"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," he 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?"