Cozy Christmas Shorts

by Halliday, Gemma

  Mr. Wharton—apparently no one used his first name, let alone a nickname—declined to shake Helen's hand, citing his weakened immune system and the particularly virulent strain of flu this year. Kolya, however, made up for his patient's standoffishness, squeezing Helen's hand and then shaking it as if he were testing her physical fitness.

  The last judge was Edith Avila, a member of the town's Board of Selectmen. "Board of Selectpersons," she corrected Geoff with a giggle. She barely brushed her fingertips against Helen's in lieu of a traditional handshake. "You can call me Edie."

  "Nice to meet you," Helen lied. The woman showed every sign of being as saccharine as Helen's first visiting nurse, and that hadn't ended well at all. It wouldn't be good if yet another Suzy Sunshine type ended up dead in Helen's vicinity, especially with Tate insisting he couldn't represent her any longer.

  "Mr. Wharton and Edie know the rules already, but for the record here's how the judging works." Geoff encouraged everyone further into the dining room, which could seat in excess of a hundred patients and visitors. The smaller tables had been pushed against a wall to the right of the entrance, and five longer, banquet-sized tables had been rearranged so that instead of being laid out in parallel rows, they formed an inverted U shape. Each side of the U was made up of two tables, and there were five gingerbread houses on each side. The head table at the far end of the room was empty, presumably reserved to hold the three winners after the judging.

  Geoff continued, "The nursing home residents have voted for their favorites, narrowing the entries down to the ten finalists. All you have to do now is choose, in a unanimous vote, five that will get ribbons. Then I'll take pictures, you'll announce the results, and everyone will be happy."

  "Except for the losers," Helen said.

  "Oh, no one's really a loser," Edie said. "Just making it to the finals is quite an honor among the nursing home residents. Plus, the finalists all get mentioned in the newspaper, thanks to Geoff, and everyone likes seeing his or her name in the paper."

  "Not me," Helen said.

  Edie blinked and then pretended not to have heard. "You're new at this, so just follow my lead. It's usually obvious which three will get the top rankings and which aren't even in the running."

  That was the best news she'd heard so far. Helen hadn't really wanted to be one of the judges. It felt a bit too much like the kind of things she'd done as the state's First Lady. All show and no substance, no real effect on anyone's lives. But Martha Waddell had known exactly how to get Helen to agree; she'd delegated the job of convincing her to Betty and Josie.

  Edie kept chattering. "We sometimes disagree briefly over the placement of the top three winners, but not for long, and the two honorable mentions are always obvious. It's never taken more than about ten minutes to reach a unanimous decision about all five. Mr. Wharton has impeccable taste, of course, and I like to think I'm not bad myself. Jason sometimes had different ideas, but he came around pretty quickly last year."

  "Why isn't he judging this year?"

  "He died," Edie said with a big smile. "He'd been ill for a long time, so I'm sure it was a great relief when he went to his reward."

  Helen couldn't help wondering if she'd been tapped as a judge because of her perceived decrepitude, making her an apt replacement for the terminally ill Jason and a presumed push-over like the wilting Mr. Wharton, rather than someone who would rock the judging boat.

  "Let's get started." Edie led the way to the where the first five gingerbread houses were set up on the table closest to the inner wall of the dining room. Fluorescent lights in the high ceilings were on, since the mid-day skies were gray, and even the floor-to-ceiling windows that ran the length of the outer wall couldn't let in enough light to view the details of the entries. "We always work around the room in a clockwise direction."

  Even from the doorway, Helen had been able to tell that all of the basic houses were identical little structures, each one a 14" cube with a pointed roof. Betty and Josie had said the kitchen staff had worked overtime during the first week of November, baking the gingerbread sheets and building a hundred of the unadorned little houses. After that, the residents, either as individuals or as teams, could claim a house and decorate it for the competition. A few opted to eat them instead, although that was generally discouraged since the gingerbread was baked hard enough to crack even Edie's good cheer. The decorations weren't restricted to traditional frosting and gum drops, but everything had to be edible, or the house was disqualified from the final round.

