Red Snow Read Online Free PDF Page B

they’d gone shopping for ingredients and a set of cookie cutters in the usual shapes. Having whipped up a batch of dough, they punched out identical men.
    “How boring,” Katt pronounced, and she began to reshape the lower leg of one man into a peg, adding the dough she’d removed to a lump on his shoulder.
    “Who’s that?” DeClercq asked while she squeezed icing from the tip of a pastry bag.
    “Long John Silver. See the parrot?”
    Next, she used a rolling pin to flatten the legs of another gingerbread man into a skirt, then she cut off his head and tucked it into the crook of one arm.
    “Marie Antoinette,” she explained, icing the gown with ruffles fit for a queen.
    Not to be outdone, DeClercq trimmed dough from the sides of one gingerbread man and added it to the torso of another.
    “Jack Sprat and his wife?” guessed Katt.
    “No. Elvis in the early years and final Vegas days.”
    Slathering a gingerbread man from head to foot with icing, Katt used the knife tip to groove bandage lines. “The Mummy,” she declared.
    “I’ll see your mummy and raise you this.” DeClercq kneaded the leftover dough into a ball, then flattened it into a big circle with the rolling pin. Raisins were gobbled-up victims peering out of the brown ooze. “The Blob,” he announced.
    In the end, Katt had fostered his redemption. It used to be that he gazed into the bathroom mirror and watched a ravaged man emerge from the shaving cream. Life with Katt, however, rejuvenated him, and soon the face DeClercq saw each morning seemed to shed years, as if he were actually turning back the hands of time.
    Then he learned that Katt’s mom wasn’t actually her mom. In fact, Luna Darke had kidnapped her as a baby, and the teen’s birth mother was very much alive. DeClercq had uncovered the secret and could have kept it to himself, but having endured the loss of Jane, he knew he couldn’t foist that torment on another human being. So he had let her go, and Katt was now living in England, where her mother, a Bostonian, had found work.
    “How’s your mom?” the Mountie asked, wheeling her suitcase through the airport from the arrivals hall to the exit for the parking lot.
    “She met a man. I think she’s in love! That’s why I called you. My Christmas gift to her is no me .”
    “Lucky me. And what’s with calling me Dad? Didn’t it used to be Bob?”
    “‘When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child,’” the teenager quoted. “‘But when I became a woman, I put away childish things.’”
    “A little education is a dangerous thing.” DeClercq rolled his eyes. “What does that mean?”
    “Absence makes the heart grow fonder. I now realize that you’re a better father than any bio-dad could be.”
    “How much do you want?”
    “Millions,” Katt said, laughing.
    They crossed the road between the terminal and the parking lot. Katt was on the lookout for his Benz—the car she had dubbed the “old-fogey-mobile”—so her eyebrows rose when they approached a brand-new, metallic red 350Z.
    “Uh-oh! Midlife crisis?” she asked.
    “It’s a birthday present from Gill.”
    “The shame of it,” Katt moaned, burying her face in the crook of her arm. “Dad’s a kept man.”
    “I prefer to view it as Dad’s got a rich girlfriend.”
    “Can I drive?”
    “Well …”
    “Driving on the left has vastly improved my skill.”
    Sighing, he tossed her the key.
    It was an hour-long trip from the airport—on an island in the mouth of the Fraser River—through the high-rise canyons of the downtown core to DeClercq’s waterfront home on Burrard Inlet. Katt was a better driver—or so he thought, until she slammed on the brakes so hard that dear old Dad would have smashed through the windshield if not for his seatbelt.
    Screeeech!
    Standing bewildered in the headlight beams on the road in front of the car was a small, scruffy white cat. Katt gave it a short honk, but the animal didn’t move. She gave it a