The Lover's Knot

by Clare O'Donohue

  “Your funeral,” he said. “Pick up the paint and I’ll do it.”

  So I headed out to the hardware store down the street and picked out a soft, creamy beige that would have looked dull in any other room. But when Tom put it on the wall it gave the place a nice crisp pop. Hopefully Eleanor would agree.

  Then I headed over to the police station to see Jesse.

  “Want to have lunch?” I asked.

  “Sure,” he said, pushing aside a pile of papers on his desk. “What’s under your arm?”

  “Invitations.”

  He eyed the box. “To what? The reopening of the shop?”

  “No,” I said, then wished I’d lied. “Ryan asked me to address them and put them in the mail.”

  Jesse sat back. “Wedding invitations. I guess you figured out what you wanted.”

  “I guess. He is a good guy. And sometimes it’s better to fix something than to just throw it away.”

  “Absolutely.” The flat cop tone was in his voice.

  “I have something for you,” I said, and reached into the box, pulling out an envelope. “It’s for you, and a guest, if you want to bring somebody.”

  “Thank you,” he said, eyeing the invitation as if it were a piece of evidence. “I’d be very honored.” He dropped it on his desk.

  “There’s a catch.”

  “Solve Marc’s murder first?” He smiled. “I might be able to do that.” He dumped a plastic bag on his desk. “What do you see?”

  There wasn’t much to see. A wallet, a car key, a handful of change. “What are you showing me?”

  “It’s what I’m not showing you.”

  “Are you the riddler now? Because we could be here all day if I have to list all the things you’re not showing me.”

  “When we were at Marc’s apartment, we found that key to your grandmother’s house. At first we thought it might be his apartment key, but you said that he probably would have had that with him.”

  I looked at the items again. “He didn’t, though.” I looked up at Jesse. “And if he didn’t . . .”

  “Somebody else does.” Jesse leaned back in his chair. “But who that is . . .”

  “Carrie.”

  “Carrie? Why would . . . ?”

  “I saw her the day after the murder with the same key chain that Marc had. She said it was the key to her husband’s office.”

  “You are sure it was the same key?”

  “I am absolutely certain.” I looked at the pile of Marc’s things on Jesse’s desk. Was it the same key? “I’m positive,” I said. “I think.”

  Jesse smiled. “As long as you’re sure.”

  “We should talk to Carrie.”

  He nodded. “I think I can handle that on my own. Give me about a half an hour and I’ll be ready for lunch. Is that okay?’

  “Perfect,” I said. I dropped the box of invitations on Jesse’s desk and left his office.

  “I barely knew him,” Carrie said. I was standing at the front door of her sprawling two-story home. It was getting a little cold outside, but she wasn’t letting us in.

  “When we first met you said Marc was really talented.” I stepped into the hall as Carrie unhappily moved back to make room. “You practically gushed.”

  “I did no such thing. I thought he was a talented carpenter. So, obviously, did Eleanor since she hired him to redo the shop. And what business is it of yours anyway?”

  It wasn’t, of course. “Do you have a key to your husband’s office? ” I asked.

  “Of course I have a key.”

  “Can I see it?”

  Carrie stared at me for several seconds, then walked away. I stood in the hallway, listening to the sounds of some children’s movie playing in the family room. When she came back she handed me a small set of keys on a gold chain.

  “That’s not it,” I said.

  “Of course it is. These are the keys to my husband’s office. You can drive over there yourself and try them.”

  I put them in my pocket, ignoring Carrie’s surprised expression. “I’ll do that, thanks for your help.” Then I moved outside.

  “Are we still expected to bring our blocks for the quilt on Friday? ” Carrie said, in a slightly higher pitch than normal.

  “I think so,” I said.

  “I guess I’ll see you then.” She closed the door.

  Carrie’s husband, a pediatrician in a larger town near Archers Rest, was with a patient when we arrived. He stepped out only long enough to say that his wife had called and explained why I was there.

