Sugarplum Dead Read Online Free PDF

Christmases when she used to pray for a daddy like all of her friends and the tears that stained her pillow and the questions she never asked her mother. She thought of scraping by and making do and going without. She rememberedthe years when she’d spun fantasies about her father, and she remembered even more clearly the years she’d no longer spun fantasies, when the idea of a father was remote and unreal. He had never been there for her. Never.
    She stared at him, saw his smile slip away, his eyes widen, his hands drop.
    â€œYou walked out a long time ago.” She spoke crisply, as if to a late deliveryman, polite but firm, dismissive. “As far as I’m concerned, you can keep right on walking.”
    Eyes straight ahead, Annie moved past him, brushing against his suddenly raised arm. For an instant, her heart quivered, but she yanked open the door and plunged out into the fog. She broke into a run, her steps echoing on the boardwalk though the fog dulled the sound. Behind her, she heard a call, muffled by the fog.
    â€œAnnie, Annie, please—”
    Annie banged into Confidential Commissions.
    Max’s buxom blond secretary looked up, a tiny Christmas wreath blinking from her bouffant hairdo. Her welcoming smile froze, then fled. She pushed back her chair. “Annie, what’s—”
    Annie was already across the narrow anteroom and flinging open Max’s door.
    Max lounged in his oversize red leather chair, holding a copy of Golf Digest, feet propped on an Italian Renaissance desk that would have looked at home in a Vatican office. A putter leaned against the desk. The in box held a dozen varicolored golf balls. The desk lamp was twisted to illuminate the artificial putting green.
    â€œMax!”
    She scarcely had time to see his shocked face, he moved so fast, and she was clinging to him, clinging with all her strength.
    â€œAnnie, what’s wrong?” Instead of Max’s usual easy, amused tone, his voice was hard, the tone of a man prepared to attack whoever had hurt her. It was like watching a shaggy, well-loved Irish setter transformed to a German shepherd. Her Max, her affable, civilized, laughing Max with a glint in his eye and a grim set to his mouth.
    Annie looked up, seeing a face she knew well, handsome features and Nordic blue eyes and golden hair with the glisten of wheat in the sunlight, and a face she’d never seen, eyes steely, jaw taut.
    â€œIt’s my father.” Her voice was still clipped and harsh.
    Max slipped his arm around her shoulders, drew her to the red leather sofa. “Father?”
    No wonder his voice was puzzled. He knew Annie’s family history as she knew his—in bits and pieces. She’d never said much about either of her parents. Why talk about things that hurt when there were always so many happy things to discuss? And, of course, Annie’s mother had died of breast cancer years before Annie had met Max. All Max knew of Judy Laurance were snapshots in albums and one studio photograph, a delicate face with sparkling blue eyes, a high-bridged nose, hollow cheeks and a pointed chin. Straight dark hair parted in the middle. The high-necked blue polka-dot granny dress had a lace collar.
    The picture didn’t reflect Judy’s grave smile or the way her eyes lit when Annie came into a room. Annie had always wished she’d looked like her mother, but she knew she didn’t with her short blond hair and serious gray eyes and round chin.
    She looked past Max, not seeing the bright modern paintings on his walls, seeing instead the figure of astocky man with sandy hair and mustache and a round face with laugh lines.
    Now she knew where her face came from.
    She didn’t care.
    â€œI don’t care,” she said explosively.
    Max grabbed her hands. “Annie, what about your father?”
    â€œHe walked in the store. Just now. I don’t know where he came from. Or why. Oh, he said he’s been