Purple Knot

by Raquel Byrnes

  “Can we go to the library?”

  “The library? What do you have in mind?”

  Salem patted his laptop bag and smiled. “I have the file Chuy faxed. You’ll want to look at it right away. The library is only a few minutes out of the way, right?”

  “Yeah, it’s a couple of streets down from the law office.” Jimmy glanced at Salem in the rear-view mirror.

  I was impressed. I’d been in Seattle for a couple of days now and had no idea where Parker’s lawyer practiced.

  “OK, then, its settled. I’ll hunker down with Reyna at the library, and you can pick us up when you’re done being grilled.”

  Jimmy nodded.

  I hadn’t realized I’d been worried they’d get along until I breathed a sigh of relief.

  Jimmy dropped us off just outside the angular window and metal building. He leaned over, kissed me softly, and sent the blood rushing into my face. I glanced over at Salem, but he was busy looking at his sneakers.

  We took the breezeway and the sun flashed through the diamond-shaped windows as we walked. Salem looked up, as most first time visitors do, at the see-through floor four stories above. He whistled appreciatively. “This place must be amazing during a rainstorm.”

  “You may get a chance to experience that first hand.” I eyed the gray clouds roiling overhead and smiled.

  We walked past the first floor shelves and through the to the information wall with its scrolling updates. Salem loved technology and this library did not disappoint. I led him up the red stairs, through the red hallways, and into the red room that made up the second floor.

  Salem took it all in silently.

  The building truly was beautiful both inside and out. When we moved to the reading room and closed the door behind us Salem set up his laptop and pulled out the file from Chuy.

  Surely Salem had seen the kiss. Surely he’d say something. But he didn’t. He arranged his papers and sat down, hands folded in front of him, like a parochial school boy. I decided that two could play the coy game. “So anything interesting turn up in Parker’s financial records?”

  Salem looked at me for a few seconds, a smile on his face, and then slid the folder across the table to me.

  I leafed through the report. Chuy had been very thorough. I had a list of all of Parker’s credit cards and their balances. Behind that was an itemized list of charges going back two months. Chuy had included a list of phone numbers attached to Parker’s name. There were six. I decided to call them later. I scanned the itemized list of his credit card expenditures.

  One thing popped out at me. It was a verification tag on a query from a place called Glen-Willow. The charge was so large that it triggered a security feature on Parker’s credit card. I had the same feature. The card company will call and verify by phone that one made the purchase. From the amount involved, they should have checked. Glen-Willow put a hold on eighty-five thousand dollars on Parker’s credit card. I looked at Salem who was typing on his laptop.

  “What’s Glen-Willow?”

  “Well that’s what I’m looking up.” He found the website relatively easily. Glen-Willow was an in-patient facility for drug rehabilitation.

  “What in the world?” I blinked at the screen.

  “Yeah,” Salem agreed.

  “I don’t think Parker had an addiction problem.”

  I tried to understand why he would go there. Was he selling to this facility? My gaze drifted to the credit card list and then I saw it. I rubbed my eyes with both hands, fighting back the frustration.

  “What?” Salem asked.

  “Look at the date and time for the hold on that eighty-five thousand.” I pointed to the paper.

  “Does this mean we just found an alibi for Parker?” Salem asked.

  I slammed my hand down on the table and blinked back tears. According to his credit card, Parker Evans checked into rehab the day before Summer was killed. I just proved he didn’t do it.

  Salem gave me a worried look.

  “He still could have hired someone.”

  I nodded and walked to the far wall of the reading room and looked out the window.

  “Reyna?”

  “Then we go at this differently.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Drug addicts leave a wide wake of destruction in their personal lives. Maybe this is not what it seems.”

  “I don’t know what you’re saying.” Salem shook his head and looked back at the laptop as if it held all the answers.

