The Snow White Christmas Cookie

by David Handler

  “Be with you in one sec. And don’t bother looking because you won’t find anything.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that,” she said, heading straight for his kitchen. Mitch could hear her opening and closing cupboards and drawers. “Clearly, you’ve become more devious.…” To his horror, the cursed cereal killer was now rummaging around in his refrigerator, where it took her less than thirty seconds to find his cache of Cocoa Puffs buried in the vegetable bin, underneath the carrots and potatoes. She returned to the living room, shaking her head with disapproval. “You’ll have to do better than that, fatty.”

  “Damn, Josie, you are killing me.”

  “No, you are killing yourself. Do you have any idea what’s in these?”

  “Really tasty stuff.”

  “Really tasty chemicals and artificial everything. You’re a smart man, Mitch. I can’t bear the idea of you eating a big bowl of stupid for breakfast.”

  “I’m going to regret asking this but what did you have?”

  “A banana and raw kale smoothie.”

  “I may vomit.”

  “It was delicious and full of nutrients.”

  “Just exactly what color is a concoction like that? No, don’t tell me—I will vomit.”

  She returned to the kitchen and dumped his Cocoa Puffs into the trash. “Promise me you won’t buy this crap anymore.”

  “Oh, all right. I promise you.”

  “Do you mean that?”

  “No.”

  “Naybs, you are hopeless. I don’t even know why I try.”

  He fetched his gloves and stocking cap, grinning at her. “I don’t either.”

  It was a fluffy, pure-white snow and there was almost no wind. Just a dreamy, wonderful silence. Mitch loved how quiet the world got when it snowed this way. He and Josie tromped their way down the narrow pathway in the thigh-high drifts that their own footsteps had made on previous mornings. Mitch still could not believe how much snow there was. It was as if somebody had buried the whole island beneath three feet of shaving cream. There was no trace of recognizable landscape anywhere. The shuttered summer houses looked like igloos.

  The tide was going out, exposing a smooth, firm strip of beach. They ran side by side, their pace slow but steady, snowflakes smacking them in the face. They’d taken to running an hour’s worth of laps around the island. Mitch had no idea how many miles that was. Didn’t really care. It was how much time you put in that mattered, not how far you went. Josie ran very erect and was never out of breath. She was five-feet-seven, tops. Mitch’s legs were definitely longer. Yet he always sensed that Dorset’s life coach was dialing down for his benefit. If she wanted to she could take off on him like the Road Runner.

  “How did Bryce do at the party?” she asked as they jogged past a trio of gulls searching for their breakfast at the water’s edge.

  “He seemed okay,” Mitch puffed. “Why are you asking?”

  “Because he’s not okay. He’s not even within shouting distance of okay. He really, really didn’t want to go. And he would only stay for a half hour. We came home and watched one of your Budd Boetticher westerns with Randolph Scott. Bryce loves those movies. So do I. There’s something so intensely real about them. And Randolph Scott is just so calm and sure. Bryce isn’t calm or sure. He’s still trying to figure out how to live with himself when he’s sober. That’s not easy, Mitch. He’s been self-medicating since he was thirteen—alcohol, pot, coke, ludes. Hell, when he first came to me he was still getting Sheened every night. And wasn’t taking care of himself at all. Would you believe he hadn’t had his teeth cleaned for twelve whole years?”

  “And I’m guessing he didn’t floss daily.”

  “He didn’t want to be that guy anymore. And we’ve made a lot of progress. He’s learning how to hold himself responsible for the choices he makes. We’ve broken his pattern of dependency on Vicodin and Xanax. We practice yoga twice a day for his back pain, perform breathing exercises for his anxiety. His nutrition is much, much better. And it’s good for him to have work to do out here. It keeps his mind occupied and his hands busy.” She wrinkled her pink snub of a nose. “Gosh knows he doesn’t use them for anything else.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing. We just had a bit of a tiff this morning, that’s all.” She let out a laugh as they ran past the old lighthouse. “This situation is rich with irony.”

  “What situation?”

  “I spend all day long trying to help people with their problems, and I have no one to talk to about my own.”

