She carted her paint box and the dog out to her beat-up yellow van, simmering with exasperation and another emotion she didn’t quite recognize but thought might be fear. It put an acrid taste in her mouth, and she didn’t like it. Once on the passenger seat, Spot simmered, too. “Oh, calm down,” she said to him, as she put the van in gear. “Anything’s better than jail.” Spot looked at her strangely. “The pound. I meant the pound.” She talked to him all the way home, and by the time she pulled into the fenced lot behind the Goodnight Gallery, Spot was asleep and she was calmer. When she shut off the motor, he jerked awake, his eyes like marbles, and she carried him, now heaving with anxiety, into the shabby gallery office and deposited him on the floor in front of her mother and niece, both of them looking blonde and blue-eyed and cute. So not like me, Tilda thought. Behind them, Gwennie’s bubbler jukebox played “No, No Not Again,” by the Three Degrees.

“This is Spot,” she said to Gwen and Nadine. “I’m finding him a home where people will treat him with dignity and not sell him down the river while his back is turned.”

“Well, I’m sorry,” Nadine said, her pretty face defiant under her mop of pale curls. She was wearing a black T-shirt that said bite me in Gothic letters, but she still looked like Shirley Temple in a snit. “Nobody told me we couldn’t sell paintings. We’re an art gallery, for cripe’s sake.” She crouched down on the worn Oriental rug to pet Spot, who backed away, still heaving, his eyes peeled for a getaway. “What is wrong with this dog?”

“So many things,” Tilda said. “About the painting?”

“While you were in Iowa,” Gwen said to her, “Nadine broke curfew and Andrew sent her down to clean the basement as a punishment.”

Tilda took a deep breath and thought of a few choice things to say to her ex-brother-in-law.

“You can stop looking so mad,” Nadine said. “Dad didn’t let me in the locked part. I still don’t know what’s in there.”