by Cleo Coyle
At three weeks to Christmas, festive shopping bags and gift-wrapped boxes joined smartphones and laptops at our marble tables. Our tree was duly decorated, its piney branches scenting the air. Jazzy renditions of holiday classics drifted from our sound system, and flickering red orange flames sent a glow of warmth from our exposed brick fireplace.
Shoppers took a load off to sip an eggnog latte or nibble a candy cane–frosted brownie. At last, their crazy-busy worlds had calmed down.
Ironically, my own work schedule was ramping up to full throttle.
Tonight my baristas and I were in charge of the beverage service for the first of three exclusive parties in the Great New York Cookie Swap, an annual tradition that gave city bakers a showcase while raking in a Santa’s sleigh of cash for charity.
Unfortunately, many of tonight’s well-heeled guests would be driving in from tony suburbs; and the approaching snowstorm could kill the event. On the other hand, the blizzard might bypass us completely. The meteorologists, who sounded more like bookies than weather reporters, were currently giving us a “fifty percent chance” of dodging the snow bullet.
My pop, who was an actual bookie, didn’t like fifty-fifty odds, but the way I saw it, when latte mugs were half empty, they were also half full.
“I haven’t seen a flurry since last February,” Tucker complained. “And the almanac predicts a dry winter. At this rate, New York’s chance for a white Christmas is about on par with my chances of dating Channing Tatum.” He swung a bright red sack off his narrow shoulders. “Not in this lifetime.”
“You already have a boyfriend,” I pointed out. “And I’ll take a white Christmas on December twenty-fifth. Not tonight . . .” Beyond our French doors, the December sky remained free of clouds, its cobalt hue as clear as my favorite cop’s steady gaze. Now all it had to do was stay that way.
“Yes, fret not, oh worshipper of the Hallmark moment . . .” Hands on her zaftig hips, Esther Best emerged from behind our espresso machine. “Santa’s sleigh doesn’t blast off for three weeks, and that’s plenty of time for your cherished whiteout.”
Esther Best (shortened from Bestovasky by her grandfather) was my senior barista. An NYU grad student and the most popular slam poetess on Hudson Street, Esther had Rubenesque cleavage, wild dark hair, currently tamed into a half beehive, and an array of cheerful Internet handles, which included MorbidDreams and SnarkCandy.
Pushing up her black-framed glasses, she eyed Tuck’s bright red bag on our blue marble counter. “So what does Santa’s little helper have in his crimson pack? Theatrical hand-me-downs no sane person would be caught dead wearing?”
“Don’t be so terminally hip,” Tuck scolded. “When it comes to Christmas, you must have kitsch, especially when kids are involved.”
“Kids? Who said anything about kids?” Esther asked.
“The Cookie Swap parties are family events,” I explained. “We’ll be serving in the Bryant Park Grill, but the park skating rink is reserved for the party—so there’ll be plenty of children.”
“In other words, be ready to serve a lot of Belgian Chocolate Cocoa and Sugar Cookie Steamers?”
“Precisely,” I said. “And while our aprons are professional, they’re not exactly festive, which is why I asked Tucker for help. You know what I always say—”
“Yeah, yeah,” Esther droned, “serving is theater.”
“And I’m a firm believer in recycling costumes!” Tuck noted. “So choose anything you like from my bag of thespian tricks.”
Esther folded her arms. “I don’t know. Red and green clashes with my zombie eye makeup . . . And I’m not hiding these luscious curves under some hand-me-down Santa suit.”
“If anyone’s playing Santa, it’s moi,” Tuck said, pulling out a jingle bell–trimmed candy cane scarf that looked longer than my holiday to-do list. “And these aren’t mere ‘hand-me-downs’ my Dark Queen of Urban Angst. These are high-quality goodies left over from last year’s Ticket to the North Pole party at the New York Public Library. You remember that blowout, don’t you, Clare?”
“A North Pole party? Deadly!” another voice chimed in. “Sounds like great craic!”
Moirin Fagan, the newest addition to our shop, swept among us with her latest tray of fresh-baked cookies—gingery brown morsels glistening under a crystalline sheen of shimmering sugar.
