French Polished Murder Read Online Free

closer at the upright panel between the bottom of the keyboard and the pedals. I thought that it would have to be removed, anyway, so Cas could do whatever it was he wanted to do with felts and what not. So, eventually, he was going to have to open the bottom. And if it was rubber or something, I’d just give it a shot of oil and not be distracted as I was cleaning.
    I grabbed the electric screwdriver from the shelf. There were four screws holding the panel in. It was only a moment’s work to remove them and pull off the panel and—
    Somehow, I’d dropped the wood panel, and I was on the other side of the shed, my body pressed flat against the wall, while my hands tried to figure out a means to escape backward into it.
    Because inside the piano was a litter of papers, newspapers, and—rats.
    Don’t ask me how I knew they were rats. They were mostly pink and small and crawling all over one another. But I knew they were rats. And the instinctive reaction forming in my gut wanted me to climb on a chair and pull up the skirt I didn’t have on and scream, “A rat, a rat!”
    It took me several deep breaths before I realized that while these were probably rats—or mice, or perhaps guinea pigs or rabbits, though those were less likely to go wandering about inside old pianos—they were, in fact, tiny, pink, furless, and clearly harmless. Also, there were at least six of them, so screaming, “A rat,” would not only be futile but also seriously understating things.
    Continuing to take deep breaths—because the oxygen is likely to make you a little drunk, I guess—I forced myself to get closer. Yep. Rats or mice. Probably rats, because I had the idea mice were smaller at this stage of development—though the only baby rats I’d ever seen were the ones we dissected in biology—six of them. In a nest made of papers and other bits of rubbish.
    As I moved nearer I thought the little things were actually kind of cute. In fact, they reminded me of E when he was born, all big head and flailing limbs.
    Considering how often I’d called All-ex a rat, perhaps there was a reason for the resemblance. But unlike E, these baby rats were in a pile, and all of them seemed to be trying to dig under the others, trying to get down into a warm or safe place. . . .
    The sane thing to do, I thought, was to kill them or something, right? But how did one kill baby rats? Poison? Or smack their little heads with the screwdriver. The idea made me cringe. They hadn’t done anything wrong. Okay, so probably Cas would say they deserved death for nesting inside a piano, but if rats understood pianos, then the world was too complicated for my taste.
    But if I left them there, I had a feeling they’d die, anyway, from cold or hunger or something.
    So . . . they needed some place warm. Most babies did. And also food. And then I’d call wildlife rescue and ask them to find a foster mother or something. Mom had done that when she’d found a baby squirrel in the attic storage area of the bookstore.
    I still was not particularly fond of the idea of touching them. After all, they could have plague or salmonella or retrovirus or whatever. However, I also couldn’t let them die. So I put on my dust mask—to ward off the retrovirus thing—and I put on my heavy gloves, and then I dug underneath, trying to get all of the little rats and the nest, too.
    It wasn’t as easy as it sounds, because as I had all six in the space between my hands, I felt another one flail underneath, so I had to reach farther.
    When I was done, the mess of newspaper and paper and wiggling baby rats didn’t fit in my hands. So I grabbed a clean paint tray and dumped it all in it, covered it with a rag, because I was going to have to cross the space outside where the temperature was in the thirties, and ran, holding the tray, out of the shed and into the back hallway of the house, then along it to the kitchen, where I set the tray on the table.
    The rats were still wiggling