The Snow White Christmas Cookie (12 page)

He colored slightly. “I’m not. I just … why are you hassling me?”

“Mind if I look behind your seat?”

He shrugged his big shoulders. “Go right ahead. I got nothing to hide.”

The storage area behind his seat was a messy tangle of food wrappers, work gloves, sweatshirts, tools and jumper cables. She saw no U.S. Mail parcels back there. Nor on the floor beneath the dashboard. Nor on the seat next to him. There was a sheet of paper on the seat that appeared to be a computer printout of addresses. Several had been crossed out with a pen.

“Looking for something special, ma’am?”

Des showed him her smile. “Just looking.”

“I do what Lem tells me to. Ask him if you don’t believe me.”

“Thank you, Pat. I just may do that.”

“I got like forty-three driveways to do. Can I go now?”

“I don’t see why not. Are you planning to visit Kylie?”

Pat frowned at her. “Why would I want to do that?”

“I heard you two were tight.”

“We’ve hung out a few times. But she’s the boss’s daughter, you know? Plus Tina doesn’t like me.”

“Is Kylie tight with anyone else?”

“You’d know that better than me.”

“Would I?”

“Well, yeah. Nothing goes on around here you don’t know about, am I right?”

“Some days you are totally right, Pat. But then there are other days, days like today, when I realize that I haven’t got the faintest idea what’s happening.” She tipped her hat at him again. “Drive safe, okay?”

*   *   *

It took her nearly an hour to make it to Lawrence and Memorial on I-95. The state’s plow crews were doing their best to keep an emergency lane open in each direction, but a good fifteen inches of snow had fallen and the howling wind was starting to blow it right back into the freshly plowed and sanded lane. If she tried to push her cruiser up over twenty mph she could feel it start to fishtail on her.

She found Lem and Tina seated in the surgical waiting room, a big room that on most days was crammed with relatives and loved ones. Today there were only a few families there. When hospitals got advance warning of a major blizzard they postponed most elective procedures. The only patients who were in surgery right now were emergency cases like Kylie.

Tina’s dark, protruding eyes grew wide when she saw Des approaching them. Quickly, she lowered her gaze and went back to doing what she’d been doing, which was texting. Lem sat and stared right at Des like a hulking, menacing bear. He must have rushed there straight from work. He was wearing a pair of filthy tan coveralls and oil-stained work boots.

“I’m probably the last person in the world you want to see right now.”

“I’m not blaming you,” he grumbled. “It was Kylie’s own stupid fault.”

“I tried to get her to stop. I got out of my car and begged her to stop.”

“I’m sure you did,” Lem said.

Tina said nothing at all. Just kept on texting.

“How is she doing?”

“Her ankle’s busted into a million pieces,” he replied, running a thick hand over his shiny shaved head. “The orthopedic surgeon said he’d have to insert titanium screws and plates and stuff like that. She’s only eighteen years old. This’ll bother her for the rest of her life.”

“I’m real sorry to hear that. Can the three of us talk somewhere for a few minutes?”

“Why not? She’ll be in surgery for at least another hour.” Lem got his huge self up out of the molded plastic chair and looked down at Tina, who was still sitting there texting. “Could you stop doing that for thirty goddamned seconds and come with us?”

“I’m telling my mom what’s going on, you mind?” she huffed at him. But she did get up and join them.

Down the hall was a small room that used to be the smoking lounge. Now it was used for private conversations between physicians and families. Nobody was in there. There was a table with a half dozen chairs set around it. The three of them sat down. Tina immediately glanced down at the screen of her cell phone. Lem immediately glared at her. There was definite hostility between them. Part of it was the strain of Kylie’s not-so-excellent adventure. Part of it was that same sour vibe that Des had picked up on at Rut’s party.

Des took off her hat and set it on the table. “Talk to me. Why did Kylie try to steal those Ugg boots?”

“Because we took away her charge cards,” Lem answered.

“We had to,” Tina explained. “The girl’s a shopaholic. She becomes totally obsessed with
this
jacket or
those
boots and she will not think about anything else. Or
do
anything else. She won’t work. Won’t go to college. She just sits around the house all day dreaming her stupid dreams. Wants to be like that Kim Kardashian or one of those ‘Real Housewives’ who lives in a big mansion somewhere and spends all day getting pedicures and planning fancy parties. I keep telling her, sweetie, that’s television. It’s not real. You got to
work
for every little thing you get in life. But she doesn’t want to hear that.”

