Murder in Christmas River: A Christmas Cozy Mystery (2 page)

Especially the Gingerbread Junction Competition.    

The grand prize is a four-day trip to Maui.

But it’s not even about the trip to Maui. There’s much more at stake than tropical palm trees, warm waters and Mai Tai cocktails.

It’s about the title. To be known as the Junction queen. To be recognized as more creative, crafty and clever than anybody else that year.

I started participating in the competition when I was 15. When I was 17, I got my first win. There were a few years I missed while I was away at college, but ever since I was 23, I’ve been in every single gingerbread house competition.

That’s 10 years of straight competitions.

Every year, people come from all over the Northwest come to ogle the gingerbread art we create. Some of the competitors spend all year preparing for it, creating blueprint after blueprint for epic cookie houses with intricate decorations. For some of us, it becomes an obsession.

Or maybe that’s just me.

The past two years, I’ve become particularly obsessed with creating the grandest gingerbread house the world has ever seen. 

I’ve won five competitions altogether, and come in second place most of the other times, except for two years ago, when I bombed out of the competition completely. It ended in a week-long depression-driven pie binge where each night I’d go home, drink glass after glass of white wine and eat leftover pie and sob while watching late-night soul music infomercials. 

There were obviously other reasons for my meltdown. But the loss and utter humiliation of not even placing in the competition really killed me.

But I was determined to redeem myself from that experience. This year, I was determined to show everyone that I was back. I wanted to show them that I couldn’t be beaten so easily. That I wasn’t a has-been. That I could still create works of art through sugar, flour, and spices.

I had to prove to them that I was a winner. 

If only my gingerbread house building partner was as focused.

 “Next thing I knew, he was looking at me with this absolutely horrified expression on his face. I can’t even describe it, Cin. The kind of pain the man must have been in. I mean, the coffee spilled all over him,” she said. “And the most horrible thing about it all was that for some reason, I just wanted to start giggling. I mean, I just had the worst time containing myself.”

Kara’s face broke out into a smile, revealing two perfectly straight rows of perfect white teeth.

I shook my head, hunching over the first story of the gingerbread mansion we were working on.

“I can’t believe you,” I said.

“I know, I can’t believe myself either sometimes,” she said. She was still smiling. “There oughta be a law against me.”

We were in the back of the pie shop. It was late afternoon—a time of the day that rarely saw visitors. We were in the kitchen, working on the first step in the week-long process of building an elaborate, award-winning gingerbread house.

Well, at least one of us was working. Kara was talking more shop than slaving away, but that was okay. It was going to be a long evening.

Kara had been my best friend since high school. She was a platinum blonde who, true to her hair color, had a lot of spark and tenacity. She was loud and abrasive, and acted like a bull in a china shop sometimes. But despite her general noisiness, Kara had a deep love for crafting and was a hard worker. Her store,
Ornate Ornaments
, did well, especially during the winter and summer tourist seasons. People would buy ornaments in Christmas River even when it wasn’t Christmas.

She was a smart business woman.

Even though we’d been best friends for a long time, it wasn’t always that way. When I moved away from Christmas River to go to college, we lost touch. It wasn’t until I moved back five years ago to take care of my grandpa and set up shop that we started talking again.

I never completely understood why Kara had never left Central Oregon. She always seemed like she was made for a big city, but Kara had never gotten much farther than Farewell, a town 30 minutes west that was about three times the size of Christmas River. She had met and married a man out there, and moved there for him. But four years into the marriage, things fell apart. And when they did, Kara came back home to this side of the mountains, and opened up her ornament shop.

We were similar in that way. We both knew what it was like to have the rug ripped out from underneath us. To have it all fall apart.  

“Well, are you going to see him again?” I asked. “Or are you going to let the poor man die of shame?”

Since her divorce, Kara had been going through what seemed like hundreds of dates. She must have dated just about every eligible bachelor in Christmas River and the surrounding towns.

Nothing ever seemed to work out, though. But her dates did always make for good stories. 