“Great crack?” Tucked blinked. “Excuse me, but as far as I know, Santa’s white powder does not require a cocaine pipe.”
“Not that kind o’ crack!” Moirin laughed. “Craic is Irish slang for . . . well, it means a few things. What I meant was it sounded like a fun time.”
Esther made a show of sniffing the air then gestured to Moirin’s tray. “Those Gingerbread Crackle Cookies smell like crack to me.”
Tuck shot me a meaningful look. “It does smell like Mrs. Claus’s kitchen in here.”
I smiled. “That’s the idea.”
In New York, the battle for holiday buzz was fierce, and every year I searched for a way to see that the Village Blend came up a winner. This year my weapon was the evocative smell of Christmas cookies.
The scents of cinnamon, ginger, caramel, molasses, and chocolate not only filled our shop, but also drifted outside (via my strategically placed vent and fan), where they lured passersby to come in from the cold, indulge, and bring a friend. (Buy two coffee drinks, get two cookies free!) The cookies were so good that customers almost always purchased more to eat, along with a box to take home.
It was a new idea for us, worked out through an arrangement with Janelle Babcock, a friend and pastry chef who rented us the small convection oven and sold us the refrigerated cookie dough.
Every hour between 2 and 8 PM, a different batch of cookies went into the Blend’s oven, thanks to Janelle’s (borrowed) baker’s assistant Moirin Fagan, aka “M.”
(I found Moirin’s name easy enough to pronounce—really, who couldn’t remember Mur-in?—but from her first day she insisted we call her by her first initial, and so we did.)
Confident and opinionated, M was the kind of girl my grandmother would call “mouthy,” Madame (the Blend’s owner) would call “sassy,” but I simply called “perfectly equipped for Manhattan retail.”
She handled good customers with friendly efficiency; bad ones with firm control. And a shift didn’t go by without her teaching us some new word of Irish slang from her native Emerald Isle. To wit—
Craic meant a fun time, but also the news, as in “What’s the craic?” Deadly was good. Tiz me berrys meant you’re kidding me. The bathroom was jax; police officers were guards; daycent meant decent, and something terrible was nawful. If you were drunk, you were demented; and a jerk of a customer was an eejit.
My staff liked her immediately. In fact, we all liked her so much that we invited her to participate in our annual Secret Santa tradition. The presents were already piling up in a special area of our back pantry—beside the eight-inch-high, battery-operated Christmas tree and plastic, motion-activated Bing Crosby. Tucker provided the latter. “Whenever we hear Bing croon ‘White Christmas,’ we’ll all know someone is back there, adding a Secret Santa gift to the pile!”
The next sound I heard that afternoon wasn’t Bing, but our front doorbell. The fresh-baked cookies brought in a few new customers along with my shift-change baristas.
With a wave to Vicki and Gardner, I turned to Tucker.
“Okay,” I said. “Time for a preparty costume meeting—with cookies.”
* * *
I grabbed a corner café table, and Esther poured us coffees. Then Tuck dug into his bag and dangled a scrap of red velvet, trimmed in fake fur.
“What do you think, Esther? Want to be Santa’s Little Helper?”
Esther’s eyes went wide as she crunched her crinkle. “I’ve seen wider belts than that skirt. Maybe I will take a Santa suit after all.”
Shuddering, I snatched the flimsy material out of Tuck’s hand and stuffed it back into his bag.
�
��But it’s Santa’s Little Helper,” Tuck wailed. “Don’t you remember, Clare? You wore it last Christmas to—”
“Never again. And there’ll be no skimpy outfits in this coffeehouse.”
“Glad to hear you say that, yeah!” Moirin’s head bobbed in appreciation. “I once worked a pub job with a whacker of a manager. It was pure dose! He made all the girls wear skirts up to their navels. We didn’t bend over—unless we wanted to moon the bartender, and I reckon some of the girls did.”
“Well, for catering, I don’t require my staff to wear anything but black pants, black shoes, white shirts, and our Village Blend aprons—with the exception of this evening.” I speared Tucker. “Tell me you have hats in that bag of tricks.”
“Of course!” Tuck fumbled through it. “Here we go . . .”
