Cremas, Christmas Cookies, and Crooks

by Harper Lin

  “Do you think this one has too much icing?” Sammy asked, holding up a gingerbread man wearing an intricately patterned pair of Christmas-themed pajamas.

  “There’s no such thing as too much icing,” a familiar voice behind me said.

  I turned around and smiled at my boyfriend, Matt Cardosi. “What are you doing here?”

  He brushed a kiss across my lips before answering. “My last meeting ended early, so I figured I’d head out before rush hour. The office is empty on Friday afternoons this close to Christmas, anyway.”

  “I’d hug you, but I’m a mess.” I glanced from his clean white dress shirt to my apron. It was a good thing I had it on. In addition to a liberal coating of flour, there were also a few smears of gingerbread dough. Fortunately, the apron was black, so it mostly hid the speckles of food coloring I knew also covered it.

  “I see that. You’ll just have to owe me.” He smiled mischievously. “I do charge interest, though.”

  I giggled despite myself.

  Matt looked over at Sammy, who had gone back to her cookie decorating. “If you’re worried about that one having too much icing, I can take it off your hands for you. No charge.”

  “Uh-uh. No,” I said as he reached over toward it. “That one’s too pretty. It’s going out front so our actual paying customers can see how talented Sammy is.”

  “Well, do you have an ugly one?” he asked, scoping out the tray that held Sammy’s finished work. “I can taste test them for you. Make sure Franny didn’t accidentally use salt instead of sugar.”

  “That only happened once!” I protested.

  “Still, it’s better to be safe than sorry.” His hand inched toward one of the cookies. Sammy swatted at it with a towel.

  “You can have one from that tray over there,” she said, pointing to a different tray, which held my beheaded victims and the couple that she’d smudged. “But Fran’s already sampled them.”

  Matt grinned at me. “Burn your tongue again?”

  “No!”

  “She’s getting better,” he said to Sammy.

  She nodded as she glanced over at me, her lips twitching up in a smile.

  “I’m ignoring you two,” I said and dumped the sugar cookie dough out of the mixer bowl and onto a piece of plastic wrap for storage in the refrigerator.

  “Do you want me to taste that for you?” Matt reached over with a spoon he’d grabbed from somewhere and tried to scoop off a bite of my dough.

  “Matty!” I made motions as if I were trying to stop him but let him get a bite of it.

  He nodded approvingly. “Tastes like sugar cookies.”

  I wrapped up the dough and took it to the refrigerator. I was putting the bowl and paddle from the mixer in the sink to be washed when Becky, one of my high school student part-timers, came in.

  “How was play practice?” Sammy asked.

  Becky shrugged as she dropped her backpack and coat off in the storage room. Sammy and I exchanged a look.

  “Still having trouble with Ms. Underwood?” Sammy asked.

  Becky nodded.

  “At least it’s almost over, right? Just another week?”

  “Yeah.”

  Sammy and I looked at each other again. Becky was usually much more bubbly and chatty than that. She’d been a little more down than usual since play practice started, but nothing like this.

  “Is everything okay?” I asked. “Did something happen at practice today?”

  She shrugged and sniffed. For a second, I thought she was going to cry, but then it passed. “Ms. Underwood was yelling at us a lot today. It’s really annoying. The play was always really fun when Mrs. Crowsdale and Ms. Blarney were in charge of it, but Ms. Underwood’s so mean. It’s like, why is she even a teacher if she thinks teenagers are so annoying, you know? Like, she volunteered to do this. It’s part of her job. It’s what the drama teacher does.”

  “Can you talk to Mrs. Crowsdale about it?” Sammy asked. Mrs. Crowsdale was the assistant director in the play and one of the most popular teachers at Cape Bay High School.

  “We’ve tried! And she’s tried to talk to Ms. Underwood, but it doesn’t make a difference. She’s brand new, and she thinks she knows everything, and she doesn’t listen to anybody! She tells us we’re stupid and calls us entitled little brats like there’s something wrong with us because we don’t like being yelled at. She’s just mean!” Now Becky really looked as if she was going to cry. Not that I could blame her. Based on my short experience with her, Ms. Underwood was awful.

