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.