by Meg Muldoon
“Well, you know what I heard about her? I heard that—”
“Uh, excuse me, Miss Cinnamon?”
Tobias Jones, my newest employee, stuck his head back into the kitchen. Tiana hushed what she was saying.
Tobias hadn’t been working at the shop long, but already, he’d proven to be a skilled and valuable asset. Before I hired him, Tobias had spent the majority of his time across the street by the Christmas River drugstore and pharmacy, holding a sign begging for food. He was a Marine Corps veteran and had been homeless for a long period of time.
These days, I was helping him get back on his feet. I’d helped him rent a room on the east side of Christmas River, and had hired him to work the cash register and help with supply deliveries at the shop. If that went well, I was planning to move him back into the kitchen and teach him a few things about making pies.
So far, my bet was proving to be a sound one. Tobias had been a huge help. Additionally, he had a cheerful disposition that always went a way toward lightening the mood.
“There’s someone out here says they want to see you,” he said, looking from Tiana to me.
“Did they say who they were?”
“Uh, no, miss,” he said. “Sorry I forgot to ask. But it’s a young lady. She has red hair and seems nicer than a warm Georgia breeze.”
I smiled at his colorful way with words. But then my heart sank a little when I realized that there weren’t too many other folks in town who matched that description.
I glanced over at Tiana.
She could read my face plain enough.
“That’s her?” she asked.
I nodded, taking off my apron.
“You want me to go out for you?” Tiana said. “Tell her to come back another time?”
“No,” I said. “We’ve got to meet properly sooner or later. I might as well go out and be neighborly.”
I let out a sigh and then forced a warm, friendly smile, heading for the door.
Even though I didn’t much feel like smiling.
Chapter 3
“Didn’t… didn’t I just see you in front of the shop?”
She gave me a knowing smile.
I stammered sheepishly.
“Yeah, uh, I’m sorry I didn’t introduce myself,” I said. “I was running late on my walk with Chadwick, and I just didn’t have much time for talking.”
“Well, I’m glad that we get a chance to meet now,” she said. “I just wanted to stop by and let you know that I think the world of your establishment here. I mean, I’ve heard the best things about your pies. I hope that we can talk shop sometime when you’re less busy.”
“That would be lovely,” I said, between gritted teeth.
They felt like they’d just been crazy glued together.
“I moved here from Portland,” Pepper started saying. “I don’t know too many folks around here, and it would be really nice if we could…”
I found myself zoning out as I stared at her perfect porcelain skin, her perfectly shaped lips, that curly red hair and those full, deep blue eyes of hers.
I felt my hands inadvertently ball up into fists at my side.
I suddenly realized that she had stopped talking and was waiting for me to reply.
I cleared my throat.
“Well, we will have to grab coffee sometime,” I said, unsure whether or not that was the right response to whatever she had just said.
“That would be great,” she said, her voice brimming with excitement. “I’d love to hear what it’s been like running a pie shop for as long as you have.”
She grinned again.
Did she just call me old?
“Oh, before I forget, I brought you something.”
She fished around inside her purse, and then pulled out a round plastic container ensconced in pink ribbon.
“These are pistachio and cherry macarons,” she said, implementing an instant French accent when she said the name of the cookie. “Something I learned to make when I was at pastry school in Paris.”
My mouth almost dropped open, and that knot that had been in my stomach all afternoon since first setting eyes on Pepper’s Pies tightened up more than a blood pressure arm band.
I took the carton of cookies from her, but couldn’t find any words.
“Well, I’ll let you get back to your work,” she said. “But it was such a pleasure to meet you.”
She reached a manicured hand out to me and shook my hand.
“Bye, Cinnamon,” she said.
“Bye,” I squeaked out.
She turned on her boots, and then walked, no, floated, across the dining room. Some of the customers turned their heads to look at her as she passed, transfixed by the new beautiful girl in town.
I looked down at the elaborate box of cookies in my hands.
I felt like I’d just gotten shot in the gut.
Chapter 4
“Ugh, these hardly have any taste,” Kara said, stuffing another one of Pepper’s cookies into her mouth. “They’re blander than Mrs. Billings’ hair color.”
She scrunched her face up into a grimace, but judging by the way she’d devoured half the carton already, I was pretty sure Kara didn’t quite believe what she was telling me.
Although, she was pregnant. I think the woman would have devoured a sandwich from a bus station vending machine at this point and not thought twice about it.
When I had bitten into one of Pepper’s macarons, the hair color of Kara’s soon-to-be mother-in-law was the last thing that would have occurred to me. The pillowy soft cookie almost melted in my mouth, the light saltiness of the pistachios pairing ever so perfectly with the sugary sweet cherry filling. The cookies were soft, gooey, powdery, and delightful. I’d been having trouble not devouring the carton myself.
If this was how Pepper’s cookies tasted, then how were her pies?
For as long as I’d been in Christmas River, I’d always felt that I sold a unique product. No one else for towns around offered pies as good as mine, and I never felt like I had to compete with anybody.
