The Lover's Knot

by Clare O'Donohue

  We walked up the steps to the front door and I struggled with the lock. I wanted to get inside, but for some reason the key wasn’t cooperating. I looked down and saw that my hand was shaking. Eleanor saw too. She took the key. In seconds the door was open and she hobbled inside. I was almost in myself when I heard steps behind me.

  “Nell,” said a soft but familiar voice.

  I turned around. Ryan was standing inches away. Suddenly the porch light went on. In the light, I saw the blood on his hands.

  CHAPTER 22

  “What are you doing here?” I said loudly, surprised by how frightened I felt.

  Ryan’s voice was shaking. “Is he dead?” he asked.

  I almost couldn’t answer. “Yes.” I finally got the words out. “Yes, he’s dead.” I stood frozen, not wanting to ask how Ryan knew Marc was dead.

  “God,” he said. “Oh my God.”

  Lights were going on all over the downstairs area of the house, flooding the porch. The front door creaked open. Barney came out fast, barking and growling at Ryan. Eleanor stood at the doorway.

  “You should come inside. Both of you,” she said.

  So we did.

  Eleanor and I sat at the kitchen table, silent and waiting until Ryan came down from the upstairs bathroom. He had washed the blood off and looked relieved that it was gone. He sat on one side of the table and my grandmother and I sat on the other. Barney stood guard between us. I felt like we were Ryan’s jury, waiting for the evidence to convict or exonerate. But in this case, beyond a reasonable doubt wouldn’t be enough. I wanted to know beyond all doubt that Ryan had nothing to do with the scene at Someday Quilts.

  “I saw you,” he said to me. He glanced over at my grandmother as if he were embarrassed to have her in the room. But I wanted her there, and it was clear she wasn’t going anywhere no matter what. “I was walking back toward the shop to talk to you, and I saw you and that guy kissing.”

  Eleanor turned toward me, but since I couldn’t bring myself to look her way I had no idea what kind of a look she was giving me.

  “I know it’s stupid of me to be so jealous,” he said.

  “You’ve never been before,” I said.

  He shrugged. “You’ve never given me a reason.” He sounded tired—more than tired. “I don’t know. Lots of things have been going on lately. I came up here to tell you. Then I guess I saw that guy—and you—and I felt like the biggest fool on the planet.”

  “I didn’t even know him two weeks ago,” I muttered, finding it hard to believe that so much had happened in such a short span of time.

  “That’s true,” Eleanor broke in. “She met him after you called off the engagement.”

  “Postponed,” Ryan corrected her, then shook his head. “Whatever, it doesn’t matter.”

  “What did you do?” I finally asked the question that had been hanging in the air since his arrival.

  “Nothing. I swear I didn’t think I hit him that hard.”

  “You hit him,” Eleanor said as if she were a detective trying to take his statement.

  Ryan got up and walked over to the sink.

  “Would you like some tea?” Eleanor asked.

  “No, he wouldn’t,” I said. I didn’t want to waste any time with hospitality. I wanted to know what had happened.

  “Yeah,” Ryan said at the same time, and filled the kettle with water.

  We all stopped talking, waiting for the kettle to whistle. When it did, Eleanor, Barney and I watched Ryan put three tea bags into a teapot and fill it with hot water. He opened the refrigerator as if he had lived there all his life and poured milk into a jug. He brought the milk, tea and three mugs over to the table.

  “Do you take sugar?” he said to my grandmother, who shook her head.

  It was all very surreally civilized. When Ryan sat down again and tea was poured, the break was over. My grandmother said again, “You hit him.”

  “Yeah. I walked back to the shop to find Nell.” He looked down. “I saw the two of you.” I felt guilty for a moment, then stupid, then just scared. Could Ryan really have killed Marc because of a few kisses?

  “What did you do?” I asked again, with an impatience in my voice that surprised even me.

  “I walked around. I went to some Irish bar on the next block and had a beer.”

  “Moran’s,” my grandmother clarified.

  “I guess. I decided that I had to talk to you, Nell, to find out what was going on. So I walked back over to the shop. He was by himself.”

