Page 48 of The Cowboy and the Baby

“Noelle?”

“Is . . . that . . . a . . . rat?”

She pointed at the wall with the business end of the hammer, motioning to where she’d been pulling up linoleum. A fuzzy brown body vanished into a hole I thought I’d covered up. I hid a swear word.

“Ah, no. Not a rat. That was a squirrel. But at least it wasn’t a skunk, right?”

“A squirrel?”

“Yep. Thought I patched that hole, but Cody might have made a new one while framing the room. I can stuff it with steel wool and patch it again.”

“But what about the squirrel?”

I shrugged. “It’ll find its way out.”

Will it? her dubious expression seemed to ask. Her point was valid. A dead squirrel in the wall might smell foul. More than likely, it might dig its way into the basement and live there for a while, but that was a problem for another day.

Drywall dust powdered her freckled nose as she reconsidered the wall. She’d pulled her hair away from her face in a wild knot that fell to pieces around her shoulders. From the depths of Morgan’s closet, she’d pulled a pair of coveralls and wore them over a long-sleeved gray shirt. They drowned her.

I leaned against the doorway and sent a smile to Lily.

“Small rodents live in the walls sometimes, especially in the winter. This cold snap probably drove them inside. We’ll get everything patched up so it doesn’t happen again next winter, but we’ll have to deal with it for now.”

She paled.

“All winter?”

“Unfortunately.”

“How do we stop them?”

“Considering that the walls are made out of doors and patched together, at best? We fill the holes up as we find them.” I gestured to the roof. “But critters are probably up there, too. We’ll discover them as we work on it.”

“No, Cade. It must be right now. Soon. We can’t . . . we can’t have squirrels living in our walls! They make noise, right? Anyone could hear them if someone came to visit us?”

My head tilted, noting more than disgust in her expression. Her voice rotated into panic as she set the tools aside, swiped her hands on the jeans, and insisted again, “We can’t have squirrels in the walls, making noises!”

Who would come here? I thought, baffled. I held up both hands in a placating gesture.

“Sure. We won’t have squirrels in the walls, Noelle. We’ll get them out. The trick is steel wool. They can’t?—”

“Where is it?”

“What?”

“The steel wool?” She waved a hand to the wall. “I’ll put it in right now. Do we unroll it, or something? How do I patch this up? How do we make sure they never come back?”

I was speechless. What had come over her? Thus far, Noelle had been calm and rational, if not tired. She walked around in a daze, though she seemed eager to concentrate on anything that would grab her attention.

“Noelle, what’s wrong?”

A moment of fire erupted in her eyes. Maybe I made my tone too inquiring, or not soft enough. But it was too late to take it back.

“There are squirrels in the wall, Cade! That seems pretty self-explanatory!”

Cora had panicked like this before, especially in the teenage years after she’d started her period and we were both trying to figure that mess out. Like Cora then, I hoped Noelle needed someone firm. Someone who did not panic while she flailed in the water and then regained her bearings. It worked for Cora.

I hoped it worked here.