The Case of the Pumpkin Patch Thief

Every October, Maple Hollow holds a biggest-pumpkin contest at the community patch, and this year the prize was a hundred dollars and a blue ribbon. The champion was Goliath, a lumpy giant with a curly stem, grown by old Mr. Abernathy’s granddaughter. I help run the patch, so I was there when we locked up on Tuesday night: Goliath sat in the winner’s row, photographed, measured, and ribboned. When we opened on Wednesday morning, the ribbon was still there — but the pumpkin under it was not Goliath. It was an ordinary pumpkin with a straight stem, sitting where the champion had been. Somebody had swapped them in the night.

The patch keeps two wheelbarrows in the shed. One has a wobbly wheel that leaves a doubled track, like a pair of lines wobbling side by side. That doubled track ran from the winner’s row all the way to the back gate, where the ground was soft from the rain. Beside the gate, in the mud, was a single clear boot print: a work boot, size twelve. The shed sign-out sheet said only one person had borrowed the wobbly wheelbarrow that week, on Tuesday afternoon. Everyone else at the patch avoids it — it rattles, it pulls left, and it dumps its load if you hurry.

Four people had a key to the back gate. Marla Jenssen manages the patch; she wears size nine boots and spent Tuesday night at the town hall meeting, in front of half the town. Rosa Delgado teaches at the school; she wears size seven boots and runs the school’s own pumpkin contest, which Goliath was too big to enter anyway. Hank Miller farms next door; he wears size ten boots and roasts pumpkin seeds for his farm stand every evening — his jacket pockets are always full of them. And Dev Okafor runs the bakery; he wears size twelve boots, and his Halloween window display had won second place two years running, behind displays built around contest pumpkins.

One clue looked bad for Hank: his jacket, hanging in the shed, had pumpkin seeds spilling from both pockets. But Hank’s stand sells roasted seeds by the bag, and he pockets a handful from every batch he tastes. His seeds were on every jacket he owns, every week of October. They proved nothing at all.

Dev told me he had been home baking all night, and that his ovens never let him leave. But his assistant, Ana, said Dev left the bakery at half past ten “to fetch more flour,” and did not come back until midnight. And the night clerk at the mill said a bakery van was parked by the patch’s back gate at eleven o’clock, its driver loading something heavy through the gate. Two people, who had never spoken to each other, put Dev away from his ovens at exactly the hours the swap must have happened.

So I lined the facts up: the doubled wheelbarrow track, the size twelve print, the seeds that proved nothing, the van at the back gate, and the assistant who watched Dev leave. Only one person fits them all. Who took the champion?