The Double Wedding Ring Read Online Free Page B

multicolored mice,” I told her. “Are there?”
    â€œHow would I know?”
    I took a deep breath and headed toward whatever it was. I grabbed a yardstick as my weapon, suddenly realizing that a quilt shop has a lot of sharp instruments—we had forty scissors and rotary cutters lining a wall—but none of them are useful unless you want to get up close and cause a lot of damage. I didn’t plan on doing either. If it was a mouse, and I was very much hoping it wasn’t, then I intended to persuade it to leave by whatever means would allow me to keep my distance.
    Behind me I heard, “Don’t come in here.”
    I turned around and saw Natalie call out a warning to Eleanor. Barney, her faithful and now deaf golden retriever, beside her.
    â€œDon’t listen to her.” I gestured toward the pair. “Barney go in there and sniff out the mouse.”
    I yielded my yardstick to his doggy senses. He might be quite old and gray, nearly fourteen now, but he could still smell.
    â€œWhat are you talking about—and what happened?” Eleanor dropped a shopping bag on the floor and came toward me. Although she was seventy-four, my grandmother didn’t need a yardstick to get rid of mice. She had authority even vermin would understand.
    As she got to my side, Barney ran past us and into the classroom. We held quilt meetings there every Friday and dozens of classes in every kind of quilting we could think of—from beginner nine-patches to elaborate art quilts. And now it was infested. Where there was one mouse . . . I shuddered to think.
    From the classroom we heard Barney bark. A low, excited bark. It wasn’t loud or full of warning. It almost seemed like he wanted to play. He barked again. And then there was a weird, long growl. Very angry, and definitely not coming from the dog.
    Eleanor went first. I followed. Natalie stayed on the cutting table and yelled after us, “Tell me what you find.”
    In the classroom, Barney was barking into a basket of one-and-a-half-inch strips, leftovers from a class Eleanor had taught on scrap quilting. Something in the pile was moving.
    â€œWhat is it, Barney?” Eleanor approached slowly.
    Barney looked up at her, excited, happy. Whatever it was, he wasn’t afraid.
    Eleanor got closer and I moved closer, too. Suddenly, a paw came out of the scraps. I jumped back.
    â€œWhat was . . .”
    Then, a head. A furry little head that was white with black spots, as if a cow had been turned into . . . a kitten.
    â€œOh, how cute. . . .” I reached out and got a scratch. The head disappeared into the basket of fabric scraps, letting out a small hiss as a warning.
    â€œLeave her alone. She’s scared.” Eleanor grabbed Barney’s collar and brought him to the office, shutting the door behind him.
    Natalie was suddenly behind me.
    â€œIt’s a kitten, by the looks of it,” I told her.
    â€œLet me see.” She practically ran into the classroom. Now she was brave.

    For an hour, three grown women and a dog waited patiently for the kitten to come out of her hiding place in the basket. I ran to the store for cat food, Natalie went across the street to the coffee shop for milk, and Eleanor sat quietly on the floor near the cat, speaking softly. Barney whimpered in the office, feeling—justifiably—shut out, when all he wanted was to make friends.
    Finally, after we’d given up and gone back to work, helping customers and cutting fabric and explaining to the dozen or so people who asked that, yes, there had been a death at Jesse’s but there was no news on that front, a little meow came from the classroom.
    I moved as quietly as I could. The little thing was gobbling up the cat food as if it hadn’t eaten in days. Make that weeks. Once I was able to see it, it was clear it couldn’t be more than a few months old. And it was so thin I worried that