  “Sure you do. You have me. That’s what running buddies are for.”

  “Our love life has…” Josie glanced over at him, her mouth tightening. “It’s become nonexistent. He has no interest in me at all anymore.”

  “Have you talked to him about it?”

  “I just tried. That’s what our tiff was about. He said, and I quote, ‘You have no idea what it’s like to be me.’ I said, ‘Hey, mister, let’s you and me climb out of that pity pit, preferably while we’re both naked.’ And he said, ‘This is the real me. Get used to it or get lost.’ He got really withdrawn and quiet after that. And then I left to run with you. I honestly don’t know what’s happened, Mitch. Things were so great between us that way. Now we lie in bed night after night and he never so much as touches me.”

  “That’s pretty hard to imagine.”

  She arched an eyebrow at him. “Meaning?…”

  “You’re a good-looking woman, naybs.”

  “I appreciate the compliment, but I haven’t felt like one lately. I watched you and Des standing there together last night, glowing with so much love for each other, and it made me ache inside. I wish Bryce and I had that. I-I thought we did. But he’s pulling away from me and I don’t know how to hold on to him. Bryce is someone who has never experienced any kind of love. He’s never belonged to a family. Never belonged anywhere. And he’s really a very sensitive man. He told me once that he used to be angry at the world. He isn’t angry anymore. But he still doesn’t trust anyone. And he for damned sure won’t let anyone in. He’s a project. I knew that going in. He has his good days and his bad days. Today’s a bad day. He was seeing a shrink up in Essex before I took him on as a client. He decided to stop seeing him a few weeks ago. Maybe that wasn’t such a good idea. Maybe he needs to talk out his underlying problems some more. I’m going to suggest that real gently when I get back.” She flashed a faint smile at Mitch. “Sorry to dump all of this on you.”

  “Don’t be sorry. I told you—that’s what running buddies are for.”

  The snow was falling even harder by the time Mitch parted company with Josie and trudged back to his cottage, exhausted but invigorated. He brushed his snow-caked hoodie off on the front porch before he went inside and peeled off his thermal layers one by one by one en route to a hot shower, which felt pretty damned good. He lingered in there for a few minutes, letting the hot water beat down on him. By now his stomach was growling. He was thinking about those Cocoa Puffs that Josie had tossed in the trash. Thinking that maybe he could fish them out, wash them one puff at a time and dry them in the toaster oven. But then it occurred to him that doing this would signify that he was a truly diseased person. No, those Cocoa Puffs were history, he decided as he toweled himself dry. He’d have to settle for the same dee-licious kibble that he fed the cats, repackaged under its human brand name—Grape-Nuts.

  He was getting dressed when someone pounded on his front door. Josie came bursting in, still wearing her snow-caked running clothes. Her blue eyes were bulging and she was speechless.

  “What is it, naybs? What’s wrong?”

  “Bryce is … he’s lying in bed with a bunch of empty pill bottles and a bottle of Cuervo,” she gulped. “He’s gone, Mitch.”

  “Gone? What do you mean he’s gone?”

  “He OD’d. He left a suicide note and everything. Bryce is dead.”

  CHAPTER 3

  AT LEAST FOUR INCHES of fresh
snow had fallen since Des drove home from Mitch’s place to put in some time on her portrait of Titus Smart, age nine, whose aunt Marcella, age sixteen, had smashed him in the face with a crowbar approximately twenty-seven times. When Des had asked the blood-spattered Marcella why she’d done it she calmly replied, “I didn’t care for the way he was looking at me.” And so Des not-so-calmly drew and drew. Sleep was not an option, she reflected as she drove her way back out to Big Sister, the Crown Vic’s wipers shoving the flakes aside. It was not quite 8:00 A.M. But, happily, the town plowman had made an early pass through the Peck Point Nature Preserve. She used her key card to raise the barricade and inched her way out onto the narrow wooden causeway, following the Jewett girls’ tire tracks through the deepening snow with great care. It was easy to fishtail on the causeway and sideswipe the railing. Easy to go through the railing and right down into the angry surf below.

