Page 42 of Pumpkin Patch Peril
Helen smiled serenely. “I went to bed at a reasonable hour. You three were still arguing about probability matrices and pumpkin transportation logistics when I excused myself around midnight.”
“Traitor,” Ruth grumbled, finally crawling out from under the table. She sat up slowly, looking around at the chaos. “We swore we’d solve this together. All for one and one for all night!”
“And did you?” Helen asked mildly, settling at the table and surveying their whiteboard masterpiece. “Solve it, I mean?”
The question hung in the air like the lingering smell of too much coffee and late-night desperation.
Ida suddenly straightened, her eyes lighting up with the fervor of someone who’d had a mathematical revelation. “Wait! I’ve got it!” She jumped to her feet, sending pastry crumbs cascading to the floor. “We should treat this like a math problem!”
The room fell silent except for the persistent chirping of the alarm clock.
“The suspects,” Ida continued, gesturing wildly at the whiteboard, “they all add up to zero!”
Everyone stared at her in the kind of silence usually reserved for profound moments or complete mental breakdowns.
Ruth finally broke the quiet, waving her hand in a “continue” gesture while still squinting from her position on the floor. “And...?”
Ida’s triumphant expression slowly deflated like a punctured balloon. She looked at the whiteboard, then at her friends, then back at the whiteboard.
“And... nothing,” she admitted. “I don’t actually know what that means.”
All four ladies turned to stare at the whiteboard, where their night of frenzied investigation had produced what could generously be described as organized chaos. Names were crossed out, re-written, circled, and connected with lines that formed patterns resembling either a complex mathematical proof or the work of someone who’d inhaled too many marker fumes.
Mona’s mind began to race, the caffeine-fogged gears slowly turning as she studied their work. Something was there, just out of reach, like a word on the tip of her tongue or a melody she couldn’t quite place.
“Wait,” she said slowly, the marker still clutched in her hand. “We saw Gertie’s pumpkin still on the vine. It was the largest by far in her field?—”
“And could grow even larger, she said,” Ruth cut in, finally hauling herself up from the floor and brushing off her clothes.
“Exactly!” Mona pointed the marker at Gertrude’s name on the board. “The point is, we’d know if she tried to submit Brenda’s pumpkin since she’d have two big pumpkins in her possession.”
“And since we haven’t found any smashed pumpkin bits anywhere,” Ida added, picking the last of the apple turnover glaze from her hair, “we should assume that thing is still around somewhere, intact.”
Helen straightened in her chair and pointed to another name on their chaotic evidence board. “What about Doris? Unless she used Brenda’s prize pumpkin to bake all those pumpkin goods she had.”
Ruth nodded vigorously, then immediately regretted it as her hangover-like symptoms kicked in. “She could have been lying to us about that. And remember—she borrowed her nephew’s car because it was black and good for surveillance. Or so she claimed.”
“Maybe that wasn’t the reason at all,” Mona said, her marker hovering over Doris’s name. “Maybe she was hiding her car because it had a giant pumpkin in it.”
“Or it got damaged from carrying the pumpkin,” Ruth added. “She only has that little Volkswagen Beetle...”
“Can a small car even handle a pumpkin that size?” Ruth wondered aloud.
“How big would that pumpkin actually be?” Helen asked practically.
Ida’s eyes lit up with the same fervor she usually reserved for bingo probability calculations. “I can calculate that!” She jumped up and grabbed a small decorative pumpkin from Mona’s fall display on the kitchen counter. “Let’s weigh this one and measure the circumference, then we can extrapolate out to what a five hundred and twenty pound one would be!”
Ten minutes later, after commandeering Mona’s kitchen scale and a measuring tape, Ida had covered half the whiteboard with mathematical calculations that would have impressed a physics professor.
“According to my computations,” she announced with scientific authority, “a five hundred and twenty pound pumpkin would be approximately four feet in diameter. There’s no way that would fit in Doris’s little Beetle, not without some serious structural damage to the vehicle.”
“What about the Knowles?” Mona mused, studying their names on the board. “There’s something funny there. It would have been so easy for them to steal it. They could have just rolled it right down the hill from Brenda’s field!”
“And Ivy had those charms,” Ruth added, squinting at their notes. “Maybe the one in Brenda’s barn was actually from her and not Laura.”
“Speaking of Laura,” Mona said, circling back to their environmental activist, “she admitted to being in the barn tosteal the pesticides last week... but claimed she never saw the pumpkin.”
Mona stood back from the whiteboard, studying their chaotic investigation web with the intensity of someone trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle in the dark. She tilted her head to the right, squinting at the connections between suspects and clues. Then she tilted it to the left, as if a different angle might reveal the pattern they’d been missing.
