The Double Wedding Ring

by Clare O'Donohue

  “Oliver,” my grandmother scolded. “Don’t say such a thing.”

  “Why bring the encyclopedias first?” my dad asked. “Why not clothes and furniture?”

  “Most of that stuff is going down to South Carolina,” Oliver said. “We just bought a house down there.”

  My dad looked at Eleanor and then at me. “Does your mom know that?”

  Instead of answering I looked outside the back window into the cold and dark. “She’s not coming back in,” I said. I grabbed two jackets and put one on me. “I’m going to get her. It’s freezing out there.”

  “Remind her dinner is almost ready,” my dad said. “She’s a great cook, and she knows not to let a good meal spoil.”

  She wasn’t on the back porch, so I walked to the path through the trees and toward the river. My grandmother’s yard bordered the Hudson, and there was an eerie quietness to it, especially in winter. It didn’t help that the river was a sheet of black at night. As a kid I thought the yard was haunted, but now, even on the darkest nights, it seemed peaceful.

  “Mom,” I called out when I spotted her standing by the river’s edge, staring off into the water. “Getting pneumonia isn’t going to help anything.”

  She turned to me. She’d been crying. She took the coat I handed her and put it on. Even though we both were still shivering, it didn’t seem as though she was anxious to go inside.

  “I didn’t mean to sound like that,” she said. “I know he’s a good man, Nell, and you’re smart enough to choose the right future for yourself. It’s just that it feels like you were on one path in New York and now . . .”

  “And now it’s all different.”

  “After your engagement broke off you came here because it was comforting. And maybe now you’re staying because you’ve gotten used to playing it safe.”

  “Is it just because you couldn’t wait to leave Archers Rest when you were growing up that you think I must feel the same way?”

  “No.” She hesitated. “It’s not just that. I don’t have anything against this town. It’s filled with good people living good lives.”

  “But . . .”

  She pulled the coat tighter, and I could see that she was considering her words. “When you were a little girl, you would do these giant jigsaw puzzles, the ones with a thousand pieces.”

  “I remember.”

  “You would be looking for one piece, a duck’s bill or a leaf from a tree, and you would get stuck on it. You would search and search and search. I’d tell you to let it go and move on to another part of the puzzle, but you wouldn’t, Nell. You would keep at it.”

  “And I would find it. Isn’t that a good thing?”

  “Yes, but sometimes you get so caught up in the details that you don’t step back and look at the bigger picture. That attention to detail is probably what draws you to quilting, and makes you good at whatever it is you do to help Jesse with his police work, but it can hamper you, too,” she said. “All I’m asking is for you to take your nose out of the puzzle long enough to see what else is out there.”

  “I promise. I’ll look at the big picture. I’ll really think about the kind of future I want,” I said. “But you can’t decide for me.”

  “If you tell me you want to marry Jesse and live your life in Archers Rest, and you’re one hundred percent sure, I’ll be happy.”

  I linked my arm through hers. “What’s best for me right now is not freezing to death fifty feet from the house.”

  As we walked back, I thought about what she said. I did tend to get lost in the details. The big picture can be messy and overwhelming, while focusing on a small spot—a clue, a stitch, the day in front of me—feels manageable. It was always my belief that the small things add up—if you gather enough clues it may lead toward a killer; enough stitches and you finish a quilt—but I could see that it might not work that way with the rest of my life. Focusing just on the day I’m in may not lead me where I want to go unless I had an idea of the destination.

  Jesse wasn’t much older than I was chronologically, but in terms of his view of life, it seemed sometimes that we were generations apart. I loved Allie, but if I took her on as my child to raise, it would mean big changes for me. And with or without Jesse, did I want to live in Archers Rest for the rest of my life? I hadn’t thought about that either, maybe deliberately. I’d always been uncomfortable about wedding talk and I thought one day I would just be sure. Asking myself those questions made it seem like there was a chance I wouldn’t be in Jesse and Allie’s lives, and even the possibility of that was too hard to think about.

