Quilt Trip: A Southern Quilting Mystery Read Online Free PDF

harder than she thought she would. Meadow’s snoring made for a white noise, while the cold air in the room and the stress of the day set the stage for a deep sleep.
    The sound of a creaking door—all the doors on the second floor had that annoying trait—woke her up briefly. Beatrice made an attempt to read her watch in the dark before finally giving up. If it was pitch black outside, then clearly it wasn’t time to wake up yet. She rolled over and went back to sleep.
    The next time Beatrice woke up, the sun was just starting to light up the room. She and Meadow had left the heavy curtains open, hoping a small amount of moonlight would illuminate their room overnight. Now the sun was lighting the room up quickly. She got up, feeling the cold floor on her feet, and walked to the window. Although it wasn’t as cloudy as it had been the day before, the landscape outside the window was completely iced over. There would be no leaving until that sheet of ice melted.
    They hadn’t made plans for breakfast since no one was particularly excited about their ordeal. It would probably be oatmeal and cornflakes—and there might not be enough milk to go around. And the meal would quite possibly be accompanied by arguing or drama. Muriel Starnes was the kind of person who stirred up the passions of people around her while remaining unaffected herself.
    Beatrice turned her cell phone on to see whether she had better reception upstairs than she’d had downstairs. There were no signal bars on her phone, though, and she saw to her dismay that she only had about twenty-five percent charge remaining. She quickly turned the phone back off.
    Beatrice heard signs of stirring out in the hall, so she smoothed down her clothes—which
did
look as if she’d slept in them—and walked downstairs to the kitchen. There she saw Winnie, trying out an older-model cell phone and making a face.
    “Nothing?” asked Beatrice.
    Winnie shook her head and glared at her phone. “I was hoping that maybe I could get a signal, but we’re really in a bad spot here. I really want to get out of here.”
    Beatrice wondered over that a little. She could understand wanting to get out of there—she wanted to leave, too. It was inconvenient, it was cold, there were no changes of clothes, meals required a good deal of creativity, and the tension in the house was strange and strong. But the sheer desperation in Winnie’s voice was perplexing.
    “I knew I shouldn’t have come here,” Winnie continued with frustration in her voice. “But my guild really pushed me to come to make a pitch for us to be in charge of that scholarship. Muriel had sent an invitation directly to me. I knew I should have thrown it in the trash.”
    Beatrice frowned. “I wonder how she knew who to contact in each guild? Muriel seems so isolated here.”
    “She probably has a computer of some kind here,” Winnie said with a shrug. “She’s a sharp businesswoman and probably manages her own stocks and things like that. It helps if you have a computer.”
    “Why isn’t Muriel keeping up her house better, then? If she is so successful and has such good business sense?” asked Beatrice.
    Winnie gave her an irritated scowl. “Who knows? And I, for one, don’t care. If I had to guess, I’d say that she simply doesn’t care about the house. If she cares about something, she’ll pour money into it. Or maybe she’s just too cheap to put money into an old house.”
    The possibility of a computer was good news, at any rate. Hadn’t Meadow said that Muriel didn’t have any electronics in the house? “Let’s track the computer down, then! We can e-mail the police department or our friends and get out of here.”
    “No power, remember?” Winnie reminded her in a gloomy tone.
    No power. It was very easy to forget that, when you were so used to having it.
    Dot Giles joined them, along with Holly Weaver. “What are y’all thinking about for breakfast?” Dot asked, pulling open the