Excerpt from KIKI AND CARA MIA'S HOLIDAY CELEBRATION

By
Joanna Campbell Slan

Author’s
Note: In Kiki Lowenstein’s life, this novella comes after Killer,Paper, Cut. In Cara Mia Delgatto’s life, this novella comes after Tear Down and Die (only 99 cents!)

Chapter 1

Monday (Hanukkah starts Wednesday at
sundown)

Kiki Lowenstein’s house in Webster Groves,
Missouri

~ Kiki ~

Standing on
the back stoop of our tiny house, I could see that the sky was brightening up,
but you couldn’t call it daylight yet. I could see my breath hanging in the air
like little patches of fog. If I hadn’t been eight-months pregnant, with
hormones that stoked my internal furnace to an unnaturally high temperature, I
would have been shivering in my house slippers. Instead, I was actually
comfortable.

                So was Bronwyn “Brawny”
Macavity, our nanny. Of course, Brawny is the original Celtic warrior, a Stoic
of the first order. Nothing fazes her.

                Nothing except a call from her
brother that their ninety-five-year-old mother took a fall off a curb in
Aberdeen, Scotland, and broke her hip. Now that
got her attention.

“Do you have everything?” I asked Bronwyn Macavity, our nanny. Instead of
her usual garb