CHAPTER 13

Gilroy left early the next morning. He gave me a quick kiss and set out in the pitch dark, telling me to stay in bed, he’d grab something from Holly’s Sweets on the way to the station.

Snug in bed, I’d mumbled something about the cold and told him I loved him. He tromped down the stairs and I thought about Shasta Karlsen and the come-to-the-station call she’d soon get from the Juniper Grove PD. But Shasta steal paintings from a murder scene? I didn’t buy it. Not for herself, certainly, and not even for Isak and his gallery. Convinced of the absurdity of it, I fell back asleep.

More than an hour later I slowly resurfaced, nudged awake by the pale white light breaking through the bedroom window.

I dressed and made a breakfast of eggs and toast, finishing it off with half a cream puff, and by the time I’d washed my dishes, Julia was at the door, telling me she and Royce had discovered “crucial” information.

“Well, Royce discovered it,” she amended, waving a slip of paper. She left her snow boots on the mat inside the front door and headed for the kitchen. “You know, his contacts at Town Hall love him. All he has to do is walk in the door.”

“Coffee?” I asked as she took a seat at the table.

“No thanks, I’m off to meet Royce for breakfast at Wyatt’s.”

I turned toward her, smiling broadly. For starters, I was bursting with happiness for my friend. She’d lived too long as a widow. But it was also payback time—in a lighthearted way, of course. She’d done the same thing often enough to me, hadn’t she? A big grin and a nudge-nudge whenever I’d mentioned breakfast, lunch, or dinner with Gilroy. Or mentioned his name at all before we were married.

“It’s breakfast, Rachel,” she scolded.

“Yes it is. Breakfast, Julia.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing, nothing.”

“Why did you say ‘breakfast’ like that?”

“Never mind.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

Wiping the smile from my face, I sat opposite her. “Tell me what you found out.”

“If you can control yourself, I will. Three things. First, Dalton has a lot of money.”

“I figured. I’ve seen his house, and Underhill said he was well off.”

She shook her head. “No, I mean oodles of money. In the past three years, contractors have taken out permits for work inside and outside his house worth at least a hundred and twenty thousand dollars.”

I gasped. “What? How?”

She unfolded the paper. “A deck, a fence, terracing the back yard to level part of it—he brought in a backhoe for that—remodeling the downstairs, which required moving ductwork, and tons more. A gal in the Records Section found the permits and estimated the cost for Royce.”

“Where’d Dalton get that kind of money?”

“That’s the second thing. His checking and savings accounts in town aren’t big enough.”

“So I gathered from Underhill, but how do you know?”

“There’s more. He didn’t take out a loan for the work, and unless he has a balance of a hundred and twenty thousand dollars on his credit cards, which is unlikely, he didn’t use them. The money came from someplace else.”

“Hold on, Julia. How do you know all this?”

“Royce’s friend at the Records Section has a friend at the bank.”

I frowned, thinking how vulnerable Gilroy and I might be to that level of small-town snooping.

“She didn’t give us specifics,” Julia said. “She was careful about that. All she said was Dalton must have bartered for the work or paid in cash because the money couldn’t have come out of his accounts.”

I tried to picture it: Dalton bartering for a backhoe with one of his paintings. Ridiculous. It stood to reason he’d paid for the landscaping and renovations in cash, but where had the cash come from and where had he stashed it in the meantime? At his house? Or had he kept an account outside of Juniper Grove? “What if he banked somewhere else, like Fort Collins?” I asked. “That information would be in his will. No way he’d let the government take his money when he could leave it to someone. We need to find out what’s in the will, and fast.”

Julia smiled. “Royce is already on it.”

“Even Royce has to wait until the will’s published.”

“Nonsense. Anyway, I’m sure your husband is on it too.”

“Of course, a third account would only tell us where the money was, not where Dalton got it. If he sold four of his Hidden paintings outside of a gallery, that would cover his renovations and landscaping, but nothing else, like his mortgage, bills, food, property tax. But he’s only sold three of them—we know that from his website—and we don’t know when he sold them.”

“Maybe he’s sold more landscapes, but they weren’t on his website.”

“Could be. But why would Dalton keep the money outside Juniper Grove?”

Julia discarded my question with a wave of her hand. “We’ll figure that out later.”

“We can talk to the contractors. Did Royce get their names?”

“Of course he did, and he’ll be talking to them—and Chief Gilroy—after breakfast.”

“He doesn’t let the grass grow, does he?”

