Halloween and Other Seasons

She thought she heard him call her name.

She froze in mid sob, and wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her sweater.

“Jody…?”

She knew how foolish this was, but she had heard him call to her.

Forgetting the picture, she pushed herself to her feet and stumbled to the back of the house. The noise had come from the kitchen.

A blast of cold air hit her. She saw that the kitchen door leading to the backyard was open.

Holding her sweater closed and shivering, she stepped out onto the back stoop.

“Jody?” she called, almost fearfully.

The backyard was awash in unraked leaves pushed into dunes by the wind. The sky was overcast, huge banks of gray cumulus clouds rolling over one another from west to east. The temperature was falling. The pumpkin fields beyond the fence looked ominous, cold, brown and wet. The far hills surrounding Orangefield were dark, the trees stripped of green.

It looked like the landscape of a particular kind of hell.

She shivered, still holding her sweater closed, and turned around.

She gasped, and put her hand to her mouth.

There, staring straight up at her, was the face of a pumpkin. Puffs of steam issued from the eyes, the nose. The surface of the face looked hard and glassy, and, from within, there was a soft orange glow.

There was a body below it, the size of an older boy or young teen, sharp angles and shiny metal. The thing had its hands on her shoulders, holding her. There were gloves on its hands, but she could feel sharp metal fingers within.

The face came closer. There was a flat metallic smell, like 3-in-1 oil. The eyes stared into her, studying her, as if watching her from a far distance.

A long puff of metallic-smelling steam hissed forth from the mouth, which was smiling impossibly wide through its two angled teeth.

The jet of steam held a word, in the form of a question:

“Mmmmmom?” Jody said.

5

It was getting dark.

Len Schneider looked like a man who was thinking. He stood with his head down, hands in the pockets of his jacket.

He glanced at his watch.

Almost time to go.

His hands clenched into fists.

It had turned even colder. The last few days had each announced, with increasing earnestness, that autumn was here and winter wasn’t far behind. A curt wind was dervishing dead leaves into some of the shallow pits they had dug. The deeper holes were filled with muddy water and blankets of leaves.

There was nothing else in any of them.

Where the hell are you, you son of a bitch?

His fists clenched tighter.

“Detective? We’re gonna roll now.”

Schneider looked up to see Fran Morrison, one of the fresh-faced uniformed cops, standing in front of him. Behind the tight cluster of trees, in a small clearing, a work crew was loading shovels and other tools into a truck: an emblem on its door, in orange letters on a black background, read TOWN OF ORANGEFIELD, PUBLIC WORKS.

As Schneider watched, one of the crew opened the door, climbed into the truck and yanked it closed behind him.

Morrison was waiting for him to say something, so Schneider let out a long breath and said, “Yeah, Fran, we’re done here. You might as well go, too.”

“You need a ride back?”

Schneider looked down at his shoes, which were covered with mud. “No, I’m good.”

Morrison, almost sighing with relief, turned and was gone. A few moments later Schneider heard his patrol car spitting leaves from its tires as it followed the truck out of the road they had made and hooked up with a dirt road a quarter of a mile away.

He was alone, now.

But he knew he wasn’t. He felt it.

“Dammit!”

His voice echoed through the forest.

He couldn’t blame Morrison and the rest of them if they thought he was obsessed. He knew he was. But there was no way he wasn’t going to do everything he could to find Jody Wendt.

And Jody Wendt was here, somewhere.

Whoever had taken him had a lair here, somewhere.

Schneider knew it.

For a moment, Jerry Carlton’s smirking face rose into his memory, wearing those goddamned mirror shades.

“Not this time,” Schneider said out loud.

~ * ~

“My party, this time,” Grant said.

The bar itself was crowded, but the booth area, at three o’clock in the afternoon, was nearly empty. Bill Grant placed a fifth of Dewars gently on the table, as if setting down a piece of porcelain, and sat as he produced two eight ounce glasses, one with ice, one empty. He hesitated as he pushed the empty one toward Len Schneider.

“This is the way you like it, right? Neat?”

Grant had already lit the first of what would probably be a hundred cigarettes.

Schneider nodded. “I didn’t think you were paying attention last time.”

Grant gave a slight smile and pushed the empty glass to the other side of the table.

Schneider was working at the cap on the bottle, and twisted it open with practiced ease.

He poured for himself, then reached across and studied the amber liquid as it trickled over the ice in Grant’s glass.

“I thought we should talk outside the office,” Grant said.

Schneider’s ears immediately pricked up; already he detected a focus in the man he hadn’t seen before.

Len replied, still looking at the scotch in Grant’s glass, “You here to give me the fatherly pep talk? I’m sure Franny Morrison and the rest of them think I’m nuts.”

He looked up from Grant’s glass to meet the other detective’s eyes. To his surprise, Grant had pulled his cigarette from his mouth and was smiling.

“You think I’m nuts too?” Schneider asked.

Grant’s smile widened. “As a matter of fact, I do. But I understand. Thing is, I know now that this isn’t… weird shit.”

Schneider had downed one scotch, and refilled his own glass. Grant’s new attitude had begun to irk him just as much as his old one.

“This isn’t weird enough for you?” he said. “Did you hear what Jody Wendt’s mother claims happened to her two days ago? That a pumpkin-headed robot appeared on her back stoop and spoke to her in Jody’s voice?” Schneider let out a bitter laugh. “You don’t find that strange?”

“Frankly, I find it charming. She told me the same story.”