The Christmas Cookie Killer (24 page)

“Lois, no!” Phyllis cried.

Lois twisted her head around to glare over her shoulder at Phyllis and Sam. “Get outta here,” she warned them. Her face was contorted with rage. “He’s got it comin’ to him.”

Phyllis didn’t know if she could reason with Lois—given the state the other woman was in—but she had to try. “Maybe so, but if you kill him you’ll go to jail.”

“Help me,” Blake sobbed from the floor. “She’s gone crazy!”

That was a mistake, because it snapped Lois’s attention back to him. “Shut up!” she said. “Won’t even fight back, you wimpy little coward!”

That angry statement made Phyllis frown. She looked around the room and saw that a chair was overturned, there was a big gouge in the top of the coffee table, and one wall had a couple of holes in the Sheetrock. Phyllis saw some white powder cling-ing to the head of the poker and realized that it was Sheetrock dust from the damaged wall.

If she didn’t know better, she would have said that it looked like Lois had been chasing Blake around the room, swinging that poker at him with murderous intent.

But that wasn’t possible, because Blake was the abusive one.

He’d given Lois a black eye. Phyllis had seen it for herself. And his mistreatment had forced Lois to seek solace in drink . . .

hadn’t it?

THE CHRISTMAS COOKIE KILLER
• 193

“I’ll teach you to talk back to me,” Lois said. She swung the poker before anyone could stop her.

Blake yelled in terror and rolled aside. The poker slammed into the floor, tearing a hole in the carpet. Blake scrambled onto his hands and knees and then lunged to his feet as Lois slashed at him again with the fireplace implement. She missed, but only by inches.

Phyllis wanted to shout at Sam and tell him to grab Lois, but if he did that, he might get hurt. Instead she made a move for Lois herself, thinking that surely the woman wouldn’t hurt her.

“Get back!” Lois screeched, jabbing the poker toward

Phyllis.

Sam’s hand closed around Phyllis’s arm and pulled her away.

As Lois turned back toward Blake, Sam leaped forward and

grabbed her from behind, wrapping his arms around her and pinning her arms to her sides. She cursed and struggled and tried to swing the poker up and back at Sam, but she couldn’t reach him with it.

“Grab the poker!” he called to Blake. “Get it away from

her!”

For a second Phyllis thought Blake was going to be too

scared to act, but then he summoned up his courage with a visible effort and darted forward to wrap both hands around the poker. Lois screamed as he wrenched it out of her hands.

But then she seemed to go limp in Sam’s arms. Her head

lolled forward, her knees buckled, and her arms hung loosely at her sides. She groaned.

“Put her on the sofa,” Blake said as he stood there with a two-handed death grip on the poker. “I think the worst of it is over now.”

Lois had stopped struggling, all right, as if all the fight had suddenly gone out of her. She began to sob as Sam lowered her
194 •
LIVIA J. WASHBURN

onto the sofa. She rolled over and buried her face in one of the cushions as she started to wail.

“What in the world?” Phyllis said.

Blake looked down at the poker in his hands and seemed

surprised to see it. He took it over to the fireplace and put it in the stand, which held a second poker and some other fireplace tools. Then he turned to Phyllis and Sam and said in a shaky voice, “She must have been drinking all day. I knew as soon as I got home from work that there was going to be trouble, but I never dreamed it would be this bad. It never has been before.”

Phyllis remembered how Lois had been drunk in the morn-

ing a couple of days earlier. She remembered that black eye, too, and snapped, “She’s not completely to blame for this, Blake.

What do you expect, the way you treat her?”

“The way I . . . ?” Blake stared at her in what appeared to be genuine confusion. “Phyllis, what are you talking about?”

“Don’t try to pull that. I saw the black eye. If you looked at Lois now, I imagine you could still see it.”

“Oh, my God.” Blake stumbled over to an armchair and

sank down into it. He put his head in his hands for a moment.

When he looked up at Phyllis, grim lines were etched into his face. “I don’t know if you’ll believe me or not, but I swear to you I never laid a hand on Lois in anger.”

Sam waved a big hand at the destruction in the room around them. “Not even durin’ all this ruckus tonight?”

Blake shook his head. “I was just trying to stay out of her way and keep her from bashing my head in with that poker.”