“Now listen, here’s the third thing. Joan Hudson at Town Hall? After Brodie dug up Dalton’s divorce settlement, she phoned Dalton to give him a heads-up. She thought it might end up in the Post, though it never did.”

“She didn’t tell me that.” I sank back in my chair. Revenge. What better explanation for why Brodie was in Dalton’s Hidden Little Town Number 8? “Joan told me Brodie requested the divorce records in June, right? And Dalton put Brodie in his Hidden painting in July. Sounds like artistic revenge to me.”

Julia gave me a single nod, said, “Royce must be waiting,” and strode for the living room and her snow boots.

I followed her and stood at the open door. “Is it icy?”

“No, you can brush the snow with a broom. Colorado champagne powder.”

Before Julia dashed home, she told me she’d catch Holly up on the news, and I told her about the missing third painting on the easel and missing landscape. “I’m talking to Shelly Todd, too. If she’ll meet with me.”

And then I planned a serious talk with Mary Blackwell. If she didn’t open up, if she didn’t tell me what she was hiding, she could forget about me helping her with her blackmail mystery.

shelly todd lived in a white bungalow with black shutters, black gutters, and black window frames. Square-shaped, neat, and classy, her house was in marked contrast to Laura Patchett’s blue clapboard ranch-style home next door, its front yard a mass of skeletal plant remains from the summer past and a variety of garden ornaments, from purple glass balls to concrete rabbits and a bronze fox.

Shelly had readily agreed to talk to me about Laura, no persuasion necessary. Dressed in jeans and a Black Watch flannel shirt, she led me past a hall console table topped with red poinsettias, around a fat Christmas tree in her living room, and into her warm kitchen, a tea kettle just beginning to whistle.

“Laura could be prickly,” she said as she poured hot water into a teapot, “but who would do that?” Setting the kettle back on the stove, she took a deep breath and became very still. The thin winter light from a window over the sink illuminated strands of gray in her brown hair.

“Shelly?”

She left the pot on the counter and brought our cups to the table. “I’ve been thinking about what happened since I found Laura. Trying to make sense of it.”

“It doesn’t make sense.”

Her lips pursed, she shook her head. “No, and it never will. As I said, Laura could be prickly, but impatient is a better word. Full of energy. She wasn’t unkind. She was a great neighbor, and a good friend to me, as different as we were. She was a friend to everyone in the neighborhood. Holly Kavanagh told me about the Blackwells’ brunch, and who was there. Do the police have any idea why someone would kill her?”

“Not yet.”

“But you do.” It was a statement, I noticed, not a question.

“I don’t know much more than you. Holly gave me your name and I thought I’d try to help, that’s all.”

“You’re married to the chief of police.”

“I am.”

“Then what I tell you will go back to him. Good. Focus on Dalton Taylor. Yes, he was killed too, but I think he killed Laura. He despised her.”

“Why? He had everything. Much more than she did.”

“He had nothing. He envied her. She was free of the goblins that haunted him. He was plagued with worries—about what the critics thought, about getting older, about making money and leaving a legacy. He tried to hide his worries behind his bravado, but they slipped out. It’s laughable, Rachel. I mean, he’s dead, so in the end what did it all matter? Laura knew life and people are what’s important. She was the real artist.”

Her assessment was largely correct, at least when it came to Dalton’s character. “Art is forever,” he’d told me. Yet in five years, I believed, no one would remember his Hidden paintings, except perhaps as investments gone bad.

But I couldn’t see Dalton driving a palette knife into Laura’s neck. His judgments were passive. Expressed in oil and self-protectively couched in symbols.

“Laura used to say, ‘Shelly, the guy’s a fraud. Original is the last thing he is, and one day it will come out.’”

“She didn’t like his work.”

“That’s putting it mildly. She knew what he was and what it was.”

Shelly brought the teapot to the table and poured our cups. The tea smelled stale and acidic.

For some peculiar reason I felt the need to defend Dalton. Deep down inside of him—very deep inside—there was decency and an easily bruised heart. As terrible a man as he was in many ways, he wasn’t a murderer. “The police think one person killed both Dalton and Laura.”

Shelly set the pot on a trivet. “I can’t think of who else would kill her. Maybe I just hate the man so much, I . . .”

She let her words trail off. I decided it was time to mention the cane in the painting. For a moment I wondered how to broach the subject, but as usual, I abandoned finesse and jumped in with both feet.

“Did you know Dalton put Laura in one of his paintings?”

Shelly laughed. “Sure. Laura thought it was absurd. On her worst day she was more creative than Taylor could hope to be.”