  I paced back and forth. The conversation with my new defense lawyer was starting to make sense. This bomb she was worried about. It was more like a Hail Mary. Feeding a habit takes money. Much more money than I would think Parker could hide spending. I was wondering if he made the same mistakes most addicts make. I wondered if he thought he’d hidden all traces of his problem.

  “We need to make a visit to Parker’s company today.”

  “I’m sorry…what? You want to go root around in the guy’s home turf?”

  I nodded and sat down at the table and made some notes. Jimmy should finish soon. I was wondering how to handle his inevitable objection to my going to Parker’s office. I watched Salem out of the corner of my eye. He was doing the knee bounce thing again.

  “Do you have something to say?”

  “Are you going to tell me what’s going on with you and Jimmy?” Salem stopped his leg.

  “Salem…”

  “I saw the kiss. I saw your face. You’ve got it bad for him again, and I don’t even know what to say, Reyna. I mean, this is the Jimmy I’ve seen you torture yourself over for the last three years. Now you’re kissing him all lovey-dovey like…what happened?”

  “Lovey-dovey?” I gave him a blank stare.

  “Never mind, you’re right, it’s none of my business.” Salem threw his arms up and turned back to the laptop. He was peeved.

  “I don’t torture myself.” I pushed the laptop screen down trapping his fingers on the keys.

  “You haven’t dated anyone. Not since I started working for you, and it’s not like Sirena at the restaurant hasn’t tried to set you up. I’ve heard you talk with him about Summer on the phone and then brood for days afterward. I’m not blind.” Salem shot me a look and rolled his eyes.

  “OK.” He was right. I always chalked it up to my being too busy, but I knew that wasn’t true. I hadn’t wanted anyone else.

  “No, that’s fine. I know that you’re a private person.” Salem pulled his hands out off the keyboard and started packing up his gear.

  I leaned forward and put my hand across the papers Salem was trying to grab. “Jimmy and I sort of got back together.”

  “What? Like officially?” Salem’s face registered shock.

  I wasn’t sure, actually. I mean, what does getting a boat signify?

  “Well, what happened was this…” I told Salem about the conversation in Jimmy’s car, about wanting to give us a try again. His eyebrows shot up when I told him about how I thought I’d lost my engagement ring, and how Jimmy insisted I keep it. Finally I told him about the boat, and he stood up with his mouth open, aghast. “He gave you a yacht? A custom yacht? I have to see this thing!”

  “Salem, just calm down, OK?”

  He crossed his arms in front of his chest and leaned against the wall looking at me. “It sounds official to me,” he said finally. “What’s the problem?”

  I looked at Salem and wondered how I could ever explain the problem. Oh, you know, sex and religion, death and salvation; the usual relationship kinds of things. Instead I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands and took a breath. “It’s complicated.”

  “Yah,” he intoned. “Fortunately English is my first language so I think I can keep up.” He sat back in his chair and looked up at me with a smile. “So get started.”

  I took a breath. “Well, you know that Jimmy and I were engaged four years ago.”

  “Yeah, but you never would say why it ended. What happened?”

&n
bsp; “What happened…” I closed my eyes. Outside the rain started and I was hit by the melodic sound it made on the many window panes of the library. Shafts of sunlight slit through the dark clouds overhead. It was beautiful. “Jimmy and I started dating right after his father died. We were high school seniors. I got a scholarship to University of Washington, so that’s where Jimmy went. We were both in pre-law.”

  “You were almost a lawyer?” Salem looked at me askance.

  “Jimmy was…he was a really strong Christian when we were kids. I mean, he would always try to drag me to church and I would go, but I wasn’t serious. I’d go to hang out with him and Summer. But after his father died…”

  “He fell away.” Salem said quietly.

  I looked at him and nodded.

  “He never mentioned church or his faith and when we went off to college we sort of fell into this campus lifestyle. Being away from his family and by then, my father had passed, it was just us. So when we got engaged our senior year, I thought everything would be fine.”

  “You seem perfect for each other.”

