The Pumpkin Man

a nipple flashed out at her from a glossy page inside.

Someone from Goodwill was coming later for his clothes, so Jennica ignored everything on the closet hangers and reached above to the dusty things piled on his closet shelves. Old tax returns and their accompanying receipts bulged from folders held together by string. She hesitated at tossing those, leafing through some of the forms before finally shaking her head and throwing them atop the trashed porn. His life was over and his will was filed. There wasn’t any need for credit card receipts.

She pulled down a shoe box that clouded the air with motes of dust when she lifted the lid and found dozens of letters and postcards and photographs. Pulling out a random photo, she saw an attractive brunette in a yellow sundress holding a child. The woman squinted at the sun, and Jennica recognized the woman’s thin nose. It reminded her of the one she saw in the mirror every morning amid pale freckles. Just as the tousled dark curls trailing across the woman’s mouth looked personally familiar. And the dark, wide eyes.

“Mom,” Jennica whispered. Her eyes welled with tears. The little girl in the woman’s arms was her, maybe three years old, still chubby with baby fat, legs covered in white tights and her hair still sunny brown; it had darkened in grade school. She stared at the photo for a long time, leaning her thighs against the bed and thinking of those long-ago days when Mom and Dad had been together, and for a little while, at least, they’d been a typical suburban family.

Jennica cleared her throat and shook her head. Then she shoved the photo in the box and went back to the closet. There’d be time for tearful, bitter trips down memory lane later. Right now, she needed to just get through.

She went back to the closet and filed a bunch of odds and ends worth keeping in a large box: binoculars, a Scrabble board, an old 35mm camera, a zither . . . She wondered if anyone at her school would even know what a zither was, but she remembered picking out melodies on its taut fine strings when she was a kid.

Pulling down a brown varnished box with a golden cross on its lid, she frowned. What the heck? Inside was a pair of candles, a bottle of holy water and a small pamphlet titled Last Rites. She’d never known her father to be religious, so why he had an antique bit of religious history like this tucked away she had no idea. She put it back in the box.

Returning to the closet, she saw one string hung from the bare bulb. She pulled it, dousing the light. She wasn’t touching his old shoes and dress shirts. The closet was done.

She next checked all the drawers of the oak bureau and tossed the last few pairs of musty shirts and old underwear into a garbage bag, which she left by the closet door for Goodwill. The nightstand was filled with old paperbacks, mostly adventure novels: James Bond, The Executioner, Doc Savage. Jennica smiled. Her dad’s tastes hadn’t changed since she was a kid. Or maybe he just hadn’t read since she was a kid. She put a few of the beat-up paperbacks in her “save” box, liking the idea of remembering her dad by some of his old favorite things, even if she’d never read them.

There was an old leather book on top of the nightstand, no title on the front. She opened the cover. The inside page was a maze of faded bronze filigree, the paper yellowed and blotted. But the next page revealed the book’s purpose. Line after line of thin, slanted handwriting filled the page. At the very bottom it was signed Meredith.

Jennica raised her eyebrows. This must have been her aunt’s journal. Meredith had died just before the holidays, and her dad had flown out to California and done exactly the same thing Jenn was doing now: sorting through what was left. He must have been reading this just before he died. She shivered involuntarily at the thought. Weird. Or at least sad. She took the journal and set it by her purse in the living room.

A pile of boxes waited by the front door for her to take to the car. A coffeemaker, some pots and pans and containers she could use from his kitchen, a few lamps, a DVD player and a couple dozen movies from the living room. A bunch of framed photos and posters. Some candles and a nude silver statue of a mermaid from the shelf above the TV. An entire box of lightbulbs and extension cords from the hall closet. The novels and other memory trinkets from his bedroom. She didn’t want most of his furniture. It was mainly cheap stuff, and not her taste. He hadn’t had much use for expensive wood or antiques. She didn’t know where he’d spent most of his time, but it probably hadn’t been here. At least, she hoped not. The sad part was, she didn’t really know.

Jennica stared at the boxes and frowned. So, this was all that fifty-odd years of life boiled down to: a few boxes of knickknacks and worn-out junk. And blood on the floor.

The thought came unbidden, and she couldn’t help but look at the spot on the floor where she knew he’d lain dying, bleeding, alone with his killer.

“I hope they catch you,” she said to herself, but the room seemed to hear. The whisper seemed to bounce off the silent walls, and Jennica suddenly felt strange. This empty space was not her sanctuary. Not her home. She was an intruder on whatever mysteries remained hidden in the shadows behind the doors. She would never know what had occurred here in the dark. And she didn’t want to.

She bent to pick up the first box to take to the car when something caught her attention out of the corner of her eye, something lying against the baseboard beneath the decorative, thin hall table. Setting her box back down, she knelt. Then she felt around beneath the bottom shelf until her fingers came in contact with a cool bit of . . . something. She closed her hand and dragged it out into the light.

It was shriveled. One side was blackened with mold. On the other, its skin looked dusky orange and warty. The desiccated triangle looked like something left over from Halloween. It looked like the shard of a pumpkin.

What it was doing lying against the baseboard of her dad’s apartment, she had no idea. Nor, at this point, did Jennica particularly care. Raising an eyebrow, she flicked it back onto the floor and rubbed her hands on her jeans. Then she began the strenuous task of marching more than a dozen boxes down five flights of stairs and through the uncaring torrents of winter rain to her car.

CHAPTER

TWO

Simon Tobler wasn’t afraid of the dark; he was afraid of the people who walked in the dark, twisting its cloak around them for their own ends. That’s why he kept a baseball bat under his bed. Not that there was a lot of crime in River’s End, California, population 452. There had been that double murder in 2004 that some people thought was a final reprise from the Zodiac Killer, but in general the loudest sound out of River’s End was the barking of the sea lions from the estuary at the end of the Russian River.

Dark was a part of River’s End, though. The night came down early on the edge of the ocean; the sound of the tide breaking against the black rocks of the shore was one of the few sounds you could hear after six p.m. That and the occasional rev of an engine passing on Route 1, most likely hurrying back toward shelter in Bodega Bay or the highway to San Francisco. There were no streetlights here. And at two a.m., it felt as if there were no human beings for miles, though Simon knew that the Perrys were just a few hundred meters down the road. Probably snoring comfortably in their beds. They had a really pretty daughter, Jeda, about fifteen, whom Simon liked to watch when she came down the gravel trail in the late afternoon after school. She’d take the junk mail from the mailbox and close the wooden tractor gate behind her before running up the rutted path to the old farmhouse on the top of the ridge. Simon wondered if she had a boyfriend, and if she was really as innocent as those thin, fast-moving legs looked.

These things all crossed Simon’s brain as he, on the way to the bathroom, creaked across the center floorboard of the hallway in the middle of the night. Usually that’s where such idle thoughts were left. But tonight, as Simon released the night’s recycled Anchor Steam into the toilet, he thought more about the Perrys. He wondered about the manner in which Erin, the thin little blonde mother, preferred her thick-hewn husband Clint to bed her. They seemed a physical mismatch, her so slight to her husband’s bulk. He wondered whether Jeda had ever been kissed by a boy, and if she had, if she’d liked it. He wondered what it would be like to walk through their house in the dark and look in their bedrooms—

That’s when he heard it: a scraping sound. He shook himself off, pulled up his boxers and tiptoed into the hall. The noise came from the spare bedroom; steady, fast and repetitive. As if someone was dragging a piece of metal across the floor again and again and again.

Simon backed into the master bedroom and reached down under the bed without taking his eyes off the