The Christmas Cookie Killer

by Livia J. Washburn

  She knew Sam was curious about what she might have found out, but she didn’t get a chance to talk to him alone before dinner, and she didn’t want to have to explain everything to Carolyn and Eve, too. She told herself that maybe she’d have a chance to discuss the case with Sam after they had all eaten.

  That didn’t happen, though, because they were still at the table when someone knocked on the front door. The sound was rather urgent, as if there were a problem of some sort. Phyllis murmured, “What in the world?” as she got to her feet and started toward the front of the house. Sam, Carolyn, and Eve followed her, equally curious.

  Phyllis was surprised to see Vickie Kimbrough standing there on the porch when she opened the door. Unlike a couple of hours earlier, Vickie wasn’t chatty and friendly now. In the glow of the front porch light, she looked worried instead. Phyllis opened the door and asked, “Vickie, what’s wrong?”

  “I’m sorry to bother you, Phyllis,” she said quickly. “Your son’s not here, is he?”

  Phyllis shook her head. “No, I haven’t seen Mike all day.”

  “I was hoping he would be. I thought maybe he could do something about it, you know, unofficially, so the police wouldn’t have to get involved. But I don’t know what else to do except call them. I’m afraid somebody’s going to get hurt if I don’t.”

  “Vickie, what are you talking about?”

  The woman turned and pointed directly across the street at the Horton house, where every light in the place seemed to be lit up.

  “Lois and Blake,” she said. “If somebody doesn’t stop them, I’m afraid they’re going to kill each other.”

  Chapter 17

  “I’m not sure this is a good idea,” Sam said as he approached the house, going cautiously up the front walk toward the porch of the Horton house. “Most folks don’t like it when somebody interferes in their private arguments.”

  A crash came from inside the house, followed by another stream of loud cursing.

  “Somebody has to do something,” Phyllis said from right behind Sam, “and it won’t help for the police to come and haul Blake off to jail.”

  “Might be just what the fella needs,” Sam muttered.

  A part of Phyllis felt the same way, but at the same time, she didn’t think it would solve anything. Being arrested might just make Blake act worse when he got back home.

  Carolyn, Eve, and Vickie trailed along behind them, nervously hanging back a few yards. The neighborhood was lit up more brightly than usual because of all the Christmas lights and decorations up and down both sides of the street. Over the sounds of discord coming from inside the house, Phyllis heard music playing somewhere in the night. It was somewhat discordant, too, because “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” and “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” were competing against each other.

  Signs of the season, Phyllis thought, as inside the house Lois and Blake Horton continued to scream curses at each other.

  She and Sam reached the porch. Sam jabbed a finger against the doorbell button, and even though Phyllis could hear the bell ringing inside the house, Lois and Blake didn’t seem to pay any attention to it. They might not even be able to hear it over all the racket they were making, Phyllis thought.

  “You’d better knock,” she told Sam. “Maybe that will get them to stop.”

  Sam raised a fist. “Maybe I ought to holler out that it’s the police.”

  “That might get you in trouble for impersonating an officer. Better just knock as hard as you can.”

  He nodded and began pounding on the door. Something broke inside the house with a shattering crash, and a voice yelled, “Help! Oh, God, help!”

  A shock went through Phyllis. She wouldn’t have been surprised to hear Lois Horton screaming for help . . . but this terrified voice belonged to Lois’s husband, Blake.

  Sam glanced at Phyllis and muttered, “What the hell . . . !”

  “See if the door’s unlocked,” she urged him. As Blake screamed again, she realized how important it was that they get in there, even if they had to break down the door.

  That wasn’t necessary, though, because when Sam jerked the storm door open and tried the knob on the wooden door, it turned easily. He shouldered into the room, throwing the door back as he did so. Phyllis was right behind him. Carolyn, Eve, and Vickie stood in the porch, peering anxiously into the house.

