The Pumpkin Murders Read online

  I studied it, this flimsy record of my birth, and was shocked to see the date written as November 13, 1949.

  Nora was sitting at the kitchen table, smoking and flipping through a copy of Ladies’ Home Journal.

  “It says here I was born on November thirteenth,” I said.

  She looked at me with a blank expression fixed around the fag between her lips.

  “I thought my birthday was on November fourteenth,” I said. “That’s when we’ve always celebrated it.”

  If you could call Nora’s pitiful icingless cakes a celebration. Sometimes there was a present; sometimes there wasn’t.

  “Let me see that,” she said, snatching the worn paper from my hand. It tore along one of the thin creases. “Well, what do you know!” She laughed.

  I noticed that her teeth were yellowing and I rejoiced in her misfortune.

  “Imagine us having it wrong all these years,” she said.

  “It makes me feel kinda funny,” I said.

  “Why?” Nora asked. “It had a hell of a lot more to do with me than it did with you. I did all the work and it was no picnic, believe me. Not like with Pete; he just slid out like a slippery eel.”

  I took the paper back and folded it carefully. Maybe I could get a new sturdier one when I applied for my social insurance card.

  A heaviness in my stomach dragged me down so far I had to lie on my bed for a while; I’m not sure of the exact reason, whether it was the incorrect date or the fact that Nora didn’t think my birthday had much to do with me. Both, I guess.

  Anyway, the birth certificate got me my social insurance card and I worked Saturdays at The Bay through most of grade twelve, some Thursday and Friday evenings as well.

  I hated it. I dreaded busy days but slow ones were worse. We weren’t allowed to sit down when there were no customers and sometimes I wanted to scream out loud. Maybe that’s where my hatred of standing up began. I like walking, I love walking, but I hate standing for more than a couple of minutes, like at bus stops without benches.

  The only part I liked about working at The Bay was the time I spent in the employees’ lounge, smoking enthusiastically. I knew it was smoking that had turned Nora’s teeth yellow but I also knew it would never happen to me.

  It was there that I ran into Myrna again, the undertaker’s daughter. She was a Norwood girl, but two years older than me, so we hadn’t had much to do with each other till then. By this time I was fascinated by her situation. Her huge house on the other side of St. Mary’s Road was attached to a funeral parlour. The place where she ate, slept and bathed was home to dead people, with their blank eyes and their various stages of decay. Stiffs, as she still called them, got worked on there, laid out by her father and his helpers. For all I knew Myrna was one of those helpers.

  “Myrna, dear, hand me that tube, would ya,” her father might say. “Stick it in this corpse’s neck, please, and we’ll drain all his blood out before embalming him.”

  “Sure thing, Pop,” she would answer.

  I was afraid to ask her questions about the business even though I longed to hear her talk about it. Sometimes I could have sworn the stink of formaldehyde was on her. It might have been my imagination but at the time I didn’t think so.

  Myrna attended university and worked only weekends, the same as I did. She worked in the girls’ clothes department, which seemed a much better deal. Both of us got a ten per cent discount on all of our purchases. She helped me pick out clothes that suited me. I was grateful for this because I didn’t have a clue. For instance, I loved pink. Myrna convinced me that I looked like an idiot in pink, a deranged bunny rabbit was how she put it, and that greens and rusty colours suited me better.

  I had been a little nervous about approaching her in the lounge because she was older and all, but she soon came up to me and it didn’t take long before we were making fun of people together and laughing a lot. Once we started talking she told me that she was going into the family business but that her parents insisted on a university education first. They also insisted on the job at The Bay in the hope that it would improve her people skills.

  “Do you want to go into the family business,” I asked, “or are your parents making you?”

  “I want to,” she said. “My sister doesn’t. She wants to get as far away from it as she can. But I like it. Especially when no one else is around, when my dad’s not there talking too loud. It can be so quiet and…I don’t know…awe-inspiring? I feel at home with the dead.”

  She smiled and I liked her very much at that moment.

