Page 41 of Pumpkin Patch Peril
The ladies stood in stunned silence, staring at the small mountain of confiscated agricultural chemicals.
“So you see,” Laura continued, “while you’ve been chasing me around as your prime pumpkin thief, I was actually conducting environmental protection operations. Those chemicals are going to be properly disposed of instead of contaminating the ecosystem.”
Mona felt her detective theories crumbling around her. “But... but the charm...”
“Must have broken off when I was loading bags,” Laura said matter-of-factly. “These bracelets aren’t built for heavy lifting.”
Twenty minutes later, they sat in Ruth’s Oldsmobile at the end of Laura’s driveway, staring at the peaceful farmhouse and processing their complete failure.
“So,” Ruth said finally, “that was our last suspect.”
“Our only remaining suspect,” Helen corrected morosely.
“We’ve never run out of suspects before,” Mona said, slumping in the passenger seat. “This case is harder than any murder we’ve solved.”
Ida leaned forward from the backseat. “Either there’s someone not on our list...”
“Or we missed one of the clues,” Mona finished grimly.
They sat in contemplative silence, watching bees buzzing around Laura’s wildflower gardens, each lost in their own thoughts about how four experienced amateur detectives could have gotten so thoroughly stumped by a missing pumpkin.
“So what now?” Ruth asked finally.
“Now,” Mona said with more confidence than she felt, “we go back to the beginning and figure out what we missed.”
“Tomorrow is the contest, and we need to figure this out once and for all, even if we have to stay up all night to do it!”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The first thing Mona became aware of was the persistent chirping of her alarm clock, which seemed to be coming from somewhere far away and underwater.
The second thing was the unmistakable sensation of having a whiteboard marker permanently fused to her right hand.
She opened one crusty eye and found herself face-to-face with their evidence board, which now resembled something a deranged mathematics professor might have created during a caffeine-induced breakdown. Red marker streaks covered not just the whiteboard, but somehow had migrated to her cheek, the dining room wallpaper, and what appeared to be Ruth’s forehead.
“Did we... did we solve it?” Mona croaked, trying to peel the marker cap from where it had embedded itself in her palm.
A muffled snort came from the direction of the pastry plate. Ida’s head popped up from where she’d been using a half-eaten apple turnover as a pillow, bits of glazed sugar stuck to her silver hair like festive dandruff.
“Five more minutes, teacher,” Ida mumbled, then focused on Mona with bleary eyes. “Oh. Hi. I was having the most wonderfuldream about winning the lottery with my bingo frequency analysis.”
“Ruth?” Mona called, looking around the disaster zone that had once been her tidy dining room. Coffee cups sat abandoned at various stages of consumption, creating rings on every available surface. The good china was somehow scattered from the kitchen counter to the living room floor.
A weak groan emerged from beneath the mahogany table.
“I’m not dead,” came Ruth’s muffled voice. “But I wish I were. Why does everything hurt? And why does my mouth taste like dry erase marker?”
Mona peered under the table to find Ruth sprawled on her back, squinting up at them with the expression of someone who had stared too long into the abyss of unsolved mysteries. Her orange “burnt sienna” scarf was wrapped around her head like a turban, and she appeared to have used her iPad as a pillow, which explained the keyboard marks pressed into her cheek.
“Because you were chewing on the marker caps around three AM,” Ida informed her cheerfully, now sitting up properly and picking pastry crumbs out of her hair. “You kept saying it helped you think.”
The bathroom door opened with its familiar squeak, and Helen emerged looking like she’d just stepped out of a spa. Her silver hair was perfectly styled, her clothes unwrinkled, and she carried the subtle scent of the lavender hand soap Mona kept for guests.
“Good morning, ladies,” Helen said brightly, settling into her chair as if finding three friends unconscious in various states of investigation-induced stupor was perfectly normal. “Lovely morning, isn’t it? I see you all had quite a productive evening.”
The other three stared at her in various degrees of dishevelment and disbelief.
“How?” Mona managed, trying to smooth down her hair, which had apparently achieved the structural integrity of a bird’s nest. “How do you look so... human?”
