The Snow White Christmas Cookie (11 page)

He set the snow thrower to idle, rushing to her. “Josie, what happened to your eye?”

“You didn’t hear?” Her voice was low and morose. He’d never known her to sound that way before. “I figured Des would phone you.”

He shook his head. “Not when she gets busy.”

“Kylie Champlain lost control of her car and slammed into my building. It was … unreal. I was sitting there with a client and suddenly the front end of her car was
inside
my office.”

“And what happened to your eye?”

“A ceiling tile fell and hit me. It looks a lot worse than it is.”

“How about your client?”

“Just a scratch on the head. We were both lucky. The building inspector thinks the whole building may collapse. I had to beg him to let me back in for my files. He went in with me. Then he declared it off-limits—so I no longer have an office.” She let out a hollow laugh. “When I decide to have a shitty day I don’t mess around, do I?”

Now another vehicle was making its way through the Nature Preserve to the foot of the causeway. Again, not the hearse. It was a blue Toyota Tacoma pickup.

Josie let out a low groan. “Oh, God, I don’t believe this.”

The Tacoma pulled up next to her Subaru and Paulette Zander’s son, Casey, climbed out and approached them, hands buried deep in the pockets of his jacket, a Red Sox cap pulled low over his close-set eyes. Casey wore a pouty expression on his chubby face. Not a brooding, sensitive sort of pouty. He looked more like he was pissed off because Dada was too busy to play catch with him. “I need to talk to you, Josie!” he called out.

“Casey, now is not a good time,” she responded, politely but firmly.

He ducked under the barricade and started out onto the causeway anyway. “But we have to talk.”

“Casey, I have a personal situation to deal with right now. I’ll call you later, okay?”

“What time?”

“As soon as I can. I don’t know when it’ll be.”

“I just want to talk. Why are you being such a bitch?”

“Casey, this isn’t appropriate behavior. There are boundaries to our relationship.”

“
Boundaries?
What does
that
mean?”

“You know perfectly well what it means,” she said, maintaining that same polite, firm voice. “Now please leave.”

Casey didn’t budge. Just gaped at her in disbelief.

“Why don’t you take off?” Mitch suggested. “Josie’s had a hard morning.”

“You shut up,” Casey snarled in response.

“Mitch, please stay out of this.”

“Yeah,
Mitch
, mind your own business.”

“Actually, this is my business. You’re trespassing on private property.
My
private property. There’s a great big sign posted right over there, see it? Josie asked you to leave. Now I’m telling you to leave.”

“But I want to talk to her!”

“She doesn’t want to talk to you. That’s kind of obvious, isn’t it?”

Casey curled his lip at him. “Oh, sure, I get it now. You want to do her, don’t you? Or are you already doing her?”

Josie let out a gasp. “Casey, you are way out of line.”

Mitch started toward him. “What did you just say?”

“You heard me,” he jeered.

“No, I’m not sure that I did. Would you like to repeat that?”

“Mitch, don’t do this,” Josie said pleadingly.

“I bet your girlfriend the trooper doesn’t know about you two. She was asking me a million stupid questions in the ambulance. She’s a total bitch.”

“You really like that word, don’t you?” Mitch stood face-to-face with Casey now. “You’re on private property. Leave.”

“Don’t tell me what to do,” Casey warned him.

“
Leave.
”

Casey shoved him. It wasn’t much of a shove. He was all blubber. Mitch wasn’t. He shoved Casey back and sent him tumbling onto his butt. Casey got right back up and came rushing at him. Mitch sidestepped him and shoved him to the causeway again, this time planting his work boot on Casey’s neck and plastering his fat face to the snow-crusted wooden planks.

“Are you going to behave yourself or do I have to throw you in the water?”

Casey started squirming and whimpering like a little school-kid. “Let me up, will ya?”

“Not until you promise to behave yourself.”

Josie put her hand on Mitch’s arm. “Mitch, his face is going to freeze to the causeway.”

“Good, it’ll be a vast improvement. Say you’ll behave yourself!”

“Okay, okay. I’ll … behave myself.”

Mitch removed his foot from Casey’s neck and helped him up. “Now get back in your truck and get the hell out of here.”