“What about that black eye Phyllis mentioned?” Sam asked

with a nod toward her.

“Lois did that to herself while she was upset and carrying on a few nights ago. We have an old-fashioned four-poster bed in our bedroom, and she accidentally ran right into one of the posts.”

THE CHRISTMAS COOKIE KILLER
• 195

“Are you sure that’s not just a story?” Phyllis asked, still un-willing to believe him.

“We can go upstairs and I’ll show you the post,” Blake

offered.

“That wouldn’t really prove anything,” Sam said.

Blake sighed. “No, I suppose not. In the absence of proof, I guess I’ll have to ask you to just take my word for it.” He looked intently at Phyllis. “I’d like to know, though . . . did Lois
tell
you that I’d been abusing her?”

“Well . . .” Phyllis thought back. “Now that you mention

it . . . I don’t think so. I saw the black eye, and I knew that Lois had been drinking. . . . I suppose I just assumed . . .”

Suddenly she saw that she could have been completely

wrong in her conclusions. She still wasn’t sure whether she believed Blake or not, but she was starting to feel uneasy about the whole thing.

“Lois’s drinking has been a problem for a long time,” Blake said. “I tried to help her control it myself. I offered to get professional help, for both of us if need be. But she wouldn’t have anything to do with it. She’s battled depression all her life, and I guess she thought she could self-medicate with alcohol. That just made things worse.”

Sam rubbed his jaw and said, “I got to admit, you sound like you’re tellin’ the truth.”

“That’s because I am,” Blake replied with a trace of anger and impatience in his voice. “Lois’s drinking has been getting steadily worse, but she hadn’t really been violent about it until recently.”

“But why . . . why would she be like that?” Phyllis asked.

Blake shook his head. “I wish I knew. If I did, maybe I could help her.”

On the sofa, Lois rolled over and cried, “Quit talking about
196 •
LIVIA J. WASHBURN

me like I’m not even in the room, damn it!” She pushed herself into a sitting position. “And don’t listen to anything that weasel says! He can’t be trusted. He doesn’t really love me. He doesn’t want to help me. I should have gone after him with a poker a long time ago! Maybe that would teach him a lesson!”

Phyllis and Sam glanced at each other. The shrill hysteria in Lois’s voice pretty much confirmed what Blake had just told them.

“Blake, you have to do
something
,” Phyllis said. “There are places where they deal with things like this.”

He looked horrified. “I . . . I couldn’t put her in a place like that. She’s my
wife
.”

“And I know you love her—”

“He does not!” Lois shouted. She shook her fists at them, then reached up and grabbed her hair with both hands, pulling at it and whimpering as she collapsed onto her side again.

“Let me call Mike,” Phyllis said to Blake after a moment.

Blake shook his head. “I don’t want the police.”

“If you’re gonna do something she doesn’t want you to do, the law’s got to be involved somehow,” Sam pointed out. “You’ll have to get a judge to sign off on it.”

“I won’t let her be arrested and put in jail,” Blake said. His face was set in stubborn lines now.

“She won’t be put in jail,” Phyllis said. “Listen; Dwight Gresham has contacts with various treatment facilities through the counseling center at church. Let me call him and get him involved. I’m sure he’s seen this sort of thing before.”

Blake frowned. “Well . . . I suppose that might be all

right. . . .”

Phyllis had her cell phone in her pocket. She took it out and dialed the number of the church office, knowing that it rang in the parsonage after office hours.

THE CHRISTMAS COOKIE KILLER
• 197

Thinking that it might be a good idea not to talk too much about what was going to happen in front of Lois, Phyllis stepped out onto the front porch as the phone was ringing. Carolyn, Eve, and Vickie had heard everything that was going on through the open door. Carolyn said, “I’ll go in there, just in case Sam needs help.”

Phyllis didn’t think that was likely to happen. Lois seemed to be pretty much out of it now; the booze had finally caught up to her and knocked her flat on her back, figuratively speaking.

But it wouldn’t hurt for Carolyn to be there if Sam needed a hand.

A man’s voice answered the call. Phyllis said, “Brother

Dwight?” and when the preacher had confirmed his identity, she launched into a quick recitation of the facts.