  “Aw, Becky.” Sammy put down her piping bag and gave Becky a hug. “I know it’s hard, but you can make it through it. The play’s next week. Then it’ll be over. It’s just a few more days.”

  At least, that was what we all thought.

  Chapter 3

  I WOKE up late the next morning after a fun date night with Matt. We went to dinner after I closed the café for the night then caught a late showing of the newest blockbuster movie full of car chases and exploding buildings and bad guys dying in unlikely ways. It wasn’t really my kind of movie, but Matt really wanted to see it, so I agreed after extracting a promise from him that he wouldn’t complain about going to the next based-on-the-bestselling-novel chick flick I wanted to see.

  That morning, I lolled around the house for a while with my beloved Berger Picard dog, Latte, named for his fur, which was exactly the color of a perfectly poured latte. It was one of my favorite drinks to make, in part because of the skill it took to make a really good one. It wasn’t particularly difficult to make a passable one, but I took pride in making more than passable ones—pulling the shots of espresso just right so that they had a beautiful, perfect crema on top, steaming the milk to perfection, and then pouring the milk in so that it made a beautiful design on top. I’d heard people say latte art gets in the way of a good latte, but as far as I was concerned, that was just an excuse. You could have a latte that was heavenly to drink and lovely to look at at the same time. In fact, it had been one of my grandfather’s mottos back when he and my grandmother first opened Antonia’s Italian Café after they emigrated from Italy—“make your food delicious, and make it beautiful.” They were words I still tried to live by, even if I had to rely on Sammy to help me do it.

  After taking Latte on a lengthy stroll around town, I showered and headed in to the café.

  Antonia’s wasn’t far from my house—which was actually the reason my grandparents had bought the house sixty-some years ago—but then, nothing in the tiny beach town of Cape Bay was really that far from anything else. I rarely drove anywhere except to the grocery store, and even then, it was only because it was easier to load my bags in the trunk than it was to carry them.

  I took the shortcut I’d taken since I was a child—out the back door, through the neighbors’ yards, and out onto the street a block or so from the back door of the café. Even though we were already in the second half of December, we’d only had one snowfall that amounted to anything more than a dusting, and that was long since gone. The ground was frozen solid but completely bare, so I didn’t have to deal with slogging through the snow and changing into and out of snow boots. It was pretty frigid, though—just above freezing—so I bundled up in my warmest coat, wrapped a scarf around my neck, and pulled a knit hat low on my forehead. It was the one time of year I really appreciated my thick mop of black hair—it served as a kind of bonus scarf, insulating me from the wind that was determined to cut through my regular one.

  I walked in through the back door of the café, hung my coat, and divested myself of all the other trappings of winter in Massachusetts. Through the door to the café, I could see Sammy leaning across the counter, talking to her maybe-boyfriend, Officer Ryan Leary of the Cape Bay Police Department, who, I noticed, was eating his uniform-clad gingerbread man legs-first. I’d have to ask Sammy if she’d decorated a whole series of police officer gingerbread men, or if she only made one for Ryan. Despite the fact that anyone with eyes could see that the two of
them were head over heels for each other, they refused to admit that they were seeing each other. Sammy was still coming off a fairly recent breakup with her longtime loser boyfriend, but I didn’t know what Ryan’s aversion to publicly saying they were official was.

  “Hey, guys!” I called to them through the open door.

  Ryan nodded in my direction, tipping his legless gingerbread man at me. I wondered if he saw the humor in the fact that the cookie he was eating was wearing the same outfit he was.

  Sammy smiled in a way that made it look almost painful.

  “How’s it going?” I asked. I slipped my apron over my head and walked over to where they were standing as I tied the strings behind my back.

  “Got another body,” Ryan said.

  “Ryan!” Sammy gave him a disapproving look.

