Read The Marsh Madness for Free Online Page B

You’d better run before I change my mind.”
    From up the stairs a bellow from Doug: “Since we’re getting rid of some of my books, who needs seventy-five pairs of shoes?”
    Larraine chuckled. “I can’t wait to get back to normal. Doug has already taken the TVs and radios to the new place. He claims they’re too distracting here. I’ll need a week of theater to get me back to normal. Oh, and by the way, I try to catch everything I can on and off Broadway. And off-off-off. As you could probably tell, Doug’s not so keen on it. I often meet up with old friends to go. But I like you too. Maybe you and I could attend a couple of performances together.”
    “That would be great.” I was still grinning as I drove away. It would be nice to stay in touch with her. But I realized that I’d paid cash and forgotten to give her my name or my number, even though we’d talked about getting together. And I didn’t know where she was moving. Oh well. I could probably track her down through the Harrison Falls Theater Guild. An occasional trip to catch a live performance in the city sounded wonderful.
    I took a couple of minutes to drop the long white florist’s box (still containing the offending dead roses), with a note, at Tyler’s neat little brick home. It was easier than chasing him around town on his shift, and I did have a key.
    Now, I had a lot of reading to catch up on.
    *   *   *
    AT HOME, I lugged the boxes up to the third floor and set out the books on my Lucite coffee table. With their bright colors and similar styles, my new finds brought some extra life to the space. Of course, there wasn’t much time to read before our lunch tomorrow at Summerlea, but I wanted to use what I had. I chose
A Man Lay Dead
, partly because it was the first and partly because it took place in a stately home. How much fun was that? Inspector Alleyn was a suave and elegant upper-class character. He practically reeked dignity and elegance, but right from the beginning he managed to avoid being stuffy or arrogant.
    I sifted through the other books, with flickering memories of the ones I’d read seven or eight years earlier. I read quickly, so I figured I could whip through them again.
    I hadn’t wanted to put my foot in it at lunch, so I’d made sure to brush up a bit on Marsh’s history too. What do people talk about at luncheon in places like Summerlea? I felt I could at least chat about the books and their author. It seemed that theater was indeed the grand dame’s first love and crime fiction second. I thought that explained a lot. I could see characters coming and going almost as though on a stage. The image of the scene rose from the page. But best of all was the dialogue, sharp and astute. You got to hear the English dialects from the various settings. I remembered reading these bits out loud. More than once, I’d thought, I wish I’d said what she’d written.
    You couldn’t gloss over a character who wandered onto one of these pages. We readers were able to check them out as if they’d been under a particularly heartless microscopetrained on their less attractive attributes. She didn’t mind laying her characters bare. With the exception of Alleyn, of course, who remained the perfect gentleman, irritatingly aristocratic, brilliant and unflappable. It appeared he never failed to solve a crime, with his small coterie of helpers to follow along, speaking in accents that were far less elegant. Once again, I knew if I’d been in one of these dramas, it would have been as the perky little Irish maid, who was maybe a bit too uppity for her own good.
    I hadn’t found myself yet, no dark-haired twenty-something woman with blue eyes “put in with a sooty finger.” But with thirty-two books, anything was possible. Maybe I’d show up as a Bridget or a Molly with a brogue that Marsh would capture phonetically.
    With the other characters, I had decided that Sergeant Fox was my favorite, large, occasionally burly,