’s milk and meaty bones when he was teething. Then one day she went to the cupboard to get her poor Doug a bone. But the cupboard was bare. (Since then, whenever townie talk turned to youth, money, wedded bliss, or other things that seemed to vanish into thin air, they always added, “like old Mrs. Hubbard’s bones.”)

Another thing. Kate had noticed Hubbard hadn’t eaten any meatloaf at dinner, just pushed it around on his plate before burying it under a second helping of mashed potatoes.

Suppose even before he knew how to walk the baby Doug had chosen the vegetarian way, crawled to that cupboard, and hid the bones he so detested. Kate’s great-aunt Wichita always held that Shocksville things came with a warp in them. Did that go for vegetarianism, too? Had Hubbard learned the trick of changing himself into a vampire fruit bat to raid local sap buckets, orchards, and the very fruit bowls people used to brighten their dining rooms?

Maybe Hubbard wasn’t the killer. But Kate was sure she had in her pocket proof he was the Phantom Sapsucker.

Hubbard yelped on the stairs. “Careful with that scythe, sir,” he urged the Grimmer.

In the third-floor hallway Hubbard announced they were going to reenact the crime and began assigning parts. Kate was sure this kind of nonsense would get them nowhere. She cleared her throat. When Hubbard turned, she held up the apple as if to match its tooth marks to his canines.

Hubbard recognized the apple and turned pea-soup green. “Yes, I’m the Phantom Sapsucker,” he admitted in a trembling voice. “So I stole some fruit and sugar-maple sap. Hey, I slept in your attic. So put me in jail and throw away the key. But Mrs. O’Lantern, I swear I didn’t kill your husband, or Sam Spook either.”

Kate knew right then and there that poor Doug Hubbard wasn’t the murderer. “I believe you,” she said.

The Grimmer agreed. “Your vampire fruit bats are never bloodthirsty.”

“Boy, that’s a relief!” said Anna. “It’s a bummer when the cop’s the murderer.”

“But if it wasn’t Hubbard...” asked Tree, “...then who?” said Owl.

Kate turned to Strawfoot. “That was some story you came up with about the murder rampage, Spud.”

“An educated guess, dear lady.”

“You even explained the pumpkin juice on the attic stairs before Constable Hubbard mentioned it,” said Kate. “Maybe you knew how it was done because you did it.”

“I’m neither bird nor bat,” said Strawfoot. “How could I lock the door from the inside and fly out the transom?”

“My great-aunt Wichita used to say people don’t look behind a door unless they’ve stood there themselves,” replied Kate. “I don’t look behind doors. But I bet if I’d looked behind Jack’s I’d have found you staring out at me.”

Hubbard stepped forward.

“Stop right there, Constable,” said Strawfoot. “Arrest me and I’ll tell the world you are the Phantom Sapsucker and let rural justice take its hideous course.”

With his lower lip atremble, Hubbard threw back his shoulders. “I know my duty,” he said. “Professor Hayford Strawfoot, I arrest you for the murder of Jack O’Lantern and Sam Spook.”

Tapping Strawfoot with the flat of his scythe, the Grimmer added, “Spud, baby, let’s talk moral turpitude here.”

“Wow,” said Anna.

“You get charged with murder and, convicted or not, you’ll lose your academic tenure,” said the Grimmer. “I’ll see to that.” And he could. In addition to his day job, the Grimmer was a trustee at Bogeyman A&M.

Strawfoot’s jaw stuffing sagged downward. “But how will I finish my scientific work?” he protested.

“Here’s the deal,” said the Grimmer. “Plead guilty to the murders. We’ll call your piddling leap for gain and glory a crime of passion. You won’t hang. The judges always consult with me on death penalties. I can promise you life at the county prison farm. You can continue your scarecrowery studies there.”

Strawfoot brightened. “You mean I’d be outstanding in my field again?” He struck a limp but noble pose. “I accept your offer, sir. Perhaps I can atone for my crimes by making the world a better, a crow-free place.”

“One more thing, everybody,” said the Grimmer, “We’ve all got to swear not to reveal the Phantom Sapsucker’s identity.”

“Who...” said Owl, “...wouldn’t?” added Tree.

Anna put her arm in Hubbard’s. “A wife can’t be made to testify against her husband,” she said.

“Of course I’ll never tell,” said Kate. “As for Strawfoot, my Jack wasn’t vindictive. He’d have voted for life on the prison farm, too.”

“My lips are sealed,” Strawfoot assured everyone.

“Okay,” said the Grimmer. “Confession’s good for the soul. So let’s hear it.” He gestured to give the professor the floor.

Strawfoot took a deep breath and began. “Well, after he gave Spook permission to search the attic I heard Jack say he wanted Spook’s help to prove I was juggling the numbers in the scarecrow banding.

“Just as I feared, he’d caught on to what I was doing. The banded birds Jack scared away always came back. Mine never did. Why? Because I paid them to take a little vacation at the shore. I even paid Mr. Big, the Crow Magnum himself, to put out a contract on Jack.

“But if Jack was starting to blab, I’d have to do the job myself. And fast. And get Spook, too. Back in my room I watched through a crack in the door until Spook started up the attic stairs. Then I came up behind him and put a real dent in his fedora with my trusty putter and pushed him headfirst out the window.

“I hid when Miss Rexia clattered up the stairs. After she left I knocked on Jack’s door. I told him I had fresh data for our scarecrow study. He invited me in, never dreaming how far I’d go to win the Cowbell Prize.

“As he sat busily gathering up the papers he’d been showing Spook I stepped around behind him and crushed his head open. I dumped every paper on his desk into the fire, a real messy job because now they were covered with his pumpkin juice. Then I used his key to lock the door so I could make a thorough search for anything else incriminating. Hearing Kate in the hall, I flattened myself against the wall next to the door in case she had a key. I stayed there behind the door until she left. Then I ran to my room.”

Strawfoot held out his wrists for Hubbard’s handcuffs. “Well, let’s get started,” he said. “My scientific work can’t wait.”

Kate lay in bed listening to the distant music as Shocksville’s Halloween Parade stepped off. Listening was better than sleep, which, since that damned aluminum-siding salesman, always brought the O’Lanterns the same terrifying dream.

They would be standing together in the doorway on a dark Outside night watching an endless procession of children move along the street and up the walks to the houses and down again. Each child carried her husband’s head with an inside light to help it find the way. (Jack had told her how ancient kings made drinking cups from the skulls of their enemies.)

The youngest children came first, costumed as little angels, ballerinas, killer bees, and ladybugs. When they reached the door where the O’Lanterns stood they all said, “Triggertreed” and offered Jack’s head for them to drop candy in. The older children followed, cheerleaders, ninja warriors, Spider-Men in several sizes like nesting dolls, lady vampires, zombies, and, finally, coffins and tombstones with legs.

Kate wasn’t afraid of the children. It was the guardian creatures hovering all around them, always just beyond the light, who made her tremble. They frightened Jack, too. He said they whispered that they carried destruction in their fingertips. They told Kate they knew the O’Lanterns were not, as the children believed, neighbors dressed up for the occasion. She could tell those ominous dark shapes hated Shocksville even more than Shocksville feared them. She did not know why.

Kate stared up into the darkness, trying to picture the Grimmer and Anna Rexia leading the parade, trying to fight off sleep. Much as she wanted to see the procession of children all carrying her Jack’s bright smiling head, she dreaded facing that terrible dream alone.