Gone But Knot Forgotten by Mary Marks

leave Nathan.”
    â€œDid she?”
    Isabel took a bite of bread. “She didn’t have to. Nathan must have finally found a conscience, because he jumped in the ocean and killed himself. For once in his life, he did the right thing.”
    I wondered. Abernathy said Nathan’s body never turned up. Could he still be alive? Could Nathan Oliver truly have killed Harriet?
    I dropped Isabel at her place and drove back to the valley. I kept thinking about the flashy ring on her finger. When I got home, I checked the pictures from Harriet’s flash drive. The three-carat canary yellow diamond surrounded by a starburst of clear baguettes on a filigreed platinum band had, indeed, belonged to Harriet.
    The gray, damp weather made my fibromyalgia flare up, and the muscles in my neck and hip throbbed. Instead of taking a Soma, I was determined to practice my new yoga moves to see if they would help with the pain. I rolled out my pink rubber mat and lay on my back on the hard floor.
    I put one leg straight up in the air, wrapped the six-foot-long strap over my foot, and held on to the ends with both hands. I stretched the leg first to one side and then to the other, keeping my knee straight. How did Isabel get that ring? I repeated the moves with my other leg. Did she steal it? Then I did the same stretches with both my legs together. Does she have the other missing pieces of jewelry? The tightness released in my hips.
    Still lying on my back with my legs in the air, I bent my knees and stretched my arms up to grab the arches of my feet in the happy baby pose. Muscles I didn’t even know existed started burning with the stretch. I tried to breathe deeply, sending my “intentions” (whatever that meant) to the pain.
    In my head I heard Dasha, my instructor, “Take a long, slow breath from the bottom of spine to the top of head. Now hold for four counts. Slowly release breath until there is no more air in lungs. Now hold for another four counts.”
    Air. Air.
    The burning in my muscles actually subsided, but I started breathing rapidly to make up for the four counts without oxygen.
    I finally gave up and just lay quietly with my eyes closed in the corpse pose. I tried to picture Harriet on the floor of her closet with my third eye.
    Paulina Polinskaya said Harriet refused to communicate with Nathan’s spirit. According to Isabel Casco, Nathan was mean and abusive and directly responsible for Jonah’s death. No wonder Harriet refused Nathan’s collect calls from the dead. She must have hated and feared him with every fiber of her soul.
    According to the suicide note he left behind, Nathan killed himself. According to Abernathy, a search at sea failed to turn up a body. On the theory Nathan might have faked his death, Abernathy said Harriet paid for private detectives to find him. However, after seven years and dozens of fruitless searches, the courts agreed that Nathan Oliver was deceased. If Paulina’s claims could be believed, Nathan’s spirit really dwelt with the Malach haMavet.
    What if Nathan didn’t die at sea? What if he deliberately disappeared? If so, a living, flesh-and-blood Nathan could have returned to kill Harriet.
    However, the more I thought about it, the more the whole scenario made no sense. What would motivate a self-indulgent, wealthy man like Nathan to abandon his lifestyle and his fortune to a wife he didn’t love or respect?
    No matter how I examined the people in her life, not one person I talked to seemed likely to have murdered Harriet Oliver. I’d just have to keep looking. Maybe Estella and Henry would show up to bury their sister-in-law tomorrow. Maybe they could shed some light.
    When I got home, my daughter, Quincy, called from Boston. “Hi, Mom. Sorry I missed you Friday night. I had a hot date.”
    I sat on my cream-colored sofa and covered myself with my blue and white Corn and Beans quilt, enjoying the sound of my daughter’s