The Christmas Cookie Killer

by Livia J. Washburn

  “You’ve already hurt them! Coming in here and accusing their mother of murder! What did you think that would do to them?”

  Phyllis’s voice hardened with anger now as she looked at Helen’s blotchy, tear-streaked face. “I never accused you of murder,” she said. “You’re the one who brought that up.”

  Helen ignored that as she turned to the children and said, “Go to your rooms—now!”

  Parker started to cry, too, but he went with his sister as Denise pulled him away from the kitchen. They ran down the hall and disappeared into another part of the house.

  Helen said coldly to Phyllis, “I told you to get out.”

  “Not just yet,” Phyllis said. She knew she was being stubborn, but she felt almost like she’d been attacked again, and she didn’t like it. “I want to know what made you fly off the handle like that. All I said was that I thought Agnes might have discovered someone’s secret. . . .” She let her voice trail away as she stared at Helen for a long moment. Then she said, “You’ve got a secret you don’t want anyone to know, don’t you, Helen?”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  “No, of course not,” Phyllis agreed. “But I feel like I’ve caused a problem for you, and if there’s anything I can do to help, I want to.”

  “Oh, you’ve caused a problem, all right.” Helen’s voice was bitter. “My kids may never look at me the same way again.”

  Phyllis shook her head and said, “Don’t worry about them. Children are amazingly resilient. They’ll have forgotten all about this incident in a day or two, and even if they remember that it happened, it won’t upset them.”

  Helen frowned. “You’re sure?”

  “I’m certain. I saw it with my son, and with the students I taught in school, too.”

  “Lord, I hope you’re right.” Helen sat down again as weariness seemed to overwhelm her. “I didn’t want them to ever find out about it, but I should have known they would, sooner or later. I just thought that surely they’d be older first. . . .” She looked up at Phyllis. “You’re just dying to know what I’m talking about, aren’t you?”

  “Like I said, it’s none of my business,” Phyllis replied, but she was hoping that Helen was upset enough to feel the need to talk to somebody.

  Helen sighed. “You might as well sit back down. I’ve heard what a busybody you are. You won’t be satisfied until you hear all about it.”

  Another surge of anger went through Phyllis at the young woman’s tone and the unflattering description. She didn’t think she was a busybody at all. But she wanted to know the truth; that was undeniable.

  “You should have more respect for your elders,” she snapped as she went around the table and sat down again.

  Helen shrugged. “You’re probably right. I’m just upset, like you told the kids. I’m sorry, okay?”

  “Okay.” Phyllis paused. “And I’m sorry I stirred up some memories that are obviously very bad.”

  “Oh, yeah, you could say that. . . . Maybe it would do some good to talk about it. Just let me make sure the kids aren’t listening in. After all this uproar, I’ll have to tell them something, but I’m not sure yet what it’ll be. As long as it’s not the truth.”

  She stood up and went down the hall. It occurred to Phyllis that Helen might not come back, but after a couple of minutes, the younger woman reappeared and took her seat at the kitchen table again. The coffee they had been drinking earlier sat cooling in the cups, forgotten. Neither woman was interested in it anymore.

  “You know,” Phyllis began, “it’s usually a bad idea to lie to your children. You’ll find that they can handle the truth most of the time. It’s just a matter of finding the right way to express it.”

  “I’ll decide what I tell my kids and what I don’t. And I don’t feel much like telling them that their mother killed a guy.” A humorless smile touched her lips. “That’s right. I’m a killer, Mrs. Newsom.”

  “But not a murderer,” Phyllis guessed.

  “Oh, no, it was ruled self-defense, justifiable homicide, whatever you want to call it. Wasn’t even involuntary manslaughter. No charges were ever filed against me. I was fifteen. That was thirteen years ago.”

  Helen fell silent, remaining that way for so long that Phyllis thought she was going to have to prod the younger woman into speaking again. But then Helen took a deep breath and resumed the story.

  “He was one of my mother’s boyfriends. We lived down in south Texas, between San Antonio and Corpus Christi. My dad left when I was little, and we never saw him again. My mother tried to find somebody else. I guess she was one of those women you hear about, the kind who can’t stand to be without a man, any man. So she wound up dating some real creeps.”