  Myrna could be nasty, even back then. I found it a relief to have a nasty friend, someone worse than me. I could picture her biting a baby.

  She actually played tricks on people. There was a woman in her department named Muriel whom she played tricks on all the time. Poor Muriel was in her forties, skinny and lonesome. The Bay was her life, according to Myrna.

  “Hey Muriel, what’s shakin’?” Myrna would call across the lounge as Muriel walked in.

  Muriel grimaced into her shoulder and took a seat as far away from us as possible.

  “Last Friday night I really got her going,” Myrna said.

  “What did you do?”

  “I phoned her at home and disguised my voice and asked her if Moses was there.”

  “Moses?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Nothing much. Just that there was no Moses there, that I should double-check the number. She didn’t seem to think it was weird that someone these days would be named Moses.”

  “There are Moseses,” I said.

  Myrna squinted at me with a look that said I didn’t have any more of a clue than Muriel. She lit up another cigarette from the one she had just finished. If we smoked fast we could squeeze two into our break.

  “Okay, so then what?” I asked.

  “I called her back and said, ‘May I please speak to Lucifer?’ Muriel said ‘Who?’ Then I said, ‘Lucifer. You know, Satan? I need to speak to him.’”

  I laughed.

  “She asked if it was me. ‘Is that you, Myrna?’” Myrna said, in imitation of Muriel who sat across the room from us staring straight ahead. “I guess I didn’t do that great a job of disguising my voice.”

  “Or you’re the only person she knows who would phone her and say such things.”

  “She called me evil, said it’ll all come back to me one day.”

  “It might,” I said. “I’m not sure if anyone is off the hook if they’re intentionally mean.”

  Myrna looked at me as if I were speaking a foreign language, Russian maybe, one of the hard ones.

  She didn’t give a hoot about a lot of things and I think that’s what drew me to her. But she also scared me. What if she used one of her nasty ideas on me one day? What if it involved a dead person? After I began to understand the reverence she felt towards the dead I stopped worrying about that. But still, I kept my fascination with her family’s business to myself. I was afraid she would invite me over to look at corpses, to share the experience, and I knew I would take her up on it against my will.

  Her cavalier talk about stiffs was all for show. She was like Nora in that way, careful about what she put out front. But she had cracks that you could slip through, unlike my mother, who lived behind a wall of stone.

  One Saturday in the spring of 1967 Myrna came home from work with me. She backcombed my hair and put eye makeup on me and I looked like someone I had never met. We went to a dance in Windsor Park at Winakwa Community Club. We had to take a bus to get there. I knew as soon as we arrived that I was in over my head. Myrna got swept away soon after we arrived.

  Joe Turner was there; he was the only person I recognized at first.

  Boys approached me because they didn’t know who I was and because I didn’t look like me. l looked like someone who, at the very least, would give them a hand job.

  I went to the restroom and washed the makeup off my face. Then I brush
ed my hair till the backcombing was out.

  There were lewd messages written all over the walls in pen, in pencil, in lipstick. Some were carved into the old wood:

  ROXIE SUCKS COCK

  EAT ME NICKY, PLEEEESE!

  Some weren’t so lewd:

  PANTS VS TROUSERS VS SLACKS

  Those last words cheered me up; I laughed out loud.

  When I found Myrna she was dancing with a guy who had both hands on her bum. The song was “Somethin’ Stupid,” by Frank and Nancy Sinatra.

  “I’m leaving,” I said.

  “Party pooper,” Myrna said. “What happened to your face?”

  The boy turned around and I saw that it was Duane. He had a black eye.

  “What did you do to your hair?” Myrna asked.

  Duane looked through me; it was as though he’d taken lessons from Pete. Or maybe he genuinely didn’t recognize me: his least memorable sexual experience.

  I was well over any feelings of desire for Duane, but I wasn’t over what he’d done to me. That stuck like rubber cement.

  Last I heard, which wasn’t long ago, he was in prison in Quebec. Armed robbery, I think it was. So Duane’s not doing well.

