The Double Wedding Ring (3 page)

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 years in New York and his marriage to Lizzie were big blanks in our relationship. I knew about his childhood and about his life now, but that period—the time in New York City with Lizzie—he glossed over as if it were too painful to discuss. I didn't ask him about it. I guess I'd always been afraid of his admitting that his life now paled in comparison to those years.

I stopped by the house to change clothes and get the keys. Eleanor had been distracted by the news, so thankfully she didn't give me a hard time about letting the shop door lock behind me. She just handed the keys over and told me that she'd be at Someday later, once she'd done some shopping. She was doing a lot of shopping these days, but who could blame her? It was nice to see her so happy.

I drove to Main Street, parked, and got out, but somehow I wasn't ready to walk the few feet to the shop. Instead I stood quietly, breathing in the cold, crisp air and readying myself for the day. I felt overwhelmed, unprepared for Jesse's grief, and maybe even a little uncertain of the memories it would bring back for him. At twenty-seven, I was only a few years younger than Jesse, but I was definitely out of my league in life experience. A broken engagement, a move from New York City to Archers Rest, and a reboot of my career from magazines to art school was big for me, but it could hardly compare to his responsibilities and the sudden, irrevocable changes he'd been forced to endure.

I wanted to help him. And while I could do my usual snooping, being the town's Miss Marple wasn't going to be enough this time. What would be enough, I wasn't sure.

After a minute I forced myself to move toward the shop. I was being overly dramatic, I decided. Jesse and I were fine; nothing had changed between us, or would. Whatever part of his past had come looking for him last night, it wouldn't get in the way of his future, and that was with me.

The certainty felt good for a moment, the day seemed a little brighter. I was in charge of my life again. But that didn't last. I put the key into the lock of the shop's door, and pushed the door open. I assumed everything would be just as I had left it except for the one pile of easily righted, overturned fat quarters from the night before.

But it was a mess.

“What happened?” Natalie was suddenly behind me as I opened the door. Natalie was my age but had already been married for six years and had two kids. And the tone in her voice was the same one she had whenever her kids got into trouble.

“I didn't do anything,” I protested. “I left the shop neat and tidy, like always.”

“And then a hurricane went through it?”

She was right. Just yesterday Natalie and I had spent several hours making fat quarters, an oddly soothing and repetitive job. Once a fabric got low on the bolt, we'd cut the remainder into half yards of fabric, then cut that piece into half vertically, making pieces that were eighteen inches by twenty-four, instead of the normal quarter yard of nine by forty-four. The yardage is the same, but for many quilt projects the rectangle works better than a long, narrow strip.

But all the fat quarters we'd made, all three hundred of them, were now scattered on the floor. The decorative yarns that had been arranged in a basket by the back wall were thrown about as well. Even a freestanding pattern rack had been toppled.

“It wasn't like this when I left,” I said. “The wind closed the door behind me. . . .”

“The wind didn't do this much damage.”

“I was the only one here.”

As the words came out of my mouth, both of us saw something dash by. Natalie jumped. In only seconds she had lifted herself up and was now on the cutting table.

“We've got mice,” Natalie said.

“It was black and white. I don't think there are multicolored mice,” I told her. “Are there?”

“How 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.

“Don'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.

“What 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.

“What 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.

“What was . . .”

Then, a head. A furry little head that was white with black spots, as if a cow had been turned into . . . a kitten.

“Oh, 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.

“Leave 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.

“It's a kitten, by the looks of it,” I told her.

“Let 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 the poor little thing might not live through the day.

“What do we call it?” I asked.

“Her.” Eleanor was the only one the kitten would let near her, and we had to trust that she had determined the gender correctly.

“Scraps,” Natalie suggested.

“Calico?” I offered.

Eleanor shook her head. “The black spots on her head look like a four patch to me. Let's call her Patch.”

At that the kitten meowed, which we assumed was approval.

A
fter she ate, Patch found a folded quilt on a back table. It was a good choice; a brightly colored churn dash that Eleanor had made as a sample of the new batik fabrics. I'd meant to hang it, but that would have to wait. Patch plopped herself in the middle of it and promptly fell asleep.

Despite the crazy introduction, she had made it a happy morning, and I'd almost forgotten about my unfinished quilt, my to-do list for the wedding, and the death at Jesse's. Until the phone rang.

“It's me.” Jesse sounded tired and it was only one o'clock. “Lunch?”

“Jitters?”

“I'll be there in five.” He hung up. A nine-word conversation that told me what I needed to know. Jesse was overwhelmed and sad. Although I obviously didn't want him to be feeling the way he was, I was happy that he'd reached out to me for comfort.

I walked across the street to Jitters, my favorite hangout in town, and not just for the coffee. The owner, Carrie Brown, was a member of the shop's Friday quilt group and a close friend. Both Carrie and I were transplants. She'd arrived in Archers Rest just a few years before I had. She was more settled, two kids and a business, but we bonded over the Archers Rest quirks we didn't always understand. The one thing we both got used to quickly was how fast news spread in town, and Jitters was gossip central.

She poured me my favorite blend before I'd even ordered, handed me a chocolate cupcake, and sighed. “I've been hearing the news all morning and I don't know which I want to ask about more, the kitten or the body. Do you have a name?”

“Patch.”

“Patch? Was he a pirate?”

