Cremas, Christmas Cookies, and Crooks

by Harper Lin

  “Do you think you’re up to finishing your shift?” I asked Becky. “Or do you need to go home?”

  She thought for a minute. I suspected she was debating what her dad would say about her coming home early more than she was contemplating how effectively she could finish the day, but at her age, what my family would have thought was probably more important to me too. Of course, my family and my bosses had been the same people back then, so it was a little different.

  “I think I can stay,” she said finally.

  I gave her what I hoped was a big, supportive smile. “Great! Why don’t you take a few more minutes to calm down, splash some cold water on your face, and then you can get back to work.” I couldn’t remember the last time I’d suggested to two people in less than thirty minutes that they splash cold water on their faces. It seemed like such a cliché thing to say or do. But maybe it got to be a cliché because it worked.

  “Okay,” Becky said and wiped under her eyes, smearing her remaining mascara into what actually looked almost like an intentional style.

  “Okay!” I took a deep breath, slapped my hands on my legs, and got up to go back out into the café. I had a feeling it was going to be a very long few hours before the end of the day.

  Chapter 6

  MATT CAME to keep me company again that night while I baked cookies after closing time. As I mixed and rolled and cut the cookies, I filled him in on how weird the day had been with Sammy and Becky both breaking into tears and customers all so shocked about Ann Crowsdale’s arrest.

  “So this Mrs. Crowsdale is pretty popular, huh?” he asked as he bit off a gingerbread man’s head, just as I did. I knew I loved that man.

  “Massively. Sammy told me about all the charity things she does and how much all the students love her.”

  “She wasn’t there when we were there, was she?” Matt and I had attended and graduated from Cape Bay High School what seemed like an eternity ago now.

  “She came our senior year.”

  He looked at me curiously.

  I shrugged and smiled. “Last night, after you fell asleep in the middle of the movie you insisted we watch, I dug out my old yearbooks. Mrs. Bayless and Mrs. Crawford—do you remember the school secretaries?”

  He shrugged and bit off a ginger-leg.

  “Anyway, they said that they thought she was there when we were, so I was curious. It turns out she started when we were seniors, but she only taught freshman English. And it was before she got married, so she was Miss Chambliss back then.”

  “How’d you know it was her then?”

  “Well, the first names were the same, so that was one clue, but I also, uh—” I paused and focused on cutting out cookies, hoping he would forget I had been talking.

  “You also, uh, what?” His warm brown eyes twinkled at me. The corner of his mouth quirked up in half a smile. He knew I had been on the verge of confessing something embarrassing.

  “Nothing. I could just tell they were the same person.”

  “You could just tell, huh?” He crammed the rest of the cookie in his mouth and came around the counter to where I was standing. He slipped his arms around my waist and brushed a kiss against my neck.

  “Mm-hmm,” I murmured, forgetting about the cookies.

  “You could just tell?” He kissed my neck again.

  “Uh-huh.”

  Planting delicate kisses all down my neck, he slid his hands across my belly to my hips. I wasn’t even holding the cookie cutter anymore. My fingers just held onto the cool granite counter. His hands slid up to my waist… and he started tickling me. “You could just tell, huh? You could just tell?”

  I screamed and jumped away from him, giggling. “Yes! I could just tell!”

  “Are you sure?” He wiggled his fingers at me.

  “Yes!”

  I tried to back away from him and ran straight into the wall.

  “Are you sure?” he repeated. He was close enough that he could tickle me again if he wanted to.

  “Yes,” I said again but with a little less certainty in my voice.

  He wiggled his fingers then went for my sides.

  I squealed again, but I couldn’t jump away this time. “Okay, okay! I’ll tell!” I was laughing so hard I could barely catch my breath.

  He held his hands up but didn’t move away. I could tell by the light in his eyes that he’d be more than happy to resume tickling at a moment’s notice.

  Still, I mumbled my answer.

