Christmas Cookies

Christmas Cookies

“I don’t know why I’m here, sir. I can’t remember.”

“Whether you remember how or not, he’s dead, and the blame lies squarely at your feet.”

A dry sob ripped from her throat. Life was so unfair. It was Christmas time and she should have been home with her family, cuddled by the fire with Don, her children around her feet and instead she was being held in a dark, foul jail cell with a man in a blue suit who looked as if he had never felt a glimmer of that Christmas spark in his breast. Poor man, that tie doesn’t match his suit. He probably doesn’t have a wife who takes care of him. Not like Don, what a lucky man.

The man now shook his head, “I’m afraid I’m going to have to leave you for a bit, Mrs. Howard. Please try to remember. It’s imperative to our defense.”

“I’m sorry?”

The realization had not fully hit her yet, he was dead. Her husband was dead. Instead she found her mind crowded with thoughts of buying new wrapping paper, the old stuff had seen too many Christmases and small fingers pawing it, trying to wrap oddly shaped gifts, slippered feet scampering over it in pursuit of the dog as he scuttled off with a treasured candy cane. There was a holiday sale at Penny’s and she still had not bought Don a gift. Oh, yes she had. She had bought him something last week, what was it? Outside it began to snow, the small, condensed flakes that meant it was going to snow for a long time. A very long time. If only she could get her thoughts in order, and remember what it was that was eluding her so cleverly.

Her mind wandered back to the day before. There had been cookies, the sugary kind that her kids loved to decorate. She didn’t use the Betty Crocker mixes they sell in the grocery store; Jodie never did anything by halves. She would spend the entire night mixing cookie dough the way Grandma had taught her. Later they would all decorate the cookies with little candies and frosting. The frosting always got everywhere and most of the cookies vanished before they were finally decorated except for the few she managed to sneak away for gift baskets.

Her eyes clouded and her brow knitted as she exerted all her cognitive energies into remembering what was so important. Something that was key to unraveling why she was here. Somewhere above her a recording of “Greensleeves was playing. “Alas, my love you do me wrong…”

Outside the snow was piling up in banks. A thin sliver of moonlight was slicing through the clouds overhead, reflecting off the snow with the keenness of a freshly sharpened blade. A knife? A knife. Her eyes widened slightly. There had been a knife, the kind Don used when he went hunting. She had bought it for Christmas. It had been on the counter next to a row of warm, perfectly frosted cookies. The snowmen had been smiling innocently up at her. They couldn’t possibly know their impending fate.

They had been arguing violently. As she remembered the violent heat once again surged into her chest. She felt around for something to seize, something to hurt him the way she had been hurt so many times. She wanted to bruise, to torture his body they way he had tortured her soul with all his infidelities. And her! The perfect little wife! No one ever had suspected there was anything amiss in the Howard household.

“Mrs. Howard makes these wonderful sugar cookies from scratch with the little peppermint sticks on top. She never uses mixes; she never does anything by halves.”

“What a nice couple they are, we should invite them over more, dear. And so sweet that Mrs. Howard. Her husband is such an attentive husband.”

Oh yes, that’s what they all said. In her mind she saw him, the blood pouring from his chest, mingling with the snow, leaving long red stripes in the white. “Just like a peppermint stick,” she had thought calmly. She stabbed his unmoving body twelve times more, just to make sure he was dead before passing out beside him. Mrs. Howard never did anything by halves.