  As the three judges and Geoff approached the first entry, Mr. Wharton sniffed. "I smell cloves, Kolya. They know I'm allergic to cloves. They promised they wouldn't use it in the recipe."

  "Do not worry," Kolya said, with only a hint of a Russian accent. "I will wrestle the cloves to the ground if necessary. I also have your epi pen. I will not let anything happen to you."

  "Are you sure?"

  "You are safe as houses," Kolya said in a tone so serious that it seemed unlikely he even recognized the pun.

  The first entry consisted of a dozen gingerbread men clustered—or, presumably, rocking—around the Christmas tree in the front yard of a basic house decorated for the holidays. Helen could see why it had been voted one of the ten finalists. The details on the display were exquisite, from the tiny icicles along the roof and the candles in the windows, to the strings of popcorn and cranberries on the Christmas tree. There were even miniature marzipan birds alighting on the branches. Unfortunately, something had gone wrong, probably while the entry was transported into the dining room, and the tree had fallen over onto its side.

  Helen looked closer and realized that the legs and feet of a miniature gingerbread man stuck out from beneath the tree, and around him was a pool of something dark red and sticky, like seedless raspberry jam.

  The fallen tree was intentional, she realized, and the gingerbread men weren't rocking around the tree. They were peering at a fatally crushed gingerbread corpse.

  * * *

  A moment later, Edie gasped. "I can't believe the staff allowed that entry to be included in the finalists. The residents here don't need any more reminders of death."

  "One of those residents—or perhaps a whole team of them, considering how much work this must have taken—built the house, so I don't think it bothered them," Helen said.

  "Well." Edie huffed and pointedly moved on to the next entry. "That makes the judging easier, at least. We can eliminate one finalist right away."

  Based on Betty's and Josie's expressed desire to see the conman known as the Gingerbread Man get his comeuppance, Helen had a feeling the remaining entries weren't going to be any less morbid. At first, it looked like she was wrong. The next gingerbread house had been turned into a confectionary store. In its front yard was a cylindrical vat fashioned out of white chocolate and filled with dark chocolate pudding. A tiny spiral hose cut out of a cherry Twizzler led from the vat to a conveyor belt for filling wreath-shaped candy forms with the chocolate. A crew of gingerbread men worked to sort the chocolates, a couple of them resorting to the I Love Lucy trick of eating the candies that moved past them too quickly. All very sweet and nostalgic, entirely appropriate for the nursing home crowd.

  "Awww, how cute," Edie said. "Look, there's a gingerbread man swimming in the vat of chocolate."

  Helen looked closer. He wasn't swimming. He was floating, face down. She suspected he was supposed to be dead. She glanced at the title of the entry: Drowning in Chocolate.

  She had to laugh. This was going to be a lot more fun than she'd anticipated.

  "What?" Edie said.

  "Never mind," Helen said. "We might as well move on to the next one. I'm afraid we'll need to disqualify this one for not meeting the theme of 'Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree.'"

  Edie's smile faltered, and she peered at the display more closely, as if determined to find something she could latch onto as rocking or a tree or any of the activities mentioned in the song. The Partridge Family
helpfully supplied the lyrics in the background, and Edie spun her failure into a victory. "I told you this would be quick and easy. Two down, eight left to consider. I'm sure there will be more nice ones."

  Edie was destined for disappointment. Not a single one of the remaining entries could be considered "nice." The contestants had largely ignored the sappy "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" theme, although how they'd managed to get the song out of their heads while it was playing constantly in the background, she couldn't imagine. At the moment, a version by Cyndi Lauper was grating on her nerves, and she was beginning to understand why the residents had taken sides on the issue of which one was best, even becoming a bit militant about it.

  They'd had no trouble agreeing on a new theme for the contest: "The Gingerbread Man Bites It." Some of the artists had even fashioned miniature-sized crime scene tape, as exquisitely made as the scarf that Betty was knitting. The poor gingerbread man had died in every imaginable holiday-related way: falls, electrocution, and even being run over by a reindeer. The last one caused Edie to snap, "That's not even the right song."