  Joe Turner gave me a ride home that night and he didn’t even ask me for a hand job. I guess he thought I was just a kid, without the big hair and eyeliner.

  I didn’t hate Myrna after that night. But it took me quite a long time to want to hang around with her again. A person could disappear if left in her hands, fall into a hole somewhere when no one was looking, where no one even knew there was a hole.

  She pursued me quite fervently; I still don’t know why. We never had much in common except that for some reason we liked each other.

  Myrna and Nora liked each other too. That really got to me. It was one of the main things about Myrna that drove me crazy. It seemed peculiar to me that a kid would want to hang around with the mother of another kid. Not just peculiar. Wrong. One time she dropped in on me when I wasn’t home. She used to do that—drop in. I didn’t like it; I preferred some kind of plan.

  It was late in the summer, the final week before university classes began. When I arrived I found her and Nora sitting on chairs in the backyard. Mr. Jones had bought two wooden lawn chairs for us. The grade eight boys in shops class at Hugh John Macdonald had built them. They were a lot more comfortable than the nylon ones Nora had brought home from Canadian Tire. Mr. Jones had painted the new chairs green.

  Nora and Myrna were facing each other and one of Nora’s feet rested on Myrna’s bare knees. My friend was painting my mother’s toenails.

  “What the hell is going on here?” I asked and they both looked up at me.

  The nail polish was pearly peach.

  “Myrna’s helping me get ready for the party,” Nora said.

  She and Mr. Jones were going to a party at the Castles’ place, Quint’s parents’ place. They lived in a huge house by the river.

  I turned around and went inside the house. I felt sick to my stomach. As I hurled up my Red Top cheeseburger into the toilet I could hear the sounds of giggling wafting up from the backyard, through the bathroom window.

  Myrna also developed an interest in Pete as time went by and he was no longer a kid. She asked me about him all the time.

  He was handsome in a pale poetic way, smart in school, and good at sports. Not football, he was too slight for that, but he played on the basketball team and with his agility he beat the high school’s all-time record for leaping hurdles.

  And Pete had a way with words. None of them were ever directed my way, but whenever an occasion called for a poem, the high school principal, Mr. Longbottom, would ask Pete to write a haiku. Here’s an example:

  pigskin champs

  lead the parade

  autumn rains down

  That was when the Norwood Broncs won the football championship. Pete’s haiku were often related to sports, as that was what was most often celebrated at our school.

  I don’t know if they were any good; I’ve never been a studier of poetry. It was just amazing to me that he did it. I saved them, the ones I knew about, the ones I liked. They seemed to me like they came from a good part of Pete, maybe the best part.

  Here’s another one:

  pageantry in snow

  players are the figures

  in a dream

  That was after some kids from the school enacted the nativity scene at an outdoor Christmas festival.

  Mr. Longbottom hung Pete’s haiku up on the bulletin board next to photos of the occasions that they described. He had the art teacher, Miss Kirby, write them out in fancy lettering.

  I developed a renewed interest in being friends with Pete. It was the haiku, I think, that sucked me in. I made a few tentative gestures. I asked him some questions, which I hadn’t done for years, about his poems, about his hurdles, about his clothes.

  “You seem to prefer wearing your shirts tucked in,” I said cheerily.

  That one was more a comment than a question.

  I left long spaces of time between my efforts, not wanting to cause a disruption. But I never got an answer.

  When I baked a blueberry pie I took him a piece on a plate and placed it next to him on the front steps. Later, when he was gone, I picked it up and offered it to a neighbour kid who was riding by on his trike. I sat with him while he ate it, watched his face and hands turn blue. Then I fetched a damp washcloth and we cleaned him up before he pedalled off home.

  The girls at school were infatuated with Pete and he counted several of them among his friends. But he didn’t have a real girlfriend till the summer he was sixteen. I heard him say to someone that he had observed the way girlfriends could take the wind out of your sails. His choice for his first girlfriend remains a puzzle to me to this day.