Lem tugged uneasily at his long beard. “Is she in bad trouble?”

“Possibly. There’s the shoplifting charge. She also shoved Joanie Tooker to the ground and dislocated her elbow. Joanie can call that criminal assault if she chooses to. And then she fled the scene of a crime and engaged me in a pursuit that endangered the lives of several drivers before she plowed into that building. We’re talking hit and run, reckless endangerment…”

“Are you saying she may go to
jail?
” Tina’s dark eyes searched Des’s face apprehensively.

“That’ll be up to the district prosecutor.”

Lem let the weight of this soak in for a moment. “We’ll have to get her a lawyer, won’t we? Damn, this is just what I don’t need right now. I can barely make my payroll. You don’t suppose if she apologized to Joanie and, say, we offered to repair the building that maybe that’d do the trick, do you?”

“Like I said, it’ll be up to the district prosecutor.”

Tina’s cell phone vibrated on the table in front of her. She squinted at the screen and said, “It’s my mother again. Back in a sec, okay?”

“Whatever,” Lem growled.

She was already thumbing out a text as she took off down the hall.

Des sat there with Lem, growing increasingly aware of his powerful scent. The man smelled as if he’d been marinating in beef broth for a week.

“I ran into Pat Faulstich on Dorset Street before I came here. He was collecting your money from your customers’ mailboxes.”

“Yeah, I asked him to. Was he leaving those flyers, too?”

“I didn’t see any flyers.”

He looked at her in disbelief. “He didn’t pick up the flyers? I told the damned mo-ron to get ’em from my house. They’re right there on the dining table. Big stack of yellow flyers saying we got to tack on an ten extra bucks from now on. It’s because my supplier keeps jacking up the price of road salt. Pat
promised
me he’d put ’em in the boxes. And he’s my best man, can you imagine?”

“Does he have any money problems that you’re aware of?”

“He hasn’t got any of it, if that’s what you mean.”

“How about drugs? Is he into drugs?”

“Smokes a little weed now and then. All of those boys do. But he’s never been in trouble with the law or had an accident on the job. And he shows up every morning, which is more than I can say for a lot of them. They stay up half of the night boozing at the Rustic and some of ’em are still so wasted when they show up that I have to send ’em home. You got to have your head on straight when you’re manning a plow truck. If you don’t you’ll sideswipe a telephone pole. But those boys just don’t give a damn. I call ’em boys but they’re not. Pat’s twenty-six. When I was his age I already had a wife and an eight-year-old daughter.” He peered across the table at her. “Why are we talking about this?”

“You have routine access to the mailboxes on Hank Merrill’s route.”

“So?…”

“So someone’s been stealing from those boxes. They’ve taken mail, small packages, Hank’s tips…”

“And
my
money.” He stabbed himself in the chest with a blunt thumb.

“Do you know anything about this, Lem?”

“You bet I do. I know that some bastard’s taking food out of my mouth. I know that if I ever get my hands on him I’m going to-to…” Lem broke off, glowering at her. “You think
I’m
the thief? Why would I do something crazy like that? No, don’t tell me. I already know the answer. You think I’m hiding money from Tina so I can spend it on Debbie, am I right? That is total bull. How does this stuff even start? I’ll bet it’s Rut Peck. That old geezer’s always flapping his gums. Especially after he gets a glass of stout in him. Let me ask
you
something—why is my marriage any of your business?”

“It’s not.”

“Damned right it’s not. Debbie’s husband left her for a younger woman last summer, okay? And she called me out of the blue. I hadn’t heard from her in ten, twelve years. Debbie was the first girl I was ever with. We were each other’s first. And she was feeling kind of sad and sentimental, so I met her for lunch in Mystic. She’s way out of my league now. All frosted and polished. Designer clothes, fancy perfume. She sure smells good. You know what Tina smells like? Tina smells like Windex. Anyhow, we ended up taking a room at the Mohegan Sun—strictly for old times’ sake. It was just that one time, I swear. That one time and then another time two weeks later. But I’m not carrying on some kind of love affair with her. Us being together, it was just something Debbie needed. And I was happy to help her out. I mean, she and Tina are the only two women I’ve ever been with in my whole life. First Debbie, then Tina. There are still folks in Dorset who think Debbie was my true love and that I only married Tina because I knocked her up. That’s bull. Tina and me have had a lot of good years together.”