  Helen fell silent again. The faraway look in her eyes told Phyllis that she was reliving those days, and they weren’t very pretty. Phyllis guessed, “This man you’re talking about . . . did he make advances toward you?”

  “What?” Helen seemed a little surprised, as if Phyllis’s question had broken her out of her memories. “Oh. No, he never laid a hand on me.”

  “I just thought, from the way you said you were fifteen . . .”

  Helen shook her head. “No, not at all.”

  “Did he abuse your mother?”

  “Not the way you’re thinking of. The son of a bitch was a thief. He found out where we had some extra money stashed, and he went after it. My mom caught him about to sneak out of the house with the money. She tried to stop him, and he pulled a gun.” Helen paused and shook her head again. “You believe it? He was going to shoot her over a measly six hundred bucks.”

  “But you stopped him.”

  “You bet I did. He didn’t see me behind him. There was a butcher knife on the kitchen counter. I picked it up and shoved it in his back as hard as I could.”

  Phyllis tried to suppress the shiver that ran through her. Helen’s voice was almost emotionless now. She didn’t seem to care that she had ended a man’s life, and in a particularly gruesome fashion at that.

  As if to confirm what Phyllis was thinking, Helen said, “Understand, I didn’t lose any sleep over what happened. Well, not much, anyway. There were a few nights when I started thinking about all the blood, and that sort of got to me. But not as much as the way the kids acted at school. Some of them whispered about it behind my back. I was the badass girl who’d stabbed a guy to death. Some of the others thought it was cool, like I was some sort of action movie hero. But neither of those things was true. I just wanted to protect my mother, and the knife was there. The guy was a lot bigger than me, so I used what I could to stop him.”

  “And you had absolutely no reason to feel guilty about it,” Phyllis said.

  “I didn’t think so. Still, even if he’s a jerk, when you end a guy’s life . . . when he’s breathing and thinking and wanting things one minute, and then the next he’s just . . . nothing . . . it’s kind of hard.”

  “I’m sure it must be.” Phyllis hoped fervently that she never found out firsthand what that was like.

  “Anyway,” Helen continued, “the cops and the district attorney believed my mom and me and didn’t file charges against me. The man I killed had stolen from some of his girlfriends in the past, and been in other trouble with the law. A few months later we moved, since my mom knew what it was like for me at school. She has relatives in Millsap, so we came up here, and nobody knew who I was or what I’d done. The story wasn’t big news. It was a fresh start, and that’s just what I wanted.” Helen looked across the table at Phyllis. “Now you know my secret. You think I’d kill to keep anybody else from finding out?”

  For a second Phyllis couldn’t tell if the younger woman was threatening her. Then she decided that Helen was genuinely curious.

  “I don’t think so,” Phyllis said. “Did Agnes Simmons find out?”

  “That’s the thing. . . . I don’t know. My mom still lives in Millsap. She comes over here to visit me and the kids pretty often. A few months back
I accidentally got a piece of Mrs. Simmons’s mail. It was stuck between a couple of big envelopes in my mailbox. I doubt if the postman ever saw it. So I took it over there to her, and my mom walked down the street with me and met Mrs. Simmons, and they hit it off pretty well. Ever since then, when Mom comes to visit me, she usually stops by and says hello to Mrs. Simmons, too.”

  “So she could have told her about what happened to you when you were fifteen.”

  Helen nodded. “Yeah, she could have. Mom likes to talk, and sometimes her mouth gets a little ahead of her brain, you know what I mean? But even if she had, it wouldn’t have been that big a deal. I mean, I don’t want people to know, but I wouldn’t . . . kill anybody over it.”

  Phyllis didn’t want to think that could be the case . . . but she remembered the violent reaction that had gripped Helen when the young woman thought she was being accused of murder. If Agnes had threatened to expose Helen’s secret, perhaps to her two young children, what might Helen have done in the heat of the moment? From the way Helen talked about the incident in south Texas, clearly she was capable of acting swiftly and violently and then regarding what had happened somewhat dispassionately. The mood swings she had displayed here today might be a sign of an unstable personality.