  As the reality dawned on Helen, she began to worry about how Geoff was going to react. Several months ago, he'd been assaulted by someone trying to convince him to stop investigating a hard-news story. Ever since then, even the hint of a story involving violence had been enough to make him run and hide. She turned to see what he was doing and saw that he was enthusiastically snapping pictures of the various gingerbread corpses.

  "This is fantastic," Geoff said, obviously unfazed by the holiday mayhem. "I bet they'll print at least one of my pictures on the front page. Accident scenes always sell lots of newspapers."

  Once they reached the last of the entries, Geoff left for the activity room to interview some of the residents responsible for the top ten gingerbread houses while the judges conferred.

  Mr. Wharton hadn't said a word until then. He looked over his shoulder at his nurse. "It isn't healthy, all this preoccupation with death. I shouldn't be exposed to all this negativity."

  He did look pale, more so than when Helen had first come into the room.

  "I see much positives here," Kolya said, his broad, stoic face as hard to read as Tate's. "Especially in the one where the gingerbread man is electrocuted."

  Mr. Wharton flinched. "Death is no laughing matter."

  "Not for the cookie corpse, certainly," Kolya said, "but no human will die on my watch. You may laugh without fear of death."

  Edie tapped on her clipboard to get everyone's attention. "None of us wants to be here any longer than necessary, so let's get to work." She turned to Helen. "This is just the preliminary voting round, to see what we're all thinking. You need to write down your favorites, in order, and with a bit of luck we'll all be in agreement, and we can announce the winners."

  Helen wondered who'd voted Edie the foreperson of this particular jury, but since she didn't want the job herself she didn't complain. She jotted down her five top picks, sadly not including the vat of chocolate, since its makers hadn't included even the smallest token reference to the official theme.

  Edie collected the lists from Helen and Kolya, who'd written down Mr. Wharton's choices for him, and raced over to the empty head table to lay them out next to each other. While Mr. Wharton slowly shuffled along the outer length of the side tables, with Kolya a step behind him, Helen compared the three lists.

  At first glance, it looked like the judging was actually going to be fairly simple. All three judges had excluded the same five finalists from consideration, leaving the same top five entries to be awarded some degree of recognition.

  Then she studied the rankings among the remaining five entries, and the judging became complicated again. One judge's bottom pick was another's top pick, and vice versa, with no apparent points of agreement.

  Mr. Wharton was leaning more heavily on his cane as he approached the head table. "Kolya, dear, I hate to trouble you, but I need something to drink. Perhaps they'd have something in the kitchen?"

  Instead of trotting off to fetch a drink, Kolya bent to pick up Mr. Wharton as if he were as small and light as a child. Kolya said, "Give us fifteen minutes, and then Mr. Wharton will be ready to continue with the judging." He proceeded to disappear through the nearby swinging doors to the kitchen.

  "Poor Mr. Wharton," Edie said. "He's so frail, but that doesn't stop him from carrying out his duties as a leading citizen of this town."

  "I never knew judging a gingerbread house competition was considered part of everyone's civic duties."

  "Fortunately, Mr. Wharton does understand how things work. He knows what's expected of him, and he works hard to meet everyone's expectations."

  Helen had long since stopped trying to meet other people's expectations, and Mr. Wharton was certainly old enough to have learned that it was an exercise in futility. Besides, as far as she could tell, it wasn't Mr. Wharton who was working hard. It was Kolya who did all the lifting, from the two-ounce clipboard to the hundred-and-sixty-pound patient.

  * * *

  Before Helen lost what little she had of the holiday spirit and was tempted to do something that would require Tate's—or, rather, his lawyer nephew's—assistance to fix, she told Edie she needed a minute to check on a friend.

