“Not around me—and I didn’t tell him about Connor Morse’s record.”
“Did he talk about Isak’s past?”
“What about it?”
I made a quick decision to stay quiet on that subject. “Do you have any idea who killed Laura or Dalton?”
“Sheesh, no. I need to go.”
“Not yet. At the brunch, why did you tell Laura about the cane?
She stared ahead, frozen like an animal caught in the headlights of a car.
“Did you get a kick out of that, like you did telling me I was a murderer in one of Dalton’s paintings? What’s with you? You reveal personal information about her to a man who hated her, and then when he taunts her in a painting, you tell her about it?”
Charlotte stiffened her back. “Yeah, I saw Dalton had added a cane and I told her about it. She had a right to know, and I don’t give a rip what you or anyone else thinks.”
She turned on her high heels and marched back inside the building.
I went back to my car, brushed snow from the windshield, and turned the heat on high.
Then I mentally gathered all the puzzle pieces—Dalton’s gossipy paintings, the art gallery’s shaky financial situation, Charlotte and Brodie’s Town Hall snooping, Laura’s impending blindness, Mary and her blackmailer, the audio bugs in Dalton’s studio, the stolen landscapes—and tried to make sense of them.
The photo of Dalton and Shasta smacked of Brodie’s revenge. Word of it would get out, without his figurative prints on it. He only needed to show it to Mary.
But the photo came with three other pieces of blackmail, including Brodie’s DUI report. And who knew about Isak’s Minnesota assault accusation? Who knew about that, Brodie’s DUI, the Blackwells’ mortgage, and Shasta and Dalton’s affair—all those things—and decided to send the information to Mary?
Only Isak’s assault was publishable. Brodie would never reveal his own DUI, and the mortgage and affair weren’t newspaper material. To my mind that eliminated Brodie as the blackmailer, though not as the killer. Anyway, assuming a connection between Mary’s blackmailer and the murders hadn’t gotten me anywhere.
My phone rang. It was Holly, asking where I was. Julia and Royce were in the bakery. Could I pop over? I left the Forester parked and strode toward Holly’s Sweets.
The bakery was bright and toasty warm, and the air was fragrant with fresh bread, sugar, cinnamon, and a dozen other delicious scents. Julia and Royce were eating scones at one of two small tables on the far wall while Holly wiped down the counters.
“There she is,” Julia said, sounding slightly perturbed. “Where have you been, Rachel?”
“There was a break-in at my house. I had to wait for the locksmith.”
“What?” Dishrag in hand, Holly swung around the main display case and marched to where I stood. “Were you there? Are you all right?”
“I wasn’t there when it happened.”
“Does your husband know?” Julia demanded. “Did they steal something?”
“Of course he knows, and the intruder took just one thing.” I paused. “The landscape painting Dalton Taylor gave me as a wedding gift.”
“Freaky.” Holly sat at the second table, and I joined her. “Someone broke into your house to steal a painting. Is it valuable?”
“Not hugely,” I said, but in fact I had no idea of its monetary worth, only that Dalton hadn’t valued it in any sense.
For a minute or two we batted lame theories around—the landscape would be sold on the black market being the best of them—and then Royce told me his news.
On New Year’s Day in the early afternoon, a witness saw Clay Blackwell and Isak Karlsen arguing on Willow Court, about three blocks from Dalton Taylor’s house on Appletree Court.
“They’d parked at the curb and were shouting at each other in the street,” Royce said. “Then the two drove off in their cars. My witness knew Clay, and after I showed him a photo of Isak, he said that was the other man.”
“Royce found a photo of Isak on my computer and snapped it with his phone,” Julia said with pride.
“Brilliant,” I said.
“Well, my witness didn’t connect the argument with the murders, so he never reported it,” Royce said. “You wouldn’t, would you? Two men shouting at each other.”
I didn’t ask how Royce had found his witness. I’d learned that he knew half the people in Juniper Grove, and half the people in Juniper Grove loved him and knew he loved a mystery. He put people at ease, and they enjoyed talking with him.
“What were they arguing about?” I asked.
Royce pushed back an errant strand of white hair. “The witness couldn’t hear everything—he was at his front door three houses down—but he said it was about money and trouble.”
“Trouble,” Holly repeated.
“He heard two things clearly. Before Clay got back in his car, he yelled, ‘If people find out, you can forget about the gallery. That idiot.’ And then, just as they were leaving, Isak pointed at Clay and said, ‘You did this.’
“We need to stop by the station and tell Chief Gilroy,” Julia said. “It could be significant.”
“Who were they talking about?” Holly asked.
I didn’t hesitate. “Dalton. Had to be.”
“When they drove off,” Royce continued, “Clay went one way and Isak went another, but my witness didn’t remember which way.”
Holly got to her feet. “Peter will be here in half an hour. Meeting tonight? If we don’t figure this out, I’ll be up all hours.”
We scheduled a Mystery Gang meeting for six o’clock. I bought shortbread cookies for the station and headed out into the snow-speckled wind for my Forester.
Then I phoned Shasta Karlsen.
CHAPTER 17
Shasta had wanted to meet at her house, but since going there alone would qualify as taking a foolish risk in Gilroy’s eyes, I asked if we might rendezvous at Grove Coffee. A little put out, but driven by curiosity, she showed up ten minutes later.
We grabbed a table by the window, the same one, it seemed to me, that Shasta and Dalton had sat at when an unknown watcher had snapped their photo.
“Your husband interviewed me a little while ago,” she said, peeling the plastic top from her Styrofoam cup of tea. “Again.”
“He’ll talk to everyone two or three times in the course of an investigation. It’s normal.”
“Right now he’s interviewing Isak again. So why are we here? Are you going to ask me if I killed Laura or Dalton?”
