“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.”