Pumpkin Roll (2 page)

A phone call with Heather, Pete’s daughter-in-law, assured her that the boys could share one bedroom, which would give Pete and Sadie their own separate rooms. Heather was warm and easygoing and loved the idea of having double coverage for her boys. Pete and Sadie had sat down and set specific rules—not venturing into one another’s bedrooms, kissing kept to a minimum and only in vertical positions. Since attaining a new level in their relationship, they had both realized that age didn’t factor into chemistry as much as they would have suspected.

It had been so nice to have uninterrupted time with Pete, and she’d always loved New England in the fall, which made the trip a good choice so far. She and Pete had arrived three days early—Pete stayed with the family, but Sadie had stayed at the Courtyard Marriott a few miles away in Brookline—so the boys could get used to them before their parents left for Texas. Sadie and Heather had hit it off as well in person as they had on the phone.

“It’s been fun getting to know Jared and his family from the inside-out,” she added, looking up at Pete and trying not to get lost in his hazel eyes.

“And they love you,” Pete said. He leaned in for a quick kiss before eyeing the knife still in her hand. “Maybe I should let you get back to work before one of us gets hurt.”

Sadie laughed and turned back to serving.

Pete pulled out a chair. “So, why the interest in psychopaths and sociopaths?”

Sadie shrugged. “I caught part of a
Law & Order
episode the other day. They seemed to be using the two terms interchangeably in the show. Are they two names for the same thing?”

“Well,” Pete said, folding his arms over his chest, “they’re both antisocial personality disorders, which means they function 100 percent on what they want.”

“That means they have no moral code?”

Pete shook his head. “Not necessarily. Many of them still live by a moral code, but only because it gets them what they want. The terms are often used interchangeably, but to those who care to differentiate, sociopaths are generally classified as such because they don’t fit very well in society. Psychopaths, on the other hand, have an uncanny ability to mimic the way normal people act. They can appear to play the part of average citizens whereas sociopaths tend to stand out more. Neither of them has a conscience—but one group can pretend that they do. The definition seems to change every few years though, so don’t quote me.”

“Are they all violent?” Sadie asked.

Pete shook his head again. “Many of them live relatively normal lives and are contributing members of society. They become dangerous once their disorder escalates to the point where they are aggressively acting on their most base instincts. They don’t think rules—including laws—apply to them. That’s usually where I end up coming in with my police badge.”

“That’s scary,” Sadie said. “To think there are people with no conscience living their lives among the rest of us.”

Pete nodded in agreement. “But, like I said, they aren’t all criminals. For example, Pat was involved in the PTA for years, and I’m pretty sure there were a few psychopaths involved in that organization.”

Sadie smiled to herself and moved to the table, putting a fork by each plate as she considered the vastness of Pete’s knowledge. Then she paused. “Shouldn’t the boys have been back by now?”

Pete cocked an ear toward the doorway. “I hate to interrupt them if they aren’t screaming. . . . Wait.”

Sadie heard it too. Whispers. She and Pete shared a quick look and then bolted toward the hallway that joined the kitchen and the living room. Sadie reached it first and came up short when she saw the three boys kneeling on the couch and peeking over the back in order to look out the big picture window. They were in their pajamas, she noted, but were obviously intent on something happening outside. She looked over her shoulder at Pete standing directly behind her, and he shrugged.

Slowly they moved into the room, Sadie veering to the left side of the couch and Pete toward the right. They leaned forward to look out the window, and Sadie scanned the street to figure out what the boys were looking at. After a few moments, she spotted a woman across the street, digging in a flower bed outside the house . . . in late October . . . at night. And she wasn’t using a trowel to worry out some dead flowers; she was using a spade and making a pile of dirt on the sidewalk that led to the front door.

“Who’s that?” Sadie asked Kalan, who was closest to her.

“Mrs. Wapple,” Kalan said quietly.

“What’s she doing?”

“Being weird.”

“Does she do weird things a lot?”

Kalan nodded and folded his arms over the back of the couch, resting his chin on his hands. “We like to watch her when Mom turns off the TV.”

“She’s a witch!” Chance said.

“Witch!” Fig repeated.

Sadie’s eyes flickered to the large cardboard cartoon witch on the wall—one of a dozen decorations Heather had put up in preparation for Halloween next week.

“I think she’s just . . . digging,” Pete said. But Sadie knew he found it strange as well.

“Mr. Forsberk’s dog pooped on her grass, and she cast a spell on it and it got hit by a car,” Kalan said.

Sadie directed a look at Pete, inviting him with her eyes to help her out. He didn’t get the cue. “I feel bad for Mr. Forsberk’s dog,” she said, “but unless Mrs. Wapple was driving the car, then it was probably just a very sad accident.”

“It wasn’t,” Kalan said, still wide-eyed and sincere. “It was a spell. Mama even said.”

“Your mom said it was a spell?” Pete asked for clarification.

“Well, no,” Kalan said. “But she did say Mrs. Wapple is a witch.”

“A witch!” Fig said, loudly this time, and began jumping on the couch. Apparently his interest had waned. “A witch, a witch, a witch.”

Pete tried to shush him, and Sadie once again launched into her defense of the poor old woman digging across the street. Then Chance pointed out the window, his mouth open. Sadie followed his gaze and was startled to see Mrs. Wapple facing them, standing on the sidewalk that ran parallel to the street rather than on the walkway leading to her house. The streetlight down the block illuminated the gray hat made of some type of coarse fabric on her head and her long dark hair that fell in frizzy waves past her shoulders. As they watched, Mrs. Wapple lifted her hand and began drawing pictures in the air with her index finger.

