The Double Wedding Ring Read Online Free

maid of honor. Not many women get to help plan their grandmother’s wedding, but she was more than that to me. She was my friend, my employer, and my housemate. It was too happy an occasion to be ruined by anything. Even by this.
    I grabbed my coat and got ready to leave for work, but there was something else I had to do. I walked to the back door and checked it once again. The lock certainly seemed sturdy to me, but that door was definitely open when I’d come downstairs a couple of hours ago. I knew it had been locked the night before. Jesse is the king of careful. But when I mentioned it, he hadn’t been concerned. May-
be I shouldn’t be either. Except I was. I looked for scratch marks around the key, or a sign of a break-in at the doorjamb. There was none, which should have reassured me. But I couldn’t erase the nagging fear that someone had walked into the kitchen last night while Jesse and I were asleep upstairs. The alarm on the panel next to the door was switched off. Had we really forgotten to set the alarm when we went upstairs? Or had someone else done it? The code was Allie’s birthday, not something an ordinary burglar would know. But nothing was taken, so ordinary or not, Jesse hadn’t been robbed. Another thought crept in. Could it have been Roger’s killer? What did he want? And would be come back? A chill went down my back.
    As I left Jesse’s house, triple-checking that the door was locked behind me, I looked around. The car was gone; the street was quiet. I walked over to the burned-out streetlamp that prevented me from seeing into the car. I couldn’t get a great view of it, but I could tell one thing: the bulb under the large glass cover wasn’t burned out. It was missing.

C HAPTER 4
    I ’d only been quilting for a little over a year and I’d already tried my hand at most techniques—from hand appliqué to longarm quilting. I’d carefully re-created quilts from patterns as old as the Civil War, done more than a few traditional pieced and appliquéd quilts, and had even started dying my own fabrics for mixed media art quilts, with photographs and painted touches.
    And while I loved both the traditional designs and the innovative patterns that we stocked for sale, lately I’d been coming up with ideas of my own. I’d made several quilts that hung around the shop, all my own design, though they borrowed from previous traditions. I liked building on what had come before—seeing what was old in a new light, and paying homage to the women, and the men, who had been creating quilts for centuries.
    At the moment, I was playing with a new idea, a quilt that combined the clean, geometric lines of the modern quilt movement with William Morris–inspired appliqué. When I was playing around with the design on paper I was worried it would be a mishmash of styles, but as I cut the fabric I could already tell it would work. I’d cut squares out of several shades of solid gray in sizes from four inches to twelve. I’d arranged the pieces on a design board to make a top that seemed like randomly placed squares of varying sizes, but was in fact a carefully planned puzzle. Then I cut large flowers from solid purples, blues, and greens that I intended to appliqué over the squares. What was a very simple, very modern quilt top would soon be something entirely of my imagination.
    Twenty-four hours earlier I imagined I would spend the day behind the counter happily hand-appliquéing my flowers, helping customers, and passing the day quietly. But I’d already given up on that plan. I knew word of Jesse’s friend’s death would get out, and Someday Quilts would be the go-to place for everyone who wanted to be the first to know.
    All the information I could provide was what I had seen—cigarette smoke last night and a dead man this morning. Beyond that, I wasn’t going to be much help to the curious. Jesse’s