David Handler: The Snow White Christmas Cookie

Mitch studied the old man carefully. He kept sensing that there was more to this that Rut wasn’t telling him. Rut seemed unsettled. And he couldn’t quite look him in the eye. “Rut, what’s really going on here?”

The old postmaster stayed silent for a long moment, his eyes fastened on the concrete floor. “Mitch, that’s what I’d like your lady friend to find out.”

“Okay, wait, I’m missing something huge here.”

“Give me a few more minutes and I’ll be ready for you again, I promise.”

Des swatted at him playfully as they cuddled in his bed beneath the down comforter and Clemmie and Quirt, listening to the surf crash against the rocks. It wasn’t unusual for Clemmie, Mitch’s ottoman-shaped house cat, to snuggle with them in the sleeping loft. But it was rare for Quirt, his lean, mean, outdoor hunter, who’d only taken to joining them after the island’s snow cover became knee-high.

“I don’t get it. What does Rut want me to do?”

Mitch nuzzled her neck, inhaling her intoxicating scent, which was one part cinnamon, two parts her. “Have a conversation with Paulette, I guess.”

“But if we have a grinch…”

“We definitely have a grinch. No if about it.”

“Why hasn’t she said something to me?”

“Because then it would qualify as the postmaster of Dorset officially reaching out to the Connecticut State Police. Rut doesn’t want her to get in trouble with the postal inspectors over our quaint, small-town ways. He has a genuine soft spot for Paulette, it turns out. And I don’t mean the sweet, fatherly kind.”

“Really?” Her almond-shaped pale green eyes shined at him in the candlelight. “At his age?”

“There’s no expiration date on a man’s erotic yearnings. Or so I’ve been informed. It’ll be a few decades before I can confirm that.”

Des laid her head on his chest, wrapping her arms around him. “I just realized something truly heinous. I have to get dressed and go home.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Yeah, I do. I’ll be on fender-bender detail once the snow gets here.”

The newest blizzard was supposed to arrive a couple of hours before dawn. At least eighteen inches of the white stuff were expected to fall before a warm front moved in by late afternoon and the snow turned to sleet, frozen rain and then just plain rain. Buckets of it.

“Besides, if I don’t leave now I might get stranded out here.”

“Sounds good to me. There’s plenty of food, wine and firewood. We can finish decorating my Chanukah bush. Or Christmas tree, as you prefer to call it.”

It was a six-foot balsam fir that he’d felled with an axe in the island’s dense forest and lugged home through the snow just like an old-time Yankee. He’d adorned it with seashells, pinecones and other found objects, including the teeny-tiny yellow string bikini that Des had worn last summer. Although for some mysterious reason it kept vanishing from the tree and showing up back in the wardrobe cupboard.

“Or we could just hide here under the covers. I still have that magic feather in the nightstand.”

“Baby, I have to go. The snow is going to start any minute.”

Mitch ran his hands up and down her impossibly smooth, sleek body, caressing her gently. “Are you sure there’s no way I can convince you to stay just a little while longer?”

She let out a soft whimper and then they didn’t talk about much of anything for quite a while longer.

Fat snowflakes were starting to patter against the skylight over the bed when she left at 4:00 A.M. Mitch dozed off after that, but when dawn arrived Quirt woke him back up, anxious to take care of some personal business. Mitch went down the narrow stairs and let him out. The snow was coming down hard now. Within seconds Quirt was scratching at the door, wanting back in. Mitch obliged him, then put the coffee on and built a fire in the stone fireplace. His post-and-beam cottage was basically one big room with bay windows facing the water in three different directions. There was a kitchen and bath, the sleeping loft and that was it. The moth-eaten overstuffed chairs and non-matching loveseat had been taking up space in one of his neighbor’s barns. The coffee table was an ancient rowboat with an old storm window over it. Mitch’s desk was a mahogany door that he’d found at the dump and set atop two sawhorses. His sky blue Fender Stratocaster and monster stack of amps filled one corner of the room, waiting there for whenever he felt like cutting loose. Books and DVDs were piled here, there, everywhere.

While the coffee brewed he did some thermal layering for his beach run. First an undershirt and long johns of Capilene. Then polar fleece sweat pants, a cotton turtleneck and his Columbia University hoodie. On his feet he wore heavy merino wool socks and his New Balance Gore-Tex trail runners. Properly swaddled he poured himself some coffee, fired up his computer and got to work. Mitch had been the lead film critic for the most distinguished daily newspaper in New York City until it was bought out by a media empire that tried to morph him into a cable news quote slut. Now he wrote quirky essays for an e-zine that had been launched by his old editor. This morning he was saluting some of the greatest unheralded movie scores of all time. In today’s connected online world that meant showing his readers what he was talking about, not just telling them. As Mitch sipped his coffee he poked around until he found a YouTube video link of the Los Angeles Philharmonic performing the incredible chase music that Bernard Herrmann had composed for On Dangerous Ground, Nicholas Ray’s noir classic. And another of David Amram at the Montreal Jazz Festival playing his profoundly heartbreaking score to Elia Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass . Mitch had just created links to three of Kris Kristofferson’s original songs from Cisco Pike , the 1972 cult classic, when he heard a pounding on his front door.

“Come on in, naybs!”

“It’s go time, naybs,” Josie exclaimed as she came bounding through the door, her Bates College hoodie dusted with snow. She wore a stocking cap under the hood to protect her ears and mittens on her hands. For leggings she had on water-resistant rain pants.

“Be with you in one sec. And don’t bother looking because you won’t find anything.”

“I’ll be the judge of that,” she said, heading straight for his kitchen. Mitch could hear her opening and closing cupboards and drawers. “Clearly, you’ve become more devious.…” To his horror, the cursed cereal killer was now rummaging around in his refrigerator, where it took her less than thirty seconds to find his cache of Cocoa Puffs buried in the vegetable bin, underneath the carrots and potatoes. She returned to the living room, shaking her head with disapproval. “You’ll have to do better than that, fatty.”

“Damn, Josie, you are killing me.”

“No, you are killing yourself. Do you have any idea what’s in these?”

“Really tasty stuff.”

“Really tasty chemicals and artificial everything. You’re a smart man, Mitch. I can’t bear the idea of you eating a big bowl of stupid for breakfast.”

“I’m going to regret asking this but what did you have?”

“A banana and raw kale smoothie.”

“I may vomit.”

“It was delicious and full of nutrients.”

“Just exactly what color is a concoction like that? No, don’t tell me-I will vomit.”

She returned to the kitchen and dumped his Cocoa Puffs into the trash. “Promise me you won’t buy this crap anymore.”

“Oh, all right. I promise you.”

“Do you mean that?”

“No.”

“Naybs, you are hopeless. I don’t even know why I try.”