“And how are things between you right now?”

Lem narrowed his gaze at her. “Why are you asking?”

“You seem a bit snappish with each other.”

“We’ve hit a rough patch,” he acknowledged. “It happens. Hell, we’ve been together almost twenty years. And I still love that little peanut, too. Trouble is that she doesn’t feel the same way about me. She used to call me her big poppa bear. Now I come home from work and she’s on me, yap-yap-yap. Telling me I ought to lose weight, shave off my beard, grow my business, yap-yap-yap. She’s just not happy anymore. I don’t know why. Maybe her mom does. Tina’s on that damned phone with her day and night.” He glanced up at the doorway as Tina returned now. “I need a smoke,” he said abruptly. “Do you mind?”

“Go right ahead,” Des responded.

He got up and lumbered out of the lounge, digging a rumpled pack of Camels out of the pocket of his coveralls.

Tina sat back down and set her phone on the table in front of her, gazing down at its screen every few seconds. She couldn’t keep her eyes off of it. “I guess you want to talk about Kylie.”

“That would be great.”

“I wish I could get through to her,” Tina said with a shake of her frizzy head. “All she thinks about are clothes and boys. I keep telling her, sweetie, you have got to figure out who you want to be. Otherwise you’ll end up like me—cleaning other people’s toilets for a living. Mind you, I make as much in a week as a lot of my customers do. And I could tell you some things that
nobody
else knows. Trust me, if you really want to find out what’s going on, ask a cleaning lady. But this isn’t the life I wanted for myself. I wanted to be a nurse. I want Kylie to be a nurse. Now I don’t know if that’ll even be possible with her ankle all busted up like that. A nurse has to be on her feet all day.” Tina looked at Des curiously. “What did you and Lem talk about?”

“He told me that you two have hit a rough patch.”

Tina bristled, her nostrils flaring. “If by that he means he’s mixed up again with that fancy tramp, Debbie, then I guess we have.”

“He said he isn’t mixed up with her.”

“And you
believed
him? He’s a man. Men lie.”

“Are you seeing someone else, too?”

“What gives you the right to ask me that?”

“I’m trying to assess the stability of Kylie’s home life for my report. My general impressions can be a determining factor in whether the district prosecutor decides to prosecute her case. But if you don’t want to talk to me…”

“No, no, I’ll talk to you.” Tina shot a furtive glance over her shoulder at the door. Lem was still outside having a smoke. “Yes, I do have a male friend. He’s sensitive and caring. He respects me. He
loves
me. Lem doesn’t anymore.”

“Want to tell me a little bit about him?”

“His name’s Matt. He works for Verizon. He’s married to someone else, too. A woman who doesn’t love him or understand him. Matt is
here
for me emotionally. He listens to me. And he’s incredibly affectionate. I don’t just mean the physical part. Although that’s been amazing. I swear, every time I think about him my heart starts beating
so
fast. Me and Lem haven’t exactly been burning up the sheets lately. And even back when we were he never took
my
needs into consideration. Matt does. He’s so romantic and nurturing.”

“Where did you two meet?”

“On a dating site. It was like he was my best friend instantly. Right away, I was telling him things that I’ve never told anyone. And so was he. It was totally amazing. He’s…” Tina hesitated, reddening. “Matt’s my soul mate. I’ve never been this close with anyone in my whole life. We must text back and forth a hundred times a day. Lem thinks I’m texting my mom. I’m not. It’s Matt. It’s always Matt.”

“Where does he live?”

“Just outside of Tacoma.”

“Tacoma,
Washington
? How often are you able to be together?”

“We’re together constantly.”

“I mean in the flesh, Tina.”

“We haven’t been together that way yet. But real soon, we’re hoping.”

“Are you telling me you’re in love with a man who you’ve never met?”

Tina sighed at her impatiently. “Matt and I have an intense bond.”

“Meaning, what, you sext back and forth a lot?”

“You’re making it sound smutty. It’s not like that. What we have is romantic and intimate and
so
hot. I’ve done things with Matt that I’ve
never
done with Lem. He’s just so loving and tender. Know what he said to me just now while I was out in the hall?”