  But now I’d spent a year with my nose pressed against a puzzle, looking only at a tiny piece of it. My mother was right. It was time to move back from the thrill of the latest quilt, or the most interesting clue in an investigation, and look at the whole picture of my life.

  CHAPTER 23

  Jesse couldn’t stay for dinner, but he did want to talk. I told the others to start without me, and Jesse and I went to the living room and closed the door. I sat on the couch while he paced back and forth across the area rug.

  “Where’s Allie?”

  “Home, with Anna. She was teaching Allie how to make meat loaf or something.”

  A twinge of jealousy, quickly suppressed. Anna was an old friend going through a hard time, and just because Allie and I often cooked together didn’t mean it was “our thing.” I let go of my own pettiness, or at least tried to. “I’m sorry about my mom,” I said.

  “I’m sorry about this afternoon. About what I said at the station.”

  “It is your investigation, Jesse, but I am only trying to help.”

  He sat down next to me, started to say something, then shook his head. It was as if he were rehearsing the conversation and finding a flaw each time. Finally he spoke, but his words were measured and unemotional. “That man you met in town, he’s not thinking of moving here. That was a lie.”

  “So you do know him?”

  He stared straight ahead, his hands in his lap. “He was on the force with Roger and me. Years ago. I noticed his car yesterday after Roger’s body was found. Always on Main Street, always parked within a few yards of Someday.”

  “And so you gave him tickets instead of talking to him?”

  “It’s an old vice trick. Bob Marshall was the one who taught it to me. We would ticket cars for all sorts of stupid reasons, cars we knew belonged to the bad guys, as a way of letting them know we knew they were there. We were watching them.”

  “Why not just arrest them?”

  “We didn’t have enough evidence to arrest them.”

  “But if you telegraphed that you were watching them, wouldn’t it just make them more careful?”

  “Not really,” Jesse said. “It’s a stressor. It made them paranoid. Even when we weren’t watching, they thought we were. Instead of being more careful, people under stress make mistakes. Then we’d get them.”

  “And that’s what you wanted to do with Bob Marshall?”

  He shook his head. “I just wanted him to know that I remembered the old days. He was always pulling at me to cut corners. He would say he knew some guy was guilty. He just needed help proving it.”

  “He was a bad cop.”

  “He was a lazy cop. But Roger made sure we all stayed in line. Even Marshall. Roger wanted it done right.”

  “So what now?”

  “Hopefully he leaves town.”

  “What if he’s the killer?”

  “He’s not.”

  “How do you know?”

  Jesse laced and unlaced his fingers like a nervous tic. “I don’t.”

  “Then why don’t you question him?”

  “It’s not going to get me anywhere. He’s a cop. He knows what I’ll ask, and how I’ll ask it. He taught me.”

  “Then maybe I should—”

/>   “No.” The first word he’d spoken that had anything close to emotion in it. “Absolutely not, Nell. You just let me handle it.”

  “What don’t I know?” I took a deep breath to prepare myself for whatever he might tell me. But there was only silence. “Jesse, you are a great police officer. Even if Bob Marshall knows how interrogations work, you would find a way to get the answers you needed. You wouldn’t let a potential killer just leave town. I know Roger’s murder has something to do with your days in the city, with your time on vice, doesn’t it?”

  “No, it doesn’t,” he said. “I swear to you, Nell. It has nothing to do with me. I don’t know what it’s about, and I have no idea why Roger was parked outside my house, but I can promise you it has nothing to do with my time on the force with him. It can’t. We pushed the edges here and there, trying to get suspects to give themselves away, but we never crossed the line. Not once.”

  “Maybe one of those edges, one of those suspects . . .”

  Jesse looked into my eyes. While he likely saw concern and confusion there, I only saw sadness in his. “I never broke the law,” he said.

  “But the tickets you gave to Marshall . . .”

