He was barefoot, his hair still tousled from sleep, and he wore gray jogging shorts and a faded blue T-shirt with holes. She thought he looked adorable as he began to look for other offerings.
“Call off the search,” she laughed. “I skip breakfast half the time. Cornflakes would be great, though.”
He got bowls, the milk and a box, and he returned to the table to serve. They ate in silence. Jenn hadn’t realized how hungry she was until the sound of flakes hitting the bowl elicited a growl from her stomach.
“What do you want to do today?” Nick finally asked.
Jennica shrugged. “I was about to ask you the same thing. I’m pretty open.”
“Well, I should go to work,” Nick said. “But I think I’m going to call in sick.”
“Won’t you get in trouble?”
“My roommate was killed, I think they’ll cut me some slack,” he said. “I should go over to see Brian’s mom, speaking of that. But first I can show you and Kirstin the lay of the land. Might as well know where you’re at if you’re going to be here a couple days.”
“Speaking of which,” Jenn said, pushing the kitchen chair back. “She’s a slugabed by nature, but I can’t believe she’s asleep. Not after yesterday. I’m gonna go check.”
She walked down the hall. The door to Brian’s room was half-open, so she pushed it a little wider and poked her head inside. The sheets and blanket were twisted in a rumpled mess halfway down the mattress, but Kirstin was not in the bed.
Jenn looked around the room to confirm. There was no adjoining bath, so she couldn’t be there. The hall bathroom was empty, too. She poked her head into Nick’s bedroom. The bed there was still made, unslept in.
Panic began to gnaw at her as she walked back through the living room to the kitchen. Only Nick’s expectant face greeted her.
“She’s gone,” she announced.
“Gone?” Nick said. His brow rose in puzzlement.
“Gone,” Jenn repeated. “As in, Kirstin is not in this apartment.”
“You checked the bathroom?”
She nodded, but he got up and repeated the walk she’d just taken.
“She probably just went for a walk,” he suggested as they returned to the kitchen.
“But we’ve been awake for more than an hour,” she said. Her voice trembled.
“Maybe she couldn’t get back into the building,” Nick suggested. “The front door locks. C’mon, let’s see if she’s waiting outside.”
“She would have hit the buzzer,” Jenn argued.
Nick shrugged. “She probably doesn’t remember my last name, which is the only one listed. She wouldn’t know which button to push.”
Going to the door, he noted, “The door’s unlocked.”
Jenn blinked. “Was it that way all night?”
He shook his head. “I remember locking it after we came in.”
They walked down the single flight of stairs to the foyer. Nick moved ahead of Jenn, pushing open the front door to look outside. But Jenn slowed and bent down as she saw something on the floor of the lobby.
“Nick?” she called.
He heard the fear in her voice. Stepping quickly back inside he said, “Don’t see her out there. What’s wrong?”
But he knew before he finished. His eyes followed the index finger of Jenn’s right hand, which pointed to the corner. A pile lay atop a phone book near the mailboxes, triangles and thin slivers of pale pumpkin flesh. They looked smeared with something dark.
“Oh my God,” Jenn whispered. “Please, no.”
Holding a hand to her mouth, she dropped to her knees and picked up a piece of pumpkin. It was cool to the touch but damp. Nick knelt with her.
“Why?” Jenn whispered. “Why is he doing this to us?”
“This is insane,” Nick agreed. They stared at the pumpkin pieces for a couple minutes as Jenn cried, but he finally took her arm and pulled her up. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go back upstairs.”
“And do what?” Jenn asked.
“Wait for her? Maybe this is only a warning. We didn’t find her body. She may still be alive.”
Jenn shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
“At least there’s some hope,” he offered, pulling her to the stairs. “We need to call the police.”
Jenn laughed. “And what are you going to tell them—that someone we didn’t see kidnapped a girl who doesn’t live here and left behind a pile of pumpkin pieces in the lobby?”
“Well, we could call the police in River’s End. They would know what to make of it.”
“We’d call them for a crime in San Francisco?” Jenn asked. “Um, no. And the police here will just think we’re nuts. Or, worse, they’ll wonder if you’re cracking and confessing to killing your best friend. I think we’d spend the day being interrogated. Maybe they wouldn’t even let us go.”
Nick led them back into his apartment. He made a point of carefully locking the door, but he didn’t say anything.
“No, the police can’t help us,” Jenn continued. “We have to stop this ourselves.” She paused and shook her head. “Myself. This is my problem. It’s not yours.”
“I’m going to help you, whatever you do,” Nick promised.
“The best way you can help me is to take me back to River’s End. That’s where this all started, and I have a feeling that somehow, in my aunt’s house, is the way to make it end.”
“We should at least look for Kirstin,” he suggested. “We should look around here. Be absolutely sure.”
Jenn nodded, but she didn’t hold much hope. Her stomach boiled in a mix of horrible sadness and anger. The latter kept her going. For the moment, fury at whoever was taking all the people she loved trumped the emptiness of loss.
“Let me take a quick shower and get dressed,” she announced. “Then we can take a look around. But I don’t think we’re going to find anything.”
Nick nodded. “I’ll make a couple calls.”
She turned to embrace him, squeezing him so tight he gasped. “You have to promise me one thing,” she begged.
“What’s that?”
“When we get to River’s End, you’ll drop me off, turn around and leave. Right away. I want you to stay away from me until this is all over. I couldn’t bear it if the Pumpkin Man took you, too.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SEVEN
“I can’t believe you let them leave town,” Officer Barkiewicz complained. “They’re the only suspects we have!”
It was Monday afternoon, the day after the murder of Brian Tamarack, and Scott Barkiewicz had parked himself in the captain’s office. He and the guys from County had gone over the house with a fine-tooth comb yesterday, and a special unit was in this morning going over it again. But he was clearly itching to get back to the house. And he apparently wanted some suspects to grill.
The police captain sat back in his chair and smiled thinly. “I let them leave town because they didn’t do it.”
“How do you know that?” Barkiewicz asked. “None of them are from here. They turn up suddenly in the center of a string of murders and end up smack-dab in the middle of one of them?”
“With one of them as a victim?”
“It could be a cover,” Barkiewicz retorted. “Maybe the circle is breaking. Maybe he was refusing to go along with things anymore and they had to get rid of him.”
“What ‘things’?” Captain Jones asked. “Run some background checks on those four if you want, but I bet you’ll find they all have pretty ironclad alibis for the prior killings. They’re not who we’re looking for, Scott, trust me. And they’ll be back up here once we’ve finished with the house. I doubt those girls have any other place to go.”