“A pirate?” It took me a second to catch on. “No, the
kitten's
name is Patch, short for Four Patch, I think. The man at Jesse's was named Roger Leighton. Jesse's police partner from his days in New York.”

“How is Jesse?”

“Sad. Feeling like he let Roger down somehow,” I said. “I don't know what he could have done differently. Roger only came into town last night.”

“Last night?” Carrie stared off into space for a moment, thinking. “What did Roger look like?”

“Ordinary, I guess. He was average height, late thirties, light brown hair . . .”

“Black leather jacket and jeans?”

“Yes. How did you know?”

He was in here last night,” Carrie said. “He had green tea and a gluten-free cookie. He asked if it was organic, which it is.”

“What time?”

“Seven, seven-fifteen. It was weird. He wanted his tea in a to-go cup, but then he sat at that table. . . .” She pointed toward a table near the window. “I saw him watching across the street, right at Someday Quilts, like he was, you know, casing the joint.”

“You watch too many movies.”

“What would you call a man who sits and stares at a business, watching people come and go?”

I shrugged. “Casing the joint, I guess.”

“Okay then.” She sounded victorious. All the members of my grandmother's quilt group, myself and Carrie included, had turned ourselves into amateur sleuths. Or busybodies, depending on who was doing the describing. In either case, we prided ourselves on our growing knowledge of crime and crime terminology.

“Did he do anything other than stare?”

“No. But I did mention that the chief of police's girlfriend worked at the shop. Just to make it clear there was no point in trying to rob it,” she said. “And he had the funniest answer.”

Carrie poured another coffee and plated another cupcake. She nodded to someone behind me, and I saw that it was Jesse. “On the house,” she said. “I'm sorry about your friend.”

Jesse took a long drink from his coffee. “Thanks, Carrie,” he said. “Nell, you want to sit on the couch?” He posed it like a question, but he was already walking toward it.

“In a second,” I called after him. “What did Roger say, Carrie?”

She leaned in and whispered, “He said, ‘I hope she likes heartache.'”

Jesse and I settled into the big purple couch by the window. I was watching him, but he was staring past me at a mural I'd painted on the wall when Carrie first opened the place.

“You're very talented,” he said. “You could be a painter, if that's what you want to do.”

I'd often wondered what career I'd pursue when I finished art school in the spring, and I was happy to talk about it with Jesse. But not now. Not when I could see he was using it to avoid discussing what was really on his mind.

“Have you learned anything since this morning?” I asked.

“No. I talked to Anna. She was heartbroken. They were separated, but that didn't necessarily mean . . .” He seemed to lose his train of thought. He kept staring at the mural, a depiction of a big city skyline being poured from a coffeepot.

“It didn't mean . . .” I prompted after a few minutes.

“Lizzie used to say that when you really love someone, you always love them. No matter what comes between you. Even death.”

“She was right,” I said.

Jesse kept staring at the mural.

“Do you want something to eat?”

“I have that.” He pointed toward his uneaten chocolate cupcake.

“I meant food; a sandwich, a salad, something like that.”

“I was thinking that maybe Roger came up to talk to me about Anna,” he said.

“But you said you hadn't seen him in three years.”

“I kept in touch with Anna. Kind of. She sent Christmas cards and presents for Allie. And we'd e-mail once in a while.”

“Did she ever say anything about their marriage?”

“No. She'd just ask what Allie was up to; how my mom was doing; questions about you.” He smiled. “And she talked about the business she'd started. It was really haphazard. Maybe once every couple of months or so.”

“So why would Roger want to talk to you about her?”

He shrugged. We were sitting next to each other, but there was a distance between us. I wanted to comfort him, to share his grief, but I could feel him closing me out.

“You haven't been in touch in several years,” I said, “so maybe Roger wanted to talk to you about something from your days in New York. Maybe an old case or a friend you had in common. Has there been anyone from that time that you've talked to lately? Did you get an unexpected Christmas card, or maybe a phone call? Something you might not have placed any importance on?”

Jesse sat there staring out the window. I waited in silence until it was clear he didn't intend to answer me.

“Carrie said Roger was here last night,” I told him, “looking out this window across the street at Someday Quilts.”

Jesse looked at me. It was the first indication I had that he'd been listening. “Why?”

“I don't know. Carrie told him your girlfriend worked at the shop.”

“That was a mistake,” he said. Then he got up. “I should go.”

“Jesse, I want to help you.”

“I know. I just don't think you can.”

I sat there and watched Jesse walk out of the shop. As he reached the street, a police car pulled up. I could see that it was Greg who was driving. Jesse leaned in the window and the two chatted for a moment, then Jesse hit the door of the car and shouted something. Greg got out of the car, and Jesse got behind the wheel. He sped away nearly knocking down his best officer in the process.

Greg walked toward the coffee shop and I willed him to come inside. Greg was very loyal to his boss, and my going into the street to ask what had happened would make him uncomfortable. And it would definitely be something he'd feel obligated to tell Jesse. I needed any conversation we had to seem casual, something Greg would see as two friends talking and therefore wouldn't bother to relay. I hated manipulating Greg, but Jesse was keeping something from me. As much as I didn't want to drive him further away by pushing too hard, I wasn't going to sit around and do nothing while he was in need of help.

When Greg walked into Jitters, I started to get up, ready to head to the counter for a refill on my coffee so I could bump into him. But just as I heard Greg give Carrie his order, someone hit me on the back of the head.