  Or they might just be the sign of a young woman with a tragedy in her past, a failed marriage, a stressful job, and two young children, Phyllis told herself. She didn’t need to jump to any conclusions.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. She reached across the table and gripped Helen’s hand, and Helen didn’t pull away. “I didn’t mean to upset you or your children. But I’m really not sure that Randall Simmons killed his grandmother.”

  “I don’t know one way or the other,” Helen said. “All I know is that I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “Of course not.” Phyllis squeezed Helen’s hand and then let it go. “I’d better be going. You and Denise and Parker enjoy those cookies, now, you hear?”

  Helen summoned up a smile. “All right. Thank you, Mrs. Newsom.”

  “Goodness, you don’t have to thank me. Not after all the uproar I caused, even if I didn’t mean to.”

  Phyllis left, hoping that Helen would be able to think of something to tell the children that would calm their fears and make them forget that this incident had ever happened. That wasn’t always quite as easy as Phyllis had made it sound when she was trying to reassure Helen. Sometimes, things stuck in the minds of children and stayed with them the rest of their lives, for both good and bad.

  From the sound of it, Helen hadn’t been much more than a child herself when she’d had to take that man’s life in order to protect her mother. Something like that would stay with a person, too, no matter how much she tried to tamp it down in her memory, and Phyllis had to wonder what sort of effect it might have the next time that person found herself threatened somehow . . . or believed herself to be threatened, anyway. . . .

  And there she went again, she realized, thinking of Helen Johannson as a suspect, when she’d already decided that she wasn’t going to do that.

  The thing of it was, if Randall Simmons hadn’t killed his grandmother, then somebody else had to be guilty.

  And it was looking more and more to Phyllis as if the killer might have come out of this very neighborhood. Even though she couldn’t pin it down, she still had the feeling that someone had lied to her, somewhere along the way, and she ought to know who it was. . . .

  Phyllis took cookies to several more of the neighbors during the day, and in each case she was able to draw them into talking about Agnes’s murder. She didn’t have to try very hard since it was still on everyone’s mind. But she didn’t uncover anything as shocking as the revelation from Helen Johannson’s past, nor did anyone she talked to mention having seen suspicious people or activities in the neighborhood in the week or so before the murder.

  Phyllis found herself wondering if Jimmy Crowe even existed. Was it possible that Randall had just made him up to try to throw suspicion on someone else?

  No, she recalled, Frank had told her that Juliette Yorke had checked out Crowe through contacts of hers in Dallas. She didn’t think the lawyer would lie about something that could be verified so easily. Jimmy Crowe was real, and he was probably every bit as dangerous as Randall said he was.

  But that didn’t prove that he had ever been here in Weatherford, did it?

  Phyllis’s last visit of the afternoon was to Vickie Kimbrough, who was glad for the company and eager to talk. Phyllis knew that Vickie’s husband, Monte, worked long hours, and they didn’t have any children, which was evidently the source of some tension between the Kimbroughs. Phyllis recalled Vickie mentioning several months earlier that she and Monte had gone for some marriage counseling at the church, which had a faith-based counseling center as one of the sidelines to its regular business of saving souls.

  Vickie took the plate of cookies and said with a grin, “You know I have a sweet tooth, Phyllis. I think I’m going to eat a couple of these right now.”

  “Go right ahead,” Phyllis told her as they sat on the sofa with the plate of cookies on the coffee table in front of them.

  Vickie picked up one of Carolyn’s pecan pie cookies. “I saw the picture of these in the paper this morning. They look delicious.” She took a bite, chewed, and enthused, “They are delicious!”

  “I’ll tell Carolyn you said so.”

  “I saw them at the cookie exchange but didn’t get a chance to try one before . . . well, before all that other business happened.”

  “Yes, that ruined the whole afternoon, didn’t it?” Phyllis said, glad that Vickie had brought up the subject of the murder so that she wouldn’t have to.

  “Yes, but not as badly as poor Agnes’s afternoon was ruined.”