“You’ll be sorry you did that,” Casey vowed, shaking his fist at him.

“Look at me—I’m quaking with fear.”

Casey slunk back to his truck and drove off, his wheels spinning in the deep snow.

“Mitch, that wasn’t necessary,” Josie said scoldingly.

“I know, but it was fun.”

“This is a side of you I’ve never seen before. You have anger issues.”

“No, I don’t. I wasn’t the least bit angry.” He looked at her curiously. “He’s the client who you were with when Kylie went boom?”

“Yes.”

“He seems to have a major crush on you.”

“It happens. Some of my male clients, especially the younger ones, can get emotionally involved. Casey’s lonely. He needs a girlfriend.”

“He needs a new personality, too.”

Another vehicle was approaching the causeway now. This one was the black Cadillac hearse from Dousson Mortuary.

“Oh, good, they’re finally here.” Mitch inserted his coded plastic card in the security slot to raise the barricade.

The driver, a young black guy, rolled down his window and said, “Sorry it took us so long, bro. It is some kind of a mess out there.”

Josie drew in her breath. “Mitch, is Bryce
still
here?”

“I’m afraid so. That’s why I’ve been clearing the causeway.”

“Where do I go, bro?”

“Just follow the pathway that I’ve cleared to the big, natural-shingled house. He’s in the downstairs bedroom. I’ll be right behind you.” Mitch stepped aside so that the hearse could start its way out to the island.

“I-I can’t believe he’s still…” Josie started to shake. Her breathing was shallow and rapid. “This whole day … it’s some kind of a nightmare. I’m going to lose it, I swear.”

“No, you’re not. You’re doing great.”

“Mitch, I’m not doing great at all. My life is a total mess.” She let out a grief-stricken sob and then threw herself into his arms.

Mitch put his arms around her as she cried and cried, hugging him tight. She was more compactly built than Des but strong for her size. It was like being hugged by a python. “I know it all seems overwhelming,” he said. “But it’ll work out. We’ll work it out together. What you need right now, more than anything else, is a nice heaping bowl of Cocoa Puffs.”

She pulled away from him, laughing through her tears. “You always know how to make me feel better. I don’t know what I’d do without you, Mitch.”

“You’d do fine. You
are
doing fine.”

“No, I’m not. I’m going to be awfully clingy for the next few days.”

“Be as clingy as you want.”

“I won’t send you running for the hills?”

“Not a chance. I’m your naybs, remember?”

She gazed at him with her one good eye, which was huge and shiny. Then she hugged him again, gently this time. “Mitch, you are so much more to me than the guy next door. Don’t you know that?”

C
HAPTER
7

W
HAT IN THE HELL
am I doing?

Des pulled around behind the firehouse and used her key to the back door. She went directly up the stairs to the meeting room, which had a window that offered a panoramic view of the entire Dorset Street Historic District buried under its blanket of pure white snow. The village’s highest concentration of mailboxes was situated directly across from her—the boxes for the Captain Chadwick House condo colony and the four houses that adjoined it on Maple Lane. More than a dozen mailboxes bunched together right there. The flags on three of them were raised, meaning the residents had left something for Hank to take.

Des set a folding chair in front of the window and parked herself there, testing out the zoom lens on her Nikon D80. It was so powerful that she could make out the words
Approved by the Postmaster General
on the boxes halfway to Town Hall. She’d brought her lunch—a container of steaming-hot clam chowder from Mitzi’s fish market. Des opened the container and helped herself to some. It was chilly in the firehouse. And the wind was starting to pick up, rattling the windows. She kept her jacket on as she settled in.

Why am I doing this?

Because this was her town. These were her people. If someone was preying on them then she wanted to be the one to handle it. True, the jurisdictional boundaries were pretty clear. If a crime involved the U.S. Postal Service then it was a job for the postal inspectors. If an illegal prescription drug ring was targeting Dorset, then that was a job for the state’s Narcotics Task Force. But Des didn’t like the idea of reaching out for help. So she was giving herself this day to see what she could see. If nothing jumped out at her then, okay, she’d play it by the book. But she needed to do this her way. If she didn’t then she’d just be an empty uniform.