  The sound of the rain made me feel cold and I hugged myself in the warm reading room.

  “Jimmy’s mother Mona even made a special trip to yell at him in the campus quad, but he didn’t change his mind. He loved me and we were getting married.”

  “I still don’t see how this could have a bad ending,” Salem said.

  “I got pregnant a month after we were engaged.”

  “So?” Salem shrugged

  “So that gave Mona’s twisted mind a reason that he would want to marry me. So she made sure to tell anyone who would listen that I’d tricked Jimmy into marriage by seducing him and getting pregnant.”

  “What a witch.”

  “He was so angry that he wouldn’t go home for Christmas vacation. We opted to stay on campus and by default, missed out on any time with his sister, Summer. I knew he was troubled with all of the fighting but I could tell it was more than what was going on with his family. He started to take long walks by himself and when he came back he’d be quiet and brooding.”

  “Where was he going?”

  “I never asked but I had a suspicion. But then, one day in February I was coming home from my job with Maurice…”

  “The private investigator guy,” Salem finished for me.

  “I was driving home and stopped at the book store. I had picked up some books I needed.” I remembered the smell of the bookstore’s coffee shop and the pink baby on the cover of the maternity book I bought. “On my way home I was in a car accident.”

  Salem’s face fell. He’d seen the scar on my upper arm from the operation to pin my bones back together. He’d just never seen the one on my upper thigh. My femur had snapped in half. I’d torn my liver. I’d nearly died.

  “Oh, no, Reyna. You didn’t…”

  “I lost the baby in the accident. I spent weeks in the hospital, and when I got out, Jimmy had moved off campus and into an apartment. He had a nurse help me out, but he was never there.”

  “What do you mean he was never there?”

  I got up and walked to the window. I searched the lobby of the library for Jimmy but he was still at the lawyer’s office. “Well, at first, he was at school all the time. He was studying for his LSATs and spent hours after classes in study groups. But then, he would find reasons to stay overnight at a buddy’s house. Or he’d come see me but when he talked about the apartment it was like it was mine, only mine.”

  “That’s weird.”

  “The more I became able to move off the bed, the more I realized it was only mine. He had no clothes in the closet. There were none of his things anywhere.”

  Salem picked at the rubber on his shoes. He didn’t want to look at me.

  “The long walks…” Salem said understanding.

  “They were starting to make sense to me. He was going back to what he knew. He was going back to his first love, for comfort.”

  “He went back to church.” Salem looked at me with sadness.

  I nodded and felt the burn of salt in my eyes. Four years of hurt came flooding back to me; the betrayal of Jimmy pulling away, of him reaching out for comfort from the God that I blamed for all of my pain.

  “I was so angry and broken. I blamed God for ruining my perfect life. I blamed him for pulling Jimmy further and further away from me when I needed him most.” Tears did come this time. Fat, hot tears tore down my cheeks and I turned from Salem. I scraped them away with the sleeve of my jacket and forced myself to breathe.

  “Listen…Reyna. You don’t have to tell me.”

  “No, this is good. You know…I never said any of this out loud.”

  “You’ve never told this to anyone else?”

  “I couldn’t tell my best friend, Summer. She was Jimmy’s sister, his beloved twin. The more Jimmy was away, the more peaceful he seemed when he returned, the more alone I felt. He wanted to talk about what we’d lost. How we were going to cope, but I didn’t feel close to him anymore. I didn’t want to think about the life I’d almost had. I started to spiral down. I couldn’t sleep, or concentrate. I was getting better physically, but mentally I was breaking down. I threw myself into my last semester. I avoided Jimmy when I could. Jimmy tried to talk to me, tried to get us into Christian counseling, but I didn’t want anything to do with his church or his pastor.”

  “What happened to finally end it?” Salem asked.