  “What?” Ryan and I asked at the same time, though our tones were dramatically different—mine was shock. Ryan’s was more as if he genuinely didn’t know why Sammy reacted that way.

  “You shouldn’t act so casual about it!” Sammy said, choosing to answer Ryan first.

  “Sorry,” he mumbled and bit off a ginger-arm. He had a habit of being a little too blunt talking about crimes. He forgot that not everyone was in law enforcement and dealt with it every day.

  I looked between them, waiting for one of them to fill me in, but Ryan was munching, and Sammy seemed to have forgotten I was there. “So what’s going on?” I asked.

  Ryan glanced at Sammy.

  “Go ahead,” she said.

  He swallowed his bite of gingerbread. “There’s been another murder,” he said, looking again at Sammy for her approval.

  “Better,” she said.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Veronica Underwood. She was a teacher at the high school.”

  “Veronica Underwood?” I repeated. “I just saw her yesterday!”

  “She was just found last night.” He eyed me up and down. “I don’t need to question you, do I?”

  “What? No!” I replied defensively.

  “Is there something you want tell me? Like where you saw her? And when?”

  I couldn’t imagine that he really wanted to question me, but there was always an off chance he wasn’t at the café to see Sammy. Or for the free coffee, which was the other big draw for him. “At the school,” I said. “I met her to talk about the bake sale we’re doing during the play to support the drama club.”

  Ryan broke into a grin. “Relax, Fran. I’m just messing with you.”

  “About Ms. Underwood being dead or just about needing to question me?”

  “Unfortunately, just about needing to question you. Veronica Underwood really is dead.”

  “Murdered.”

  “Yup.”

  “Do you have any suspects yet?”

  “I know this is going to disappoint you,” Ryan said, “but we do.”

  “Trust me, I am not disappointed,” I said. There had been a handful of murders in Cape Bay over the past few months, and I’d somehow managed to get myself involved in the investigation of each of them, which was why Ryan suggested I’d be disappointed that they already had a suspect. But I’d had enough of murder investigations. I’d had enough of murders in Cape Bay in general, but since I wasn’t doing any of the actual murdering, there wasn’t much I could do about that. The investigations, on the other hand, had seemed to find me. If anything, I was relieved that the police had a suspect and there was no use in me getting involved, let alone any need for me to.

  Before we could discuss it any further, the police radio on Ryan’s shoulder crackled to life and said something completely incomprehensible. Ryan somehow understood and muttered something back into it, starting with the only thing I understood from the whole exchange: “Ten-four.”

  He looked at Sammy and grimaced. “Looks like I gotta go.”

  “You want a refill of your coffee?”

  “Yes, please.”

  Sammy topped off his coffee cup then grabbed a blond, blue-eyed gingerbread girl, dropped it into a bag, and handed it to him with a coy smile.

  Ryan took it, smiling back at her. “Thanks, Sam. See you later.” I was pretty sure I saw him wink at her before he turned to me and waved. “See ya, Fran.”

  “See ya, Ryan.”

  Sammy and I watched as he left the café and turned out onto the street.

  “So, Veronica Underwood,” I said after he disappeared from our view.

  “Yup,” Sammy replied.

  “Did he tell you anything about who they think did it?”

  “No. He just told me she was dead right before you got here.”

  “Do you know how it happened?”

  She shook her head.

  I sighed. As unpleasant as she was, I didn’t like that a woman was dead, and I really didn’t like that there had been yet another murder in our small, otherwise nearly crime-free town. But even so, there was one good thing about it.

  “I hate to say it, but on the bright side—” I stopped myself, still not sure I could actually bring myself to say it out loud.

  Sammy finished my sentence for me. “At least Becky and the other kids don’t have to deal with her anymore.”

  Chapter 4

  IT WAS, of course, the talk of the café the rest of the day. If people weren’t talking about it when they came in, they talked about it over their coffee. News travels fast in a small town, and it was no surprise that everyone knew about it and everyone had an opinion. Especially the high school students and their parents. You could almost spot them—while everyone else looked upset, or at least morbidly curious, the people who actually knew Veronica Underwood had a look that was probably best described as relief. At least everyone had the decency not to look happy about it.

