Free The Pumpkin Thief: A Chloe Boston Mystery by Melanie Jackson

You come back the week before Thanksgiving and pick up your plucked and boxed bird which is tied up with a big red ribbon.
    I was waited on by Caesar Moreno’s eldest son, Diego. He seemed promising— in a professional sense. Aesthetically, he was unappealing. Protuberant muscles are not my thing. Perhaps because I am jealous of people who can clearly lift a number of hundred pound sand bags without even trying.
    We discussed the benefits of the bronze and black heirloom turkeys. They run about seven dollars a pound and that made me gulp when I did the math. I wanted Mr. Jackman to have fun while cooking, but I decided the less expensive standard white turkey would be fine for us and chose a hen.
    Forty dollars poorer, but feeling happier about the approaching holiday, Blue and I returned to the car.
    Across from the gravel lot I noticed a soggy hay maze. Though not as scary as corn mazes, and infested with fewer spiders, I nevertheless find hay mazes to be unnerving. Again, this is because of my cousin, Todd. I stared at the wall of hay, frowning. This silly fear of monsters and mazes was proving a hindrance. True, I had lately been confronted with real threats of a human variety, but I knew that I was over-reacting to the maze because of an old fear.
    Deciding that now was as good a time as any to face my demons, I closed the car door and started slowly for the maze. Blue was with me— I’m not crazy— but I still felt nervous and foolish.
    A good memory is invaluable in detective work, but I sometimes wish that my mind would not recall the things that it does.

    The day that Todd and I set out to choose our pumpkins it rained like the dickens in the morning but settled down to a light drizzle by the time we piled into Mom’s old station wagon and pulled out of the leafy driveway.  The brakes squeaked in the old Blue Lizard, Mom’s affectionate name for the rusty pile of bolts she was forced to drive.  Mom had been on Dad’s case for several months about getting those brakes fixed, but he was pulling double shifts at work and there seemed to be no time he could fix them.  In the meantime we got plenty of angry stares from wincing drivers who were unlucky enough to be next to us when we came to a stop. Todd and I didn’t complain but we put our fingers in our ears every time we saw a light turn red.
    Todd was telling me stories, this time the Legend of Sleepy Hollow. He kept it tame because Mom was listening. When we were alone, he was a lot more graphic.
    I was pretty excited by the trip, not because we were going to just any pumpkin patch, but because we were going to Halloween Town. Halloween Town was the king of all pumpkin patches. It used to be located outside of the town limits so it wasn’t small like a regular town lot. To a six year old, it seemed huge.
    Piling out of the back of the station wagon, Todd and I raced each other to the petting zoo. Since we lived in town we didn’t get to see farm animals very often, just the regular cats and dogs. Both Todd and I liked to feed the goats even though it can tickle and every once in a while you got butted. The chickens weren’t as fun to feed because they were kind of stupid and pecked at you, but Todd liked to chase them and tell them he was going to eat them for dinner.
    One of the first goats I fed pooped while he ate from my hand. This made me laugh. I lingered longer than Todd wanted at the zoo because I didn’t want to go into the hay maze.
    There were hundreds of pumpkins to choose from all lined up in neat rows and I looked at them all while delaying. There were also colorful decorations including spooky looking scarecrows that I didn’t like very much, at least not the big ones that were large enough to be real bodies. I walked around trying to see everything at once until I came upon a dark, rectangular opening set into a wall of hay. This caught my attention instantly and kept hold of it the way a spider on the ceiling does.
    “Go ahead,