  “I found myself on a bridge one night. I was working a case for Maurice and I was on the bridge because it had the best angle for the pictures I needed. I was packing up my camera and I looked over the side of the bridge at the water running underneath…” My throat ached and I couldn’t move the air into my lungs.

  “Reyna, don’t.” Salem stood up to hug me but I took a step back.

  “It looked so peaceful, that dark water, and I couldn’t find a reason not to jump.”

  “What stopped you?” Salem looked at me, and I could see the pain in his eyes. They had the same worry that I’d seen in Jimmy’s eyes.

  “I don’t know. I guess I couldn’t imagine causing Jimmy more pain. I must have stood there for hours because Maurice came to look for me. I told him that I had to get away. I had to leave Seattle because I believed if I stayed, I would die there.”

  “So you left.”

  I nodded and sat down on the chair. He sat down too and took my hand in his. He patted it and gave me such a sorrowful look that I nearly started crying again.

  “Maurice helped me get my license and he helped set me up as a private investigator out in San Francisco. He helped me run away.”

  “What did Jimmy do?”

  “He was crushed. He followed me out here and we had a horrible fight. I finally confronted him about the apartment and he admitted to everything. He said he was trying to get us back on the right track. Jimmy felt like it was his fault that our relationship had gone down a road that wasn’t in line with God. He wanted to start over. He wanted to date again, the right way. And he wanted to postpone our engagement until we’d had counseling.”

  “That doesn’t sound unreasonable,” Salem said quietly.

  “It wasn’t. But at the time all I heard was that everything about our relationship was bad, or wrong. All I heard was that his loving me, our life together, it was all a big mistake. I broke our engagement. I told him to leave and never come back. I didn’t talk to him for over a year.”

  “So when you hired me, you’d only been out in California a year? Your practice was already so successful.”

  “Yeah, I worked insane hours to keep busy. When Summer started having trouble with Parker, I ended up talking with Jimmy again. But it was always about Summer. We never really fixed anything.”

  Salem leaned back in his chair and gave me a look. “But…that means you’re still at square one, right? I mean, you still have the same problem. Or have you forgiven God?”

  I looked at Salem and bit my lip to keep it from trembling. “That’s th
e problem,” I said quietly. “I’m not sure I know how.”

  The door to the reading room opened and Jimmy walked in. He looked at Salem and me sitting together on the chairs and confusion furrowed his brow. “What’d I miss?”

  Purple Knot

  23

  Jimmy didn’t take to my plan to stalk Parker at his building very well.

  “Are you insane?” He looked at me like he’d already decided on the answer.

  “Just let me explain.”

  Behind Jimmy, Salem who’d been walking towards us with our coffee, turned on his heels and hurried back into the café.

  “Veno Pharmaceuticals is a HUGE company, Jimmy. The building has twelve floors, twelve! Even if he is there, which I doubt, the odds of running into Parker are really low.”

  Jimmy crossed his arms. His gray eyes were hard, stubborn. “How do you figure that one?”

  “I won’t even be on the executive floors. I want to go and talk with the Human Resources department and maybe Payroll. I just need to confirm some things. Executives never go on those floors. They don’t need to. They send their secretaries.”

  “Uh-uh,” Jimmy said with finality. “You’re pretty noticeable. Word will get out no matter what floor you sashay onto.”

  Anger flared through me. I took a step toward him and held his gaze. “I’m not asking for permission, Jimmy,” I snapped. “I’m just telling you what I’m planning.”

  “It’s not smart.” Jimmy answered with a calm tone.

  I took a step back surprised. “Did you just call me dumb?”

  “You have a talent for completely missing my point no matter how hard I try.” Jimmy snorted.

  “You did it again!” I turned to go into the café but Jimmy’s arm snaked along my waist and he pulled me back to face him in a hug.

  “Ma chér, you know I think you’re brilliant, stop trying to pick a fight with me.” He drawled lazily when he spoke.

  “I’m not trying to do that.” Actually, I probably was. I sighed and relaxed in his arms.