The Snow White Christmas Cookie bam-9

by David Handler

  “How are you, girl?” Des asked, hugging Bella warmly.

  “I’ve been groped by three different old coots already. I don’t know if it’s the eggnog or what. I do know that not one of them can finish what they started. But enough about me. Those jeans you’re wearing…” Bella eyed her up and down. “Are they new?”

  “Why are you asking?”

  “Because they make you look like a runway model, that’s why.” Bella glanced over at Mitch, who was shoving a deviled egg into his pie hole as he stood chatting with Lew the Plumber. “Does that man know how lucky he is?”

  “I try to remind him from time to time.” Des reached over and squeezed her hand. “I miss you, Bella.”

  “Tie that bull outside, as we used to say on Nostrand Avenue. You two need the house to yourselves. Now you can cavort around naked whenever, wherever you feel like it.”

  Des smiled at her. “And, God knows, we cavort a lot.” Usually, two or three nights a week at Mitch’s antique caretaker’s cottage out on Big Sister Island. And another two nights a week at her place. They had no particular schedule. They were comfortable with where they were. Or weren’t-which was ready to live together full time. Plus he had to be in New York a lot for screenings and still had his apartment there. It wasn’t a conventional arrangement, but nothing about them was conventional.

  Tina Champlain came over to them toting platters of deviled eggs and cocktail weenies.

  “You’re Rut’s guest tonight,” Des reminded her. “You don’t have to serve.”

  “Yeah, I do,” Tina responded. “If I don’t, your boy will eat all of them.”

  It wasn’t just Mitch. Deviled eggs and cocktail weenies were catnip to the male of the species. Tina’s husband, Lem, was already hovering close to her.

  Tina and Lem made for one of Dorset’s odder couples. She was a tiny, high-strung Chihuahua of a woman in her thirties with frizzy black hair and slightly protruding dark eyes. Nice little figure, although she hid it underneath a baggy fleece top and loose-fitting jeans. Lem was a gruff bear who reveled in looking menacing. It was how he got a measure of respect from the blue bloods. The man was not only mammoth but he shaved his head and wore a ZZ Top beard halfway down his chest. He also carried a large knife in a sheath on his belt, just in case he needed a blade at an eggnog party. Lem owned Champlain Landscaping. During the warm months he and his crew of mow boys tended the lawns in Dorset. This time of year they plowed driveways and delivered firewood. Between Lem’s business and the money Tina made cleaning houses, they made out pretty well for a couple of teen sweethearts who’d barely finished high school. Tina was already pregnant with their daughter, Kylie, by then. Kylie was eighteen now and when you saw her and Tina around town together you’d swear they were sisters. Kylie was tiny like she was.

  “How’s Kylie doing?” Des asked them.

  “Don’t get me started,” Lem growled.

  “She’s fine,” Tina said, shooting a look at him-and then at Mitch, who had inched his way over by her side. “No more weenies for you.”

  “Does that mean I can have a deviled egg?”

  “One,” she allowed.

  “I love you, Tina,” Mitch said, popping it into his mouth.

  “Kylie’s not fine,” Lem muttered at her.

  “We want her to go to nursing school,” Tina said with a weary sigh. “All she wants to do is party and shop.”

  “That girl can’t be trusted with a credit card,” Lem said. “I had to take hers away and tear ’em up.”

  Tina’s cell phone vibrated in the pocket of her fleece top. “Hold these for a sec, will you, Lemmy?”

  He took the platters from her so she could read the text message on her phone’s screen. “You’re as bad as Kylie,” he complained as she thumbed out a response. “On that damned thing every second.”

  “It’s my mom, will ya? She moved in with her cousin in Philly last month,” Tina explained, her eyes never leaving the screen. “And now she texts me a hundred times a day. There, all done, okay?” She tucked the phone back in her pocket and took the platters back from him. “What were we talking about?”

  “Kylie.” Des couldn’t help notice the chippy vibe Tina and Lem gave off. “Is she seeing anyone special these days?”

  “She’s been spending a little time with Pat Faulstich,” Lem replied.

  “Well, that won’t last,” Tina assured him. “I don’t want her mixed up with one of your plow monkeys.”

