The Christmas Cookie Killer

by Livia J. Washburn

  Paying for what they were buying took almost as long as picking it out, as was usual at this time of year. The cashier wished them a corporate-mandated “Happy Holidays,” and feeling momentarily contrary, Phyllis told her, “And Merry Christmas to you!” in a loud voice.

  By the time they were headed for the cars, Phyllis was glad the ordeal was over. There might be another ordeal facing them, though. Since there was no point in postponing it, when they got to the cars she suggested, “Lois, why don’t you let Eve drive you home?”

  Lois shook her head. “That’s not really necessary,” she said. “Look, I know I was upset before . . .”

  She’d been more than upset, Phyllis thought. She’d been drunk.

  “But I’m perfectly capable of driving home,” Lois went on. “I’m feeling much better now.”

  It was true that they had been inside the store for a pretty good while. But had it been long enough for Lois to completely sober up? Phyllis doubted that . . . even though they had been in Wal-Mart three days before Christmas, which was a pretty sobering experience in itself.

  Eve caught Phyllis’s eye and shook her head without Lois noticing. Phyllis took that to mean that her friend was telling her not to press the issue. Eve had spent a lot more time in the store with Lois than Phyllis had, so maybe she was a better judge of what sort of shape the younger woman was in. Phyllis decided to go along with her suggestion. She nodded and said, “All right. I’m glad to hear it. But anytime you need help, Lois . . . any sort of help . . . just remember that we’re right across the street.”

  Lois smiled and nodded. “Thank you. That means a lot to me, Phyllis.”

  She loaded her purchases in the trunk of the Toyota, then closed the lid and looked at the car for a second before shaking her head and giving a rueful laugh.

  “Boy, I really did a lousy job of parking, didn’t I?”

  Still shaking her head, she unlocked the car and climbed in.

  Phyllis and Eve got the things they had bought into the Lincoln’s trunk, not wasting any time about it. Phyllis wanted to follow Lois home and make sure she got there all right. Lois couldn’t take offense at that; Phyllis would be going the same way regardless, since she lived across the street.

  “What a horrible situation,” Phyllis said as she started the car and pulled out behind Lois. “Did she tell you anything about it?”

  “Not really,” Eve said. “I could tell she didn’t want to talk about it, so I kept the conversation on other things instead.”

  To Phyllis’s relief, she saw that Lois seemed to be driving fairly well and not moving around too much in her lane. And she didn’t stray out of it at all.

  “I had no idea that she drank so much . . . or that Blake hit her. They seem like such a nice, normal couple.”

  “Oh, there’s no such thing, dear,” Eve said.

  Phyllis frowned over at her. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that you never know, just by looking at how people behave outwardly, how they really live their lives. Every couple does things they wouldn’t want the world to know about. It might be something serious like drinking or abuse, or it might just be something a little embarrassing, like what they do in the bedroom. But just think about the tales that children bring to school. You and I didn’t encounter it so much because our students were older, but we’ve both heard Carolyn relate some hair-raising stories about things her second graders used to tell her about their home lives.”

  That was true, Phyllis thought. Children were so innocent, especially the little ones. They didn’t really know they were doing anything wrong when they came to school and told their friends and their teachers about what went on at their homes. The stories ranged from the horrible and the heart wrenching all the way to the utterly bizarre and—might as well admit it, Phyllis told herself—amusing. One thing was certain, though: If you had something in your life you wanted to keep secret, it was probably wise not to let a seven- or eight-year-old know about it.

  Of course, there were children that grew old fast . . . too fast. She remembered Carolyn telling her about a little girl who stopped another girl from talking about something bad her father had done. She solemnly told her that she shouldn’t talk about those things, that she should keep them to herself—like she did. Carolyn had made sure the school counselor knew about both girls.

  Lois made it home safely, much to Phyllis’s relief. She waved across the street to Phyllis and Eve as she unloaded her purchases and carried them inside. The dark glasses hid Lois’s eyes, but they couldn’t hide the memory of what Phyllis had seen.