  “What was that? I couldn’t hear you.” He stepped closer, so close that I could feel the warmth of his body.

  “I said,” I said out loud and then mumbled the rest.

  He wiggled his fingers in front of his face.

  I kissed him.

  “Not so fast, missy.” He pulled his mouth away but left his hands resting on my waist, whether for kissing or tickling, I wasn’t sure.

  I gave him my best puppy dog eyes.

  He wiggled his fingers.

  “I compared her picture in her mug shot online to the picture of her in my yearbook! Except for looking about fifteen years younger in the yearbook picture, they looked the same!”

  “That’s it?”

  “Well, and I looked her up online, and she has her maiden name listed on her social media.”

  Matt smiled. The little crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes were so hot. “If all you did was look at a couple of online search results, why were you trying so hard not to tell me?”

  “Well, it seemed a little—”

  “Like exactly what you’ve done on every other murder case you’ve investigated?”

  “I’m not investigating this case.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “The police already have it solved.”

  “Mm-hmm, and you looked her up online like probably everybody else in town did.”

  “True,” I said, although I was only barely listening to what he said. He was so warm and so close to me and his breath smelled like fresh gingerbread.

  “So what’s to be embarrassed about?” he asked softly in my ear.

  “It just seemed like—” I sort of forgot what I was going to say next.

  “A good way to get me to come kiss you?”

  That sounded like a good answer. “Mm-hmm.”

  “You could have just asked.”

  He was still kissing me when someone knocked on the glass front door of the café.

  “We’re closed!” I called, pulling Matt’s head back down to mine.

  “Fran, it’s me!”

  Matt stepped back, and I went to let Sammy in.

  “Why didn’t you just use your key?” I asked her.

  She looked at me skeptically. “The front of the café is a bunch of glass windows, Fran.”

  I blushed as I realized that anybody who had walked by could have seen Matt and me making out. Thank goodness Cape Bay was a sleepy little town that shut down early.

  “Hey, Matt!” Sammy called.

  “Hey, Sam!” Matt had helped himself to another cookie and was, annoyingly, looking more pleased with himself than embarrassed.

  “So what’s up?” I asked, hoping to move the conversation along. “You don’t usually come by after we close.” I thought for a second. I wasn’t usually in the café long after close, so I didn’t actually know. “Do you?”

  “No,” she said, looking at me as if it were an exceptionally strange thing to suggest. “I saw the lights on and saw you and, um, Matt in here…” She had the grace to look a little uncomfortable. “And thought maybe I could talk to you for a few minutes.” She looked from me to Matt and back as though she was gauging how dismayed we were by the interruption. Not that I wouldn’t have minded making out with Matt awhile longer, but I did have cookies to make, so I wasn’t too bothered. Besides, I really didn’t want her to think that we were routinely hooking up in the café.

  “Sure,” I said. “Do we need to go in the back or—”

  “No, Matt’s okay.”
r />   “So what’s up?” I said again.

  “I know we talked about it earlier, but I can’t stop thinking about Mrs. Crowsdale.”

  “Okay,” I said, picking up the cookie cutter I’d laid aside earlier.

  “Hang on,” she said and disappeared into the back.

  I looked over at Matt. He shrugged and bit into a fresh cookie. How he ate so many without going into sugar shock, I had no idea.

  Sammy reemerged with her apron on and her tray of icing supplies in her hands. “If I’m here, I may as well work,” she said

  “You don’t have to do that,” I said.

  She shrugged and attached one of the tips to her piping bag. “It’s less to do in the morning. Besides, I think better when I have something to occupy my hands.”

  “Up to you,” I said as I started moving the cut cookies onto the baking sheet. “So you said you were thinking about Mrs. Crowsdale.”

  Sammy leaned in close to a gingerbread man as she piped a Christmas sweater on him. “I just can’t stop. I’ll manage to distract myself for maybe five minutes, and then I remember that she was arrested, and I get upset all over again.”

