“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.
“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—”