  In the activity room, "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" was playing again, although this time it was the Alvin and the Chipmunks version. The two elderly couples were dancing in front of the tree, Betty was adding another letter to her crime scene scarf, and Josie was crocheting a clone of the first elf hat. The only indication that time had passed was the addition of a dozen new visitors, some seated with their relatives and others touring the display of gingerbread houses that hadn't made the semi-finals.

  "Well?" Josie said as Helen approached her. "Who won?"

  "I can't talk about it." Helen looked around for a seat, but there weren't any empty ones, so she leaned against the arm of Josie's wingback chair. "We're just taking a break because Mr. Wharton was feeling faint."

  "Kolya won't let anything happen to him," Josie said. "He's a really good nurse. At first I thought it was just a cover story and he was really a bodyguard/assassin. You know, the Russian accent, all those muscles, and the way he glares at anyone who upsets his patient."

  "Everyone thought that," Betty explained. "Not just Josie. But Kolya won us over. He's so devoted to Mr. Wharton."

  "Still, we're careful around him," Josie said. "He never talks about where he came from, what nursing credentials he has, or who he worked for before Mr. Wharton. For all we know, he might get violent if he thought it was necessary to protect his patient. Not that anyone's going to attack Mr. Wharton, of course. He's so fragile it would be like kicking a puppy."

  "Mr. Wharton hasn't had an easy life," Betty said. "You never hear him complain, though."

  "I did," Helen said. "Maybe not in so many words, but in every action he takes. He's practically shouting, 'Help me, I'm pitiful!' in body language."

  "You can't blame him for that," Josie said. "It's his illness."

  Helen thought she might feel more sympathy for the man if she understood him better. "What illness is it, exactly?"

  Betty and Josie looked at each other for a moment before Betty answered. "You know, I never asked. But, like you say, his body language broadcasts how sick he is. He can barely walk, and he has trouble breathing sometimes."

  She hadn't observed any shortness of breath, but she had seen Mr. Wharton walking slowly, and he had seemed tired before Kolya carried him off to the kitchen. Then again, she walked slowly, tired easily, and carried a cane too. That didn't mean she needed anyone's pity.

  "Don't forget his dizziness," Josie said. "At the awarding of ribbons for last year's gingerbread houses, he almost passed out. Said he was overcome by the number of people in the room."

  Perhaps he really was ill and she was only judging him harshly because of her fear that someday she would be as helpless as he was, unable even to blow her own nose. "Never min
d Mr. Wharton. Why is everyone so obsessed with killing off the Gingerbread Man?"

  Betty looked toward the front windows where several residents had their wheelchairs set up at either end of the gingerbread house display. Helen recognized one of them as the uncle of homicide detective Hank Peterson. "We aren't really supposed to know, but Hank sometimes lets things slip to his uncle, who then tells us."

  Betty's and Josie's stories could last for hours, and Helen didn't have that much time right now. "Tells you what?"

  Betty leaned forward to whisper, "The grifter known as the Gingerbread Man was in Springfield during Thanksgiving week."

  "He might even be on his way here," Josie said eagerly and without trying to be quiet. "We're ready for him. We'll make sure he doesn't take advantage of anyone else."

  "Don't mind her," Betty said. "No one here is really going to become a vigilante. It's just fun to think about something happening to him, so we don't have to be afraid all the time. He can't steal anything from us if he's dead. He mostly targeted elderly people, you know, and stole every penny they had. We all know how lucky we are to be able to live in a decent place with good friends, and we might not be able to stay here if we lost our savings. That's scary, and one way to deal with that fear is to make jokes about it."

  "That makes perfect sense to me," Helen said. "Some of the entries are really funny. And the workmanship is exquisite. It's not going to be easy to pick a winner."

  "There's no rush," Josie said. "We're not going anywhere. Not today, and not anytime in the next month."

  "Neither am I," Helen said, a little more sadly than she'd intended. "I've got nothing special planned for the holidays."

  "You could spend Christmas day here," Betty said. "Martha always makes it special for the residents and anyone who visits us. Stockings filled with usually forbidden foods in the morning, a few presents at lunchtime, and a turkey feast at night."