“He made an addition to that painting three days after Christmas, and Laura was steaming angry about it. Did she tell you?”

“No, but Holly told me Laura stormed out after looking at the painting. What do you mean addition?”

“Dalton painted her as basically unseeing, right?”

“Bourgeois, unimaginative, and all the rest.”

“In the grass next to her figure, he added a blind person’s cane. White with a red stripe.”

Disbelief swept over Shelly’s face. Two seconds later, she erupted with anger. “You see what I mean about that man? I’m not upset he’s dead, and I don’t care what that sounds like. Laura was worth ten of him.”

“I don’t—”

“She must have wondered how he knew. Only me and her sister knew, and we never said a word and never would have. She didn’t want the attention or pity. Her eye doctor knew, but he wouldn’t have talked.”

With that the last puzzle piece fell into place. “Dalton’s cane wasn’t metaphorical, even if he’d intended it to be.”

Shelly shook her head. “Laura was losing her eyesight. Quickly. Some progressive condition—I forget what it’s called. How could Taylor have been so cruel to her?”

“Could the Blackwells have known? Or the Karlsens?”

“No, Laura was insistent it stay a secret, and she could see well enough to hide it.”

“She still drove a car.”

“Not for long, and not outside of Juniper Grove. She was going to sell it this month.”

“What about others at the New Year’s brunch? Charlotte Wynn and Brodie Keegan. Could they have known?”

“Rachel, only three people besides Laura knew. Me, Laura’s sister Deena, and Laura’s eye doctor. Deena doesn’t live in Colorado and she wouldn’t break a confidence. Laura only told me because I’d seen her stumble in her garden a couple times and she knew she’d need my help soon.”

Shelly raised her teacup. Her expression hardened, and she lowered it without taking a drink. “Now I think of it, when she was working on a project in her studio, you could tell something was wrong. She’d have to get close to what she was working on, and she’d squint and turn her head to the side a little—she could see best out of her right eye. If someone saw her working on a painting or greeting card, or doing any closeup work, they would’ve . . . yeah, they would’ve thought she was having problems.”

“Did people visit her studio?”

“Not often, but sometimes. Her house, too. If only I’d seen someone, or even a car out front, the day she was killed. I was watching TV.”

“Did any of the brunch guests visit her in the past two months?”

“Mary and Clay, definitely. Isak and Shasta Karlsen two or three times. Never, ever Taylor, though Laura went to his studio once. All it took was one person to leak her secret, right? What’s ironic is she could still see well enough to spot a change to that vile painting.”

“I think someone told her the cane had been added.”

“Dalton.”

“I doubt it.”

“Who then?”

I believed I knew who, but as I only suspected and didn’t know for certain, I kept the name to myself. “Someone at the brunch.”

“She shouldn’t have gone to that thing. I’d invited her here on New Year’s Day.” A gust of wind scraped the bare whips of a tall shrub against the window pane. Shelly turned her head to look out over the back yard. “When I think of how giving up her art weighed on her. Not just giving up the joy of it, but the sheer survival difficulties that come with being blind. She had some savings, but as a self-employed artist she didn’t have a pension. She was a good ten years from retirement age. A lot of creative, money-making years left.”

“Would she have stayed in her house?”

“You bet.” Her jaw set, her voice resolute, she turned back to me. “She wouldn’t have sold it. She had me, and eventually, when she told our neighbors, she would’ve had them. We also found out the county has an assistance program for the visually impaired and blind. Juniper Grove does too. She wasn’t happy about applying for help, but she was a realist. She would’ve survived. But Dalton took that from her.”

There was no point arguing that Dalton wasn’t the killer. In her grief, Shelly had concluded that he was, and she would not be budged. It felt right and safe. I grabbed a quick sip of tea—it tasted as sour as it smelled—and thanked her for taking time out of her day.

At the door she told me to watch my step, drawing my attention to the wind-driven sheet of snow on her walkway.

I took one step forward and wheeled back. “You said Laura applied for assistance.”

“She started the process. It takes time to complete.”

“Assistance from Juniper Grove as well as the county?”

“Sure. The county offers financial help, but the town offers practical help through a volunteer program. Snow shoveling, lawn cleanup, driving to appointments, that kind of thing. Laura was going to need both money and everyday help.”

“What’s the town’s program called?”

“The Volunteer Aid Program.”

“Where did she apply, and when?”

Bewildered by my questions, Shelly nevertheless answered. “She printed the application online, then she took it to Town Hall, about two weeks ago. Before Christmas. Why? Is it important?”