Gingerbread

Margo was skeptical but Jass was eager upon finding the lonely, lit house, resting quietly on the dark street, and entering, Jass smiled devilishly, knowing they would have quite a story to tell after they ate their fill, dressed to the nines, and looted the place known in legend as the Gingerbread House.

Chapter 2

Sean sighed, slowly pinching the bridge of his nose, and tried to quell the mercurial feeling of anger and 'had-enough'; so rather than throwing the chair next to him across the room as he would have liked, he placed his palm on the table and calmly stated, "If you mention anything about gingerbread again, and continue to lie to me, I will break your neck."

Chapter 3

Margo was silent -- she seemed not to know even how to form words when asked about this legend of the Gingerbread House, which had been circulating for several years and had lately been brought into the center of the strange murder investigation of three formerly homeless people who had suddenly become rich and yet were killed mercilessly in their homes -- but when she did speak, she said only, "They didn't follow the rules."

Chapter 4

"She said there were rules that they had to follow, otherwise there would be consequences, but they didn't know what the consequences would be," said Tara, to which Sean immediately replied, "Death, the consequence is death -- so who is the next Hansel and Gretel and how are we going to find this house?"

Chapter 5

"You know it when you see it but there is no way to find it, somehow all alone, like the gingerbread house in the story; when you go inside, the house is toasty in the winter and chilled in the summer, or so people say; it is beautiful, the refrigerator is full,there is cable television and Internet and the closets are full of clothes in all sizes and there is always a safe behind a painting of God reaching down to man -- a copy of Michelangelo's Creation of Adam; the combination is always one-twenty-five-fifteen- ten, and there is always cash inside, although there may be jewels and other valuables as well; I've heard talk of luxury vehicles in the garage with the keys in the ignition, or sometimes boats or airplanes; aside from all this, there is always a document, a list of rules or expectations, which is probably more than fair under the circumstances."

Chapter 6

Tara shook her head, removing the tomatoes from her hamburger and replacing them with more than double the amount of ketchup, saying, "This girl, Margo, has more than mere street knowledge of the Gingerbread House; it appears that she suddenly came into some money about two months ago -- enough to pay for rehab out-of-pocket, and a known associate of hers, one Jass McElroy, came into even more money at the same time; the only thing is, he must not have followed the rules because he has gone missing."

Chapter 7

The girl reluctantly admitted to having found a gingerbread house along with drug-dealer-turned-playboy-turned-missing-person, whom she accused of keeping her high for his own purposes, from whom she determined to free herself by hiding small, expensive items from the house in her clothes after he'd left her alone, thinking she had passed out, in order to pay for drug rehabilitation; "I didn't see the full list of rules for myself," she said, "but it said something about receiving a second chance and making the best of it, so I decided that I would do that and I never saw Jass again after that night."

Chapter 8

"We could spend the rest of our careers looking for this house without ever finding it," Sean said, ready to file away the wicked case of the Gingerbread House, but Tara disagreed, suggesting that with a little help, she could be the spitting image of Margo Baron.

Chapter 9

Tara felt more like Margo than she ever wanted to, not the rich good-girl-gone-bad runaway that Margo herself described, but the stuck drug user that wished to change it all but couldn't, since going undercover as a relapsed, homeless drug addict required more than Tara had anticipated only to attract the attention of the so-called Benefactor by breaking a few rules.

Chapter 10

If Tara was overdosing, she might have been imagining a frightening, wicked witch bending down in her face; she hadn't imagined the lone lit crack house on Meth Row, as it was known on the street, which never had any electricity, since it was abandoned, and no one was paying utilities; even while she was tripping, she knew immediately it was a gingerbread house; so either the witch she saw was a drug-induced hallucination or very real, consequently making her words real: "I knew you weren't Margo Baron -- she'll be well taken care of, but you -- these may be your last minutes on earth."

Chapter 11

Tara lay in a hospital bed, taped up and scraped us, refusing to look her partner in the eye, pretending she wasn't angry that he had allowed her to go so far, wondering how she had gone from English major to drugged-up agent, but telling Sean only to check into Margo's family for some connection to the Gingerbread killings, as the recovery of Jass McElroy's mutilated body now meant Margo Baron was officially the only known survivor.

Chapter 12

Beverly Baron, blushing in houndstooth, standing in the brilliant foyer of the gigantic yet tasteful house, opened her mouth and allowed her tongue to linger at the front of her soft palate before asking, "Do you really think Margo did this?" but Sean planned to present an alternative scenario.

Chapter 13

Sean drove back down the long drive away from the Baron compound, his thoughts on Tara and his own guilt and on the futility of pursuing the Barons at all; Sean's suggestion that the family's embarrassment over their own becoming street urchin, thus leading to the fabrication of the Gingerbread legend and the manipulation of the girl and her wicked boyfriend, resulting in a clean and sober Margo and a dead Jass hardly ruffled the feathers of the Baron matriarch; his last ditch effort to associate the mural replica of the Michelangelo fresco on the ceiling in the grand foyer with the paintings in the Gingerbread houses was met only with this response: "Yes, that is interesting but purely circumstantial."

Chapter 14

The stories of the Gingerbread House continued but reliable reports of specific incidents waned, and there were no spontaneously wealthy persons turning up dead; Tara and Sean were reassigned partners and continued to climb the agency ladder as if they had never known one another; Margo Baron re-connected with her family and remains clean and sober, while somewhere, there is a wicked witch cackling in the night, knowing that her black magic was behind it all.