  “Pat’s a good kid. He works hard.”

  “He’s a no-good cheesehead.”

  “Hey, I have a great idea,” Hank Merrill put in as he snatched a cocktail weenie from Tina’s platter. “Why don’t we fix her up with Casey?”

  Lem let out a huge laugh. “Brilliant idea.”

  “Isn’t it? What do you think, hon?” Hank asked Paulette as she joined them. “Kylie Champlain and your bouncing baby boy?”

  Dorset’s postmaster considered her response carefully before she said, “I think that you’d better slow down on that eggnog. And don’t be nasty.” Paulette was Hank’s boss, if anyone cared to get technical. She’d gone to work as a carrier for Rut Peck back when she was in her twenties. She was in her early fifties now. A tall, taut, good-looking woman with a strong jaw and long, beautiful black hair streaked with silver. Also a tight-lipped, controlled woman who seemed to be under a great deal of strain. Worry lines furrowed her brow. Casey was her twenty-eight-year-old son from a marriage that had ended in divorce long ago. Paulette had wangled him a part-time job as a weekend carrier. He lived in the basement of the house she shared with Hank.

  “I’m not being nasty,” insisted Hank, who was evidently well into the high-octane eggnog. “Just saying Casey and Kylie would make a nice couple. Am I right or am I right?” he asked Lem.

  “Totally right,” Lem assured him with a big grin.

  Lem liked Hank. Everyone liked Hank. He was a goofy, amiable and extremely active fellow around Dorset. In addition to his duties on the fire department, he coached the girls’ high school basketball team and played tuba in the Dorset town band. Most Saturdays, he could be found working the second chair for John the Barber. Hank was lanky and splay footed with thinning sandy-colored hair and an extremely large, busy Adam’s apple. He had the wheezy laugh of a longtime smoker. He also had a habit of sucking on his teeth, which were crooked and rather horsy.

  “Casey ought to find himself a nice girl,” Hank went on, pausing to take another gulp of his eggnog. “Not to mention a full-time job and his own place to live. He spends all day in our basement stuffing his face and watching TV. And all night at the Rustic drinking beer and watching TV. That kid must spend eighteen hours a day in front of the TV.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Mitch said. “I’d take that deal.”

  “So would I,” Hank agreed. “I’d like to know how he got so lucky.”

  “Casey has issues,” Paulette said to him in a distinctly cool voice.

  “He’s not the only one,” Bella interjected, wagging a stubby finger at Hank. “I have an issue with you. I have gotten no mail for the past two days, mister. Not so much as a single Chanukah card. And I still haven’t received my three-month supply of Lipitor. My online pharmacy mailed it to me from Dayton, Ohio, ten days ago.”

  “It’s the snow, Mrs. Tillis,” Paulette explained. “Our out-of-state-mail isn’t coming in at Bradley Airport because the planes can’t land. And our trucks can’t make it here from Norwich because the governor keeps closing the highways.”

  “That part I understand.” Bella turned her piercing gaze back at Hank. “But how come you didn’t say one word about the marble cake I left in my box for you? I baked it for you special.”

  Hank’s mouth opened but no sound came out. He looked totally thrown.

  Paulette stepped into the awkward silence. “Lem, all of this snow must be good for your business.”

  “You’d think so,” he acknowledged, scratching at his beard with a thumbnail the
size of a clamshell. It wasn’t a very clean-looking thumbnail. It wasn’t a very clean-looking beard either. “Only, I’ve been working harder than I ever have, plowing day and night, and I’m practically going broke. They keep jacking up the price of road salt for one thing. And, well, this is Dorset. People don’t pay their bills.” He glanced over in the direction of First Selectman Paffin. “Especially the rich ones. Keep telling me they left my money out in their mailbox. Except, guess what? The money’s not there.”

  “How do you explain that?” Des asked.

  He shrugged his big shoulders. “Easy. They got no problem lying to people like me.”

  “Get out, my next door neighbors decided to show,” Mitch exclaimed as Bryce Peck and Josie Cantro started across the parlor toward them.