“Okay, boys,” Sadie said, ushering them off the couch. “She’s just a silly old lady. And there’s cake in the kitchen, so let’s eat.” She chose to believe Mrs. Wapple hadn’t caught them spying, but was simply . . . being weird, like Kalan said.

“Cake!” Fig shouted as he bounded off the couch. Chance and Kalan followed, though Kalan kept glancing over his shoulder. Pete finished herding them into the kitchen, and soon they were arguing about which piece of cake was the biggest.

Alone in the living room, Sadie hurried to the right side of the window near the floor lamp where the pull cord for the heavy blue drapes was tacked behind the curtains. Before she pulled the blinds closed, she turned off the lamp, hoping it would make her less visible. Then she looked at Mrs. Wapple one last time. The woman was still on the sidewalk. Still staring with her finger pointing toward the house. No, not the house—pointing at Sadie.

Sadie swallowed and pulled herself a little further behind the heavy curtains. But she didn’t take her eyes off the strange woman outside.

Mrs. Wapple lifted her hand so that it was pointing at the sky, and then she closed her fingers into a fist. Still staring in Sadie’s direction, she punched her hand upward at the precise moment that the lightbulb in the lamp next to Sadie exploded with a pop. Sadie jumped out of the way as a thousand tiny shards of paper-thin glass tinkled to the floor.

“What was that?” Pete asked, stepping into the doorway.

Sadie looked at him. “The lightbulb exploded,” she said, refusing to consider the coincidence that it had happened at the same time Mrs. Wapple had punched her fist over her head. Didn’t lightbulbs have to be turned on to shatter like that? She looked out the window again, but Mrs. Wapple was gone.

She wasn’t on the sidewalk; she wasn’t digging in the garden. She was gone.

Sadie felt a strange tingling sensation wash over her skin like a cold breeze as Kalan’s words came back to her:
“Mama says she’s a witch.”

Good thing Sadie didn’t believe in that kind of thing.

Pumpkin Roll

3 eggs

1 cup sugar

1 cup canned pumpkin

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 cup flour

½ teaspoon salt

½ teaspoon nutmeg

1 teaspoon ginger

2 teaspoons cinnamon

Filling

1 (8-ounce) package cream cheese (softened)

¼ cup butter, softened

1 cup powdered sugar

½ teaspoon vanilla

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease a 11x15 jelly roll pan and line the bottom with parchment, wax paper, or a silicone mat. (The cake will stick to the pan otherwise since it’s such a thin layer.) In a medium-sized mixing bowl, beat eggs. Add sugar; mix well. Add pumpkin; mix well. Add the rest of the ingredients; mix well. Pour batter into prepared jelly roll pan (mixture will be thick). Smooth out as evenly as possible. Bake for 20 minutes.

While cake is baking, spread out a large dish towel or flour-sack towel on the counter. Sprinkle with ¼ cup powdered sugar. After removing cake from oven, immediately turn cake out onto the sugar-coated towel. Remove parchment, wax paper, or silicone mat from bottom of cake. Roll the cake and towel up together the long way. (The towel keeps the cake from sticking to itself; the powdered sugar keeps the cake from sticking to the towel.) Put the towel-rolled cake on a cooling rack and let cool at least 30 minutes.

While cake is cooling, make filling by beating cream cheese until smooth. Add butter and beat until smooth. Add powdered sugar and vanilla. Mix well.

When cake has cooled at least 30 minutes, carefully unroll it from the towel. (It might crack; there’s nothing you can do about that.) Spread with room-temperature cream cheese filling. Re-roll cake without the towel. Put cake on platter and cover. Refrigerate until serving—at least 1 hour, though 3 hours is best. (I usually cut the roll in half before I put it in the fridge or the freezer so it’s easier to work with.)

Cake freezes well for up to 2 months when wrapped tightly in aluminum foil. Serve chilled or frozen.

Serves approximately 14.

Chapter 2

That’s it?” Shawn asked on the other end of the phone the next morning, the Monday of what should prove to be a busy week.

“Isn’t that enough?” Sadie asked, annoyed that he was so hard to please. Kalan had wanted to walk the three-quarters of a mile to school so she’d obliged him and was speed-walking her way back in order to work off at least some of last night’s pumpkin roll—and the additional slice she’d had that morning. Calling Shawn, her twenty-one-year-old baby boy, and catching up while she exercised was simply good multitasking. Her breath fogged in the air as she spoke; a cold spell had settled across the East Coast overnight, but she was staying pretty warm due to the exertion. “Exploding lights and drawing pictures in the air is pretty out there, if you ask me.”

“Well, I mean, it’s weird. But you’re in
Boston,
Mom, and it’s almost Halloween. You’d think you could drum up something a bit more exciting.”

Sadie huffed extra hard to make a point. “I’m not in
Boston
Boston,” she corrected him. “I’m in Jamaica Plain, a quiet little suburb, and I think the excitement of the last year has completely destroyed any sense of normalcy you ever had,” she said with only slightly exaggerated disappointment. She really did worry that her involvement with five murder cases in the last twelve months had done some kind of damage to her son; he was a little too excited about helping her out with her newly formed PI business—Hoffmiller Investigations. Before he could defend himself, she changed the subject. “How’s that skip trace going?”