  Mitch’s bulbous 1956 kidney-colored Studebaker pickup was sitting in his driveway under the fresh blanket of snow. Des drove on past it to Preston Peck’s mammoth, natural-shingled beach house and pulled up next to the Jewett girls’ volunteer ambulance van, which they’d parked outside of the house’s attached four-car garage. Both double-wide garage doors were up. Bryce’s Jeep Wrangler and Josie’s Subaru Forester were parked inside along with a rider mower and a snow thrower. There was a cluttered handyman’s workbench. A chainsaw, weed whacker and other assorted power-driven yard gear hung from hooks on the walls. Lawn furniture and window screens had been stored in the rafters along with the net from the island’s tennis court.

  Des squared her big Smokey hat on her head and got out. Headed through the garage past two stacks of firewood and into the house’s mudroom, stamping the snow from her black lace-up boots. The kitchen was spotless and smelled of fresh brewed coffee. It was eerily quiet. Her footsteps resounded like a kettle drum as she strode down the hall into the den, where it didn’t look so much like Christmas in Connecticut as it did Christmas in Miami Beach. The sofa where Josie Cantro sat slumped next to Mitch, huge-eyed with grief, was white wicker with pale blue cushions. Same as the armchairs. The coffee table was white wicker, too. There were no rugs. Just a bare wooden floor that had been painted blue ages ago and become gently worn by thousands of sandy footprints. The summery décor clashed sharply with the snow that was falling outside of the windows that looked out over the sound. Also with the spindly little Christmas tree that stood there in the corner. There was a fireplace but no fire was going. There was a flat screen TV. There was a bookcase that was stocked with old-time rainy day diversions like jigsaw puzzles and Monopoly.

  Mitch wore a pair of jeans and a heavy turtleneck sweater. Josie was still dressed in snow-dampened running clothes. Mitch was talking to her in a soft, comforting voice. She barely seemed to hear him.

  He glanced up at Des and said, “I made coffee. Want some?”

  She shook her head. “Where is he?”

  “Through there.” He gestured toward a doorway next to the bookcase.

  It led to a bedroom that was right off of the den. A bedroom that was so tiny that Des guessed it was a converted sunporch. There was barely enough room for a chest of drawers, a pair of nightstands and the double bed where the late Bryce Peck lay propped up against a couple of pillows, his head flopped over to one side like a Raggedy Andy doll. His eyes were closed, his complexion already faintly bluish. The Jewett girls were attending to him in their usual quiet, efficient manner. Bryce’s stringy hair was uncombed, his gaunt, weathered face unshaven. He wore a ratty old tie-dyed T-shirt over a long-sleeved thermal undershirt. His hands lay open on the bed, palms up. Next to his right hand there were three empty prescription pill bottles. Next to his left lay an empty fifth of Jose Cuervo Gold tequila.

  A hand-scrawled note on a yellow Post-it was affixed to Bryce’s chest. Des read it, frowning, before she said, “Good morning, girls.”

  “Oh, it’s a lovely one,” Marge responded.

  “What did he take?”

  “Quite some cocktail,” Mary said. “We’re looking at twenty-four Xanax, thirty Vicodin and another thirty Ambien sleep aids.”

  “Were they his pills?”

  Mary nodded. “Prescribed by Ed Swibold, that country club shrink up in Essex. The prescriptions were filled in November.”

  “Mind you, we have no way of knowing if all three pill bottles were full,” Marge pointed out. “But Josie swears that they were. Also that the fifth of Cuervo had never been opened. She told us Bryce was alive when she left to go running with Mitch. She was gone for an hour and change. By the time she got back here, he was dead.”

  “Say those pill bottles were full. Would they be enough to kill him within the time frame we’re talking about?”

  “Him and a good-sized herd of elephants,” Marge affirmed.