  Phyllis and Sam stopped short after rushing into the Horton living room. A fireplace was on one side of the room, and Lois had a black iron poker in her hands, lifted over her head and poised to descend on Blake, who lay sprawled on the floor at her feet, blood dripping from a cut on his forehead. The shattered remains of a lamp were on the floor near him, and Phyllis supposed that the cut on Blake’s head had come from a flying piece of the lamp’s ceramic base.

  “Lois, no!” Phyllis cried.

  Lois twisted her head around to glare over her shoulder at Phyllis and Sam. “Get outta here,” she warned them. Her face was contorted with rage. “He’s got it comin’ to him.”

  Phyllis didn’t know if she could reason with Lois—given the state the other woman was in—but she had to try. “Maybe so, but if you kill him you’ll go to jail.”

  “Help me,” Blake sobbed from the floor. “She’s gone crazy!”

  That was a mistake, because it snapped Lois’s attention back to him. “Shut up!” she said. “Won’t even fight back, you wimpy little coward!”

  That angry statement made Phyllis frown. She looked around the room and saw that a chair was overturned, there was a big gouge in the top of the coffee table, and one wall had a couple of holes in the Sheetrock. Phyllis saw some white powder clinging to the head of the poker and realized that it was Sheetrock dust from the damaged wall.

  If she didn’t know better, she would have said that it looked like Lois had been chasing Blake around the room, swinging that poker at him with murderous intent.

  But that wasn’t possible, because Blake was the abusive one. He’d given Lois a black eye. Phyllis had seen it for herself. And his mistreatment had forced Lois to seek solace in drink . . . hadn’t it?

  “I’ll teach you to talk back to me,” Lois said. She swung the poker before anyone could stop her.

  Blake yelled in terror and rolled aside. The poker slammed into the floor, tearing a hole in the carpet. Blake scrambled onto his hands and knees and then lunged to his feet as Lois slashed at him again with the fireplace implement. She missed, but only by inches.

  Phyllis wanted to shout at Sam and tell him to grab Lois, but if he did that, he might get hurt. Instead she made a move for Lois herself, thinking that surely the woman wouldn’t hurt her.

  “Get back!” Lois screeched, jabbing the poker toward Phyllis.

  Sam’s hand closed around Phyllis’s arm and pulled her away. As Lois turned back toward Blake, Sam leaped forward and grabbed her from behind, wrapping his arms around her and pinning her arms to her sides. She cursed and struggled and tried to swing the poker up and back at Sam, but she couldn’t reach him with it.

  “Grab the poker!” he called to Blake. “Get it away from her!”

  For a second Phyllis thought Blake was going to be too scared to act, but then he summoned up his courage with a visible effort and darted forward to wrap both hands around the poker. Lois screamed as he wrenched it out of her hands.

  But then she seemed to go limp in Sam’s arms. Her head lolled forward, her knees buckled, and her arms hung loosely at her sides. She groaned.

  “Put her on the sofa,” Blake said as he stood there with a two-handed death grip on the poker. “I think the worst of it is over now.”

  Lois had stopped struggling, all right, as if all the fight had suddenly gone out of her. She began to sob as Sam lowered her onto the sofa. She rolled over and buried her face in one of the cushions as she started to wail.

  “What in the world?” Phyllis said.

  Blake looked down at the poker in his hands and seemed surprised to see it. He took it
over to the fireplace and put it in the stand, which held a second poker and some other fireplace tools. Then he turned to Phyllis and Sam and said in a shaky voice, “She must have been drinking all day. I knew as soon as I got home from work that there was going to be trouble, but I never dreamed it would be this bad. It never has been before.”

  Phyllis remembered how Lois had been drunk in the morning a couple of days earlier. She remembered that black eye, too, and snapped, “She’s not completely to blame for this, Blake. What do you expect, the way you treat her?”

  “The way I . . . ?” Blake stared at her in what appeared to be genuine confusion. “Phyllis, what are you talking about?”

  “Don’t try to pull that. I saw the black eye. If you looked at Lois now, I imagine you could still see it.”