  All the extra vehicles were still parked next door at the Simmons house, Phyllis noticed. She supposed that Frank, Ted, Billie, and their families had planned to stay with Agnes through Christmas, but now that Agnes was gone and the funeral was over, would they all just return to their homes, leaving the old house locked up and empty behind them? After everything that had happened, Phyllis couldn’t imagine that they still wanted to stay here through Christmas.

  On the other hand, Randall was still in jail here in Weatherford, and Frank and Claire probably wanted to be close to their son. It would be easier for them to stay in Agnes’s house than to make the drive back and forth from Dallas every time they needed to talk to Randall’s lawyer or appear in court.

  Thinking about Agnes’s murder made Phyllis glance suddenly across the street at the Horton house. She wouldn’t have dreamed that Blake Horton was capable of giving his wife a black eye like that.

  What else was Blake capable of that she never would have dreamed? Phyllis wondered.

  Then she told herself that suspecting Blake Horton was crazy, absolutely crazy.

  But the idea lingered in her mind anyway. There were so many dangerous secrets that Agnes, perched there in front of her window, might have been privy to. . . .

  Chapter 12

  “That’s a big ham,” Carolyn said as she looked at it sitting on the kitchen counter.

  “Eighteen pounds,” Phyllis said.

  Sam patted his flat belly under his flannel shirt. “Plenty of good eatin’, looks like.”

  “Don’t start drooling yet—it’s for Christmas dinner,” Phyllis said as she opened the refrigerator and looked for a place to put the ham. She hadn’t really thought this out, she told herself. There wasn’t a space big enough for the ham, so she would have to rearrange some things, maybe even throw out a few, so that she could fit it in. She added, “You know that. I’m not even going to cook it until Christmas morning.”

  “Well, by then I’m sure gonna be ready for it,” Sam said with a grin. “I’m lookin’ forward to Christmas like a little kid again.”

  Eve said, “When you see my present, you’ll feel like a kid again, dear.”

  Phyllis frowned as she bent to look into the refrigerator. She wasn’t sure she knew what Eve meant by that. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

  It took her about ten minutes to make a place for the ham. When she went to pick it up from the counter, Sam stepped forward and said, “Let me handle that big fella for you.” He took it from the counter and slid it neatly into the space Phyllis had made for it.

  Everything else from the store was already put away, so there was nothing more to do at the moment. As Phyllis walked into the living room, her eye fell on the black box containing the videotape of the church service from the previous Sunday. She had watched it that same afternoon, after Dwight Gresham dropped it off, and she’d called the church office on Monday morning to let them know she was finished with it. She’d expected someone to pick it up that day and had set it on the little table in the foyer. Since then she’d been busy enough that she’d forgotten all about it, and she was a little surprised to notice that it was still there.

  “Goodness, I thought Dwight or one of the deacons would have come by and gotten that tape by now,” she commented. “It’s Wednesday. They need to get it to people who are actually homebound and really need it.”

  “You let
’em know at the church that you were through with it?” Sam asked.

  Phyllis nodded. “First thing Monday morning.”

  “Who’d you talk to? The preacher?”

  “No, I spoke to the church secretary, but she said she’d tell Dwight. I guess he must have forgotten to come by and get it. He was busy with Agnes’s funeral and all.” Phyllis went to the phone, picked it up, and dialed the number of the church office from memory. It rang a couple of times before it was picked up and a familiar voice answered.

  “Jada?” Phyllis said, a little surprised to hear the voice of the pastor’s wife.

  “That’s right.”

  “This is Phyllis Newsom. I didn’t know you worked in the church office now.”

  “Oh, hello, Phyllis,” Jada Gresham said. “I’m just filling in because Charlaine had to be out of town today. What can I do for you?”

  “I just realized I still have the videotape of last Sunday morning’s service that Dwight dropped off here on Sunday afternoon for me to watch. I called Monday morning and told Charlaine that I was done with it, so I thought someone would have picked it up by now.”

  “You still have the tape?” Jada sounded puzzled. “Dwight told me he was going to pick it up on Monday. I suppose it slipped his mind. He was working on the funeral service for poor Agnes Simmons, and he was upset about that. He was fond of her.”

