Clare O'Donohue [Some Day Qui The Double Cross (epub)

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.I’m in trouble.I’m heading toward the inn.”“I’m coming to get you,” he said.“And Nell, I.”The signal was lost again, and with it Jesse’s comforting voice.My heart sank.“Don’t let that be the last time I talk to him,” I silently prayed.Then I saw the gun.“Jesse’s on his way right now,” I called out as defiantly as I could, but even I could hear the fear in my voice.“Well, he’s going to be too late,” was the response.The gun was pointed directly at me.I wasn’t going to just stand there and get shot, so I turned and ran toward the trail.I’d taken ten steps when I heard a loud sound.After that all I could feel was pain.CHAPTER 1Two Weeks EarlierIt’s the closest two quilters have ever come to killing each other.“I’m not doing this to hurt you,” Susanne tried to explain.“You’ve betrayed me,” Bernie spat back.“You’re being an old fool.” Susanne sat back in her chair and looked to the rest of the group for support.The rest of us looked elsewhere.It had started innocently enough.Just an hour earlier I’d closed up Someday Quilts for our usual Friday meeting.A small group of us met at my grandmother’s quilt shop each week to work on our quilts, eat fattening foods, and catch up on gossip.To an outsider we might have appeared to be an odd group.There was me, a twenty-six-year-old aspiring artist and part-time worker at the shop; my grandmother, Eleanor Cassidy, the shop’s owner; Carrie, in her midforties, a mother of two and owner of the local coffee shop; Natalie, my age and already a mom with a second child on the way; her mother, Susanne; and Bernie, the ex-hippy pharmacist and our most laid-back member—until now.The only member missing was Maggie, my grandmother’s oldest friend, who was in Ohio awaiting the birth of her first great-grandchild.On the surface we had little in common, and we certainly didn’t seem like a group of close friends, but we all quilted.And with that to share, the rest came easy.Natalie, the shop’s newest part-time employee, had arrived early so she and I could make the coffee and arrange the chairs.Then we set a copy of the Winston Weekly newspaper on each person’s seat.I was expecting lots of excitement once everyone had a chance to see it, but excitement was hardly the right word for what I got.“What do you want us to read?” my grandmother asked as she sat down.My grandmother, Eleanor, was part role model, part bulldog.A wonderful quilter, a strong business owner, a loving grandma (though never one to let me get away with anything), she was the person I hoped to be one day.Even her look was worth emulating.She had let her hair turn a no-fuss gray and cut it short, but stylishly.Her clothes, a pair of dark jeans and a pink oxford shirt, created the same pretty-but-practical effect.“We have a celebrity in our midst,” I told her, to pump up the enthusiasm.“A missing dog?” asked Eleanor.“Why is that a celebrity?”“It’s not the dog,” I said.Eleanor rolled her eyes and tossed the paper to me.I scanned it.The front-page story was about a dog that had gone missing while out on a hunt.The owner described it as a kidnapping.Apparently it was the second dog to disappear in less than a month, and the owners were convinced it wasn’t a coincidence.I flipped to page two, then page three.There it was.I handed the paper back to my grandmother.Just as I did, Carrie found the article in her copy and read it to the rest of us: “ ‘Award-winning quilter Susanne Hendrick will be teaching a class called Journal Quilting at the newly opened Patchwork Bed-and-Breakfast owned by Rita and George Olnhausen.It will be a weeklong class, beginning April second, that will encourage participants to express their thoughts in fabric and explore techniques beyond basic quilting.Beginners and advanced quilters welcome.Contact George Olnhausen for class details and enrollment.’ ”“That’s amazing,” declared Carrie.“You’re well on your way to a teaching career.”“I love teaching classes here at the shop,” Susanne said to my grandmother, “but I want to do something beyond Someday Quilts.You know, stretch myself a bit [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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