But now… now I had the sense that change was afoot in Christmas River. And that perhaps to keep my shop’s status as the premier sweet pit stop of Main Street, I was going to have to fight tooth and nail.
Kara brushed the crumbs off of her oversized red reindeer sweater that had become her main go-to outfit of late. Mostly because it had ample room for that swelling belly of hers.
We were in the back of her ornament shop. She had a stack of wood strips in front of her on the craft table, along with a wood burning tool. She was chowing down while the tool heated up.
“Your pies are so much better, Cin,” she said, clearing her throat. “Everyone will know that if they don’t already.”
She popped another cookie into her mouth.
“That woman has some nerve moving in right across the street from you. You know, I’ve been steaming all day about it. I can only imagine what I’d do if some ornament start-up moved so close to my shop…”
She shook her head.
“Why, I think things might get real nasty real fast,” she said.
She stared dead into my eyes.
“This is your turf, Cin,” she said, with all the intensity of a 300-pound football player going for the ball. “Don’t you ever let her forget that, either.”
Good old Kara. She was in prime linebacker mode. That’s the name I’d given to this particular aggressive and ferocious attitude that she occasionally had lately. I was fairly certain it was a side effect of her pregnancy.
“Well, I would, except she seems nicer than a warm Georgia breeze,” I said, echoing Tobias’s turn of the phrase.
Kara furrowed her brow.
“What?”
“Nothing,” I said, sighing and taking another bite of the cookie.
“Well, whatever that means. Cin? You need to cut the bull. You need to be prepared to take off the kiddy gloves when it comes down to it. Because let me tell you, a lady who sets up a
pie shop right across the street from another pie shop is not a nice person. No matter if she comes from Georgia or whatever the heck you’re talking about.”
I didn’t correct her and tell her that Pepper was from Portland, not Georgia, for fear that Kara might turn that linebacker energy on me.
She slipped a white painter’s mask over her head and secured it over her mouth. Then she picked up the wood-burning tool, and grabbed one of the strips of wood. She began engraving it, a thin stream of smoke rising up from the burning wood.
“So, uh, those are going to be place cards, then? For the reception tables?” I asked, looking at her slow and steady movements.
She nodded, a deep crease of concentration cutting down between her brows.
“Do you think you’ve got enough time to do all that?” I said, trying to put it as delicately as I could.
Kara was getting married to John Billings in what was supposed to be a small, intimate, and non-stressful wedding on New Year’s Eve. She had said she didn’t want anything to be too fancy, given that she didn’t have a lot of time to plan the event. The baby was due in May, and Kara had wanted to get married before she was too large to fit into a wedding dress.
But while Kara had said the wedding was going to be low-key and not much more dressed up than a shotgun wedding, in reality, I could see that it was slowly snowballing into a massive undertaking. Part of the reason for this was because Kara was such a detail-oriented, crafty, and controlling person that everything, from the place cards to the chandeliers in the reception lodge, had to be specially made or embellished by her.
It was a lovely idea, but she’d been looking quite under the weather lately with all the work she’d been putting into the wedding decorations. And that was something that worried me a little, what with her being pregnant and all.
As the maid of honor, I’d been doing my utmost to help where I could. But I lacked the crafty touch that Kara was blessed with. When I tried to make things, they usually turned out lopsided and crooked. The only thing I was good at was making gingerbread houses, and that had very little to do with wedding decorations.
She glanced up at me from behind her safety mask.
“Of course I’ve got enough time to do this,” she said. “These place cards are crucial to the wedding.”
“I know, but wouldn’t it be easier just to write the names out instead of burning them onto wood? I mean, since you’re so busy and everything?”
She looked up again, giving me a sharp look that was one step away from full-on linebacker mode.
“Cinnamon, I’m already giving up my dream wedding gown because of… well, you know,” she said, looking down at her protruding gut. “But I won’t, for the life of me, give up my vision for the wedding. Okay? Now, I’ve got it under control. Don’t worry a hair on that pretty head of yours over it.”
She went back to her wood-burning. She was still carving the second letter in her mom’s name on the place card.
Her mother’s name was Genevieve.
I tried to do the math, wondering just how many letters she had left to burn for the wedding guests. Just the thought of it made my hands ache.
But Kara was headstrong. And I could tell she wasn’t going to be talked out of anything.
“Well, okay then,” I said, reluctantly. “But you’re sure you can’t assign me any tasks or anything like that?”
She shook her head.
After last week’s vase-shattering incident, where I accidently broke one of her centerpiece vases after she asked me to drill a hole in one of the sides, Kara has stopped assigning me “wedding craft tasks” as she called them.
“You’re already doing plenty, Cin,” she said.
I scanned her face.
Part of me felt like I was being a poor maid of honor by not knowing how to do any of this stuff. Kara, had after all, done so much for me and my wedding the year before.
“Are you sure?” I said. “I mean, I could help you with decorating the chandeliers later maybe?”
She pulled off her mask.
“Thanks, but you don’t have to worry yourself, Cin,” she said. “I’m on schedule. Everything will be just fine.”
