Sugarplum Dead by Carolyn Hart Read Free Book Online

his lips brushed her cheek, slipped softly toward her mouth. “It’s okay. We’re okay.”
    Were they? Her absent father, his distant father, his ditzy (surely it was no more than that!) mother, how much did they matter for Annie and Max? Just for an instant she lay still, and then her lips opened and fear was lost in passion.

Three
    A NNIE GLANCED IN her rearview mirror. That blue Ford had been behind her red Volvo on Saturday when she went to the store. She’d spotted it on Sunday afternoon when she and Max went to the club for brunch. Now it was behind her this morning, obviously having waited for her to pass one of the side roads that opened onto Sand Dollar Road. It didn’t take the perspicacity of G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown to guess the identity of the driver.
    Annie picked up speed. It didn’t matter. Her too-late father could trail her around the island from now until next summer and she wouldn’t change her mind. She had too much to do, including shopping for Max and thinking about the future—a future that did not include the driver of the blue Ford. She slammed out of her car, ignoring the Ford as it parked in the lane behind her. Whistling “Jingle Bells,” she hurried toward the boardwalk.
    Red and green Christmas garlands were wrapped around the light poles and strung along the seawall. The sun sparkled on jade-green water and boats ranging from sailfish to yachts. Annie took a deep breath and looked beyond the harbor to a pod of porpoises playfully diving. It was already in the fifties and would reach the low sixties, a December day that made winter seem far away. A happy day, and a day she was determined to keep that way, despite the blue Ford. And Laurel.
    Annie heard footsteps behind her.
    She walked faster, reached Death on Demand, unlocked the door and hurried inside. She moved purposefully down the center aisle, accompanied by Agatha, who nipped at her ankle in between emitting sharp yowls.
    â€œI am not late,” Annie protested. “And you have dry food; delicious, nutritious dry food.” Annie picked up speed and was glad for evasion skills perfected in long-ago soccer games. She reached the coffee bar unscathed, shook down fresh food, opened a can of dietary soft food.
    Agatha glared, then crouched over her bowl.
    Gradually, Annie relaxed. The front door hadn’t opened. Okay, should she string the Christmas lights around the mugs shelved behind the coffee bar? Or unpack some of the boxes of books that had arrived Saturday? She moved briskly to the storeroom and picked up the box marked COFFEE BAR CHRISTMAS LIGHTS .
    As Annie deposited the box on the coffee bar, the phone rang. She reached out.
    â€œDeath on Demand, the finest mystery bookstore east of Atlanta.” She loved the phrase, which rolled over her tongue as easily as a Godiva chocolate.
    â€œAnd south of Pittsburgh,” came a cheerful voice.
    â€œHenny!” Henrietta Brawley was Death on Demand’s best customer, a club woman of enormous skill and dedication, a gifted actress, a former schoolteacher, a onetime Peace Corps volunteer and she was, most of all, one of Annie’s best friends. Annie felt only a small pang as she realized that Henny, vacationing in Pittsburgh, had probably done a lot of her book shopping at Mystery Lovers Bookshop in the Pittsburgh suburb of Oakmont.But this wasn’t the season to be piggy. “Say hello to Mary Alice for me.” Annie had met Mary Alice Gorman, the ebullient owner, at a mystery conference.
    â€œWill do. Annie, I’ve actually seen the hospital where Mary Roberts Rinehart went to nursing school!” Sheer delight lifted her voice. “I tried to figure out the wing where she and the others were quarantined with that smallpox outbreak over Christmas of 1895.”
    Annie lifted the lid of the box, pulled out a strand and began to untangle it. Why had she put the lights away snarled like a ball of