The Pumpkin Thief: A Chloe Boston Mystery Read Online Free PDF

but I refrained. The present situation was calamitous enough and there is a statute of limitations on getting even for past Halloween pranks played on younger cousins.
    “If you assault her, I’ll have to run you in,” the chief said softly, but he was amused.
    “My attacks are strictly verbal,” I assured him. There had been only one exception, and that was when my former fiancé had kidnapped me. That time my better nature failed to triumph over baser instincts and I had bloodied his nose.
    “I wonder if the gates were locked all day. It would help narrow down the time frame for the murder,” Dad said when Mr. Jackman’s car pulled away. Dad was no fan of Althea’s either.
    The coroner would figure out time of death eventually, but everyone knows that time is of the essence in a homicide. Dad and the chief both looked at me, one with expectation and one with curiosity.
    I thought back to my several trips past the house during the day.
    “No. Shut but not padlocked.” They usually were locked because the city didn’t want vagrants in the house, but I was willing to bet that they hadn’t been consistently locked up for weeks. “It would have been inconvenient for the 4-H kids going in and out with decorations. And anyway, there is a way into the grounds through the hedge from the corn maze. The grounds aren’t secure.”
    “I called the inn after they found his wallet and got a name for the deceased—Hector Sayers,” the chief said. “You were right. The deceased was registered at the inn. He arrived four days ago. Nothing suspicious about him but he did go out a lot at night. I’ll send someone to Harley’s tomorrow and see if he was hanging with anyone in particular. No one in the crowd came forward to say they knew him or had seen him anywhere, but pretty much everyone here was….”
    “Wholesome and law abiding,” I supplied. Our limited criminal element was not drawn to events where no liquor was served.
    The town didn’t have a lot of places that stayed open late. Harley’s Bar and Grill was one of them. I used to work there and knew the owner would be less than thrilled to have the police around, but it had to be done.
    My dad’s brow creased and smeared his skull paint. It was already looking a little droopy. He’d been perspiring.
    “I know that name.”
    “Deborah Burns ran off with a Sayer, didn’t she?” I asked. Living in a small town, we know more than our immediate family’s genealogy.
    “That’s right,” Dad said. “Alonzo Sayer.”
    I looked up at the chief and explained: “Elijah and Theresa Burns used to own the haunted house. Deborah was their daughter. There was a son too, I think, but he was younger.”
    “What happened?” the chief asked, knowing there was a story and that gossip can sometimes be relevant.
    “The Burnses died in a motor home fire back in 2007 while they were camping in Oregon. The propane tank on the stove exploded. The circumstances were kind of suspicious but the investigation never got pursued. Hope Falls got the house because there were no heirs and the Burnses owed taxes to the city. I think it’s called escheat.” I was hazy on the last point. I had been interested in the Burns case because of the potential for it to be homicide, not for arcane tax law. We didn’t get many killings in Hope Falls and I sometimes looked beyond the town limits for cases to investigate— only in my mind of course. To do anything else would be to trample on someone else’s jurisdiction.
    “But what about their kids? Why wouldn’t they inherit?” The chief asked.
    Dad took up the story. “There were none left. Elijah and Theresa had two children, Carl and Deborah. Carl got killed in a motorcycle accident in ‘88. I thought at the time it might have been a suicide. Kid went right off a cliff without ever slowing down.”
    “Drunk?”
    “No. No alcohol, no drugs. Elijah took it especially hard. It was a pride thing— losing their son. Deborah wasn’t