  “You can leave the keys with me when you’re finished,” he said. He was, it seemed, close to fifty, with softly graying hair and warm hazel eyes. He was friendly and open and asked about Jesse’s daughter, who was also a patient. He even offered his own keys for us to try, saying that he often took Carrie’s set when he couldn’t easily find his own. “Here you go,” he said as he took them from his pocket. “They might be the ones you saw.”

  It was a set of keys on a leather chain, but it was a larger set than I remembered and the leather was brown, not black. “I don’t think that’s the same set,” I said to myself. But my half hour was up and I knew Jesse would be wondering where I was, so I headed back to his office.

  Jesse took me to a Chinese restaurant in the next town over and we shared plates of beef with broccoli and kung pao chicken. I felt he was studying me the entire time and it made me incredibly self-conscious, especially since I couldn’t figure out why.

  “How’s Ryan?”

  “Fine. He’s getting a cold.”

  “You must miss him.”

  “How long were you married?” I don’t know why I changed the subject, but I’d been curious and if Ryan was fair game then so was Jesse’s wife.

  “Just over five years.”

  “When did she get sick?”

  “She had cancer before I met her. She thought it was all in the past, but just after Allie was born Liz got sick again. She died almost two years ago.”

  “That must have been hard. Not just losing your wife but suddenly being a single parent.”

  “I have a lot of help.”

  “But don’t you miss being with someone?”

  “Sometimes. But you can’t get into a new relationship until you’re over the things that happened in the old one.”

  “My grandmother says the two of you had the kind of love even she envied.”

  He stared out the window for what seemed like several minutes. Finally he leaned back in his seat. “So they weren’t the right keys.”

  I nearly choked on a piece of beef. “What?”

  “I called Carrie to ask her about the keys and she told me you had stopped by for a visit.”

  I couldn’t tell if he was angry or amused, and there was no point in denying it, so I told him about my frustrating visit to Carrie and then her husband.

  “You might be wrong about the color of the leather. Witnesses often get small details wrong,” he said. “At the time the keys weren’t important, so why would you remember?”

  “I had seen Marc’s keys,” I argued. “If they’re not with Carrie and they’re not with his stuff at the apartment or in the evidence bag, where are they?”

  Jesse stared at me for a while, then said quietly, “The shop.”

  After lunch Jesse dropped me at the shop, and while he was there he searched outside, just in case. Then we went inside, where Jesse stood for a minute taking in the changes to the once crowded quilt shop.

  “This place is going to be beautiful,” he said. Tom and I both smiled proudly. We looked around. Tom was already building the new table for cutting fabric, and his assistant was attaching shelving at the far end of the shop.

  “At least things aren’t going to be falling all over each other anymore, ” I said.

  Jesse smiled at me. “I’ll bet Eleanor will be thrilled with what you’ve done.” I blushed. I hoped so.

  “The keys,” I reminded Jesse.

  “Tom,” h
e said to his former brother-in-law. “Did you find a set of keys on a leather key chain?”

  Tom shook his head. “The ladies had the place cleaned out before we started to work.”

  “It could have gotten into a box and taken to Eleanor’s. If Marc put them on a shelf or left them on a table . . . ,” I offered.

  “I thought of that. But we took crime scene photos. I looked at them this morning. No keys.”

  “Carrie could be lying.”

  “She could,” he said. “So could you.” I wasn’t sure if he was kidding or not. His voice was so steady and lacked intonation that I didn’t know how to react.

  “So could you,” I said, a little cocky.

  “What’s my motive?”

  “Bored police chief. Looking for something to do. You killed Marc so you could spend a few weeks solving the crime.”

  He smiled. “I’ll take my statement and fingerprints later. Right now you need to tell me if there’s anywhere in here a set of keys could have gotten hidden?”

  “What about in that pile of quilts that was sitting on the countertop?”

  “We opened each one before we released them to Eleanor. Of course we kept the one next to Marc’s body.”

  “I wonder why he grabbed it.”

