Clare O’Donohue - The Lover’s Knot

She eyed me with a flicker of suspicion that quickly disappeared. "I never lost a penny or so much as a spool of thread. But if you are so convinced this is the right thing, you have a new project to research, " she said. "Leave me alone with this thing while I play with it. You can't understand things unless you fiddle around yourself. You learned that with the muffins."

So I left her in the dining room and headed out for a walk. Nancy was running the shop that had now spilled out from the dining room to the front hallway. Tom was working hard at the store. I knew that Eleanor, Nancy, Maggie and Susanne had finished their parts of the quilt, and only Carrie and Natalie had outstanding blocks. Everything seemed to be moving along quickly. All except for Marc's murder.

I wandered around town for about twenty minutes, passing the police station three times. I hoped to run into Jesse, but I wasn't having any luck, so I headed inside. The young uniformed officer from the day of the accidental break-in was sitting at a desk. He smiled as I walked in.

"How's it going?" he asked. "The renovation going okay? I hear Tom might be finished before your grandmother and the other ladies are done with the quilt."

"Maybe." Everyone in town knew everything and felt everything was their business. I was still getting used to it, but for once maybe it would work to my advantage. "How's the investigation going?"

"Not good. We're stuck. I'll tell you, absolutely stuck." He shook his head to emphasize his point.

"There was a note on pink paper. Did you find anything on that?"

He shook his head again. "It had only smudged fingerprints on it. It's a dead end so far."

I knew I would be pushing my luck if I kept asking questions, but I had one more. "Is Jesse, Chief Dewalt around?"

"No. He went out to get some lunch at Marabelle's over by the highway. Want me to give him a message?"

"No. In fact, don't bother telling him I was here."

Marabelle's was a sandwich shop I'd been to several times in the years I'd been coming to visit my grandmother. When I arrived, I saw Jesse's car parked on the street in front and I pulled in right behind it.

I had rushed over so that I wouldn't miss Jesse, but now I had to make it look casual, so I strolled into the shop and tried not to look around. The place was small, with a few tables near the window, but I kept my eyes on the counter.

"Chicken salad on wheat," I said to the woman behind the counter. I spoke a little loudly with the hope that Jesse might look up. It worked.

"Nell," I heard Jesse call out.

I turned and tried to look surprised. "What are you doing here?"

Jesse pointed to his half-finished sandwich. "Same thing as you, I guess."

I picked up my sandwich and joined Jesse without his asking. "How are things?"

"Good. And you?"

"Good."

"The fiance?"

"Good, I suppose."

"Things not going well?"

I sighed. "So much has happened."

Jesse leaned back in his seat and nodded. "It's got to be hard, not being sure."

I looked into his eyes and for a moment saw a sweetness in them. "I still love him; I just don't know if I want what he wants anymore, " I admitted.

"People think that the moment a relationship is over you need to have one good cry and move on," Jesse said. "It's not that simple. Sometimes those old feelings linger, even when you start to have new feelings."

I looked up at him, but he suddenly looked down at his plate. "I don't know that it's over," I said. "I just don't know if I'm ready."

"You think he might have killed a guy. How do you get past that?" I looked at Jesse a long time without any idea how to answer him. Finally he said, "So are you going to ask me?"

"About what?"

He shook his head. "Okay, I'll go back to small talk," he said. "This weather is sure turning cold."

"Okay. How is the investigation going? If you don't mind sharing details of an open investigation with me."

"I do mind sharing details, but I will tell you that I'm a bit stuck. I've checked with girlfriends, gambling buddies, anyone I can think of. It's gone nowhere."

"So where does that leave you?" Jesse took a sip of his Coke. I waited for an answer, then realized none was coming. "It leads you back to the quilt shop," I said.

"So what have you come up with?" he asked. I was surprised by the question, and it must have shown. "You're telling me you haven't been looking for, what did you call them, clues?"

"I haven't, actually. You told me to stay out of it."

"And that worked?"

"Yes," I said a little indignant. Then I leaned in. "But that doesn't mean it has to do with the quilt shop. You're leaving out the possibility that it could have been a robbery or something. Some stranger came into the shop and killed Marc."

"Yes, I am. I'm leaving out the possibility that a robber came into an empty quilt shop and Marc let him in. And then, with nothing to gain, the guy stabbed him with a pair of scissors he found at the shop."

"Marc had fifteen thousand dollars. Maybe the robber killed him for that."

"How would a robber know that? And that's assuming that Marc still had the cash on Friday. For all we know he went back to the OTB and lost it the next day." Jesse stopped talking and finished his sandwich, but I'd lost my appetite.

"If your suspects are now my grandmother and her friends, you're crazy. It can't be anyone connected to the quilt shop," I said.

"It doesn't have to be."

"It can't be Ryan either."

We sat at the table quietly staring out the window.

"How's the quilt coming?" Jesse finally broke the silence.

Glad of the change in subject, I said proudly, "I cut out a bunch of flowers."

Jesse smiled. "Well, that calls for a celebration. They have a really good chocolate cake here."

"You don't have to ask me twice."

Jesse jumped up, a wide grin across his face, and brought over chocolate cake and coffee. For the next half hour we sat and talked about quilting, his daughter, Allison, and the way the last of the autumn leaves were already falling.

Ryan, Marc, and the identity of a murderer were far away and forgotten subjects, and it seemed that Jesse was as glad of that as I was.

By the time I got home all the members of the quilt club had already arrived. Nancy was pouring M &M's into a bowl while Carrie set out coffee for everyone. Bernie sat with my grandmother looking over a new quilting book that had arrived that morning. Maggie and Susanne leaned over a vibrant quilt top Natalie had made.

"I still have to quilt it," she was saying, "and I just can't figure out the best design."

"Since it's strips, I would do circles," Susanne suggested. "You want to do something simple, so as not to interfere with the design of the top, but you also want to play against the strong rectangles the strips make."

I walked closer to see the quilt they were studying. When Natalie saw me, she held up the top she called a Bargello, and I was stunned. The quilt was made of two-inch strips of about forty fabrics that were then cross-cut into strips that varied in width from a half inch to three inches. Then these strips were sewn together to make a kind of wave effect. The quilt pattern was, according to Maggie, named after a needlepoint stitch and replicated the look. It looked like about the most complicated pattern I'd seen so far, but everyone loudly assured me it wasn't.

"The hardest thing for this quilt is choosing the right fabrics," Bernie told me.

"And putting them together in the right order," Susanne added.

"Still," I hesitated. "It looks like you have to be precise."

"That just comes from experience."

I walked over and took the quilt top in my hand. A red square caught my eye. In the first strip it was near the middle but its position moved up and down on each succeeding strip across the quilt. It was quite a beautiful effect until I got to the last three strips. There two red squares were next to each other.