“I drove her in my car. She’s only two minutes away.”

“Okay, so tell me about the stuff you put in my coat pocket.”

“Yes, sorry. Someone put them in my mailbox yesterday. In a large envelope. Luckily, Clay wasn’t at home.”

“Was the envelope addressed to you?”

“It wasn’t addressed. It was blank, and I don’t know who put it in there.”

“Anything else in it?”

“Nothing.”

Now I was thoroughly confused. “So why would someone give those things to you?”

Another sniff.

“It doesn’t make sense, Mary.”

“They know me now. They know how weak I am, and they want the Post to print stories. Three stories. I think the mortgage paper is a reminder. They can dig up any information they want on me and Clay, so I’d better do as I’m told.”

“But they didn’t actually tell you what to do with the information, right? How do you know they want you to print stories on Isak and the rest?”

Silence ensued. I waited.

“I know it’s what they want because that’s what they wanted the first time,” she said at last. “And I complied. I gave in, Rachel. I did it. Did you read the article on Connor Morse, the teacher at Juniper Grove High who’d been arrested for dealing heroin when he was seventeen?”

I told her Gilroy and I didn’t get the paper.

“Someone put his arrest record in my mailbox, with a demand that it be published. The guy’s in this thirties now, but his arrest turned out to be true, so Brodie printed the story in mid-December, without a byline. He loved it. He called the article a service to the community. Our subscriptions shot up.”

“What happened to the teacher?”

“He was fired.” She let out a strangled laugh. “Well, Brodie’s not going to love the article about Brodie and his car accident.”

“He’d never print that.”

I heard muffled noises and Mary—her hand covering the phone?—yelling something.

“Can you still talk?” I asked.

“Clay’s back. I need your help. Call me at work tomorrow morning.”

The phone clicked off.

Gilroy had heard my end of the conversation, judging by the expression he gave me back in the living room.

“Now we know someone gave those things to Mary,” he said. “What happened to what teacher?”

“Connor Morse. He was arrested as a teenager for dealing heroin. Someone pressured the Post into writing a story about him, using Mary. They printed it and the teacher was fired.”

“If he has an arrest record for dealing, why did the high school hire him?”

“Either the school didn’t perform its due diligence or Morse’s record was expunged because he was under eighteen.”

“Someone had it in for Morse? And now for Isak Karlsen and Brodie Keegan?”

“It sounds like we have an avenging angel on our hands. We’re going to need more caffeine. And sugar.”

Before I made it out of the living room, a phone rang in the kitchen. Gilroy’s ringtone.

He strode ahead of me, and while he answered his phone I put another coffee pod in the machine.

“Where?” Gilroy was saying. “Who called it in?”

I turned.

“You know what to do, Underhill. I’ll be there in five minutes.”

He punched off, stuck his phone in his back pocket, and reached for his coat. “Laura Patchett’s been murdered.”

“Laura? We just saw her—I can’t believe it! How?”

“I’ll be back as soon as I can. Lock the door behind me.”

CHAPTER 4

Laura Patchett’s death put Mary’s mysterious papers on the back burner. After taking a few minutes to digest what Gilroy had told me and imagine various worst-case murder scenarios, I’d phoned Holly and Julia.

Holly’s husband and son had gone cross-country skiing for the afternoon, leaving her alone with a good book, and Royce Putnam, Julia’s boyfriend—I cringed a little at the word, him being nearly seventy years old—wasn’t expected until dinnertime. They were free, they’d told me, and eager to know the details of the Brunch from Hell and talk about Laura.

Julia arrived first, barreling into the living room, chucking her coat on the back of an armchair. “I knew Laura,” she said ruefully. She coiled a strand of short gray hair around her forefinger. “Not well, but we talked every now and then, and she was kind. A little different, but she was an artist. I bought some of her greeting cards in Blooms. I haven’t even used them yet. She wasn’t the sort of person to be involved with shady people, Rachel. Who would hurt her?”

“That’s what James is trying to figure out right now.”

She smoothed her hair and dropped to the armchair. “How was she murdered?”

“I don’t know how. Or where.”

Holly hit the doorbell for a nanosecond before letting herself in. “Good grief, Julia, you’re already here? Did you two start?”

“Julia’s been here sixty seconds,” I reassured her. “She was just saying she knew Laura a little, and I was saying I don’t know how she died.”

“I knew her from the bakery,” Holly said, taking a seat on the couch. “She was friendly and talkative. She had a thing for ginger-molasses cookies. I don’t make them often, so she used to ask me to put a dozen aside for her when I did. Otherwise, she’d ask for cinnamon cookies.”

“You know, it’s a little scary that you remember in detail what everyone in town orders,” Julia said.