  Des glanced around the room. No furniture was overturned, no lamps or windows broken. She moved in more closely and examined Bryce’s skull, throat and hands. Saw no head wounds. No bruising around his throat. No fresh scratches on his hands. No skin, blood or other foreign matter under his nails. There was no reason to think that Bryce’s death was anything other than what it appeared to be—a straight suicide by a man who had a long history of emotional problems and drug dependency. As resident trooper her job now was to report her preliminary observations to the Troop F barracks in Westbrook and obtain contact information for the victim’s next of kin. A detective would take over from there. And a death investigator from the Medical Examiner’s office in Farmington would slog his way down to photograph the body and take Josie’s statement. After that, Bryce’s body would be delivered by hearse to Farmington for an autopsy. The M.E.’s people no longer transported bodies in their own fleet of vans. The job had been outsourced to undertakers.

  Des studied that hand-scrawled Post-it on Bryce’s chest again, which read: Just an awkward stage. “What do you suppose that means?” she wondered aloud.

  “Bryce used to say that to me whenever he went off into one of his dark places,” Josie answered softly, standing there in the doorway with Mitch. “He’d shrug his shoulders and say ‘It’s just an awkward stage.’ I ought to have those words carved on his headstone except…”

  “Except what, Josie?”

  “He told me he wanted to be cremated.”

  “So his death was something that you two had talked about?”

  “He talked about it all of the time. I kept telling the gnarly doofus that I intended to keep him around for a good thirty years. But he … he didn’t expect to be around for long.”

  Des nodded, glancing around at the cramped little room.

  “We’ve been sleeping down here to save on the fuel bill,” Josie explained. “It costs a fortune to heat this big old place. We don’t go upstairs at all.”

  “About those pill bottles,” Des said. “You’re sure they were full?”

  “Positive. I count them every morning to make sure. He wasn’t taking any of that stuff anymore. Their presence in our medicine chest was entirely totemic.”

  “Entirely what?”

  “They were symbolic. They represented what he didn’t need anymore.”

  “Was that your idea or Bryce’s?”

  “It was something we both agreed to.”

  The tiny room fell silent as all of them stood there trying not to look at her dead boyfriend.

  “Josie, why don’t we continue this conversation in the kitchen?”

  Mitch joined them, topping off Josie’s coffee mug and his own before he sat with them at the round oak table.

  “I don’t happen to believe in pills,” Josie stated firmly. “I don’t think they make you healthy—just drug dependent. I’m strictly about self-healing that utilizes energy-based modalities and mind-body practices.”

  “Forgive me, but I don’t understand what you just said.”

  “I’m saying that we concentrated on harnessing the vast power of Bryce’s mind to return his body to its natural state of being. We d
etoxified his system of artificial chemicals. We reduced his stress levels. We placed him on a…” She trailed off, staring at Des accusingly. “You think I’m full of crap, don’t you?”

  “That’s not true at all, Josie,” Des said.

  “Yes, it is. I can see it in your eyes. I happen to be a fully accredited life coach, you know. People value what I do. You would, too, if you needed me. You don’t. You’re someone who has tremendous personal discipline. You exercise, eat right, don’t smoke or do drugs. You’ve got it together.”

  Des glanced down at the graphite stick residue that was always there underneath the middle fingernail of her right hand. Yeah, I’ve got it together. I just see dead people is all.

  “But most people aren’t like you, Des. They’re weak. And an amazing number of them don’t like themselves very much. I have one client who pays me seventy-five dollars an hour just to go grocery shopping with her twice a week. She says she’d be lost without me. This is an affluent, well-educated career woman. You wouldn’t think she’d need me, but she does. Most of my clients do.”

  “Bryce was more than a client to you.”

  “Much more,” Josie acknowledged, lowering her blue eyes. “That … never happened before. I’ve never fallen in love with a client. I can’t explain it.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  The Jewett girls were done in the bedroom. They said their good-byes and headed back out by way of the mudroom. Des heard their van start up and pull away.

  Josie gazed out the kitchen window at the snow, which was now coming down so hard that you could barely see across the beach to the water. “I could never, ever convince him that he deserved to be loved. And he was so depressed this morning that I decided he ought to see Dr. Swibold again. Mitch and I were talking about it while we were running.”

  “It’s true, we were,” he confirmed.

  “Josie, is there any chance Bryce was self-medicating without your knowledge? Scoring drugs on his own?”