The Marsh Madness

I felt my stomach fluttering with excitement.

“What did you find out about Shelby from your friend at breakfast?”

“She’s a very pretty girl from a well-to-do but not fabulously wealthy family.”

“Not like the Kauffmans,” I said, sampling the warm sliced baguette with flavored butter.

She got a solid business degree and apparently was doing well, but in the last couple of years she decided to become an actress.”

“What did your friend think of that?”

He shook his head. “She disapproved. She thought that Shelby was not a good actor and would never make it in that world.”

I got that. Shelby had let her anxiety show more than once during our lunch. “So what is this not good actor—a pretty girl from a well-off family—doing, getting involved in a scam that resulted in a murder?”

“I don’t know,” Lance said with one of his graceful shrugs. “And my friend had no clue. Maybe Shelby’s some kind of psychopath.”

I thought back to our luncheon and recalled the beautiful, slender and appealing woman who had greeted us. Could she have been a psychopath? “I don’t think so. She was a bit nervous, uncomfortable.

“Apparently, Jordan, that’s the talent of the psychopath. They make you believe them.”

I leaned back and pursed my lips. Shelby could have been a psychopath, but I wasn’t buying it. I could certainly believe it of the faux Chadwick with his lizard eyes or even the hulking Thomas with his unmoving face and green-tinged hands. I knew that psychopaths could look like normal people, especially charming and attractive or powerful people. Many people believe you find lots of them heading corporations or in the senior ranks. But Lisa had been genuinely nervous during our meeting and lunch. I would have bet Uncle Mick’s shop on it. Yes, you can fake the slight shake in the hands, but she’d gone pale more than once, and there had been the little tic under her eye. Now I wondered if she was nervous about being part of the scam.

“I don’t buy it, Lance. I met her. And Lance, if you are thinking about mentioning that my last bad boyfriend—because we’re not including Tyler in this—was a psychopath, I agree. He was for sure, and I did a ton of reading about psychopaths after that.”

“As your personal librarian, I am aware of that.”

The napkins were cloth, so I couldn’t doodle on them. I whipped out a notebook, ripped out a piece of paper and wrote:

PSYCHOPATH—Shelby????

Lance said, “Oh good. Here’s our lunch. It’s hungry work arguing with you.”

The server, still with the deer-in-the-headlights expression, placed Lance’s cheese plate and my snazzy square soup bowl in front of us and jerked her hand back as if she expected to be bitten.

I gave her a reassuring smile, but I don’t think she bought it. Maybe she thought I was the psychopath.

Lance beamed at her. She blushed. Oh, Lance.

“So,” I said, with my pen poised, “maybe Shelby Church became involved because of a man. Let’s say she had a boyfriend and she was doing it for him. It wouldn’t be the first time a woman got involved in a crime because she fell for the wrong man.”

He shrugged. “I’m a man. I don’t involve women in crime.”

“Not every man involves a woman in crime. But let’s assume that’s the case here.”

Lance picked up a piece of artisanal cheddar and beamed at it. “Assume away. So maybe there is a man running the show. Which one of them?”

“I don’t know. Maybe neither of them.”

“You have got to try this cheese, Jordan.”

I kept talking. “The reason I said neither of them is because of how she reacted to Thomas. She wasn’t aware of his presence. He wasn’t controlling her or influencing her. He wasn’t important to her.”

Lance gave one of his little shrugs.

I said, “Women know these things. Of course, I had no real evidence, but I did feel confident that Thomas wasn’t the man.”