  “Probably to steady himself. It seems to me that after he was stabbed he must have turned around and grabbed the counter, holding on to that quilt.” Jesse took a few steps toward the door. “Then he must have walked over to the door . . .”

  “Maybe tried to grab his killer as he fled.”

  Jesse nodded. “But instead he fell by the door. Losing his keys and fifteen thousand dollars in the process.”

  “I thought you weren’t convinced he still had the money.”

  “I’m keeping my options open. You can’t pick a theory and try to prove it. You just have to follow the facts wherever they lead you.”

  “All right,” I said. I decided to ignore what I assumed was his dig at my insistence that Ryan was innocent. “If we are following the keys, then everything that was in the shop is now at my grandmother’s.”

  CHAPTER 47

  “What is he looking for?” Eleanor asked me as Jesse methodically examined each basket, box, and bin that had come from the shop.

  “Let’s go in the kitchen,” I said. “I’m starving.”

  Though I was a long way from becoming the kind of cook my grandmother was, I was getting comfortable in the kitchen. I boiled some pasta and made a rosemary butter sauce. I followed Eleanor’s recipe but threw in a few ingredients of my own.

  “Not bad,” Eleanor said. “It has a bit of spice to it.” She leaned in. “Did you get your invitations mailed?”

  “Oh, God. I left them somewhere.”

  “You lost them?”

  “No. I didn’t lose my wedding invitations. I just put them down somewhere.” Eleanor rolled her eyes just slightly, but it was enough. “I did not do it on purpose.”

  “Am I interrupting?” Jesse stood in the doorway.

  “Did you find what you were looking for?” Eleanor turned to him.

  “No. I didn’t.”

  “Well, then sit and have some dinner. Some good might as well have come of the trip.”

  So Jesse sat and ate some pasta and had a slice of cake from one of Eleanor’s regular customers. We talked about the shop and the town and everything we could think of except the murder.

  “How bad is the quilt?” Eleanor asked with a serious, quiet tone. “The quilt found near poor Marc’s body.”

  “How bad? You mean is there blood on it?” Jesse asked. She nodded. “There isn’t much, actually. Marc had blood on his hand and it got on some of the fabric near the corner.”

  “I could probably get it out. Or I could repair it,” she said. “If I can get it back soon, I probably can fix it. I’ve had that quilt in the shop since day one. It would feel very strange not to have it hanging there when we reopen.”

  “I wish I could guarantee that.”

  She nodded, a sadness across her face. “I’m off to bed then. You young people have yourselves more cake and coffee.”

  Alone in the kitchen, Jesse finished the last of his coffee and looked out at the darkened hallway beyond the kitchen. “I think it’s pretty amazing that your grandmother lives here all alone. This place has to get a little spooky at night.”

  I smiled. “It does. Especially when you’re here by yourself. The night Eleanor went into the hospital, I could have sworn someone was trying to break in. It freaked me out.”

  He sat up. “Why didn’t you call?”

  “Yeah. I was going to call the police to tell them I was scared.”

  “That’s what we’re here for.”

  “It was nothing. I came downstairs and looked around. There wasn’t anybody here. The door was open, but it was a really windy night. And it’s an old door.” Jesse got up and checked the door. It was locked securely. I smiled at how protective he suddenly was, and then I looked to his left at the small shelf near the door. “The key.”

  “The key?” he looked at me.

  “When my grandmother went into the hospital, I couldn’t find the key to the car. Marc drove me to the shop. Then later that night the door is somehow open, and the next morning, I found the key. It had to be Marc.”

  “You think he made a duplicate?” Jesse’s eyes darted around the kitchen. “What would he want to take?”

  “There isn’t anything here. I told him, too, but he didn’t seem to believe me.”

  “So he’s not trying to take anything.”

  I shook my head. “Maybe he wanted to leave something here.”

  Jesse looked at me as if he were taking it all in. “You think the fifteen grand is here?”

  I jumped up. “Oh, God. Do you think it could be?”

  “I went through all the stuff taken from the shop when I was looking for his key.”