  “Oh, my God.” Blake stumbled over to an armchair and sank down into it. He put his head in his hands for a moment. When he looked up at Phyllis, grim lines were etched into his face. “I don’t know if you’ll believe me or not, but I swear to you I never laid a hand on Lois in anger.”

  Sam waved a big hand at the destruction in the room around them. “Not even durin’ all this ruckus tonight?”

  Blake shook his head. “I was just trying to stay out of her way and keep her from bashing my head in with that poker.”

  “What about that black eye Phyllis mentioned?” Sam asked with a nod toward her.

  “Lois did that to herself while she was upset and carrying on a few nights ago. We have an old-fashioned four-poster bed in our bedroom, and she accidentally ran right into one of the posts.”

  “Are you sure that’s not just a story?” Phyllis asked, still unwilling to believe him.

  “We can go upstairs and I’ll show you the post,” Blake offered.

  “That wouldn’t really prove anything,” Sam said.

  Blake sighed. “No, I suppose not. In the absence of proof, I guess I’ll have to ask you to just take my word for it.” He looked intently at Phyllis. “I’d like to know, though . . . did Lois tell you that I’d been abusing her?”

  “Well . . .” Phyllis thought back. “Now that you mention it . . . I don’t think so. I saw the black eye, and I knew that Lois had been drinking. . . . I suppose I just assumed . . .”

  Suddenly she saw that she could have been completely wrong in her conclusions. She still wasn’t sure whether she believed Blake or not, but she was starting to feel uneasy about the whole thing.

  “Lois’s drinking has been a problem for a long time,” Blake said. “I tried to help her control it myself. I offered to get professional help, for both of us if need be. But she wouldn’t have anything to do with it. She’s battled depression all her life, and I guess she thought she could self-medicate with alcohol. That just made things worse.”

  Sam rubbed his jaw and said, “I got to admit, you sound like you’re tellin’ the truth.”

  “That’s because I am,” Blake replied with a trace of anger and impatience in his voice. “Lois’s drinking has been getting steadily worse, but she hadn’t really been violent about it until recently.”

  “But why . . . why would she be like that?” Phyllis asked.

  Blake shook his head. “I wish I knew. If I did, maybe I could help her.”

  On the sofa, Lois rolled over and cried, “Quit talking about me like I’m not even in the room, damn it!” She pushed herself into a sitting position. “And don’t listen to anything that weasel says! He can’t be trusted. He doesn’t really love me. He doesn’t want to help me. I should have gone after him with a poker a long time ago! Maybe that would teach him a lesson!”

  Phyllis and Sam glanced at each other. The shrill hysteria in Lois’s voice pretty much confirmed what Blake had just told them.

  “Blake, you have to do something,” Phyllis said. “There are places where they deal with things like this.”

  He looked horrified. “I . . . I couldn’t put her in a place like that. She’s my wife.”

  “And I know you love her—”

  “He does not!” Lois shouted. She shook her fists at them, then reached up and grabbed her hair with both hands, pulling at it and whimpering as she collapsed onto her side again.

  “Let me call Mike,” Phyllis said to Blake after a moment.

  Blake shook his head. “I don’t want the police.”

  “If you’re gonna do something she doesn’t want you to do, the law’s got to be involved somehow,” Sam pointed out. “You’ll have to get a judge to sign off on it.”

  “I won’t let her be arrested and put in jail,” Blake said. His face was set in stubborn lines now.

  “She won’t be put in jail,” Phyllis said. “Listen; Dwight Gresham has contacts with various treatment facilities through the counseling center at church. Let me call him and get him involved. I’m sure he’s seen this sort of thing before.”

  Blake frowned. “Well . . . I suppose that might be all right. . . .”

  Phyllis had her cell phone in her pocket. She took it out and dialed the number of the church office, knowing that it rang in the parsonage after office hours.

  Thinking that it might be a good idea not to talk too much about what was going to happen in front of Lois, Phyllis stepped out onto the front porch as the phone was ringing. Carolyn, Eve, and Vickie had heard everything that was going on through the open door. Carolyn said, “I’ll go in there, just in case Sam needs help.”