  It wasn’t Myrna, but not for want of her trying. She was cute in a short, cheerleader kind of way and she had a trace of wildness in her character that I fully expected would appeal to Pete. But he remained aloof from her, maybe because she was my friend, maybe because of the huge age difference between them, although I couldn’t imagine that mattering to him. Here was his chance to get laid, for Christ’s sake. Even when she used her trump card—access to the dead—he resisted.

  She invited me over in a loud voice when she knew he was in the next room.

  “There’s a guy at the funeral home who blew his brains out in a car. Do you want to come and look at him?”

  “No,” I said. “But thanks for asking.”

  We did go to the Red Top Carwash where we heard that the car, a ’57 Caddy, was being cleaned. Pete was there, too, with Tim and Ralph, gaping, like we were. A man took a hose to the inside of the car. Something slippery and grey spilled out onto the pavement. I’ll never forget the smell. It reminded me of worms on sidewalks after rain.

  “What if I’d said yes?” I asked Myrna.

  We sat in a booth at the Red Top with our root beers and our cigarettes. The restaurant was next door to the car wash. The same three men owned both businesses.

  “Pardon?” said Myrna.

  “What if I had said yes, I did want to see the dead guy?”

  “I knew you wouldn’t.”

  “But what if I did?”

  “I wouldn’t let you. It’s private.”

  “So it’s all for show, you and your fancy offers.”

  Myrna smiled. “Don’t tell anybody.”

  I woke up screaming that night. Nora’s boyfriend, Mr. Jones, came to check on me. He stood in the doorway of my room and asked if everything was all right.

  “Yes, thanks,” I said.

  What else could I say to a stranger?

  CHAPTER 10

  I wanted to set Nora’s journal aside for a while after reading the bit about Luce lying down for the men. But I couldn’t leave it for long. It was like a drug, one of the nasty ones, that whispers your name like an angel and then leaves you feeling wretched before you’re even done with it.

  So
I sat down again with a glass of iced tea and read on.

  August, 1939

  Luce locked me in the root seller before the men came. The men and Darcy. When I started out yelling Luce said she’d stuff my mouth with dirty rags to shut me up so I didn’t yell for long. I did nothing wrong I swear. I reckon it’s to do with the men having at her but that’s nothing to do with me. It’s not fair. She stared down at me with her bad black eyes, the sky white behind her all wrong. I thought skies were sposed to be blue.

  I took Spike for a walk, to get us both some air. We went to the river. Spike wanted to go in the water, but I didn’t let him. It’s full of poisons.

  We walked down Taché Avenue to Norwood United Church and on to my friend Hermione’s place, Cuts Only. She was still open. Hermione is a haircutter who does me when I need it and Joanne and Myrna too.

  “Well, well, well,” she said as we scrabbled through the door. Spike slipped on the wooden floor in his excitement to get to her. All conceivable colours of hair stuck to his fur. Hermione was cutting her own hair, taking long hanks of her salt and pepper tresses and snipping them off near her scalp.

  She put down her scissors and scooped Spike up in her arms. She kissed him and he sneezed and licked her face and sneezed again.

  “What on earth are you doing?” I asked.

  She laughed. “I’m going to shave my head. Hey! You can help!” She set Spike down and he shook himself off as best he could and sat blinking up at her.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t like the white mixed in with the dark brown. It makes me look dowdy.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  “Yes, it does.” She looked in the mirror. Half her head was short tufts, the other half long and wavy. “Maybe when it’s all gone white I’ll be okay with it.”

  “Are you sure about this?” I asked.

  “Yes, I am.”

  “How about just colouring it or highlighting it or something?”

  “I don’t do colours. I don’t do highlights. That’s why this place is called Cuts Only. You know that.”

  “You could make an exception for yourself,” I said.

  Hermione filled a bowl with water and stray hair and set it on the floor for Spike, who slurped eagerly till he had his fill. Then he coughed for a while and Hemione went back to her image in the mirror.