  Bryce Peck was the black sheep of Dorset’s blue-blooded founding family. An aging wild child who’d spent his entire adult life running away from his life of privilege only to return home this past August as a gaunt, weathered burnout case. Bryce’s extremely tight-assed older brother, Preston, was allowing him to winter over in the family’s prized eight-bedroom summer house out on Big Sister in exchange for Bryce serving as the island’s caretaker. Des imagined that Bryce had been quite dashing in his youth. He was tall and broad shouldered, with deep-set dark eyes and high, hard cheekbones. But now, at age forty-six, he was a haunted shell of a man, his face ravaged by decades of hard living. Word was he’d been a heavy drinker. Heavy into any drugs, legal and illegal, that made you numb. Those deep-set eyes of his had a frightened look in them. And his work-roughened hands never stopped trembling. Mitch got along well with him. Mitch was gifted that way. But Bryce stayed away from most people. He was a moody, withdrawn man who was uneasy in social settings.

  Especially now that he was clean and sober thanks to Josie Cantro, a blonde who was fifteen years younger than Bryce. Josie didn’t come from money. Didn’t come from Dorset. She was from somewhere up in Maine. But she’d built herself a thriving little business as Dorset’s resident life coach. Josie was one of those relentlessly upbeat women who helped other people do things like lose weight. She’d helped Bryce wean himself off of booze and pills. And in the process they’d fallen in love. She’d moved in with him just before Thanksgiving. Josie was always perky, always smiling that sunny smile of hers. She practically glowed. Not exactly a beauty. Her face was too round. And she had a turned-up little pug nose. But she was definitely a honey, with big blue eyes, a long mane of creamy blond hair and a slammin’ bod. A health food junkie and fitness freak who’d taken to dragging neighbor Mitch out for morning beach runs in the snow. Also to rummaging through his kitchen for evil junk food. Josie’s heart was in the right place. Des had no doubt it was because of her that Bryce had shown up here to pay his respects to his cousin Rut. She also had no doubt that Josie had done many people around Dorset a lot of good. And yet, Des couldn’t shake the feeling that something about the woman was wrong. It was not, repeat not, a jealousy thing. Des didn’t worry about Mitch. But her cop instincts kept telling her that nobody was as unfailingly smiley faced as Josie Cantro was-not unless they were fronting.

  “Hey, naybs, are you up for a snow run tomorrow morning?” Josie asked Mitch brightly when she and Bryce reached them.

  “Absolutely, naybs,” Mitch answered just as brightly.

  Or maybe I’m just being bitchy because I hate the stupid nickname that he and his vanilla blonde neighbor have for each other.

  Bryce, meanwhile, stood there looking as if he wanted to flee through the nearest exit. When Mitch put a hand on his shoulder the poor man practically jumped out of his skin.

  “Easy there, pardner,” Mitch said. “You’re among friends.”

  Bryce nodded his head, shuddering. “For a second I–I just couldn’t…”

  “Couldn’t what, Bryce?”

  “Remember what I was doing here.”

  Josie turned her attention to Hank. “Dude, how are you doing?”

  “Doing great.” Hank patted his shirt pocket. “Got my nicotine gum right here if I need it. So far I haven’t.”

  “And he hasn’t had a cigarette in two months,” Paulette put in proudly. “All thanks to you, Josie.”

  “It wasn’t me. It was all Hank. Hank’s the man.” Now Josie’s blue-eyed gaze fell on Des. “I am so totally hating you right this second.”

  “And this would be because?…”

  She was staring longingly at Des’s skinny jeans. “I exercise two hours a day. I subsist on wild greens and tree bark. And when I tried on a pair of those I looked like I ought to be playing left tackle for the New England Patriots.”

  “I find that hard to believe.”

  “Believe, Trooper Des. These thighs are seriously chunky. And we won’t even discuss my butt.”

  Old Rut waddled his way over toward them, his face aglow. “Thanks again, young lady,” he said to Tina. “This is a wonderful evening.”

  “My pleasure, Mr. Peck.”

  “Everybody enjoying that eggnog?”

  “You bet,” Lem said.

  Rut raised an eyebrow at Mitch. “There’s, um, something I want to show you down in the cellar, young fella.”

