“Where’s my diary?”
“Last night,” Bella bites her nails, “a mouse knocked over the kerosene lamp. The diary caught fire.”
“Missy?” Bella scours our room, next morning.
“Oh, the mouse grabbed Missy. I chased. It dropped Missy by the fireplace,” I pull the blackened doll from my pajamas.
That is one strong mouse! Do I detect a naughty sibling?
I like the tit-for-tat bickering of the children here, and the scapegoating of the poor mouse. 🙂 I think the story might have been a little clearer if you’d established the point-of-view character right at the beginning – I thought this was a 3rd person story told from Bella’s POV until the “I” in the very last sentence.
Methinks either that mouse was a rat or the sibling’s pants are on fire 🙂