“About a year. I’m still moving in.”

A number of completed canvases were casually stacked against two walls, and along the windowed wall sat a long, blond-wood table strewn with ink wells and fountain pens, a laughing Buddha statue—a fat paintbrush jutting from its open mouth—baskets of erasers, tubes of oil paint, and glass jars blooming with bouquets of upended paintbrushes. My eyes stopped at a metal cup containing numerous wood-handled palettes.

A terrible murder weapon, the palette. Adequately pointed at the tip, but farther down, it expanded to an unbearable width. I couldn’t imagine the viciousness needed to use it on another human being.

“Yeah, I know, it’s disorganized,” Dalton said, “but work comes before organization. I probably don’t need to tell you that. You must have an office.”

A clock gonged from somewhere downstairs.

I looked up. “I do, and it can be a mess. What’s that smell?”

“Solvent.”

He must have had a vat of it, the odor was so strong. Casting a backward glance at the large painting on an easel, I asked, “Is that part of your Hidden Little Town series?”

“The tenth.”

“Do you mind?” I stepped to the canvas before he could answer, hoping I appeared to be fascinated by his genius rather than hunting for clues. This painting, too, depicted downtown Juniper Grove, though again the buildings were out of place.

A man stood outside Town Hall, his hand hesitantly on the front door, and next door was a restaurant, Le Pain, in real life La Petite Rose, I thought. Through the restaurant’s window I saw the spitting image of Shasta Karlsen. Seated at a table, laptop in front of her, she was sipping wine, but not with Isak or Dalton. Was it Clay?

“Something caught your eye?” he asked.

“Do you get tired of painting Juniper Grove?”

“What makes you think I paint Juniper Grove?”

I straightened and gave him an Oh, please look.

“Clay Blackwell paints Juniper Grove,” he said. “He started a year ago, to celebrate his forty-fifth birthday, or so he told me.”

“I didn’t know Clay was a painter.”

“He’s not. He’s an electrician, and a good one. He wired my studio for sound.”

“But you said he paints Juniper Grove.”

“He paints on the side, as a hobby, and he works in hobby-store acrylics.”

“Horrors.”

“Let me ask you. Do you write on the side?”

“I used to, before I could afford to quit my job in Boston. On the side then, full time now. Writer then, writer now.”

Dalton shook his head, slowly and sadly. How could I not understand? “Clay doesn’t paint carefully or thoughtfully. He’s not slow and meticulous, and he goes for quantity.”

So says the man working on three paintings at once.

“The process of creating art should be mysterious,” Dalton went on. “To put it in writing terms, Clay’s a ball point and I’m a fountain pen.” He crossed his arms over his chest, as though his witticism silenced any counter-claim I could possibly make.

Refusing to be drawn into a silly argument about art, I shifted gears, probing Dalton for information about Aspen Leaf. “Are any of Clay’s paintings going to show at the new gallery?”

He answered me with a smirk. For just a moment, when he’d told me how fortunate he felt to live in such a home, I’d sensed a warm human being. Now the jerk was back.

“It’s his gallery, as well as Isak’s, so why not?” I asked.

“Why eat a cheeseburger when you can have filet mignon?”

I bit back my retort. Shame. It would’ve been a good one. “So . . .” I gestured at his half-finished Hidden Little Town painting, propped on the easel, bathed in northern light. “If the paintings in this series aren’t Juniper Grove, why do you fill them with Juniper Grove landmarks and people?”

He leveled his gaze at me. “Says who?”

“Says me. Unlike Laura Patchett, I’m not blind.”

He squinted, frowned. “Blind? She drove from the brunch in a car.”

“Didn’t you say as much at the Blackwells’ brunch? Laura’s not capable of seeing the world around her? And then you have her painting an apple but looking way from it, with grayed-out eyes.”

“Don’t be literal. I only knew her a few months, but that was long enough to know she wasn’t observant.”

“Not an artist?”

“She created the brunch invitations. The invitations.”

“Then there’s your portrayals of Brodie Keegan and Connor Morse and Isak Karlsen.”

At the mention of Brodie, Connor, and Isak, Dalton’s expression changed. He looked like a kid who’d been caught with a cookie but felt only pride at how clever he’d been to break into the cookie jar.

“Sometimes an artist uses real life as a foundation, but then he fictionalizes.”

“Painting me as Maureen Nicholson’s killer? Where’s the real-life foundation in that?”

“She was murdered, no? And you solved her murder.”

“What if people take your fictionalization seriously? You have Isak putting his label on someone else’s jam. Do he and Clay know you did that?”

“Doubtful.”

“Don’t you care if people view you as vindictive? Even a liar?”

“Life is short, art is forever.”

“Dalton, you have that exactly backwards.”

He let his hands fall to his sides, then walked to the windows, cleared a space next to his Buddha statue, and sat on the edge of the table. “I see and hear things, then I say to myself, ‘Oh, that’s interesting,’ and I use those things in my work. One of the first community events I went to when I moved here was the Farmers’ Market Festival, and three separate people”—he held up three fingers to make his point—“told me with absolute assurance that Isak copied recipes from old-timers and claimed them as his own. These were reliable people without an axe to grind, as far as I could tell. They offered the information, without me asking. So I have Isak switching labels—the truth with a slight fictional twist.”

“What if those three people were in competition with Isak at the festival?”