The Snow White Christmas Cookie

“You tell me. What in the heck are you doing?”

“Picking up Lem’s money.” He grabbed a dozen or more envelopes from the seat next to him and showed them to her. “Lem’s the one who usually picks ’em up but he’s at the hospital on account of Kylie so he told me to. I didn’t take anything. It’s all there, I swear. And I don’t have a thing in my pockets except my own money, which is like maybe seven dollars, okay?”

“You seem a bit defensive, Pat.” Agitated was more like it. “Why is that?”

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