The Hen of the Baskervilles(5)

Or maybe my better nature was overcome by all the sights and smells in the produce tent. Right in front of me were long tables covered with apples of every kind—red, yellow, and green; large and small, all sorted and labeled with the cultivar and the name of the grower. Nearby were grapes, pears, and plums. And a little farther back—

I heard a shriek from the back of the tent, followed by loud wailing. It sounded like a child. I knew my own two toddlers were safe at home with Michael, but the sound triggered a familiar stomach-twisting anxiety. People were turning and heading toward it. I scrambled to follow.

At the very back of the tent were the entries in the largest pumpkin contest. There were already twenty contenders on display, with a few more due to show up today. I had to admit they weren’t the most attractive pumpkins I’d ever seen. None of them were the vivid orange you looked for in a pumpkin, and they didn’t have a typical rounded, wide-ribbed pumpkin shape. They all looked pale, bloated, and slumped. But they were undoubtedly large. The smallest ones looked like overstuffed ottomans, and you probably could have carved small carriages out of the largest few, which one veteran pumpkin aficionado told me probably weighed at least sixteen or seventeen hundred pounds.

It had made me nervous yesterday every time another giant pumpkin came into the barn, hauled on a trailer behind a pair of tractors, with a dozen burly volunteers to lift it into place. I decided then it was a good thing the giant pumpkins weren’t cute and rounded—at least they weren’t likely to roll onto one of the hapless movers. Most of them looked more likely to collapse inward from their own weight.

But what if one that was more rollable than most had been hauled in since I’d given up watching the arrivals? One that could roll over onto someone. Like a child. Of course, the child wouldn’t still be wailing if he’d been crushed by a giant pumpkin. He’d be screaming in agony if he could make any sound at all. But if he’d seen someone else crushed …

When I pushed my way through the crowd at the pumpkin end of the tent, I saw a boy of about nine or ten sitting on the ground in the middle of the remains of a smashed pumpkin. He was crying uncontrollably and had some kind of goop all over him. Almost certainly pumpkin guts. At a guess, he was surrounded by close to sixteen or seventeen hundred pounds of pumpkin guts.

“What happened?” I asked. “Is he hurt?”

I was already pulling out my cell phone to call Dad.

“Th-they smashed my pumpkin,” the boy wailed. He waved his arms, and since both of his fists were clutching handfuls of pumpkin debris, seeds and little bits of flesh flew everywhere. A man was stooped beside him, patting him on the back.

“We came in this morning to check on it,” the man said. “And we saw this.”

He indicated the mountain of pale orange and white debris.

“Wasn’t there anyone here in the barn overnight?” I asked. I was pulling out my notebook and flipping to the page where I had a list of all the volunteers with their cell phone numbers.

“Volunteer was at the other end of the barn,” someone said. “Didn’t see anything.”

I definitely needed to have a word with the volunteers, who seemed under the delusion that their job was purely honorary. And was I premature in seeing a pattern in these two events?

I already had my cell phone out, so I called Vern.

“We have an act of vandalism in the produce barn,” I reported. “Someone smashed one of the biggest pumpkins.”

“I’ll be right over,” Vern said. “Just seeing our patient off in the ambulance. He’s conscious and complaining.”

“Good,” I said. “About the conscious part, anyway. Oh, and maybe you could send Horace over when he’s finished with the bantam forensics,” I added, before he hung up.

“Now I’ll never w-w-win,” the boy was sobbing.

“We don’t know that yet,” I said. “We need to put all the pieces of this pumpkin in something.”

The bystanders gazed at the huge mound of pulp and seeds.

“Like what?” one of them asked. “A swimming pool?”

I was calling my tent volunteer. As I heard the ringing through my phone, a trilling musical noise arose from one of the bystanders. A woman in jeans, wearing a t-shirt with the FFV logo of the Future Farmers of Virginia, reached into her pocket, pulled out her cell phone, and then looked up to meet my eyes as she said “Hello.”

“We need some containers for the pumpkin,” I told her. “Keep everyone away from it until Vern and Horace are finished. Meanwhile I’ll get Randall to deliver some steel drums—I’m sure they have them or can get them over at his construction company. When they arrive, weigh them on whatever you’re going to use to weigh the pumpkins, and then get some volunteers to help you load all the pumpkin debris into the drums.”