“Nine in all. Laura asked him how many he’d painted so far, and when he answered she said it was amazing he’d found so much to gossip about. Shasta and Laura knew what Dalton was up to.”

“The painter as town chronicler,” Holly declared. “Town gossip.”

Gossip. The word yanked me back to Mary’s four mysterious items. Was there a connection between them and Dalton’s paintings? Dalton’s gossip, unlike Mary’s, wasn’t in print, but he’d memorialized it in his paintings.

“I don’t believe in coincidences, and neither does James,” I said, retaking my seat.

“You think whatever Laura saw is connected to her death?” Holly asked.

“I think so, yes. But now I wonder if Mary Blackwell’s gossip is also linked.”

I recounted my phone call with Mary and her admission that she’d given Brodie damaging information on Connor Morse. As I began to describe the papers and photo she’d tucked in my coat pocket, I felt more than a twinge of guilt. Wasn’t I spreading gossip? But it wasn’t gossip, it was real. Fact, not art. And if we were going to help Mary, we needed all the facts.

“I remember reading about Connor Morse last month,” Holly said. “His career as a teacher ended, that’s for sure.”

“I read about that,” Julia said. “You can’t blame the high school for firing him.”

“Maybe they didn’t have a choice.” Holly grasped the mouse and scrolled the painting, mumbling, “High school . . . high school. There—yup.” She angled the monitor. “What does that look like to you?”

“It looks like a high school building,” Julia said, “but it’s not the same as Juniper Grove High.”

“It wouldn’t be. And there?” Holly tapped the screen.

In the parking lot of Dalton’s fictional high school, a man dressed in a sweater and jeans, wearing round, black glasses, his hair pulled to a tight bun atop his head, was passing what looked like money to a thug in a black leather jacket. Leather Man was taking Sweater Man’s money and, in exchange, presenting him with a small, cream-colored packet.

I shot Holly a look. “It looks like someone’s dealing drugs.”

“And that someone is wearing a man bun,” Holly said. “Just like Connor Morse.”

CHAPTER 5

Talk about wheels turning. I quickly calculated what I knew of our time line. “Isak told me Laura saw this painting two months ago for the first time, so it’s at least two months old. But Mary said the Post’s article on Morse came out in mid-December, about two weeks ago.”

“But that’s Connor Morse,” Holly said. “Same glasses, too. Round, not rectangular.”

“So the question is, how did Dalton Taylor know about Morse’s drug dealing before the newspaper article came out?”

Julia, a frown creasing her face, made a puffing sound and shifted in her seat. “The article said Morse was a teenager at the time of his arrest. There was nothing about him dealing drugs on school property.”

“Taylor’s playing with the time and place,” Holly explained, “like he played with Lilac Lane’s name and location. But he’s clearly connecting the town’s high school to a guy with a man bun dealing drugs.”

“How do you know Morse wore his hair in one of those ludicrous buns?” Julia asked. “He wasn’t in the newspaper’s photo.”

“He was every time he came into the bakery.”

“Your bakery is Juniper Grove’s own Grand Central Station,” I said. I clicked on the other Taylor painting and enlarged it. “Let’s see what we can find.”

It didn’t take long for Julia to spot Brodie Keegan. Or so it seemed. A young man was slumped behind the wheel of silver car. The car’s door was half open, the man’s left leg was out the door, and a whiskey bottle lay in the grass near his foot. In place of a passenger was a large red ball, and the car’s rear plate bore the letters ID. Dalton was no friend of subtlety.

“No one knows about Brodie’s DUI in Idaho,” I half whispered. “Mary found out only yesterday. How on earth did Dalton know?”

“Someone must be feeding him information,” Holly said.

I nodded. “Someone likes what Dalton is doing. They’re enjoying it—as much as Dalton himself. Maybe it’s the same person who put the papers and photo in Mary’s mailbox.”

But that theory left unanswered questions. Painting figures in a supposedly fictional town and publishing articles on real, named people were two very different actions commanding very different consequences. Morse’s portrayal as a drug dealer in Dalton’s painting went back months, at least, and no one had taken note of it as far as we knew. Only the newspaper article had resulted in Morse losing his job.

Julia stole a glance at her watch.

“When is Royce coming?” I asked.

“Two hours.”

“You’ve got dinner to make, so you’d better shoo,” I said. “Tell him we said hello.”

“Send those photos to my phone. We’ll give them a look after dinner. You know how Royce loves a mystery.”

Royce was an avid mystery reader and puzzle solver, and because he’d once headed the Records Section at Town Hall and still had a friend there, he could be a goldmine of information.

As Julia skedaddled like a teenager out of my office, I shouted after her to be careful. She was in such a bubbly state I was afraid she’d tumble down the stairs.

On hearing the front door shut, I turned to Holly. “When is Royce going to ask her to marry him? What’s he waiting for? Honestly, I want to light a fire under that man.”

“I was sure he’d ask her at Christmas,” Holly said. “It would’ve been so romantic. But he’s only been a widower for three years now. Not even three, I think.”

“It’ll be three in a month or two.”

“Well, they’re together and they’re happy.”

“Right. And the timing is their business. It’ll happen when it happens. Still . . .”

“Still.”

I pushed romance out of my mind and opened the photo of the Laura Painting, as I now thought of it. “Okay. Laura Patchett. She had to have seen herself in this.”

Holly set her elbows on the desk and leaned in, her gaze on the monitor.

“It might not look like Laura,” I reminded her. “I don’t recognize most of the people in this painting. There must be twenty-five of them, and they can’t all be real.”

“I see Blooms downtown, only it’s called Blossoms.”

I grunted. And Dalton thinks he’s creative.

I scrolled down, my eyes scanning left to right, and spotted, through the window of a house, a blond, crafty-looking bearded man toiling away in his living room. “That’s Isak Karlsen, changing labels on a jam jar!”

“Karlsen?” Holly looked closer. “Labels on a jam jar?”