  “I told you it was just a reminder. I didn’t put them in the system, so they’re not on his record. It was just . . .” He seemed flustered.

  “Okay, this isn’t about you,” I said. “I believe that. But there’s more to this than you’re telling me.”

  Jesse stood up. “I need to get home to Allie. She barely knows Anna, so she’s going to start feeling weird about my being gone too long.” He grabbed my hand, pulled me up next to him, and hugged me. “I’m a good man, Nell Fitzgerald, and I love you. Do you believe that?”

  “Of course.”

  “No matter what happens, you keep believing that, okay?”

  “Jesse . . .”

  “Tell me.”

  “You’re a good man and you love me. And I’ll believe that no matter what.”

  He kissed my forehead and walked away from me. I heard the living room door open, and heard him in the hallway. I stayed where I was until I heard the front door close, then I sat down on the couch. At first I just stared into space, trying to go over the conversation, examining every word. But then I realized I’d fallen into the trap my mother warned me against, and I stepped back, looked at the bigger picture—the murder, Jesse’s reluctance to share what he knew with me, the words he’d said as he left. And I burst into tears.

  CHAPTER 24

  That night and into the next morning it snowed hard. By the time I sat in the kitchen eating Cheerios, there was nearly a foot on the ground and more expected later in the day. My mother and grandmother sparred over me, over my parents’ travels and what Eleanor should do with the house during the months she and Oliver would be in South Carolina. While my dad read the paper in what can only be called willful deafness, I ate quietly, still exhausted from thinking about what Jesse had said.

  Barney sat staring at his quilt-covered dog bed, which was now occupied by a sleeping kitten. Barney, the ever-protective big brother, didn’t seem to mind being kicked out of his favorite napping place. He just stood and watched her. While so many other relationships seemed to be moving toward arguments and tears, Patch and Barney were slowly finding a détente and maybe, hopefully, a friendship.

  At nine o’clock, Eleanor drove her SUV into town, with Patch in tow, and I walked Barney the half mile from the house to the shop. I was freezing, but Barney was in the dog version of heaven. He sniffed and sneezed, and rolled around in the wet, cold snow every chance he had. He’d wandered into the street when a car came around the corner, but Barney didn’t seem to notice it. With his hearing gone, and the snow a wonderful distraction, the old dog nearly met his end. I grabbed him and pulled him back as the car, a blue sedan, passed by. Bob Marshall waved. I waved back, almost instinctively, but I also felt watched. He knew my path to town in the morning. Not that it meant anything, I told myself. Most of the town knew that I usually walked the dog into work. I debated whether to call Jesse, but decided against it. He would only warn me again to stay away from the investigation, and his reluctance to say why would just make me worry.

  Once I got to the shop, I put Barney in the office, but he whined and scratched at the door until I opened it and let him find his favorite spot in the shop, another quilt-covered dog bed near the sale fabrics. It was a popular part of the store, both for the sales and the dog, and Barney liked it because it was near the heating vent. Barney looked for his new friend, hoping to build on the growing trust they’d started to have. But Patch didn’t share his enthusiasm. She found herself backed up against the wall with Barney’s large teeth blocking her escape. I grabbed the old dog and pulled him away.

  “She’s playing hard to get,” I told him. “Give her time.”

  Barney, who never had to work this hard to be loved, found the whole thing pretty stressful. Relationships are hard for everyone, I guess. I warned him to stay away from Patch, who’d used the opportunity to jump onto a shelf. After rubbing up against a few fabrics, in the true spirit of a quilter, she found herself a home on a pile of flannel fabrics just out of the dog’s reach. At first Barney sniffed and whined about that, too, but he eventually settled down in his bed and napped.