  “We all were,” Phyllis agreed. “If you could mention it to him . . .”

  “Of course.”

  “I don’t want any of the people who watch it on a regular basis to miss seeing it.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Jada assured her. “I’ll see to it that Dwight takes care of it.” She laughed. “And it’s not like that’s the only videotape the church owns. If everyone’s not through with it by Sunday, we’ll just use another one.”

  “All right; that’s fine. Thank you, Jada.”

  “Anything else I can do for you? How are you getting along?”

  “I’m pretty much back to normal,” Phyllis said, “so I can’t think of a thing.”

  “Well, try not to overdo it. You can’t be too careful with head injuries.”

  Phyllis thanked her again and hung up. She said to Sam, “Honestly, you’d think I had a fractured skull or something, the way people keep worrying about me.”

  “That’s because folks care about you,” Sam said. “A lot.”

  She looked at him. “Really?”

  “No doubt about it,” he said with a nod.

  Phyllis and Carolyn were in the kitchen that afternoon, getting ready to make some pies for their Christmas dinner, and Carolyn’s daughter’s, too, when the doorbell rang. Eve had gone out, Phyllis knew, and Sam was in the garage, puttering around at the workbench, so she said, “I’ll see who that is.”

  “Good,” Carolyn said. Her hands were covered with flour from the pie crusts she was working on. You could buy perfectly good pie crusts at the grocery store now, but Carolyn, being Carolyn, preferred the ones made from scratch.

  Phyllis left the bowl of pumpkin and the spices she was about to mix with it on the counter next to the ingredients Carolyn had laid out for her chocolate pecan pies. She went to the front door, looked through the little window in it, and saw a woman she didn’t recognize standing on the porch.

  “Hello,” she said as she opened the door. “Can I help you?”

  “Mrs. Newsom?” The woman was around forty, Phyllis judged, slender in a gray wool skirt and jacket over a plain, cream-colored blouse. Her brown hair, which had a few lighter streaks in it, was pulled back in a rather severe style. Her best feature was a pair of intense green eyes that were made to seem even larger than they were by the silver-rimmed glasses she wore. She carried a briefcase in her left hand.

  “Yes, I’m Phyllis Newsom, if that’s who you’re looking for,” Phyllis replied with a nod.

  “My name is Juliette Yorke, with an E. I’m an attorney.”

  That didn’t surprise Phyllis at all. Juliette Yorke looked like a lawyer, and a no-nonsense one, at that. Phyllis glanced down at her shoes. Low heeled, conservative, and comfortable. Again, not a surprise.

  “What can I do for you, Ms. Yorke?”

  “Would it be all right if I came in and talked to you for a few minutes about the murder of Agnes Simmons?”

  Phyllis stepped back. “Oh, of course. Goodness’ sake, where are my manners? And just a few days before Christmas, at that! Please, come in, Ms. Yorke.”

  Once they were sitting in the living room, Phyllis on the sofa and Juliette Yorke in one of the armchairs, the lawyer put her knees primly together and placed the briefcase on her lap. She snapped the catches back and opened it.

  “I’m representing Randall Simmons,” she said, “and I’d like to record this conversation, if that’s all right with you, Mrs. Newsom.”

  “You mean like a deposition? Shouldn’t the district attorney or one of his assistants be here if you’re going to do that, Ms. Yorke?”

  Juliette Yorke’s lips tightened a little. “Your son is a deputy sheriff, isn’t that right?”

  “Yes, he is.”

  “We met during the Dunston case. I represented Lindsey Gonzales.”

  “Oh, of course,” Phyllis said. “I remember Mike mentioning you.”

  “I suppose having a relative in law enforcement is why you know about such things as depositions.”

  Juliette Yorke’s accent, and her rather stiff demeanor, showed that she wasn’t from around here, Phyllis thought. She said, “I know it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to discuss the case against Randall with you, at least not without someone here from the district attorney’s office. So I don’t want you to record what we’re saying.”

