Read Online Town in a Pumpkin Bash by B. B. Haywood - Free Book Online

closer to the window for a better look.
    The folder appeared to have a few documents inside, though she couldn’t tell what
     they were, since she could see only their edges poking out of the folder. However,
     she could just make out a single word someone had written on the folder’s tab with
     a heavy black marker.
    It read, in all capital letters,
EMMA
.

NINE

    “Well, Ms. Holliday, here we are again,” said Daryl Durr, Cape Willington’s chief
     of police, in a particularly calm, controlled, almost disinterested manner that told
     Candy he was anything but.
    She nodded, arms folded across her chest. She didn’t quite trust herself to talk just
     yet. She’d noticed on the walk back across the field that her hands were shaking,
     which was why she now stood with her arms crossed, her hands tucked away at her sides.
     The full force of what had happened—that there had been another murder in Cape Willington—had
     shaken her. Once again, the victim had been someone she had known. And once again,
     she somehow found herself smack dab in the middle of a murder mystery.
    She stood perhaps a dozen paces from where Sebastian J. Quinn’s body still lay in
     the pumpkin patch. A couple of police officers were cordoning off the area around
     the crime scene with stakes they’d found and yellow police tape, whileanother stood nearby in a conversation with two EMTs. And a dark-haired female officer
     was talking to T.J. and the man in the bee costume. Off to the right, the flaring
     lights of three patrol cars and an ambulance, parked along the same dirt farm road
     the tractor and hay wagon had followed into High Field, cut across the darkening day.
    The whole scene had taken on a surreal aspect, causing Candy’s thoughts to scatter,
     despite her efforts to focus them.
    Chief Durr must have recognized her discomfort, for his expression softened just a
     bit. “I know this is difficult for you, Ms. Holliday,” he told her, his eyes allowing
     a trace of sympathy, “but you and I have been through this drill before, haven’t we?”
     His forced smile looked almost genuine.
    Candy returned it as best she could. “Yes, Chief, we have.”
    The chief had arrived at the pumpkin patch ten minutes earlier, wearing aviator sunglasses
     and a chocolate brown bomber jacket over his standard police-issue uniform. He’d first
     walked around the crime scene, studying it from all angles with a practiced eye and
     talking briefly with a deputy, several of the officers, and a few hayride passengers
     before spotting Candy and heading over to her. He’d greeted her with a tip of the
     hat, his expression grim.
    “So, you want to tell me what happened?”
    She nodded, took a deep breath as she collected her thoughts, and then told the whole
     story, from the beginning, as carefully and factually as possible. Her voice was hesitant
     and strained at first but grew steadier and more assured as she talked. She told him
     that Sebastian had contacted Maggie a few weeks earlier about renting Sapphire Vine’s
     old place, and how he’d failed to show for a scheduled meeting that morning, and how
     they’d loaded up the hay wagon, making their regular rounds of the two fields, and
     found and uncovered the body. She mentioned the flashlight she’d spotted in Sebastian’s
     grip, and her guess about the time of his death the night before, and the car she’d
     found parked along a dirt road beyond the edge of High Field.
    She left out the part about the folder labeled
Emma
. She was sure he’d find that himself when he searched the car. Whether or not it
     had anything to do with Sebastian’s death, she couldn’t say—though deep down she felt
     it could be important.
    The chief listened to her carefully before grunting and turning back toward the activity
     surrounding the body, his eyes peering out from beneath his hat’s bill. “And do you
     think it’s a coincidence,” he said after a few moments, “that the body was