  “That’s understandable.” I rolled out the scraps of dough left over from the batch I’d just cut out. “She’s someone you look up to. It’s hard to see our heroes fall.”

  “That’s the thing, Fran.” She switched piping bags and started working on the gingerbread man’s pants. “No matter how hard I try, I really can’t believe that she ‘fell.’ Not as far as murder anyway. I mean, if someone told me she’d lied about something or even shoplifted, I’d be disappointed and have trouble believing it, but murder? I just can’t make myself believe she’s capable of taking a life.”

  “Maybe it was an accident.”

  “She would have called 9-1-1.”

  “Maybe she hit Veronica on purpose but didn’t mean to kill her, or even really hurt her.”

  “She still would have called 9-1-1.”

  “You don’t know that, Sammy.”

  “No, that’s the thing, Fran. I do.”

  “How do you know?” I asked. I didn’t want to be argumentative, but I also didn’t think she would have come to me if she wanted someone who would just blindly agree with her.

  She sighed heavily. “I don’t know, but I just do. I know she wouldn’t have killed her on purpose, and I know that if she’d done it accidentally, she would have turned herself in.”

  “Are you sure she didn’t turn herself in?”

  She put down her piping bag and nodded. “Ryan told me,” she said softly. “He said her kids were there. Mike took her outside and didn’t handcuff her until they got to the car, but they still saw the police come for their mom.”

  “Oh wow.”

  Even Matt stopped munching on cookies long enough to appreciate how awful it was.

  “Speaking of Ryan, have you talked to him about any of this?” I asked.

  “I tried. But he said the evidence all overwhelmingly points to her.”

  “I’m sorry, Sammy.”

  “Thanks.” She sighed and looked down at the cookies in front of her. “Fran, I have something to ask you.”

  I held my cookie cutter over the dough and rotated it back and forth, trying to figure out how I could get the most cookies out of it. “Sure, what is it?”

  “Would you please investigate Veronica Underwood’s murder?”

  Chapter 7

  I PUT down my cookie cutter and looked at Sammy.

  “Sammy, you just said that all the police’s evidence points to Mrs. Crowsdale,” I said.

  “I know,” Sammy said. “But you find things the police don’t. And people talk to you.”

  I just stared at her, not knowing what to say.

  “Please, Fran?”

  I really didn’t want to get myself involved in another murder investigation. The last couple times I’d stuck my nose in police business, I’d found my life and my property in danger. I wasn’t really interested in getting myself in either of those situations again. And I trusted Mike and Ryan and the rest of the Cape Bay Police Department. If they said all the evidence pointed to Ann Crowsdale, I believed that it did. But what if Sammy’s gut feeling was right?

  I looked over at Matt. He raised his eyebrows and shrugged. It looked as if I was on my own on this one. I turned back to Sammy, who stared at me imploringly.

  “Sammy, I—” I started, fully intending to say no. But the look on her face was so desperate and so hopeful, I couldn’t do it. “I’ll think about it.”

  “Thank you,” she said and gave me a hug.

  She finished icing the group of cookies she was working on, and I got the last of my batch into and then out of the oven. We locked up the café, and then Matt and I walked Sammy to her apartment above one of the shops on Main Street.

  “So,” he said as we started toward our street where our houses—the houses we’d grown up in and ended up living in again in our adulthood—were two doors apart.

  “So?” I asked.

  “So what’re you going to do?”

  I sighed and leaned into him. He put his arm around me and rested his hand on my shoulder. “I really don’t know,” I said.

  “Do you think Mike could have gotten it wrong?”

  “I don’t know. He’s a good detective, but every single person I’ve talked to or even overheard has said that there’s no way Ann Crowsdale could be a murderer. They don’t have the evidence Mike does, though.” I gave up trying to rationalize it and shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “You’ll figure it out,” he said and kissed me on the temple. “You always do.”