I probably would have felt a little worse about my crafting inability, if I hadn’t been planning her surprise wedding shower for weeks now. I figured whatever I lacked in wood burning and drilling I could more than make up for in thoughtfulness and several rounds of the meanest virgin cocktails there ever were.
She absently reached for another one of the cookies in the carton.
I leaned back and crossed my arms as she lifted her mask and stuffed the macaron into her mouth.
She reached for another one and was about to cram that one in her mouth too, but stopped when she noticed me looking at her.
“What?” she said.
I raised an eyebrow.
“Not so bland, are they?”
She laughed nervously.
“Oh, Cin,” she said. “You put dog biscuits in front of me right now, I’d do the same thing. I mean, I think this baby is going to be the next Mario Batali. He just loves his food.”
She patted her gut and cracked a grin.
But I knew that she was lying.
She wasn’t eating Pepper’s cookies because she had low standards lately when it came to food.
She was eating them because they were nothing short of delicious.
I stifled a sigh, and tried not to let on how glum I was feeling.
Chapter 5
The wind was howling hard through the woods, sending the long, bony branches of nearby trees scraping against the back window. A large December moon rose high through fast-moving, silvery clouds, spilling its milky light across the snowy landscape.
Luckily, it was warm and cozy inside the pie shop. Much of it having to do with the sugary air and the dancing Christmas lights that circled the room. The small Christmas tree in the corner, covered to the hilt in tinsel and lights and Kara’s handmade ornaments, didn’t hurt the cozy atmosphere either.
Christmas was a little less than three weeks away. And while this Christmas was supposed to be more low key than other years – it was going to be just Daniel and me – I still felt behind in the preparations. I had Daniel’s gift, having purchased a new pair of his beloved work boots right after Thanksgiving. We had agreed earlier this month that because cash flow was a little tight, as Christmas was coming on the heels of our honeymoon, that the two of us wouldn’t exchange gifts this year. I, of course, had already broken this promise before even making it, using my Thanksgiving pie funds to purchase his boots.
But I was pretty certain that once he saw those boots under the Christmas tree, he’d forget all about the pact that we had made.
When it came to everybody else on my Christmas list, though, I had fallen sorely behind. I was short on ideas, and inspiration was hard to find between the hours I spent slaving away in the kitchen and the time I spent walking the dogs at the Humane Society.
Let alone the time it would take to build a masterpiece gingerbread house for the annual Gingerbread Junction Competition this year.
I took a sip of my blueberry pomegranate tea, and smiled.
Despite being so busy, there had been no question in my mind about entering the Gingerbread Junction this year. I had missed it the year before because I had my wedding to plan, and it was one of the rare times that I skipped the annual competition. Subsequently, I’d been having the itch to build a gingerbread house all year long. I’d been waiting for the month of December for what felt like ages, just so I could once again have an excuse to create an elaborate, over-the-top, sensational cookie house. And I’d be lying if I didn’t say this year’s $500 top prize wasn’t a pretty sweet incentive, too.
In the past, the top prize had been two plane tickets to Hawaii. But after the Mason Barstow scandal three years ago, the committee had been slowly scaling back the prize amount. They stopped giving away plane tickets, and instead, switched to cool, hard
cash. Which this year, suited me just fine.
The oven timer beeped. I pulled on a pair of mitts and then brought out a pan of freshly baked gingerbread cookie, cut precisely in the angles I needed to build the first two stories of the ice palace I planned to sweep the competition with.
I let the gingerbread cool while I whipped up some frosting and set up the baseboard. This year, I was making a gingerbread house based on my love for the movie Dr. Zhivago. I was going to call it “The Ice Palace of Varykino,” and I was planning to go to town on it, creating Russian-style domed cookie rooftops, sugar ice encrusted spires, marzipan trees and woodland creatures, and even a cookie sleigh outside of the structure itself. The ice palace was going to be my largest endeavor to date, and since Kara was busy with her own New Year’s wedding plans this year, I was building it entirely on my own.
When the cookie cutouts were cool, I carefully slid a spatula under the gingerbread, loosening it from the parchment paper. I carefully transferred the pieces to another baking pan, stacking them carefully on top of one another.
I was so excited about my idea, that I could hardly wait to get started.
The competition was always stiff at the Gingerbread Junction. But with over 15 years of experience in the contest, I was going into it feeling relatively confident.
I could almost hear the judges call my name. I could almost hear the noise of the crowd as I walked up on stage to collect my winnings. I could almost feel the smooth crispness of that $500 in my hands. I could almost—
Just then, there was a loud crashing sound outside the window, coming from the back deck of the pie shop.
My heart sped up and I froze in place, holding the whisk I’d been using to whip up the frosting tightly in one hand.
It wasn’t that late, but it might as well have been midnight as far as downtown Christmas River was concerned. The streets were abandoned as a graveyard here at this hour, and as Tiana and Tobias had left for the evening, I was all by myself in the shop.
And I had, somewhat stupidly, left all the blinds open to watch the beautiful December moon rise up through the trees. Meaning anybody out there in those woods could have been watching me all this time.