Pumpkin Roll (21 page)

Sadie stood up straight and spun around to get Pete’s attention, but of course he was still outside.

“Help me,” the voice said again, this time clearer.

“Who is this?” Sadie said, her heart rate increasing as a rush of heat overcame her.

“It’s me,” the voice answered.

“Who?”

“Delores.”

Sadie froze. “Delores Wapple?” Mrs. Wapple didn’t have a phone, did she?

“Help me,” the voice said again.

“O-okay,” Sadie said, walking to the living room to look out the front window. The house appeared just as it always did, gray and dismal. The snow was still falling, whitewashing everything. “What do you need help with?”

The line went dead.

“Hello?” Sadie said into the phone. “Mrs. Wapple? Delores? Hello?”

There was no one there. Sadie pulled the phone from her ear and scrolled to see the most recent number on the caller ID. The screen said no data.

She ran to the back door. Pete looked up when the door opened. He must have read the alarm on her face because he stood quickly and took a step toward her. She met him halfway across the yard.

“Mrs. Wapple just called me,” she said as snowflakes landed on her hair. She held out the cordless phone as though that alone was proof. “She said she needed help, and then the line went dead.”

Pete stared at Sadie, then past her shoulder and into the house. The situation was wearing on him, and in that moment Sadie realized how affected he was by all of this and decided she wouldn’t put more on his shoulders; she’d do this one herself. Her decision was encouraged by the fact that he was keeping something from her. She was trying hard not to judge him for that, or overanalyze it, but it showed that they were still two individuals. He was entitled to deal with things his way, and she was entitled to deal with things her way.

“I’m going over there,” she said, turning back to the house.

“What?” He put a hand on her arm. She’d forgotten to grab her coat, and his wet glove made her take a sharp breath.

“She called for help. You stay with the boys, and I’ll be right back, okay?”

Pete shook his head, but she pretended not to notice. She didn’t have time to consider his opinion on this. “I’ll be right back,” she said again before she pushed through the back door and hurried through the house and down the front steps, careful not to slip on the snow-slick pavement.

She grabbed her phone on her way through the house but was crossing the street before she realized she still hadn’t grabbed her coat. No way was she going back inside and opening herself up to discussing this with Pete.

She didn’t even attempt the front door this time, knowing it was sealed, and went straight to the nearly hidden gate. In an instant, her last visit to Delores’s backyard came back, and she relived the heart-stopping panic she’d felt when Delores’s face had suddenly appeared on the other side of the glass. She did not relish encountering anything like that again and questioned why she was here after the break-in that afternoon. But the voice on the phone had asked for help. Sadie simply couldn’t ignore that, so she carefully entered the backyard and made her way to the patio. Snow clung to the grass but had melted over most of the bricks of the patio, making it wet and slippery.

Sadie took a breath and was about to knock on the sliding glass door when she noticed that it wasn’t closed all the way. The edge of the doormat inside the house had come up just enough to prevent the door from sliding the last quarter of an inch. A wave of trepidation raced down Sadie’s spine. It seemed someone had closed the door in a hurry, and yet there were no footprints in the dusting of snow that would indicate a recent exit or entrance to the house—at least not on the grass.

She knocked. “Delores?” she called loudly. It felt strange to call her by her first name, as though they had a basis for that kind of familiarity. After a moment, she called again, “Mrs. Wapple?”

No one answered and Sadie glanced toward the gate. Should she get Pete? Urgency took her forward instead of back, and she slid the door open, smooth and fluid in its tracks. “Delores?” she called again, leaning inside. “Mrs. Wapple? It’s Sadie Hoffmiller. What’s wrong?”

No answer.

All the blinds were closed, as they’d been yesterday, and as she took a step onto the tile, she squinted in an attempt to help her eyes adjust to the dim interior. The sunroom area, if that’s what it was, went back about eight feet. Two tiled steps led up to a small kitchen, with a hallway shooting off to the left. Everything was as cluttered as the sitting area was. She could see part of one doorway down the hall that had a light on—the only light on in the house. A den, perhaps? With her eyes on the lit room, Sadie dodged clutter and followed a thin trail that headed toward the tiled steps.

“Mrs. Wapp—” Her shoe hit something, and when her foot hit the ground, it slid across the floor. She stumbled, catching herself on the back of the wicker settee and sending a pile of magazines and papers that had been balanced there to the floor. Once she righted herself, she looked down at whatever she’d kicked over and gasped at the pool of red oozing liquid quickly overtaking the magazines at her feet.

Blood?

She scrambled backward, realizing her shoes were covered in it, and clamped her hand over her mouth to keep from screaming before she noted the pungent, chemical smell. Her eyes were adjusting to the darkness, and she could make out an overturned can not far from the puddle and partially concealed by an old tablecloth thrown over an end table.

Paint?

She fumbled for the light switch on the wall. The three steps to the switch were sticky and slick with her shoes covered in paint. Once the lights were on, she bent over enough to assure herself that it was red paint, not blood. The face of a Labrador retriever on the front of one of the magazines was slowly being engulfed by the growing red pool. Sadie could just make out the white address label in the bottom corner before it disappeared completely.

