Heartless(64)

Cath shook her head, baffled. “Had some villain knocked the budgie off balance?”

“Never mind that. It was the hero part that was important. All my life, I never dreamed I could be anything but a maid, just plain old me.”

“Oh, Mary Ann.” Cath pulled her into an embrace. “I never knew you felt that way. I would share all my dreams with you if I could.”

“I know, Cath. And you do. You share the most important dream with me … our dream.”

Cath smiled. “Yes, and this is the beginning of it. These pumpkins, this baking contest, and those twenty gold crowns. Of course, I’ll need my brilliant business partner to tell me what to do with those crowns once we have them. I would be sure to make horrible decisions if left to my own devices.”

“You would,” said Mary Ann, without apology. “But have no fear. The bonnet doesn’t seem to affect my head for basic mathematics.”

“Good. Then let’s go find the best pumpkins in this patch, shall we?”

They picked their way toward the cottage, their boots squishing into the ankle-deep mud. To their right, they passed a picket fence—or what had once been a picket fence—though now it looked more like a series of uneven, half-rotted wooden boards with crackled, peeling paint. It surrounded a smaller patch, set off from the farm’s main acreage, bearing signs of recent destruction and still smelling of smoke. Charred vines piled on top of one another, blackened stumps that may have once been pumpkins, blistered paint where flame had touched the fence boards. This corner of the patch looked abandoned.

The dirt path turned to loose gravel and weeds as they approached the cottage. Their footsteps crunched in the eerie quiet.

Cath plastered on a friendly smile and knocked on the door. They waited, their shoulders pressed together for warmth, but the only noise inside was the pop and crackle of a lonely fireplace. Catherine knocked again, harder, but was met with more silence.

After a third knock, she began to wonder if Peter Peter and his wife weren’t home after all. She took a step back and searched the windows, but they were hung with a mesh of pumpkin vines.

“I suppose they’re not home,” Mary Ann said, sagging with relief.

Catherine scanned the patch. The pumpkins were like baubles disappearing into the fog. She had half a mind to grab a few and run.

“Do you hear that?” said Mary Ann.

Catherine cocked her head and listened. A faint noise—sawing, she thought, the back-and-forth grate of teeth ripping through wood.

“Let’s go see.” She ducked away from the cottage door.

“Must we?” Mary Ann whined, but she followed Cath anyhow, through a tangle of vines that had overgrown their row and crossed over the mud-squelching path.

Rounding to the back of the cottage, Cath spotted a pair of lanterns flickering off the limbs of the encroaching forest, silhouetting the shells of two enormous pumpkins.

They were the biggest pumpkins she’d ever seen. Their severed stems were the width of tree trunks and their orange flesh reached the same height as the cottage’s roof. The pumpkin farthest from them had even been carved to look like a building of sorts, with tiny square windows cut from its flesh and an iron pipe sticking out through the ceiling that could have been a chimney.

Peter Peter was standing on a rickety ladder against the second pumpkin, pushing a saw back and forth through its shell. He was dressed in filthy overalls and sweating, every muscle straining as he pushed the saw in and out, out and in. Watery orange liquid oozed from the cut and dripped down the pumpkin’s side.

Afraid to startle him, Catherine and Mary Ann waited until he’d finished the cut. Hanging the saw from a hook on the ladder, he pushed at the pumpkin’s shell, forcing a tall, thin piece of flesh into the gourd. It left a window barely wider than Catherine’s hand. Inside she could see the stringy guts and seeds dangling from the pumpkin’s ceiling. The smell of fresh-cut squash rolled over them.

Covering her mouth, Catherine coughed.

Peter turned so fast he nearly slipped off the ladder, but caught himself on a vine that hung down the pumpkin’s side.

“What’re you doing here?” he barked.

“Good day, Sir Peter,” said Catherine, curtsying. “We’re so sorry to bother you, but I was hoping I might be able to purchase some of your famed sugar pie pumpkins. I’m entering the baking contest at tomorrow’s Turtle Days Festival and I have my heart set on making a spiced pumpkin cake.”

Peter glared at them and Cath had the horrible vision of him sawing them both into pieces.

She shuddered. Mary Ann glanced sideways at her, and Catherine brightened her smile to hide the horrifying thoughts in her head.

Grabbing the saw, Peter scrambled so fast to the ground Catherine was surprised he didn’t send the ladder flopping into the mud. His eyes darted between them with a discomforting intensity, a barely restrained madness. Catherine and Mary Ann both drew startled steps backward.

“I didn’t ask you here! You’re not welcome, and I’m not about to do business with entitled, condescending trollops like you, what think you’re better than me, no matter I been knighted by the King himself, right as anyone. You want a sugar pie pumpkin, you can grow it yourself, get your own pretty hands all dirtied up for once.”

Heart hammering, Catherine stumbled back another step, pulling Mary Ann with her. Her eyes kept darting to the saw and its rusted teeth.