The Last Christmas Letter

By Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Joanne makes her home the perfect place for Christmas so her grandchildren will always remember the holiday. She even puts her Christmas cards on the banister.

But this year, she faces a dilemma. Her father has been in a coma since Thanksgiving, but a Christmas card from him arrived in mid-December. Even stranger, the letter inside gets longer every time she looks at it.

Her father always made up fantasy worlds, but now Joanne feels like she's living inside one—and she wants to leave.

 "Kristine Kathryn Rusch's eerie and slow-starting 'The Last Christmas Letter' decisively delivers the Twilight Zone's trademark out-of-this-world wonder…exceptional, with vivid characters and some mind-bending narrative moments."

—Publishers Weekly

• Language: English
• Publisher: WMG Publishing
• Release date: Dec 14, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386953470

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

USA Today bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch writes in almost every genre. Generally, she uses her real name (Rusch) for most of her writing. Under that name, she publishes bestselling science fiction and fantasy, award-winning mysteries, acclaimed mainstream fiction, controversial nonfiction, and the occasional romance. Her novels have made bestseller lists around the world and her short fiction has appeared in eighteen best of the year collections. She has won more than twenty-five awards for her fiction, including the Hugo, Le Prix Imaginales, the Asimov’s Readers Choice award, and the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Readers Choice Award. Publications from The Chicago Tribune to Booklist have included her Kris Nelscott mystery novels in their top-ten-best mystery novels of the year. The Nelscott books have received nominations for almost every award in the mystery field, including the best novel Edgar Award, and the Shamus Award. She writes goofy romance novels as award-winner Kristine Grayson, romantic suspense as Kristine Dexter, and futuristic sf as Kris DeLake.  She also edits. Beginning with work at the innovative publishing company, Pulphouse, followed by her award-winning tenure at The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, she took fifteen years off before returning to editing with the original anthology series Fiction River, published by WMG Publishing. She acts as series editor with her husband, writer Dean Wesley Smith, and edits at least two anthologies in the series per year on her own. To keep up with everything she does, go to kriswrites.com and sign up for her newsletter. To track her many pen names and series, see their individual websites (krisnelscott.com, kristinegrayson.com, krisdelake.com, retrievalartist.com, divingintothewreck.com). She lives and occasionally sleeps in Oregon.

Book preview

The Last Christmas Letter

The Last Christmas Letter

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

WMG Publishing Inc.

Contents

The Last Christmas Letter

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Also by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

About the Author

The Last Christmas Letter

I can’t believe you did this, Joanne, her sister said on the phone. Just because I can’t come to Wisconsin for Christmas doesn’t give you the right. It’s mean.

Joanne Carlton leaned against the oven. It was warm with the afternoon’s baking. The entire kitchen smelled of vanilla, cinnamon and cookies.

I didn’t do anything, Annie, Joanne said tiredly.

Nice try, her sister snapped and hung up.

Joanne rested the phone against her forehead and closed her eyes. For nearly fifty years, she had put up with her sister’s histrionics, usually laughing them off. Annie was volatile. Annie was temperamental. Annie was the emotional one, while Ginny was the pretty one and Joanne was the smart one.

Joanne was also the oldest and had been, from the beginning, the one everyone expected to be responsible.

But she wasn’t responsible for this.

She set the phone back in its cradle, then wiped her hands on the towel she had looped through her belt.

The grandchildren were coming for the annual cookie decorating party, something everyone in her extended family—the family she raised, not the one she was raised in—looked forward to. Cookie decorating and then, in four days, Christmas.

Her entire house was spotless. She had decorated every room, and had trees on every floor. In the basement she had set up the white flocked tree she had bought one year when the children were young, upstairs she had the artificial tree that her late husband had once sprayed with pine scent because he couldn’t stand the smell of plastic, and on this floor she had a real tree that her son Ryan had begrudgingly helped her put up in early December.

Her house looked like Christmas, felt like Christmas, and smelled like Christmas, and that was what she wanted—a sense of the holiday so strong that years from now, when her grandchildren thought of Christmas, her house would rise in their memories as the perfect place for the perfect holiday.

The children would have their perfect holiday, but for her, some years were harder than others. This was one of the hard years.

She walked into the entry. Christmas cards hung from the garland that looped the mahogany banister leading upstairs. She picked up the pile of cards that had arrived this week, the ones she hadn’t had time to hang.

Strike that. The ones she’d been avoiding hanging.

She plucked out a card that had ostensibly come from her father. It looked like a card Daddy would pick out: Garish red and green, with Santa and Rudolph on the front. Santa was shaking his finger at Rudolph whose nose was glowing red.

We can’t call your room the Red Light District, Santa was saying, and no, I won’t explain why.

Inside, the card read Happy Holidays, with the I dotted by