Page 2 of Pumpkin Patch Peril
“Pssst!” Louder this time, more insistent.
Ruth’s eyebrows shot up. “That’s definitely not the coffee machine.”
Helen’s eyes darted under the table, then toward the floor near the counter. “Mouse?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Ruth whispered, leaning forward conspiratorially. “A mouse can’t pssst. They squeak.”
“Depends on the mouse,” Ida said seriously, carefully closing her bingo notebook and tucking it back into her purse. “I once knew a mouse that could whistle ‘Yankee Doodle.’”
The other three stared at her.
“What? It was a very talented mouse.”
They craned their necks, scanning the café like a surveillance team. Customers sat obliviously at their tables, scrolling through phones or reading newspapers.
Then Mona spotted her. Brenda from Mossberry Farm leaned out from the narrow space between the coffee pot stand and the wall, her face half-hidden by a tower of paper cups. Herusually confident demeanor had been replaced by something that looked suspiciously like panic. She jerked her head sharply toward the back hallway, her eyes wide with urgency.
“Well, that’s suspicious,” Mona said, setting down her fork.
Ruth followed her gaze and snorted. “You don’t know suspicious until you’ve seen her try to sell zucchini at full price in August. Highway robbery, that’s what it was.”
Brenda motioned again, more frantically this time. Her eyes darted around the café as if she expected someone to leap out from behind the cake display. She clearly didn’t want anyone else to notice her clandestine gesturing.
“She looks terrified,” Helen observed. “What do you suppose has gotten into her?”
Ida squinted across the café. “Maybe she finally realized how much she overcharges for those tomatoes.”
Mona sighed, recognizing the look of someone who needed help and was too proud or too scared to ask for it properly. She pushed back her chair with the resignation of someone whose peaceful morning was about to become significantly more complicated. “Hold my cinnamon roll,” she announced, dabbing her mouth with a napkin. “If I’m not back in five minutes, come looking.”
“Dibs on her scarf,” Ida said to the others, eyeing the soft blue wool draped over Mona’s chair.
Mona crossed the café, weaving between tables of chattering customers who seemed blissfully unaware of the drama unfolding. She slipped into the hallway, where Brenda was waiting.
“Thank goodness,” Brenda whispered, hustling Mona down to the end by the storage closet. The space smelled of coffee beans and cleaning supplies, a cramped refuge from the café’s cheerful bustle.
“Keep your voice down,” Brenda hissed, glancing back toward the main room as if expecting eavesdroppers to materialize from thin air.
“I haven’t said a word yet,” Mona pointed out reasonably.
Brenda peered back down the hallway, then leaned so close Mona could smell her lavender perfume mixed with what might have been panic sweat. “I need to hire you.”
Mona blinked, caught off guard. She’d expected complaints about the coffee, maybe gossip about the upcoming Harvest Festival, possibly even a request for Lexy’s chocolate chip cookie recipe. This was not on her list of likely scenarios. “To help with your harvest?”
“No.” Brenda’s voice dropped to barely above a whisper. “To find my pumpkin.”
“Your what?”
“My pumpkin,” Brenda repeated, the words coming out like a fierce prayer. “Five hundred and twenty pounds. Gone.”
Mona studied her carefully. Brenda was usually brisk, confident, bossy as a barn cat with opinions about everything from weather patterns to proper soil pH. She ran Mossberry Farm with military precision and had never been seen to back down from an argument about farming methods. Now her hands shook, and her usually perfect ponytail had come loose, wisps of graying brown hair framing her face.
“Who steals a pumpkin?” Mona asked, genuinely bewildered. “I mean, you can buy them anywhere this time of year, and they don’t cost much.”
“Not like this one,” Brenda said urgently. “I’ve been nurturing it all season, Mona. Custom fertilizer, hand-watering. It was going to be my entry in the Giant Pumpkin Competition at the Harvest Festival.”
“And now it’s just... gone?”
“Vanished. Sometime between Sunday night and Monday morning. I had it in the barn for safekeeping. Someone took it on purpose.” Brenda’s voice cracked slightly. “The Harvest Festival’s in four days. If word gets out that my entry’s missing, I’ll be the laughingstock of Brook Ridge Falls. Do you know how many people I’ve told about that pumpkin? How many times I’ve bragged about keeping my winners title?”