She spotted Hank as soon as his white Grumman LLV turned onto Dorset Street from Big Branch. The mail truck was pretty hard to miss with those red and blue stripes and postal insignias stamped all over it. Especially when it was the only vehicle out on the road. Through her zoom lens she watched Hank nose it slowly from curbside box to curbside box. The LLV’s steering wheel was on the right-hand side. Hank used his right hand to open the mailbox, his left to grab the mail from the tray next to him. Then he reached across his body to stuff the mail in, closing the box with his right hand before he moved on. It was not an easy or natural repetitive motion. She wondered how many carriers developed rotator cuff problems from doing it hundreds of times every day. She also wondered how they dealt with the monotony of performing the same exact task the same exact way, day in and day out. Then again, she supposed that someone could say the same thing about her job or Mitch’s or a brain surgeon’s. Every job had its share of sameness. The challenge was to find a way to keep it fresh.

So what was Hank’s way?

Now he pulled up directly across from her at the Captain Chadwick House. Her zoom lens gave her a straight-on close-up view of Hank filling the mailboxes with the catalogues, junk mail and packages that had arrived on the early truck from Norwich. As he inched his way forward, box by box, Des watched his every move, snapping pictures in case she needed them. When he reached a box with a raised flag he paused to remove two unstamped envelopes. One he held on to. His Christmas tip, Des figured. The other he returned to the box. Lem’s plow money, she assumed. Maple Lane’s residents were still leaving cash out, grinch or no grinch. That was Dorset. Cranky Yankees did not, would not, change their ways.

Now Hank stopped and got out and went around to the back of the truck. He opened it and removed a carton from L.L. Bean. A big one, at least two feet square, though it didn’t weigh much judging by the way he was handling it. He locked the truck, just like he’d told Des he did, and clomped his way through the snow to Nan Sidell’s little farmhouse next door to Rut Peck’s. He set the box down on the front porch under the overhang and rang the bell. He was starting back to his truck when the front door opened and Nan, a middle-school teacher, called out to him. Hank stopped to accept a paper plate of cookies from her. They chatted there for a sec, both of them very animated.

Meanwhile, back at the Captain Chadwick House, one of its elderly residents was waddling through the deep snow down to the curb—none other than her good friend Bella Tillis, looking like Nanook of Nostrand Avenue in her hooded down jacket, fleece pants and duck boots equipped with bright orange Yaktrax snow grippers. The old girl must have been watching for Hank. Didn’t want to give that damned grinch a chance to snatch her mail. She collected it and went tromping back inside, her precious bubble-wrapped packages of meds clutched to her chest. Des couldn’t help smiling.

Hank had unlocked his truck and moved on. As he neared Town Hall a red Champlain Landscaping plow pickup turned onto Dorset Street from Big Branch and began working its way slowly along in Hank’s wake. It wasn’t there to plow—its blade was raised high up off of the ground. No, its driver was there to check out the contents of each and every mailbox, leafing carefully through the mail Hank had just delivered before returning it to the box. Sometimes all of it, sometimes not. Sometimes he held on to an envelope and took it with him back to his truck. Des sat there watching him through her zoom lens. He was incredibly calm as he stood there rummaging through other peoples’ mail. So damned calm she almost couldn’t believe what she was seeing.

She went back downstairs to her cruiser. Pulled it around to the street and caught up with the red truck, flashing her lights at him. When he came to a stop she got out, big Smokey hat planted firmly on her head, and approached him.

Pat Faulstich, the thick-necked young Swamp Yankee with the reddish see-through beard, sat there behind the wheel looking nervous. Same as he had at McGee’s Diner earlier that morning.

“How’s it going, Pat?” she asked, tipping her hat at him.

He cleared his throat, swallowing. “Was I speeding or something?”

“Nope.”

“Then why’d you pull me over?”

“You tell me. What in the heck are you doing?”

“Picking up Lem’s money.” He grabbed a dozen or more envelopes from the seat next to him and showed them to her. “Lem’s the one who usually picks ’em up but he’s at the hospital on account of Kylie so he told me to. I didn’t take anything. It’s all there, I swear. And I don’t have a thing in my pockets except my own money, which is like maybe seven dollars, okay?”

“You seem a bit defensive, Pat.” Agitated was more like it. “Why is that?”