  Somehow, I managed to avoid anyone asking if I was going to do my own investigation of her murder. It continually surprised me that people outside my small circle knew about my roles in solving the previous murders, but I guess it was that small-town thing again—everyone knew everyone’s business, and most of them weren’t shy about asking. I didn’t know whether Veronica Underwood was really so strongly disliked that nobody cared about seeing her murderer punished, or if no one had thought that far because the news about her death was still so fresh. Or maybe it was the Christmas spirit. All I knew was that no one was asking me if I was going to solve the case, and I couldn’t have been happier about that. Well, maybe if no one was dead in the first place, but there was nothing I could do about that.

  Naturally, it couldn’t last.

  It was late afternoon when Rhonda Davis came strolling in. She was about ten years older than me and had two teenage boys who, I realized, would at least know of Veronica Underwood if they didn’t actually know her. Rhonda also worked for me part-time, mostly to support her shopping habit. She practically considered the Neiman Marcus up in Boston to be her second home, and that was where she’d been most of the day. Usually, she restricted her shopping trips—and her working for me—to times when her boys were in school, but with Christmas two short weeks away, she’d been expanding them to every available opportunity. She was on her way home from her latest one when she came into the café.

  “Hey, girls!” she called out to Sammy and me as she breezed through the door. She was bundled in a massive parka to keep the nearly frigid December air off her.

  “Hey, Rhonda!” I called back. “How was your shopping trip?” Sammy was getting ready to leave, and she and I were tucked behind the counter, discussing how many cookies I would need to make to be ready for the next day.

  Rhonda sighed dreamily. “I think I could live at Neiman’s if they’d let me.”

  Sammy and I laughed.

  “That doesn’t surprise me at all,” I said.

  “What’re you girls talking about?” Rhonda asked, leaning against the counter. “How Fran’s going to solve Veronica Underwood’s murder?”

  I groaned, and Sammy laughed.

  Rhonda laughed too. “Heard tha
t a few too many times today?”

  “First time, actually,” I replied.

  “Wow, really? Do people think you’re losing your touch or something?”

  “Maybe they just want to give me a break and let me act like a normal citizen for once.”

  “Actually, Ryan said that the police already have a suspect. That’s probably why people aren’t asking Fran about it,” Sammy said.

  Rhonda looked pointedly at Sammy and raised an eyebrow. “Not everyone has the intimate access to the police that you do, Sammy.”

  Sammy’s face turned bright red. “Oh, well, I, uh, I just—”

  “Rhonda was just teasing you,” I said, giving Rhonda a look and patting Sammy on the back. For some reason, Sammy could never tell when Rhonda was joking.

  “So who do they think did it?” Rhonda asked.

  “We don’t know,” I said then looked at Sammy. “Unless you’ve heard?”

  She shook her head, her blush subsiding.

  “Yeah, we don’t know.”

  Rhonda’s phone rang. She looked at it and sighed then tapped the screen and held it to her head. “Hello, Dan.”

  It was her husband. She “yeah,” “yup,” and “uh-huh’ed” her way through the conversation before ending with “I’m just going to grab a cup of coffee at the café, and then I’ll be home.” She ended the call and dropped her phone back in her handbag. “Guess it’s time for Mom to get back to work.” She sighed.

  “A latte?” I asked, grabbing a to-go cup.

  “Yup.”

  I put the to-go cup in its place and started pulling the espresso shot before steaming the milk. When everything was ready, I poured the milk into the espresso, flicking my wrist just so to coax out the image I wanted. I dipped a toothpick into the spare steamed milk and scooped out some of the microfoam. I dabbed it into Rhonda’s latte, adding in the finishing accents. When it was done, I rotated it around to face Rhonda, turning it carefully to keep from mixing the crisp white of the milk into the warm brown of the crema.