  “So it wasn’t hidden with that stuff. It’s somewhere else.”

  “You don’t think Eleanor would have found it?” Jesse was whispering now and I started to lower my voice in response.

  “No. She can barely get around. And if she had . . .”

  “Yeah, she would have said something.”

  “Okay,” I said, my heart beating louder than my voice. “It can’t be upstairs because I would have heard someone coming up the steps.”

  “It isn’t in the dining room, because I’ve searched that.” Jesse was looking around. “Plus, he didn’t have that much time. You said you got up and started to come downstairs.”

  “I did—I listened for a minute or so, then I got up.”

  “So, maybe the kitchen.” Jesse got up and started walking around the room. He opened cabinets and starting emptying shelves. “Look in the jars,” he said.

  I opened the flour and sugar canisters. I went through the tea bags, the coffee beans, the baking soda—anything that was open. There was no money.

  Eventually most of the kitchen cabinets were on the counter. Jesse had spent an hour looking through the entryway and came up equally empty-handed.

  “Well, it was an idea,” he said as he came back to find me putting things away in the kitchen.

  “You don’t think he would have hid anything in the living room?”

  “That would be something. Right under Eleanor’s nose.” He smiled. “I’ll talk to her tomorrow about going through the living room.”

  “I can look,” I said, but Jesse was already shaking his head.

  “I’ve got all the deputies I need, thanks.”

  When Jesse left, I sat in the kitchen and listened to the silence. He was right. The house did feel spooky. The idea that Marc had— possibly—come into the house to hide something left me a little unnerved. But if he had, there was a bigger question. Why hide it here? Was Marc afraid of someone, someone who knew he had come into a large amount of money? That thought was comforting to me because it meant that the killer could have been one of Marc’s gambling buddies. Th
e other, more frightening, thought sat at the back of my mind. Susanne’s theory that someone had killed Marc to protect a loved one. A loved one like Natalie and baby Jeremy. Or a loved one like me.

  CHAPTER 48

  The next morning Eleanor was up early and hobbling around in the kitchen, so I figured it was safe to search her room. I tried to get Barney to be my watchdog and sit at the door to the I tried to get Barney to be my watchdog and sit at the door to the living room, but he interpreted my hand gestures as an invitation to play, so I wasted five valuable minutes roughhousing with him in the hallway.

  When he was finally tired he plopped down in the doorway. I just looked at him for a moment. Poor old thing. It must be tough to have the enthusiasm of a puppy in the body of a deaf old dog. But he seemed happy enough, savoring the joys of a few pats on the head or a few minutes of play. Maybe Barney knew what I was only beginning to see. That you have to make a little happiness for yourself wherever you can, rather than dream about what may be down the road.

  As I stood in the doorway changing my life philosophy once again, I heard noises from the kitchen. I could either stand there or do what I came to do. I moved slowly into the room.

  Where to start? When Marc broke into the house the night Eleanor was in the hospital—if Marc broke into the house—then none of the bedroom furniture or television would have been here. There weren’t a lot of hiding places. The room, like all of Eleanor’s rooms, was sparsely furnished. I looked behind the curtains. Nothing. Under the rug. Nothing. I stuck my hand up the fireplace. Eleanor never used the fireplace. “Waste of good wood and good central heating,” she said at least a hundred times. I felt around. There was . . . something. A piece of tape. I inched my fingers up a little higher and felt a bulge against the wall of the fireplace. It was paper, taped to the wall. But I could only touch the corner of it.

  “Nell,” Eleanor was calling from the other room. I ignored her. “Nell, are you awake?”

  “I’ll be right there,” I yelled back. “Are you okay?”

  “Coffee’s ready. And it’s hot.”

  I strained my arm as high as it could go and felt a slight cramping in my shoulder. I had promised myself a dozen times that I was going to spend twenty minutes every day stretching. If I had known it would have such a practical use I would have done it. Oh, well, tomorrow, I thought in another likely to be broken promise.