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

that important to them.”
    “So she got fed up and ran off?” the chief guessed.
    “Yeah, eventually. She got sent off to some girls school some place right after the accident and then about a month after she came home she ran off with Alonzo.” A dark thought stirred at these words, like an alligator poking its nose out of a swamp and then re-submerging. Dad went on: “The kids had been tight in high school and no one was surprised when she left. Except Elijah. He disowned Deborah— stood up in church and renounced her.” Dad shook his head. “It was a big scandal at the time. Deborah and her husband opened some kind of custom leather place in San Francisco. They were both killed in a robbery in 2006. I was the one who broke the news to Elijah and Theresa. Theresa was sad but Elijah didn’t seem to care. Deborah had a kid, I think, but he went to live with one of the Sayers in Oregon. I get the feeling that neither Deborah nor Alonzo wanted the kid to have anything to do with her parents.”
    “Any other Sayers left here in Hope Falls?” The chief asked my dad.
    “Nope. Alonzo’s parents moved to Arizona two years ago. There were no other children to keep them here and old man Sayer’s daddy finally passed away leaving them some money. They were looking for some place warmer in the winter. Ginny Sayer had the bronchitis.”
    “I wonder if Alonzo and Deborah had a son named Hector.”
     I nodded at the chief, thinking the same thing. It would be fairly easy to check. They would also be looking for a wife or next of kin anyway.
    “Her father renounced Deborah in church,” I said. “But I wonder if he actually wrote her out of the will. If there was a will.” I tracked down the next thought. “And I wonder if there is money to go with the house. Would the bank be holding it in trust?”
    The chief nodded back.
    “Good point. I wonder who handled the estate.”
    “David Cooper,” I said immediately. David, the pustule, was my former fiancé and the only attorney in town that did estate planning. We had had a parting of the ways when he was caught sleeping with my underage cousin. By my parents. On Thanksgiving. “It might be best if someone else asked him about this though. We don’t speak.”
    The chief raised a brow but I didn’t volunteer anything.
    “Why would Hector be in Hope Falls?” Dad muttered. “Surely not for auld lang syne. Especially not with one set of grandparents dead and the other gone. Unless it was about the property? Maybe someone finally tracked him down and he’d come to see it.”
    “The haunted house was in the newspaper,” the chief said. “But that’s strictly local.”
    Uh oh. Someone was going to have to talk to David for sure. I hoped it wouldn’t be me. I’d rather interview Harley.
    “What I can’t figure is who would gain from his being dead.” This was the chief again. He was being very tolerant about our speculating. One might even think that he wasn’t going to tell us to butt out and leave things to the real police.
    “You’re thinking gain since he is a stranger here,” I said and it made sense.
    The city would gain, but I didn’t say it because it seemed very improbable that the city council had gotten up to murder in order to save an eyesore that required costly maintenance and brought in no property tax. Though, come to think of it, they did rent out the estate sometimes for weddings and other events. I would never have a party there, but some people like creepy things.
    “Why hasn’t the town sold off the house?” I asked.
    “They can’t,” Dad said. “There is some kind of statute about due diligence in searching for an heir.” The chief grunted. He and Dad were probably of the shared opinion that no one had been very diligent about anything. The town had few resources and this wasn’t an urgent case. “One thing is for sure. Someone hated this guy.”
    Dad was right. For most killers, stabbing would have been sufficient. Hanging