One by one, the chapeaus appeared: two snowman top hats; a penguin hat (complete with orange bill); and a Jack Frost dangling icicles cap.
“These are great,” I said. “You know what? I think all the baristas should wear them—in the shop, too.”
Esther groaned.
“Oh, come on,” Tucker said, in agreement with me. “It’ll be fun! I’ve got the perfect one for you, Esther . . .”
He pulled out a “kiss-me!” mistletoe hat—a green bowler with a red edge featuring a wire that dangled a sprig of plastic mistletoe, presumably for the wearer to approach unsuspecting targets and demand a holiday kiss.
Esther raised her hands in mock horror. “Not me. Not in this lifetime. Give it to Moirin.”
We waited for her reaction. She blinked and stared. The pause struck me as odd.
“M?” Esther prompted.
She tilted her head. “Yes? What?”
“Do you want this hat?”
“That hat? Tiz me berrys!” she cried. “I’d sooner wear the flimsy skirt!”
Tuck shrugged and tossed the cap aside.
“How about this one?” he asked, pulling out a green joker’s cap, complete with fake ears. Tiny bells were affixed to its many points, and when he shook it, the hat jingled.
“I couldn’t hear myself think with all those tinkling bells,” Moirin said with a toss of her black bangs.
“Give it to Nancy,” Esther said. “She’s got that terrible crush on Mr. Boss.”
Tuck raised an eyebrow. “So you want to bell the cat to warn the canary?”
“The canary being Matt?” I asked.
Esther nodded.
“That’s rich,” I said. “Sorry, but I just can’t see Matt as a canary . . .”
As anthropomorphic analogies went, my ex-husband (who also happened to be the son of the Blend’s owner and my business partner) was more like the tomcat who ate one.
“The bell hat goes on Nancy,” I agreed. “And any hat for Matteo Allegro should have big, obvious horns.”
“Got it!” Tuck sang, pulling out a reindeer hat with long brown antlers.
“Perfect.”
The throbbing beat of club music interrupted us. Moirin silenced her ringtone and checked the caller ID. A quiet look of smugness came over her face; not triumph, exactly, but more like a cat who was about to eat a canary.
“Excuse me. I’ve been expecting this call!”
“Now that looks like a girl with a plan,” Esther said as Moirin headed for the back pantry. “Probably her precious Dave.”
That’s when my own pocket started playing “Edelweiss,” my favorite tune from The Sound of Music, and I knew who was trying to reach me—my precious Mike.
In his midforties, Detective Lieutenant Mike Quinn was a few years my senior and a full foot taller. His caramel brown hair was nearly always in Spartan trim. His voice was low and patient; his bearing stoic; and his gaze a midnight blue. On the job, his eyes were chillier than an arctic lake; and in the bedroom, they melted into shimmering pools.
“Please tell me you’re at Penn Station.”
“Sorry. Still in DC.”
Tiz me berrys! “What happened?”
“Frosty the Snowman left my boss grounded in Chicago, which put me on the hook to run a major briefing . . .”
Until five months ago, Mike had spent his entire career in the NYPD. A confluence of events (the primary one involving me) had landed him on a U.S. Attorney’s anti-drug task force for the year, which meant ours was currently a commuter relationship.
“Not to worry,” he assured me. “I’ll find a seat on an afternoon flight and come right from LaGuardia.”
“That’s not what concerns me . . .”
Over the last twelve hours, towns in Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania had been crippled by the snowfall; which meant traveling anywhere in the Boston–Washington corridor today could be treacherous.
Sure, I hadn’t kissed Mike in nearly a week (a month in dog years, and my heart agreed). I didn’t relish spending another night alone, but the man should have been on that early train. Not trying to travel now!
“Have you checked the Doppler?” I demanded. “Frosty the Whiteout is rolling our way. It’s stupid to risk—”
“Don’t worry, sweetheart. It’ll all work out . . .”
Those were Mike’s last words before I lost his signal. I tried to get him back, but all I could reach was voice mail. So I left a firm message, telling him to stay put—at least for tonight. I assured him I would deal with his ex-wife and take care of his two kids at the skating party.
