The Christmas Cookie Killer (22 page)

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Helen shook her head. “Wow. Getting knocked out by a

murderer. You’re lucky to be alive.”

“I know.”

“So, tell me,” Helen said. “What happened?”

Phyllis didn’t particularly want to go through all the details again, but she didn’t see that she had any choice. Besides, if she wanted to draw any new information out of Helen, this was the best way to go about it.

“You never noticed anything unusual going on at Agnes’s

house before she was killed?” Phyllis asked when she was finished with the recitation. “From what I gather, Randall was there for several days before the murder.”

Helen shook her head. “No, I never saw anything out of the ordinary. Of course, I wasn’t looking for anything, and it’s not like I live next door to the Simmons house, or right across the street.”

“Well, I never noticed anything, either,” Phyllis said, “but in talking to people after it happened, I’ve found out that several of them noticed a suspicious character hanging around the neighborhood for a few days before the murder.”

Helen’s eyebrows arched as her eyes opened wider. “Really?

That’s kind of scary. It really would be frightening if the police hadn’t already caught the killer. He could still be lurking around here.”

“That’s what I thought,” Phyllis said. “What if Randall Simmons didn’t kill Agnes?”

“But the police have charged him with the murder.” Helen

frowned. “They wouldn’t do that if they didn’t know he was guilty, would they?”

“It’s happened before. People have been charged with

crimes they didn’t commit. They’ve even been convicted for them.”

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LIVIA J. WASHBURN

A shiver went through Helen. “Yeah, you’re right. I’ve read about things like that. Why would anyone want to kill a harmless old lady like Mrs. Simmons, though? I didn’t know her well at all, but I can’t imagine why anybody would want to hurt her.”

Phyllis decided it was time to push a little harder. “Well . . .

Agnes sat in front of her picture window all the time, especially since she broke her hip, watching everything that was going on in the neighborhood, and I thought maybe she saw something she shouldn’t have seen, or found out something that someone wanted to keep secret—”

Before Phyllis could go on, Helen suddenly bolted to her

feet. The smile was gone from her face, as was the gossipy glint in her eyes. Instead her expression was a mixture of anger and terror as she pointed toward the front of the house and gasped,

“How—how dare you! Get out of my house! Get out right

now!”

Chapter 16

P
hyllis was too shocked by Helen’s reaction to do anything except sit there for a long moment and stare at the furious young woman. Helen continued to sputter, “You come in here and accuse me . . . I never did anything to you . . . You don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“Helen . . . Helen, take it easy,” Phyllis said when she finally regained her voice. “Just calm down. I never said
you
killed Agnes.”

Helen stood on the other side of the table, trembling and wild-eyed, and then her head jerked around as a small voice asked, “Mama . . . did you kill somebody?”

Phyllis turned her head and saw Denise and Parker, Helen’s two children, standing there in the kitchen doorway, looking confused and frightened. Helen looked at them, too, and then she covered her face with her hands and slumped back into her chair as she started to sob.

Phyllis stood up and went over to the doorway, where the

children watched her with wide eyes. She knelt down to put
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LIVIA J. WASHBURN

herself on their level and said in a calm, quiet voice, “Why don’t you two go play in another room or watch television or something? Your mother is upset right now, but she’s all right, I promise you.”

“But did she kill somebody?” Denise asked again.

Phyllis reached out and hugged the little girl. “Of course not, dear. Now, you need to run along—”

The legs of the chair where Helen sat scraped against the floor as she pushed it back. “Get away from them!” she said.

“Get away from my children!”

Phyllis let go of Denise and straightened to her feet. “Please, Helen, you know I’d never hurt them,” she said.

“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.”

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“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 weari-ness 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?”

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LIVIA J. WASHBURN

“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 hu-morless 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 THE CHRISTMAS COOKIE KILLER
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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 grue-some 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
182 •
LIVIA J. WASHBURN

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 THE CHRISTMAS COOKIE KILLER
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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 dis-passionately. 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