She shrugged. “I used to have an imaginary friend. I told everyone she was my little sister. I called her Angel.” Dulcie looked over at him, her gaze locking with his as she felt a shudder quake through her. “Just another coincidence? Or is it possible that my whole life is a lie?”

Jolene tried to forget about the stupid note she’d found on her car. Midge had probably put it there.

Except it sounded...threatening. But would she have found it threatening if she wasn’t secretly getting the murder story?

Midge had warned her not to go digging around in Laura Beaumont’s murder. Why would she care unless there was something to find? And what business was it of Midge’s what Jolene did?

Jolene thought back to when she’d tried to question the members of the Whitehorse Sewing Circle. She recalled the way Ella Cavanaugh had looked at Pearl, as if afraid to say something she shouldn’t.

Jolene couldn’t believe what she was thinking as she drove toward Whitehorse. That the whole community might be involved in keeping a secret about the murder. Did they know who killed Laura and had been protecting that person for the past twenty-four years?

That seemed even more far-fetched. Maybe it was just as Midge had said, an unpleasant part of the area’s history that the community didn’t want dug up. So why didn’t Jolene believe that?

Like the books she loved to read, she knew a good mystery when she found one. She also understood that in any good mystery there were clues that needed to be uncovered. In this case, finding those clues meant digging into the murder even further.

Word had gotten out much too quickly in this isolated, small community that she’d been asking about the murder. Anything more she did would be known and even possibly jeopardize her job.

But as she hit the outskirts of Whitehorse, she was thinking about the next segment of the story—and planning to pick up the assignments herself on Thursday in the hope of finding out where the murder story was coming from.

What worried her most was why someone had chosen her to tell their story to—true or not. She couldn’t shake off the feeling that the writer was feeding her information about the murder for a reason other than a critique of the writing.

But why not give the information to the sheriff if the author knew something? Unless the story was actually a confession...

Another thought struck her. What if the author was tired of being part of the conspiracy and had decided to tell an outsider the truth, that outsider being someone safe and trustworthy like, say, the schoolteacher?