  “Are we talking about what I think we’re talking about?”

  Rut nodded. “I saved one last case for a special occasion. And this here is it.” Clearly, they were talking about a case of the old postmaster’s home-brewed stout. “Would you mind lugging it upstairs for me?”

  “You are on,” Mitch assured him.

  “Fine and dandy. I’ll meet you down there in half a tick. Just have to stop off and take a pee. Or try. I may be a while, if you catch my drift.”

  Nonetheless, Mitch headed off toward the kitchen with him.

  Des watched them go, then turned to discover Josie was smiling at her. “You and Mitch are so fortunate that you found each other,” she said.

  “Yes, we are,” Des said politely, all the while thinking: I really don’t like Josie Cantro.

  CHAPTER 2

  I really like Josie Cantro, Mitch reflected as he made his way down the steep stairs into Rut Peck’s dimly lit cellar. True, his new neighbor could get a bit overzealous when it came to dietary matters. She’d uncovered his secret caches of Cocoa Puffs three times so far and hurled them into the trash. But in the world of positive energy Josie was what’s known as a carrier. Ever since Mitch had lost his beloved wife, Maisie, to ovarian cancer he’d had very little use for the company of his fellow New York critics, a blase breed who were unremittingly sarcastic, sour and smug. Mitch vastly preferred people like Josie, enthusiastic people who embraced the joy of being alive.

  And she’d sure worked miracles with Bryce. The man who’d shown up next door to Mitch at summer’s end had been a lost soul who had nowhere else to go. Mitch had been glad when Bryce’s older brother, Preston, an uber-rich Chicago commodities trader, permitted him to stay on as Big Sister’s winter caretaker. Winters were rugged out on Big Sister, the forty acres of Yankee paradise that Mitch was lucky enough to call home. There were five precious old Peck family houses on the island, not counting Mitch’s two hundred-year-old post-and-beam caretaker’s cottage and the decommissioned lighthouse that was the second tallest in New England. Last winter there’d been a ton of storm damage to the rickety wooden causeway that connected the private island to the Peck’s Point Nature Preserve. Also to the Peck family houses. But until Josie came along, Bryce had to qualify as New England’s most hands-off caretaker. All he did was drink beer, pop Vicodin and watch the Cartoon Network. Did no chores. Rarely left the island. Spoke to no one. It was the Peck family’s attorney, Glynis Fairchild-Forniaux, who’d gently urged him to contact Josie. Unexpectedly, the two of them had fallen in love. Once she moved in, Bryce was transformed into a dutiful caretaker from dawn until dusk. He took a chainsaw to the trees that had come down when Tropical Storm Gail brushed past them in October. Replaced several rotting planks and railings in the causeway. And when the blizzards started
coming, one after another, he kept the causeway clear with the Pecks’ mammoth John Deere snow thrower. Mitch liked having Bryce and Josie around. They’d invited him over a few times for her three-alarm Thai vegan dinners. Josie would chatter away gaily. Sometimes Bryce would even stir from his remote silence and join the conversation. She was working wonders with the guy.

  Rut Peck’s cellar reeked of damp concrete, mold and something else that smelled vaguely like decaying potatoes. There wasn’t much headroom down there. Mitch’s curly hair very nearly brushed the floor joists over his head. Cardboard boxes, suitcases and old steamer trunks were piled everywhere. There was a workbench against one wall, built-in cupboards against another. The only light came from one naked bulb in the stairwell.

  Mitch heard footsteps on the stairs behind him almost as soon as he got down there. “That didn’t take you long at all,” he said. Only it wasn’t the old postmaster. “Oh, hey, I thought you were Rut.”

  “Nope, still me,” Bryce Peck said, dragging deeply on a cigarette. “For now, anyhow. Just an awkward stage.” Bryce had a strange, elliptical way of talking. He often seemed to be not all there-not all there as in part of him was somewhere else that was far away and incredibly scary. “If Josie catches me smoking she’ll skin me alive. But I’m desperate, man. Cigarettes are the only vice I have left.” His eyes flicked warily into the cellar’s darkened corners. “Damn, I haven’t been down in a basement this small since I left Bozeman.”