Part of me wondered if Kara wasn’t just going through the motions of it, and that she was still hung up on her ex. She was likeable enough, and despite what she wanted it to seem like sometimes, she did have heart. She was pretty, too. Kara could easily have had just about any of those eligible bachelors if she really wanted to.

“I seriously don’t know if I’ll get that image out of my head,” she said. “I mean, I can try, but I just know, knowin’ me, that sometime he’ll be talking to me about something serious, and it’s going to pop back in my head and I’ll start laughing.”

I shook my head again disapprovingly.

“You can’t build a relationship with that kind of starting point, can you?” she continued. “Sometimes you just have to quit while you’re ahead, you know what I mean?”

“But what if he’s a really nice guy?” I asked while gluing together the walls of the main floor grand entrance with powdered sugar frosting. “What if he’s your soul mate and he had one bad moment where he lost his grip on his mug? You can’t hold that against him, can you?”

“All’s fair in love and war, which includes dropping a guy because he spilled coffee all over himself on your first date,” Kara said, shrugging. “Anyway, I’ve stopped believing in soul mates. Mine’s been way overdue for too long. I’m beginning to think he’s forgotten about me.”

Kara tossed a used-up pastry bag into the trash can, like she was tossing out Craig Canby’s hopes at a second date with her as well.

“Don’t give me that look Cinnamon,” she said, catching my gaze at the sad pastry bag in the trash can. “I’m not as heartless as all that, and you know it. But sadly, we can’t all find doctors to ride off into the sunset with like you.”

I let out a long sigh and looked up at her.

“Let’s not go there,” I said. “I’ve got enough on my mind as is.”

“You never want to go there,” she said. “And I’m your best friend. If you can’t talk about it with me, than with who?”

“There’s nothing to talk about,” I said. “We’re just friends.”

Kara gave me a look. One of those looks I’d become familiar with in our many years of being friends.

The kind of
I smell bull crap and I’m calling you on it
look.

“You’re dead wrong,” I said.

“Well, he goes to your pie shop for lunch every afternoon,” she said. “I’ve got enough sense in that department to know that he’s not just being friendly.”

I started building the support beams of the second floor, feeling like the kitchen was getting stuffy.

“What can I say?” I said.  “I make a mean pie. I’ve got a lot of repeat customers.”

“Get out of town,” Kara said, rolling her eyes. “As good as the pie is, you know that ain’t it.”

I suddenly wanted to change the subject.

Mostly, because whenever Kara tried to talk about Dr. John Billings with me, I’d be struck by this wave of confusion mixed in with a little guilt.

John first started coming into the shop about a year ago. Soon, he was there every afternoon at exactly noon. Every day, he’d order a slice of the strawberry rhubarb pie, but he’d never finish the slice. After a few months, I started putting together the fact that John didn’t really like pie, and that there were other reasons he was there.

He wasn’t a bad sort. He was in his early 40s and had once been married a long time ago, but was now divorced. He moved to Christmas River about five years earlier from Boise to start up his own Podiatrist practice. He was smart and good-looking by most standards, and he did a lot of pro-bono work in the community.

Like I said, he wasn’t a bad sort.

But sometimes, you just know when something isn’t going to work out. I wasn’t right for him. I felt it in my bones.

And he wasn’t right for me.

But sometimes, I wondered if I was approaching the situation with a closed mind. I was getting older. That was a fact. Plus, he was a nice man. That kind of love that they always talk about, the one that sweeps you off your feet and makes you feel drunk and dizzy and obsessed all the time, I’d been there before. I’d known a love like that before.

And I knew that those kinds of love only ever ended badly. I knew what kind of a monster love like that could turn you into.

Sometimes I wondered if maybe someone like John was just who I needed. Someone who was steadier and calmer. Someone who I could grow to love, maybe. Maybe that’s what mature love was. Maybe that was the kind of love that really lasted forever.

I was undecided about John. And in the meantime, it just felt like I was leading him on. He sat there, ordering slice after slice of pie that he didn’t even like, while I just took his money and made it seem like he had a chance with me.