  The lawyer sighed, lowered the lid of her briefcase, and closed the catches. “I suppose we have nothing to talk about, then.”

  Phyllis didn’t feel any particular liking for Juliette Yorke, but her natural hospitality prompted her to say, “Would you like something to drink while you’re here? Or maybe some cookies? I hate to think that your trip over here was for nothing.”

  Juliette Yorke leaned forward as if she was about to get to her feet. “No, thank you,” she said. But then she stopped and leaned back in the armchair instead, and her severe expression eased a bit. “Actually, I skipped lunch,” she said. “A cookie sounds wonderful.”

  Phyllis stood up. Since she had so many cookies on hand, she’d been keeping a plate with an assortment of them on the coffee table so that people could stop by and graze on them any time they were passing through the living room. She picked up the plate and held it out to the lawyer. “Take as many as you like,” she told Juliette Yorke.

  The woman hesitated. “They all look so good.” She pointed at one of the cookies. “What kind is that?”

  “It’s a gingerdoodle,” Phyllis explained, glad that Juliette Yorke had picked that one. “Like a snickerdoodle, only it has ginger in it, too. It was Agnes’s recipe, in fact. She got the idea after I told her about using ginger to make spicy peach cobbler a while back. Agnes wanted a cookie that was more mellow than a gingersnap but still had the taste of ginger.”

  As a matter of fact, Phyllis had submitted the gingerdoodle recipe to the newspaper contest for Agnes, dropping off the recipe and samples of the cookies when she left her own entry at the newspaper office.

  Juliette Yorke shook her head as she picked up one of the gingerdoodles. “I’m afraid I don’t know what a snickerdoodle is.”

  Phyllis tried to contain her surprise. “No offense, Ms. Yorke, but you must not have grown up in Texas.”

  “Pennsylvania,” the lawyer said around the small bite of cookie she had taken. “Philadelphia.” She swallowed. “But it’s entirely possible they have snickerdoodles there, too. I just never baked cookies.”

  “Never?” Phyllis couldn’t imagine spending forty years or so on this earth without ever baking a batch of cookies.

  “Well . . . only the kind that come in a can in th
e refrigerated section of the grocery store, and not very many of those.” She took another bite. “This is good.”

  “You’ve missed a lot of fun if you never made cookies. Why, I remember my mother teaching me when I was little how to mix up a batch of cookie dough and roll it out and use a cookie cutter to cut out each individual cookie. . . .” With a shake of her head, Phyllis let her voice trail away, then said, “But you didn’t come here to talk about cookies, did you?”

  Juliette Yorke finished the last bite, then said, “No. I came to talk about how an innocent young man is in a lot of trouble for something that he didn’t do.”

  Aware that she probably shouldn’t respond to that, knowing that Juliette Yorke was using a lawyer’s wiles to draw her into talking, Phyllis said anyway, “Randall is hardly innocent. He skipped out on his bail on drug charges in Dallas County. That’s not in dispute.”

  The younger woman shrugged. “He hasn’t been found guilty on those drug charges, and certainly no case has been proven against him in the murder of his grandmother. He’s supposed to be considered innocent until proven guilty. And defaulting on a bail bond is hardly in the same category as those other offenses.”

  “No, I suppose not,” Phyllis agreed. “You’re his lawyer. Has he confided in you? Did he kill Agnes?”

  “I’ve entered a plea of not guilty in the matter of Mrs. Simmons’s death. That’s a matter of public record.”

  “What about the drug dealing and bail jumping?”

  For a moment Juliette Yorke didn’t answer, and Phyllis assumed she was following the lawyer’s credo that if you never said anything, you didn’t have to deny anything. But then the woman surprised her again by replying, “We’re considering a plea of no contest to those charges in return for a reduced sentence.”

  “Then he is a drug dealer!”

  “You don’t know the whole story, Mrs. Newsom,” Juliette Yorke said, “and you don’t really know my client at all.”

  Phyllis wasn’t going to lose her temper with a guest, even a lawyer, so although her voice was cool, her tone was polite as she asked, “And how long have you known Randall, Ms. Yorke?”