  “Marc,” I interrupted. “His name was Marc.”

  “Okay. Marc was outside.” I could hear anger rising in his voice, but just as quickly it was gone, replaced by tiredness and fear. “We started talking. He said something. I pushed him. I hit him. He hit back. I guess he fell against the building. He got a cut on his cheek. It looked bad. I just left him there.” Tears welled up in his eyes. “I walked around for a while, trying to think. Then I decided I needed to know, so I went back to the shop to ask him.” He paused and looked at me. “To ask him about his intentions with you.”

  I saw Ryan was waiting for a reaction, and I thought about commenting,but I decided it would only delay his story. “Then what happened?” was all I could get out.

  “Well,” he continued, “when I got back to the shop I saw an ambulance and police. I asked one of the cops what had happened, and he told me there was a guy inside who was hurt. He wouldn’t tell me any more.” Ryan sat back. “He was woozy. I should have called someone, but it didn’t look bad enough to kill him.”

  “It didn’t,” said Eleanor. “He was stabbed.”

  Confusion, and then what looked like relief, moved across Ryan’s face.

  “Are you sure?” he asked her.

  “Very,” she said. “He must have gotten up and gone into the shop and someone came in and stabbed him.”

  “Come on,” I said. “I get that Marc wasn’t the town favorite, but are you honestly telling me that on the very day that a jealous boyfriend knocks him around someone else stabs him?”

  Both Eleanor and Ryan looked at me like I was a stranger.

  “Do you want me to have killed that guy?” Ryan asked.

  “No,” I said, and backed down. But I didn’t exactly believe his story either.

  CHAPTER 23

  My grandmother excused herself ten minutes later, saying something about her tired leg. Ryan and I stayed in the kitchen and cleared up. We didn’t say anything, so the only sounds were running water and the clanking of dishes. Barney, who had stayed close to Eleanor since her return from the hospital, was now glued to my side. I didn’t know what to feel standing next to Ryan—safe, scared, angry or just numb.

  So while Ryan washed the mugs, I took Barney out into the night for short walk. We walked down to the river and stared out at the blackness. The rain had stopped but the weather hadn’t improved. I could feel a frost around me, but despite the cold and the darkness, I didn’t want to go back inside. Instead, I took Barney along the edge of the river.

  A thousand years ago I was a bride-to-be. I had a man I loved who would always love me. I had a new apartment to decorate and turn into a home. I had a lover’s knot quilt I would pass on to my children. Now what did I have? I looked out at the river, listened to the quiet and waited for an answer. None came. Resigned and feeling the cold, I turned back to the house.

  Ryan and I went upstairs, with Barney following close behind. I walked past the open door to my room toward the office at the end of the hall.

  “I don’t know how comfortable it is, but there’s a pullout bed in that couch,” I said to Ryan.

  “I’m sure it’s fine.” I could hear the exhaustion in his voice, and wondered if I sounded just as empty and tired.

  “I’ll get you some sheets and a quilt,” I said.

  Ryan grabbed my hand as I was about to walk out of the room. For a second we stood, holding hands, then I pulled away.

  Once Ryan was settled for the night, I closed
the door to my room and sat on my bed. I couldn’t take it all in. What I knew was bad enough—I didn’t even want to consider all that I didn’t know. One minute I would reassure myself by saying that I knew Ryan, I knew he wasn’t capable of murder. Then the next I would be reminded of the scene at my apartment just a couple of weeks ago when he blindsided me by postponing the wedding. Did I know him? My mind kept playing the question over and over. And then a more terrifying question crept in. Is there a murderer in the house?

  Nothing would be solved, I knew, by my sitting on the bed, so I got into my pajamas, switched off the light and lay under the covers. I don’t know how long I lay there staring at the ceiling, the image of Marc’s lifeless body in my mind, but eventually I must have drifted off. At some point in the night I felt as if I had entered a nightmare. My room looked like my room, but a shadowy figure was moving toward the bed. I jumped up.

  “I’m sorry.” I heard Ryan’s voice in the darkness.