  There were no customers in the first hour we were open, and the snow was still coming down. Eleanor went to her office to do the monthly bills, and I headed into the classroom to work on the gazebo quilt. A log cabin with appliqué flowers was unfinished at another table. Before Christmas I’d tried out a new product Eleanor had ordered—preprinted designs for paper piecing. Paper piecing is nothing new for quilters, but designers are always looking for ways to improve the technique. Patterns can be drawn or printed onto paper, and then the quilter sews fabric directly onto the paper, using the lines as a guide, allowing for absolute precision and complicated designs. The trick is using paper that can easily be torn off once the design is complete. The new product promised to be both sturdy enough to hold up to machine piecing and light enough to tear away without leaving little bits of paper stuck in the thread.

  The design we had to try was the classic double wedding ring. The pattern uses small pieces sewn in an arc to create the illusion of interlocking circles. An oval with pointed ends, referred to as the “melon,” and a diamond-shaped centerpiece made up the background. It’s a complicated quilt, not meant for beginners, but that’s the point. There are a few quilts that most traditional quilters have on their “bucket list”—beautiful, challenging, and heirloom worthy. The double wedding ring is one of them.

  I’d sewn about two dozen arcs, and had lots of cut pieces waiting, without any idea of when I would get to them. I didn’t mind the chaos, though. Having multiple, unfinished projects going at once is the sign of a real quilter. At least that’s what everyone in the group kept telling me.

  My conversation with Jesse had kept me up most of the night, and when I was able to finally let it go, my mother’s words would pop into my head. It didn’t help that I was on the sofa bed in Eleanor’s sewing room, or that I could hear my father’s snoring down the hall. I was glad when morning finally came and I saw the snow, because I knew it would mean a quiet day to sit and quilt. And that’s what I needed almost as much as I needed sleep.

  I moved from the double wedding ring to the gazebo quilt when I tired of sewing arches. The work went quickly. By the time noon came, I had the trees already appliquéd. They were simple, elongated triangles in various greens, with small brown rectangles as the trunks. Nothing flashy or precise, but the colors and shapes stood out well against the sky. I laid the first piece of gazebo on and was pinning it in place when I heard movement in the main part of the store.

  “I’m going across the street to get coffee and sandwiches.” Eleanor walked into the classroom and saw my appliqué pieces spread out on the worktables. “What’s that? Is this
a new one?”

  “Don’t look. It’s your wedding gift.”

  “But you and the girls made the quilt I’m not supposed to know about.”

  “This one is from just me.”

  “Can I know about this one?”

  “No.”

  She smiled at me. “Okay, then, I’ll bring you back some lunch. And while I’m gone maybe I’ll do a thing or two that I won’t tell you about.”

  “That’ll teach me to keep secrets, Grandma.”

  I listened as Eleanor walked toward the front door and went out, then I went back to my work. I’d barely moved my needle when the bell on the front door rang.

  “Did you forget something?” I called out.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Oh, sorry.” I dropped my work onto the table and headed into the main part of the shop. Anna was there in blue jeans and a bright blue coat, looking stylish but tired.

  “I’ve interrupted you,” she said.

  “Not really. It’s just such a quiet day I’ve been in the back sewing. Are you here for some fabric?”

  She smiled. “No, I was just wanting to see the shop. Allie was talking about it over dinner and it sounded lovely.” She looked around. “And it is.”

  She walked around the store, stopping at various displays. As she did, she’d run her fingers across the fabric admiringly. “I own an interior design business,” she said. “I’m always looking for really unique things to offer clients. Do you sell quilts?”

  “No. Just the ingredients. We can teach you how to make one, though.”

  “I don’t think I have the talent. But I do have an eye for beauty. I think that’s a kind of gift,” she said. “At least I have a lot of clients who think so.” She smiled and kept moving. When she reached the flannels, she let out a yelp.

  “Are you allergic?” I asked and rushed to grab Patch.

  “No, I’m just surprised. It’s nice. You have a kitten.”

  “And a dog.” I pointed toward Barney, who had woken up and was now circling in his bed trying to find just the right spot. When he did, he dropped down with a grunt and buried his head in his paws. It seemed he was still nursing his wounds from Patch’s rejection.