Out of the Blue: A Pengram Mystery by Scarlett Castrilli Page A

bathroom and get food from the kitchen, and neither of those rooms overlooks the backyard.”
    Great. So she hadn’t seen or heard shit. “And she lives alone?”
    “Yeah. She’s got a daughter who lives in the U.K. and a son residing in Georgia, so they can’t just drop in for visits on the regular. Once a week on Thursday afternoons she gets a food delivery from Service on Wheels. They bring up her mail from the box, too, and take out her trash. Those are her only visitors most of the time. She’s a shut-in. This guy could have been going back and forth for weeks on that driveway and she’d never have known.”
    “Would she have forgotten with her dementia even if she had?”
    “She doesn’t strike me as so far gone as to forget something like that. I asked questions about the date, current events, and she knew the answers to most of them. The month if not the day, name of the president is, all of that. She substitutes words here and there when she can’t find the one she wants, like picture box for TV, but she’s still pretty cognizant. And I talked to the son on the phone. He says he chats with his mom every week, has her bills paid online, and she’s never mentioned anything out of the ordinary to him. He wants to put her in an assisted living center but she’s been fighting it, and he can’t fly out to help with things since his wife is struggling with MS.”
    “We’ll have to canvass the neighbors and see if they noticed an unfamiliar car in her driveway,” I said. But this was a farm area. Each property was large to allow for crops or pastures, and the homes were set back from the road. It wasn’t going to surprise me at all if we came up with nothing. “He was cutting it real close tonight. I wonder if he was still at the maze when the picking crews turned up unexpectedly for that last block of grapes. He would have had to hightail it out of here.”
    “Farm-side, or they would have seen him,” Halloran said. “But it was safe to use this driveway, especially at night. We’re going to need an official task force to get through all of this.”
    “So the maze is inactive, but is the pumpkin patch as well?” I had only seen a few pumpkins scattered in the front among weeds on my way in, but it had been dark out there.
    “Yeah, inactive,” Halloran said. “All of it was her husband’s. She’s just let it die with him. Usually he bought the hay each fall for real cheap from another farmer, hired some guys from a corner to set up the maze for late September through Halloween, and then sold the bales off to people with horses and ranchers at the start of November. But not last year. He died before he could sell them. She got a little mad when I was questioning her about it, said it wasn’t her job to sell those off. It was his. I think she’s hanging on since dealing with them is too hard.”
    “Now no one is going to want those rotting bales,” I said.
    “I asked when was the last time she left the house and she said Easter when a friend drove her to church. Did the perp know that?” Halloran asked. “How? How did he know this was an okay place for him to mess around?”
    “He’s like a ghost,” I said.
    “More like the Devil,” Halloran replied, and hung up.
     
     

 
     
    Chapter Nine
     
    It was a long and terrible day.
    Francisco Hernandez had lived in a tiny rental house with his wife and young son. Her English was accented but perfect. Too stunned to cry, Rosario Hernandez just sat on the sofa in the afternoon and answered my questions as equally stunned neighbors filled the kitchen with meals and tended to the toddler. He was sick, and too young to grasp what had happened.
    For the past three years, Francisco had worked for Dalezo Vineyard Management Company in Napa. Unlike many of the seasonal workers who picked the grapes in autumn and left the area, he stayed year round in Darby. Just this summer, he was promoted to foreman. He and his wife had been saving to buy their