“I guess we’re not as young as we used to be,” Kara said, echoing my own thoughts. “No more Billy Sanders or Kevin Rhines or Daniel Brightmans to serenade us these days. It’s not like high school anymore.”

I laughed, remembering those three boys from high school. But soon felt a wave of chills run up and down my back.

I didn’t like to think about getting older any more than she did. But we weren’t
that
old.

“You make it sound like we’re fossils,” I said.

She sighed.

“Well, lately I’ve been feeling like one,” she said. “Living in a small town doesn’t help any.”

A shadow passed over her face.

“C’mon,” I said, refilling a pastry bag with more frosting sealant. “Fossils wouldn’t be able to take Gretchen O’Malley to the floor the way we’re going to this weekend, so cheer up.”

That made her laugh.

Gretchen O’Malley was our Gingerbread competition archnemesis. She was a retired, nasty woman who was the reigning queen of the competition. I couldn’t prove it, but I was pretty sure that when she wasn’t scaring children or collecting toadstools and dead ravens for a potion, she spent all her time in the kitchen, working on her gingerbread house.

Gretchen was good at the competition. But we were going to be better this year. 

“You’re right,” she said. “We’re going to make her wish that she never picked up a spatula.”

I smiled. The bell on the front door jingled, and I put down the pastry bag to go help the late afternoon customer.

Kara smiled as I walked away, but I had a feeling it didn’t last too long.

It was hard getting older. It was hard being single and getting older.

It was something I didn’t like to think about when I could avoid it.

Chapter 3

After I closed the pie shop, I walked on over to the Pine Needle Tavern. The streets had been icy the night before, but now a fine dust of snow settled over the concrete and asphalt.

I passed Gretchen O’Malley by coincidence as I walked there. She was strolling down the street, wearing some sort of fur jacket with giant gold earrings. Her arm was hooked with her husband’s. Gretchen’s husband was a stout bald man who would yell things to the judges when they were taking notes on our gingerbread houses. Gretchen would give him angry glances every once in a while in response.

I didn’t know the ins and outs of their marriage, but I got the feeling that Gretchen was the one who wore the pants in their relationship.

I nodded as we passed on the street, but she pretended not to see me, keeping her nose high in the air.

I swear, the woman would drown if a rainstorm hit.

Gretchen was a piece of work, all right.

But she didn’t have to say hi to me. She’d hear me loud and clear, soon enough. She wouldn’t be able to ignore me then.

I walked on, picking up the pace. 

It was a dark winter’s night, and I could feel the chills coming on. I pulled my down jacket tighter around me. All the storefronts were brightly lit with old-fashioned red and green bulbs, trying to instill the holiday spirit.

The longer I lived here, the more immune I became to that spirit.

It made me sad. I didn’t want to be bitter about Christmas or holiday cheer. But maybe that’s what happens when you live in a town where it’s Christmas year-round. Christmas just doesn’t mean the same.

Or at least it hadn’t for the past two years.

I pushed on the heavy doors of the tavern and was greeted with a burst of warm, fermented air. I made my way to the bar at the back. The place I knew Warren would be.

“Hey there, Cin,” Harold said, catching my eye from behind the bar. “What can I get you?”

“Aw, nothing for me tonight,” I said. “I’ve got some more work to do back at the shop. I’m just here for the old man.”

“The clock’s struck 12, boys,” Warren said from his crowded table, taking a long drink from his pint of beer.

I wondered how many that was for him. He was drinking more lately, and he really shouldn’t have been. I was pretty sure his doctor would have been harassing me if she found out how much Warren was drinking. But I knew that coming down to the tavern, drinking with the boys and reminiscing about the old days at the lumber mill was one of the things that kept him going.

“How’s the shop these days, Cinnamon?” Larry, my grandfather’s best friend of nearly 55 years, asked.

“It’s been a good season so far,” I said. “How’s Sheila? Is she ready for the Gingerbread Junction?”

“The house has smelled like gingerbread for days,” Larry said, rubbing his wrinkled face and sighing.