“So we thought you might know someone at one of the

treatment facilities who could help,” she concluded.

“I do,” Dwight said. “Is Lois calm right now?”

Phyllis looked through the window into the living room and saw that Lois was still lying on the sofa. Her eyes were closed and her mouth hung open slackly.

“Yes, she’s calm,” she told the preacher.

“Then I’ll make a few calls first before I come over there.

But I’ll be there in fifteen or twenty minutes.”

“I don’t know if that’s necessary—”

“Of course it is. Blake and Lois are part of the church, and it’s my job to help them any way I can. I’ll see you in a little while.”

“All right. Thank you.”

After Phyllis had hung up and slipped the phone back into her pocket, Vickie asked, “Is Dwight coming over here?”

Phyllis nodded. “That’s right. He said he’d be here in fifteen or twenty minutes.”

198 •
LIVIA J. WASHBURN

“Well, then, you won’t need my help anymore. I’d better

go.” She started to turn away, then paused. “Thank you, Phyllis.

When I heard all the commotion going on over here, I didn’t know what to do since I was alone. Thank goodness you and your friends were able to help.”

“Monte’s not home tonight?”

“No. Working late again, as usual. I don’t expect him home before ten or eleven o’clock.”

“Two days before Christmas and he’s working that late?”

Vickie shrugged and gave a bittersweet smile, as if to remind Phyllis of the discussion they’d had that afternoon.

The younger woman went next door and disappeared into

her house with a wave of farewell. Phyllis and Eve went into the Horton house and found Carolyn watching Lois with an alert frown on her face while Sam and Blake sat on the other side of the room and talked together in low tones. They both looked up as she walked over to them.

“Dwight is going to make some calls and then come over

here,” she told Blake. “I think you can put everything into his hands. He’ll know how to go about things legally.”

Blake nodded. “All right. That sounds good. Thank you,

Phyllis . . . and thank you for finally believing me.”

Phyllis looked at Lois and shook her head sadly. “In the end, she didn’t give me any choice but to believe you.”

A short time later, as she held the curtain back at the picture window and watched the street, Phyllis saw a car pull up at the curb in front of the Horton house. Thinking that it was probably Dwight, she let the curtain fall closed and went to the front door, stepping out onto the porch.

Sure enough, Dwight got out of the parked car, came around the front of the vehicle, and started toward the house. At that THE CHRISTMAS COOKIE KILLER
• 199

moment, Phyllis thought she saw movement from the corner of her eye, as if someone were about to step forward from the shadows between the Horton and Kimbrough houses.

Before she could turn her attention in that direction, though, another door slammed and she looked to see that Jada Gresham had stepped out of the car. She took hold of Dwight’s arm and walked with him to the porch.

“Hello, Phyllis,” she said. “Isn’t this just awful?”

Before Phyllis could answer what was pretty much a rhe-

torical question anyway, Dwight asked, “Are Lois and Blake inside?”

Phyllis nodded. “In the living room. Sam Fletcher is with them, along with my friends Carolyn and Eve.”

“Thanks.” He gave her a tight smile. “We’ll get them through this; don’t you worry.”

His wife let go of him and he hurried on into the house.

Jada lingered on the porch and said in a quiet voice, “Christmas is the worst time of the year, you know.”

Phyllis frowned, surprised by Jada’s comment. “It is?”

“I mean for things like this. Drinking, depression, mental problems of all sorts. That’s why the suicide rate is higher around the holidays than any other time of year.”

“Yes, I suppose so. I guess it hurts even worse to be un-

happy when everybody else seems so joyous.”

“Exactly,” Jada said. “Dwight’s made quite a study of it. He would have made an excellent psychologist or psychiatrist if he hadn’t been called to the ministry. But that’s very important work, too, don’t you think?”

“Of course,” Phyllis agreed. She knew how proud Jada was

of her husband, and with good reason. No one was better liked or did more good than Dwight Gresham.

He proved that over the next hour by arranging to have

200 •
LIVIA J. WASHBURN

Lois placed in one of the local alcohol and drug rehabilitation centers. Phyllis thought that it was a sign of how much things had changed in the world that not only was such a facility located in Weatherford, but there was more than one of them.