Her relief at not having stepped in a pool of blood was short-lived when she realized she’d just tracked wet paint across half the room. Her face heated up as she imagined how she was going to explain this horrendous mess. Then she wondered what a spilled can of paint was doing on the floor anyway. Had she kicked it over? Was that what her foot had hit? But a can of paint would be heavy. She hadn’t hit it very hard, and yet the puddle was still expanding, proof that the paint hadn’t already been there when she came in. A look at her hands caused her to jump again when she discovered paint on her fingers as well. The whole wall just inside the sliding glass door had been freshly painted red. Since she’d fumbled for the light, the paint was all over her hands too.

She felt horrible about the mess and confused at what was happening. Mrs. Wapple was painting? Then she remembered Mrs. Wapple’s call for help. Was this some kind of setup? Her spine prickled and her stomach tightened. What was going on here?

“Delores!” she shouted. “Mrs. Wapple!”

She turned her attention toward the lit room again, able to see a portion of the doorway from where she stood. What should she do? She could leave and tell Pete what happened, or she could take off her shoes and investigate the room. The fear that she wasn’t safe here was strong, but she had faith in her abilities to deal with that. What she didn’t have faith in was anyone else finding the answers if she left this undone right now.

After a moment’s hesitation, she bent down and began pulling at the laces of her wet and paint-covered sneakers, her adrenaline pushing her forward. Her heart rate sped up as questions began colliding into one another in her mind. There wasn’t any other painting paraphernalia scattered about, so why the paint can? And why was the house so dark? It was four thirty in the afternoon. Once Sadie had unlaced her shoes, she stepped out of them and left them where they were as she hurried toward the stairs, being more careful where she put her feet this time.

“Mrs. Wapple,” Sadie yelled, in a voice louder and more concerned than she’d been using so far. “Mrs. Wapple, are you there?”

As she passed through the kitchen, she looked around. Like the sitting area, the kitchen was not tidy. There were piles of papers, empty cans, and a sink full of dishes. It smelled like overripe fruit, something Sadie had smelled yesterday. She crinkled her nose and turned back to the hallway. “Mrs. Wapple,” she called again. “What’s going on here? What’s—” She stopped short, almost skidding to a halt on the kitchen linoleum.

She could see into the doorway of the lit room. There was some clothing strewn around the floor, but her attention was fixed on a single shoe poking out from behind the bed. Just one. It wasn’t on its side as though flung aside; rather, the toe pointed toward the ceiling like the Wicked Witch of the East’s feet did after the farmhouse fell on her in
The Wizard of Oz.
Sadie’s heart began to race with the implications. Was there a foot in that shoe? A foot connected to a body hidden from her view by the bed?

“Mrs. Wapple?” she said, her voice almost a whisper. She took a single step into the room before stopping. She stared at the shoe and tried to swallow the lump in her throat as a quick reminder of all the bodies she’d seen over the last year played through her head.
It isn’t another dead body,
Sadie chided herself.
You’re overreacting.
But she couldn’t make her feet move forward. What if it
was
a body? Mrs. Wapple’s body. The title of the article Jane had written about her last summer came to mind: “Modern Miss Marple: A Magnet for Murder.” It was a clever alliteration, she knew that, but it wasn’t normal how many cases of homicide she’d stumbled into lately. Was she prepared to find Mrs. Wapple dead in her bedroom?

“You just spoke to her,” she said out loud. Her words felt weighed down by the walls that seemed to be moving in on her.

“Help me.”

Sadie whipped her head around. The voice hadn’t come from the bedroom, but from further down the hall, where the boxes stacked along both sides of the hallway blocked any light.

“Who’s there?” Sadie asked into the heavy darkness, her voice shaking. She looked back at the shoe, still trying to decide what to do.

“Help me, Sadie,” the voice said again—the same voice Sadie had heard on the phone and the same voice she thought she’d heard in her bedroom last night right before the door had slammed shut. Suddenly a burst of air came from the direction of the hallway like a gust of wind: chill and . . . wet?

Fear streaked through Sadie like a lightning bolt, and she ran into the lit room, slamming the door closed behind her. Then she turned and felt the room begin to spin as she looked at Mrs. Wapple laying on her back between the bed and the wall, peaceful in her repose other than the deep red blood, the same color as the paint, that was matted to the side of her head and pooling into the carpet.

Chapter 18

The scene didn’t make sense, or, rather, Sadie couldn’t make sense of it as her thoughts became suddenly sluggish. Why was Mrs. Wapple lying there like that? An uncharacteristic darkness pulled over Sadie’s eyes, and she felt herself falling backward against the wall. Her breathing was coming in jagged clumps, and she gripped her chest as though she could force her lungs to fully inflate. She blinked several times, ordering herself to retain her senses, and after a few seconds the air began to clear. She could see again, but the scene before her hadn’t changed. Sadie swallowed, still gasping for air as though she’d run a mile.

“Mrs. Wapple?” she croaked, taking a step forward as tears filled her eyes. “Oh, please . . .”

Mrs. Wapple didn’t move, but as Sadie lowered herself to her knees, knowing she needed to check for a pulse, she noticed Mrs. Wapple’s chest rise and fall. Sadie was finally able to take a full breath of her own. Mrs. Wapple was alive!

To make certain, Sadie carefully took Mrs. Wapple’s wrist; it was cold and limp in her hand, but she checked for a pulse, relieved when she felt the slight expanding of Mrs. Wapple’s artery beneath her fingers, weak but apparent.

She isn’t dead,
Sadie said to herself as tears overflowed and ran down her cheeks.
She isn’t dead.