  I switched on the light. “What are you doing?” I snapped.

  Ryan stopped where he was standing, a few inches from the foot of my bed. “I couldn’t sleep.”

  “Ryan, it’s just not a good idea . . .”

  “Why not? All I want to do is sleep next to you.” He seemed hesitant, nervous. “Is that okay?”

  I took a deep breath and nodded. Just a few hours before I’d been wondering if Ryan was a murderer, but now I was relieved he was in the room. It didn’t make sense, but nothing was making sense. One minute I wanted nothing more than to be Ryan’s wife, the next I was imagining a life without him. A life that included kissing other men. In that second I realized that maybe it was unfair to be so angry at Ryan for being confused, when I was so confused myself.

  I pulled back the sheets and made room for Ryan in the bed. He climbed in and lay down with an audible sigh. “Good night,” I said as I turned my back to him.

  But he was having none of it. “I have to touch you,” he said. He moved his body close to mine, putting one arm under my head and the other over my waist, spooning me. I could feel his chest against my back, his legs against mine. I wanted so much to relax into his arms, but I also needed to guard myself. I stared straight ahead and tried to find no comfort from the way his fingers moved down my arm.

  He moved his head so that his breath was just above my ear. “I love you, Nell,” he told me, just as he had so many times before.

  I couldn’t bring myself to say anything. For a few minutes I just lay there staring at the hand that reached out from under my head, feeling his breath on my neck.

  “Did you do it?” I said almost to myself.

  “No.”

  He kissed my ear. This was what I had wanted to happen from the moment he had called off the wedding. I turned around and let my lips meet his. My kisses with Marc had been schoolgirl, uncertain and strange. But Ryan’s mouth, his hands, the feel of his skin, were all familiar to me. He moved on top of me without saying another word.

  For much of the night, with a nearly deaf dog snoring on the floor beside us, we made love underneath our wedding quilt. Just as I had dreamed we would.

  CHAPTER 24

  I woke up to the front doorbell ringing. Ryan was asleep, still half on top of me. The bell rang again. I knew it would be a struggle for my grandmother to answer it, so I jumped up, put on my clothes from the night before and ran down the stairs.

  Jesse was standing on the other side of the door.

  “You have a visitor.” He pointed to Ryan’s car.

  “My fiancé,” I said, accidentally leaving out the ex. “He came up last night.” Jesse raised an eyebrow but said nothing. “Do you want to come in?” I asked as if nothing strange had happened last night.

  He walked through the door and looked around. “Is your grandmother up?”

  “I don’t know. I just got up. Let me check.”

  “Oh, you were in bed,” he said, surprised. “You’re wearing what you wore last night.”

  “It was the closest thing to me.” I was suddenly embarrassed by his attention to detail. “Go into the kitchen. I’ll get my grandmother.”

  In the living room, Eleanor was not only awake but dressed and on the phone. When she saw me, she wrapped up her call.

  “Who was at the door?”

  “Jesse.”

  A worried look crept across my grandmother’s face. “Nothing else has happened, has it?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said, suddenly anxious at the thought. “How much more could happen?”

  She grabbed her crutches. “I’m beginning to wonder that myself.”

  Barney, looking sleepy and confused, came walking down the stairs and joined us. He sniffed at my grandmother and walked behind her as she hobbled to the kitchen on her crutches. Then he turned his attention to Jesse, who got down on his knees and roughhoused with the old dog. Barney made it very clear he loved every second of it.

  I stayed out of the way, making coffee and looking for something I could serve. We had already eaten most of the pies, cakes, casseroles and pasta dishes that friends had brought by, but there were some brownies. Hardly breakfast food, but I put them on the table.

  “We’re going to have to keep the shop closed for a few days, Mrs. Cassidy,” Jesse said as he got up off the floor.

  “It was closed anyway,” she answered.

  “He was remodeling the place?” Jesse asked.

  “Expanding,” I broke in. “My grandmother is taking over the diner next door.”

  Jesse looked at me. “I heard that. A big job for Marc.” He turned back to my grandmother.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “He did good work around here. Repaired the floor in the dining room last year and that looks nice.”