  “No, of course not.”

  Vickie shivered. “I hate to think of something like that going on right across the street. I mean, her grandson hiding out there and all, and then . . . and then . . .” She shook her head. “Well, it’s just hard to believe; that’s all.”

  “I’m not sure I do believe it,” Phyllis said.

  Vickie frowned. “What do you mean? The police arrested Randall Simmons, didn’t they? I know I read that in the paper, after I saw all the commotion over there the other day.”

  “Randall was arrested, all right, but I’m not sure I’m convinced of his guilt.” That was putting it right out in the open, but Phyllis had been beating around the bush all day and was tired of it. “In the past week or two, have you seen any strangers around here, or anyone acting suspicious?”

  Vickie thought about the question for a long moment before shaking her head. “I don’t remember anything like that,” she finally said. “I’d ask Monte, but I’m sure he wouldn’t know. He’s never around here enough to know what’s going on in the neighborhood.”

  Phyllis felt a pang of sympathy for her. “He’s still spending most of his time at work?”

  “Yes. He was a little better about it for a while, when Dwight was counseling us, but once those sessions were over, he went right back to working all the time.” Vickie gave a little laugh but didn’t sound very amused. “I suppose I should be grateful that he’s just working and not getting drunk or playing around with other women.”

  That set off a little alarm bell in the back of Phyllis’s mind. She had known couples in the past where the husbands had strayed, and in almost every case, they had tried to cover up their infidelity by claiming that they were putting in long hours at their jobs. In reality, though, they had been with other women instead of at work. Phyllis wondered if Monte Kimbrough was the sort of man to do that . . . and if he was, whether Agnes Simmons might have found out about it somehow.

  But she was really reaching with that idea, she told herself. Agnes had been laid up with that broken hip, and even before the injury had occurred, she hadn’t gotten out all that much. She wasn’t likely to have discovered that Monte Kimbrough was having an affair unless he was carrying
it on right under his wife’s nose, with someone here in the neighborhood.

  Phyllis started to catch her breath but managed to suppress the reaction quickly enough so that Vickie didn’t notice it. Maybe Monte was having an affair with a neighbor. Or maybe something was going on between some of the other people who lived on the street. Maybe everyone in the neighborhood was involved in some sort of floating orgy that involved them all except for Phyllis and her friends, and Agnes, of course.

  She couldn’t stop herself from chuckling at that crazy thought. And it was crazy. She was seeing murderers and motives behind every tree. Sure, the people who lived around here had their secrets. People in every neighborhood did. But that didn’t mean they were killers.

  Vickie looked puzzled. “What’s funny, Phyllis?”

  “Oh, nothing,” Phyllis said. “I was just thinking about how pleased Carolyn is going to be that you liked her cookies.”

  “Now, which ones are yours again?”

  “The lime sugar cookies that are shaped like snowflakes.”

  “Oh, yes, I remember. Dwight Gresham told me the other day that you’d made them and how good they were. Let me try one.” Vickie picked up one of the green, snowflakelike cookies and took a bite. “Scrumptious,” she said as she nodded.

  Phyllis was pleased, but she decided that she wouldn’t pass along that particular comment to Carolyn, who had been so pleased when the newspaper had used that very word to describe her pecan pie cookies that morning.

  After chatting with Vickie for a few more minutes, Phyllis left the plate of cookies there and went back across the street. She wasn’t sure whether she had done any good or not today. She’d found out something she hadn’t known about Helen Johannson, but she still found it unlikely that Helen had killed Agnes Simmons. It was physically possible, of course; despite being on the small side herself, Helen was young enough and strong enough to have overpowered the frail old lady, wrapped that robe belt around her neck, and choked the life out of her. Helen wasn’t so big and powerful that the struggle would have automatically left marks on Agnes’s body. That was another bit of evidence pointing toward her, rather than Oscar Gunderson or Monte Kimbrough or any of the other men in the neighborhood. Still, Phyllis thought she was being unfair to Helen. Just because someone had killed once, under extenuating circumstances, didn’t mean they would kill again.