“Wait till the storm blows over and hop a flight tomorrow. Please, Mike? I don’t want you to risk—”
That’s when I heard it, a quiet singing in our Secret Santa pantry, a tinny, mechanical crooning that gave me a forbidding chill. Just like Tucker, our battery-powered Bing was dreaming of a white Christmas.
Two
THE rest of that afternoon and evening, I stayed focused on the Cookie Swap, and for a few hours, I was actually free of worry. But now it was close to eleven o’clock, the party was over, the cleanup work done; and in all this time, Mike Quinn hadn’t shown or called.
I didn’t know what to think.
My baristas were gone, rushing off with late-night plans. And Moirin had disappeared halfway through the party (much to Janelle’s chagrin). At eight thirty, the girl had taken a cigarette break and had never come back.
I was flummoxed by this.
Moirin Fagan had never ducked out on a shift in my coffeehouse, and leaving her boss alone was completely irresponsible. Feeling badly for Janelle, I sent a member of my staff to her display table, where she helped out for the rest of the night.
Now I was calling it a night.
Grabbing my white parka off a hanger in the coat check, I wished the restaurant’s janitorial staff a happy holiday. Then the glass doors closed behind me, the lock clicked into place, and I stood alone in the shadows of Bryant Park.
Phone in hand, I tried to reach Mike again—with no luck.
Giving up, I began to cross the park just as a blast of arctic air swept through the city’s steel and glass canyons. The gust muted the roar of the nighttime streets and carried the sting of ice crystals, the first chilly breath of the approaching monster.
Shivering, I flipped up my hood, barely acknowledging the dazzling holiday wonderland around me. Thousands of tiny bulbs twinkled on the London plane trees. Beside the brightly lit ice rink, a lavish Christmas tree blazed with primary colors. Then, with no warning, the private park went suddenly dark.
I froze, midstride. Skyscrapers towered above me. Their windows shone like near-earth stars, but they were too far away to help me see. Good thing 40th Street paralleled the park. The trees diffused its streetlamps, but the ambient glow was strong enough to light my way.
I began moving again and heard approaching footsteps. The sound might have alarmed me, but it came with girlish giggles and male laughter. A well-dressed young couple emerged out of the gloom ahead.
The young man held a bottle of champagne. The young woman tottered on high-heeled boots. She tripped on a paving stone and nearly fell. Her companion caug
ht her, and they both found this hysterical.
The two loudly moved toward the darkened carousel and walked through the unlocked gate. That’s when their laughter stopped. In appalled tones, they whispered back and forth then walked quickly away, passing me.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
The boy pointed. “Some drunken woman is sleeping it off on that merry-go-round.”
“Yeah, nasty!” added the girl.
“A woman?” I asked. “Are you sure?”
“Of course, we’re sure! She’s right there on the floor.” The girl rolled her eyes and tugged on her boyfriend’s thick overcoat. “Come on . . .”
The temperature was falling. The wind was getting stronger, the frigid flakes of snow biting my face. But Jack and Jill’s discovery troubled me.
The sleeping woman might be drunk, or she might be homeless and need help. Either way, death from exposure was a real possibility on a night like this, so I strode to the carousel to speak with this stranger. If the woman could not walk away on her own, I would call 311 for help.
Right outside the carousel gate, I tripped. Just like Tipsy Girl, my heel caught on a loose paving stone—unusual for a private park like this one. It was a lawsuit waiting to happen. I nearly fell, but there was no boy to catch me, so I caught myself.
Regaining my balance, I moved forward.
“Hello?” I called, my voice competing with the wind.
The carousel was shrouded in darkness, and the circular platform rocked slightly as I stepped aboard. I maneuvered around the masterfully carved horses, each one frozen midprance, eyes wide and staring.
Finally I spied the woman. She lay faceup, her limbs sprawled, as if she were making a snow angel on the wooden floor. Under blunt-cut bangs, her eyes appeared glassy, just like the frozen horses, but her gaze was fixed on the painted ceiling.
A black shadow masked her features, so I stooped down for a closer look just as headlights from a bus on 40th flash-lit the scene. I finally saw her entire face—and the halo of blood around her head.