  “He loved the old houses,” Jesse agreed. “And I know he loved that building your shop is in.”

  “He was excited about the remodel,” I said, and a wave of sadness fell over me.

  Jesse nodded and reached his hand out toward mine, but then seemed to think better of it. Instead he took out a small tape recorder and placed it on the table. “I’ve got very bad handwriting,” he said almost apologetically, pointing to the recorder. He turned it on and looked at my grandmother.

  “Do you mind if we go over some details from last night?” he asked her.

  “No, I’d like to,” she said. “I’d like to be able to make sense of it for myself.”

  He nodded and turned to me. “It would be better if you weren’t here.”

  “I’ll be in my room,” I said, and got up from the table.

  Jesse nodded, turned to my grandmother and asked plainly, “Can you tell me what you saw last night, when you got to the store?”

  As she started to talk I stepped back into the hallway. I wanted to check on Ryan. There was no hiding that he was here—that had already been established. But it would be better if Jesse didn’t see the cuts on his hand, didn’t know about the fights.

  I went upstairs and into the bedroom as quietly as I could. Ryan was still asleep, draped across the bed as if he were passed out.

  I wasn’t sure why I wanted to protect him. Maybe I didn’t need to. If Ryan was telling the truth, then he didn’t need my protection. The smart thing would have been to wake him up and send him downstairs to tell his story. But what if he wasn’t telling the truth?

  “Hey.” Ryan opened his eyes, a smile creeping across his face.

  “The police chief is here to take statements,” I said.

  “I should get dressed.” He jumped up and put his pants on just as there was a knock on the door.

  Jesse was standing in the hallway. “Is this your room, Nell?” he said through the open door. I nodded. He walked in, looking around, first at the unmade bed and then at Ryan as he finished dressing. “The fiancé?”

  “Yeah,” said Ryan, and automatically extended his hand. They shook, but Jesse didn’t let go. He turned Ryan’s hand over and looked down at the bruised knuckles.

  “Got into a fi
ght?”

  “Yes.” Ryan pulled his hand back. “Two, actually. Both with that guy.”

  “The murder victim?” Jesse asked.

  “He was after Nell.”

  Jesse nodded. “That was his style,” he said. “Go after the vulnerable.”

  “Excuse me?” I interrupted. “The vulnerable?”

  “The way I heard it,” Jesse continued, “it was over between the two of you.” He gestured at Ryan and me. “You came up here to nurse a broken heart, and Marc was helping you with that.”

  “The way you heard it,” I repeated his words, feeling oddly uncomfortable that Jesse was aware of my friendship with Marc.

  “It’s a small-town, Nell,” Jesse said quietly. “That’s how I knew about the fight between your . . . fiancé here and Marc.”

  “Who told you?” I demanded.

  Jesse smiled. “That quilt shop is in the center of town. And it has a picture window. Normally there are quilts hanging all over it, blocking the interior. But with those gone, anyone walking down the street can get a clear view of people fighting . . . or kissing . . . or anything.”

  Got it. Jesse, Ryan and everyone in town knew what I’d been up to yesterday afternoon. Suddenly I felt like the biggest fool all over again. I took a deep breath. “Then someone must have seen Marc’s killer,” I said.

  “Afraid not. It probably happened after dark, and downtown is pretty quiet in the evenings,” he said. He turned back to Ryan. “Ryan, is it?” Ryan nodded. “First I need to get your fingerprints, then your statement if that’s okay?”

  Ryan sat on the bed, and Jesse took out what looked like a blank index card and a small inkpad and put it on the dresser. “I’ll need to get your prints, to compare against several we found in the shop,” he said to Ryan.

  Then he put his tape recorder next to them. “And I’ll need your statement. Is it okay if we do it here? I assume you wouldn’t want to come to the station when it would be quicker, and quieter, here.” Jesse looked up at me with a flash of sympathy in his face that made me feel he was trying to save me from being even more of a subject of local gossip. Then his expression changed to an unemotional stare. “You should see if your grandmother is okay.”