  But by the next morning, I still hadn’t. At the café, I didn’t avoid Sammy, but I didn’t seek her out to talk about anything other than work, either. Eventually, of course, things slowed down to the point that I couldn’t avoid it any longer.

  “Have you decided if you’re going to investigate the murder?” she asked hopefully.

  I took a deep breath, hoping that it would give me sudden clarity. It didn’t. “I’m still thinking about it.”

  Her face fell. “Okay,” she said. “I understand. But you’re going to keep thinking about it?”

  “Yes. I just need some more time. After everything that happened before, I just need some more time.”

  I could tell she was disappointed, but she took a deep breath and nodded, her long blond ponytail bobbing. “That’s fine. I just—I just don’t want to think about her sitting in jail any longer than she has to, you know?”

  As if on cue, the bell over the door jingled, signaling a new customer.

  “Oh my God,” Sammy breathed then ran over to the couple who had just walked in. She hugged the woman, who started to cry.

  At first, I tried to think of whether I’d ever heard of Sammy having any long-lost family members, but I looked again at the woman’s face and realized with a start who she was—Ann Crowsdale.

  I recognized her from the pictures I’d seen online, but only barely. Even though the mug shot had only been taken a couple of days before, she looked another fifteen years older standing in front of me than she had in the picture. Even beyond the dark circles under her eyes, she looked tired. It was in the way she held herself or, at the moment, Sammy, since they were still hugging. It was as though she was hanging on to Sammy for dear life. And she looked old, as if she’d aged two decades, the way presidents look massively older after their terms are up.

  I knew from the newspaper that she’d been in jail since her arrest—the courts had been closed for the weekend, so she’d had to wait until they reopened for her arraignment. She must have gotten out on bail. She was wearing the same blue shirt that she had been in her mug shot, and I realized she and the man she was with—her husband, I guessed—had come straight to the café.

  “Fran! Fran! Come over here!” Sammy called, beckoning me toward them. I noticed that she’d been crying too.

  I thought I knew Sammy well enough to be su
re she wouldn’t put me on the spot and tell them she’d asked me to find evidence that someone else had killed Veronica Underwood, but I still had an inkling of fear that that was exactly what she was going to do. Still, I plastered my best café-owner smile on my face and walked over.

  “Fran, this is Mrs. Crowsdale,” Sammy said excitedly.

  “Sammy, I’ve told you a million times! You’re not my student anymore; you can call me Ann.”

  “It just feels so strange,” Sammy said.

  Ann Crowsdale smiled at her, then me, lighting up her whole face, and extended her hand. “You can call me Ann too, Fran. It’s good to meet you. I was so sorry to hear about your mother. She was such a lovely person. She helped me out many times with charity events I was working on.”

  I was speechless for a moment as I shook her hand. This woman had just been released from jail after being arrested for either a crime she didn’t commit or actually murdering someone, and the first words out of her mouth upon meeting me were to tell me she was sorry to hear about my mother’s death. Finally, I managed to get my mouth to make words. “Thank you. Sammy’s told me a lot about you.”

  “Good things, I hope.”

  “Very good things,” I replied.

  “Oh, and this is my husband, Mark,” she said, gesturing toward him.

  He looked tired too, but I didn’t have a recent picture of him to compare to see if that was any different from usual. I suspected it was, though.

  We shook hands and exchanged pleasantries, then realizing they probably hadn’t come in just to meet me, I asked what I could get for them.

  “Do you know what you want, hon?” Mark asked his wife.

  She looked up at the menu board, which Sammy had painstakingly decorated with a winter wonderland full of snowmen, Christmas trees, reindeer grazing, and even a tiny Santa Claus flying over the top in his sleigh.

  “Do you still have those delicious pumpkin spice lattes?”

  “We do,” I replied. I was proud of our pumpkin spice lattes. I’d eschewed the typical pumpkin spice syrup and made my own toasted spice mix, blending it with actual pumpkin to make the flavoring. It had been incredibly popular since we introduced it.