  Phyllis didn’t think that was likely to happen. Lois seemed to be pretty much out of it now; the booze had finally caught up to her and knocked her flat on her back, figuratively speaking. But it wouldn’t hurt for Carolyn to be there if Sam needed a hand.

  A man’s voice answered the call. Phyllis said, “Brother Dwight?” and when the preacher had confirmed his identity, she launched into a quick recitation of the facts.

  “So we thought you might know someone at one of the treatment facilities who could help,” she concluded.

  “I do,” Dwight said. “Is Lois calm right now?”

  Phyllis looked through the window into the living room and saw that Lois was still lying on the sofa. Her eyes were closed and her mouth hung open slackly.

  “Yes, she’s calm,” she told the preacher.

  “Then I’ll make a few calls first before I come over there. But I’ll be there in fifteen or twenty minutes.”

  “I don’t know if that’s necessary—”

  “Of course it is. Blake and Lois are part of the church, and it’s my job to help them any way I can. I’ll see you in a little while.”

  “All right. Thank you.”

  After Phyllis had hung up and slipped the phone back into her pocket, Vickie asked, “Is Dwight coming over here?”

  Phyllis nodded. “That’s right. He said he’d be here in fifteen or twenty minutes.”

  “Well, then, you won’t need my help anymore. I’d better go.” She started to turn away, then paused. “Thank you, Phyllis. When I heard all the commotion going on over here, I didn’t know what to do since I was alone. Thank goodness you and your friends were able to help.”

  “Monte’s not home tonight?”

  “No. Working late again, as usual. I don’t expect him home before ten or eleven o’clock.”

  “Two days before Christmas and he’s working that late?”

  Vickie shrugged and gave a bittersweet smile, as if to remind Phyllis of the discussion they’d had that afternoon.

  The younger woman went next door and disappeared into her house with a wave of farewell. Phyllis and Eve went into the Horton house and found Carolyn watching Lois with an alert frown on her face while Sam and Blake sat on the other side of the room and talked together in low tones. They both looked up as she walked over to them.

  “Dwight is going to make some calls and then come over here,” she told Blake. “I think you can put everything into his hands. He’ll know how to go about things legally.”

  Blake nodded. “All right. That sounds good. Thank you, Phyllis . . . and thank you
for finally believing me.”

  Phyllis looked at Lois and shook her head sadly. “In the end, she didn’t give me any choice but to believe you.”

  A short time later, as she held the curtain back at the picture window and watched the street, Phyllis saw a car pull up at the curb in front of the Horton house. Thinking that it was probably Dwight, she let the curtain fall closed and went to the front door, stepping out onto the porch.

  Sure enough, Dwight got out of the parked car, came around the front of the vehicle, and started toward the house. At that moment, Phyllis thought she saw movement from the corner of her eye, as if someone were about to step forward from the shadows between the Horton and Kimbrough houses.

  Before she could turn her attention in that direction, though, another door slammed and she looked to see that Jada Gresham had stepped out of the car. She took hold of Dwight’s arm and walked with him to the porch.

  “Hello, Phyllis,” she said. “Isn’t this just awful?”

  Before Phyllis could answer what was pretty much a rhetorical question anyway, Dwight asked, “Are Lois and Blake inside?”

  Phyllis nodded. “In the living room. Sam Fletcher is with them, along with my friends Carolyn and Eve.”

  “Thanks.” He gave her a tight smile. “We’ll get them through this; don’t you worry.”

  His wife let go of him and he hurried on into the house. Jada lingered on the porch and said in a quiet voice, “Christmas is the worst time of the year, you know.”

  Phyllis frowned, surprised by Jada’s comment. “It is?”

  “I mean for things like this. Drinking, depression, mental problems of all sorts. That’s why the suicide rate is higher around the holidays than any other time of year.”

  “Yes, I suppose so. I guess it hurts even worse to be unhappy when everybody else seems so joyous.”