Arthur Miller is arrested two days before Christmas.
It has been three months since Cody disappeared, and Miller is nothing more than a ghost of a man. His face is the same puce as the threadbare blanket swallowing him whole, tugged over his head until all we can make out of him is his eyes. Dark. Hollow. Twin pools of midnight sunken deep into sockets that might as well be empty, his haunted stare bleeding out of his face. A walking corpse bowing under the weight of the world screaming at him.
He is hauled along the poorly-tarred roads, a public display. A cautionary tale like the ones of the witches in storybooks, burnt at the stake or hung until their necks stretch two feet long. The same will happen to Miller.
Miller’s bare feet stagger along grating cobblestones, leaving streaks of crimson behind. Sergeant Worth’s hand remains firm on the scruff of his neck, fingers clawing deep into his flesh. Every time Miller stumbles, he hauls him up and drags him along again, and when Miller’s skin catches on loose rocks, shreds of peach grated right off his heels, we do not miss Worth’s grim smile. Worth’s daughter was the third child in Wyoming to be taken.
Cody Miller was the first.
Above the frantic clicks of cameras and rancid shouts, we beg Miller for an interview. To say something, anything. To defend his innocence—even though he has no innocence left to give, not when the body of his thirty-fourth victim was found in the back of his yard, white socks coated with still-fresh dirt. They have yet to find her head.
For a moment, Miller looks up. Almost seems to stop, despite Worth’s nails burrowing themselves into his throat. His eyes are burnt sepia, empty shells in their sockets. They have labelled him a killer born at home, but from his shattered stare, what Miller has truly murdered is his own soul.
“I didn’t kill him.” It is the first of the only two sentences he says. “I didn’t kill my boy.” And then he is silent.
Roman Noble is released three days before Christmas.
The world heaves a sigh of relief when he strides out of the station with his head held high. The officers offer to take him for a drink as an apology, but he simply shakes his head and continues on. “My pumpkins need me,” he says, firm and strong, and because Noble has never been anything but, they let him go.
Silhouetted by the backdrop of his tiny farmhouse, Noble towers over the large orange globes and emerald vines bracketing his feet. He almost seems to be expecting us, arms crossed over his broad chest, and even with his bad leg buckled ever so slightly behind him, he is no less formidable. “Like he should be a Viking instead of a farmer,” Elise Darling from the best part of town says, painting pictures of his blonde hair and steel jaw and piercing blue eyes with her fluttering hands. “Or a Nordic God of some sort.”
Unlike Miller, Noble is more than happy to speak. “I won’t say it hasn’t been hard,” he begins, in sentences that would be short and clipped on the tongue of anyone else, but threaded over Noble’s sacrosanct lips, they are fact, gospel. They have been ever since the day he preached his innocence to a choir that has believed in him from the start, for how could they not?
“Pumpkins are my greatest passion.” He pets a vine lovingly, running his hand over smooth orange skin, not a single imperfection in sight save for the slight protuberance bulging from its flesh, right in the center. Just like a nose. Noble’s pumpkins are not large, but they are perfection, and those who have tasted them say they would put the nectar of the heavens to shame. The girl selling typewriters at the corner ate a slice once, and she insisted she would never taste anything quite as delicious ever again. Any other food had her sick to her stomach for a week, mortal folly compared to the ichor of the gods. “So I suppose you can imagine how much it hurt when people started saying those things.”
Marion Harriet was the first to start. The people call her Mad Marion, but it did not matter—not when she ripped a piece of Noble’s fruit from the mouth of a hapless boy and proclaimed Noble the source of all the murders spreading through Wyoming like wildfire, burning every parent’s peace away. Her nails sunk into soft orange flesh like butter, seeds dripping from between her fingers. He’s taken their heads, she hissed, and she never spoke again.
Nobody believed her. Harriet disappeared soon after that—packed up and left town in the middle of the night, leaving her son behind. He disappeared, too. Another victim, or so they say. We did try to investigate that trail, when it happened, but neither of them left anything in their tracks. Nothing beyond a weightless rumour and another invisible body.
Nobody believed her, because Noble was—still is—the best pumpkin farmer in Wyoming, and he is tall and beautiful and speaks like cold water in the desert when his stony facade falls through. Either way, they had no reason to, beyond pumpkins being shaped a little like children’s heads. But the townspeople talked, Harriet’s disappearance adding gasoline to the flames, and soon, whispers rode the breeze through the streets.
“I don’t know what kind of witch she thought I was.” Noble walks as he speaks, his bad leg dragging half a step behind him. He leads us through his farmhouse, small but cozy, and there are pumpkins on every table. Small, shrivelled ones are decorations, hanging from the stairs. One is shaped like a skull, with the same central protuberance all Noble’s pumpkins have. “Did she think I was killing children and turning their heads into pumpkins?”
He looks sad as the words leave his lips, as if recalling the day the rumours took on the weight of the sky. Officers came to his farmhouse and searched every rickety brick from top to toe. Witnesses say Noble had the closest thing to anguish on his face they’d ever seen him show when the men smashed rows and rows of carefully grown pumpkins, the fruit so soft and ripe that their shoes sunk through them like melted lard, no sound emanating from beneath their feet but the steady squish, squish, squish of plant viscera on soil. When nothing but pumpkin flesh and guts had bled across the ground, they took him in to the station, a decision that was met with much protest from the public.
And then they found the body in Miller’s back yard.
“Honestly, when I first heard about the missing children, I thought they’d run away. I didn’t blame them. It’s the fault of the parents, really. If you plant a good seed but don’t water it, feed it, and love it like your own, it’s going to wither away. But if you plant a bad seed…”
Noble cracks open a pumpkin on his kitchen table with his bare hands. These, he tells us, are his personal favourites. The ones that taste the sweetest to him but would never be able to be appreciated by the rest of the world. He keeps them for himself, because, as he says, these particular pumpkins are his greatest passion. His favourite delicacy.
“I don’t know why Miller killed his son,” he says. “Perhaps he was a bad seed. Some people just are.” And then he bites into the pumpkin in his grasp with a hearty crunch.
Written by: Amberlyn
