Free Whisper of Evil by Kay Hooper Page B

the parish, and it had provided all the additional education Shelby could bear after finishing high school.
    In high school, she had been voted Most Likely to Grace the Cover of a Magazine, which only proved that kids in high school were rotten judges of character.
    Shelby didn't give a damn what she looked like, and had in fact rejected several offers that would have put her feet on the path to possible fame and fortune as a model. But she very much liked being on the other end of a camera, and over the years her pictures had begun appearing in various magazines.
    It was still more of a hobby than a career, mostly because Shelby didn't really need a career, and also because she wasn't in the least ambitious. She didn't need a career because her parents had left her both a nice house and stock in a number of flourishing businesses. She wasn't ambitious because it simply wasn't in her nature to be. She took pictures because she enjoyed it and needed neither money nor approval to validate doing something that was fun and satisfying in and of itself.
    All of which explained why Shelby had spent the day just wandering around with her camera, snapping pictures here and there of whatever scenery or person caught her fancy. The townspeople were too accustomed to this to protest; Shelby had formed the habit of giving away prints to her subjects, cheerfully handing over negatives as well if asked for them, and since she never used a picture without permission, no one minded even the sometimes unflattering shots she occasionally got while catching her subjects unawares.
    Since the light was particularly good on this Thursday, Shelby spent virtually the entire day outside, quitting only when darkness forced her to. She stopped by the cafe for supper because she didn't feel like fixing anything for herself, flirted with Vinny for a few minutes afterward, and then went home.
    Her small house, on the outskirts of town, was the picture-postcard image of a white cottage, complete with a white picket fence. She loved flowers but boasted a brown thumb, so she paid a gardener to keep the front and back yards looking pretty year-round; the rest of home maintenance she took care of herself, perfectly capable of wielding both a paintbrush and a hammer with equal skill.
    She drove a small, neat Honda and lived with a cat named Charlie, currently the only male fixture in her life. Despite the well-meaning attempts of friends to fix her up, Shelby had yet to meet any man who even mildly tempted her to give up her independence—or the freedom to work in her darkroom until dawn or eat cold pizza in bed while watching her favorite horror movies at midnight.
    On this particular night, after a day spent happily with her camera, she intended to shut herself up in her darkroom and develop her film. She was looking forward to hours of work and was curious to see what she had captured, since there were almost always surprises.
    This time, there was definitely a surprise.
    "What the hell…" she muttered to herself, holding up the last shot of a roll she had taken around mid-afternoon.
    It had amused her to notice that Max Tanner seemed to be following Nell Gallagher around town today, and at least twice Shelby had captured the image of him lurking, very intent on Nell and apparently unconscious of the fact that he wasn't exactly being subtle about it. Shelby felt she knew Max well enough to be pretty certain he hadn't been stalking with any kind of deadly intent, and that certainty had freed her to speculate as to his motives.
    Had to be those abandonment issues, she'd decided. Or was it merely rejection of a particularly nasty sort when one referred to a prom date gone humiliatingly awry?
    In any case, she had snapped a shot of Max skulking near one corner of the courthouse while Nell, apparently oblivious to his presence, walked down the steps toward her Jeep. That much was ordinary enough, even if interesting.
    What wasn't ordinary was the odd, hazy shape