He’d seen it when she was lying to Kelly Wilkerson and also clocked the moment that the leak had closed and she’d become herself again, saying way too much. Onstage she’d always been a little more alive than other people. Last night, in the Orchid Center, he’d assumed she was shining because she was at a party with her husband’s clients. Not to mention he’d been trying not to let his gaze drop to her long, bare legs. Plus, he hadn’t seen her act since high school.

He still remembered, though. She’d played the killer in The Mousetrap. Emily in Our Town. Juliet and Blanche DuBois in weird, truncated high-school adaptations. Most people who’d seen her onstage remembered; they always brought it up at the reunions, how good she’d been in this play or that.

This guy, Adam, he was just a regular liar. Marshall watched him manufacture a shrug.

“Nope. No.” He looked Marshall dead in the eye. “Can’t say either of those faces rings a bell.”

Marshall looked back, long and level. A cop stare, bolstered by cop silence, creating an expectant void.

Adam’s face stayed quizzical. Here, his face said, was a man who wanted badly to be helpful but, regretfully, had nothing.

Such unmitigated bullshit. But subtle. Kelly was buying it. As Marshall had floated Bree’s way-too-close-to-truth story by Adam, a little tension had come into Kelly’s drug-slack spine. A little hope. Her husband’s denial crushed about half of it out of her.

“Show him the other picture. The old lady,” she demanded, slurry and querulous and not ready to give up. “She looked familiar to me. I think I saw her in the Piggly Wiggly. I was feeling the avocados, and I turned around and there she was, bent over the stroller. Geoff was asleep. I thought nothing of it at the time, because who wouldn’t look? He was such a lovely boy.”

Marshall was sure she’d just broken his pressure, but instead it was as if she’d piled more weight on Adam. The mention of a lady sped up Adam’s blinks and paused his breathing. His expression remained polite and helpful, but Marshall got the sense that Adam had an idea of whose face would appear in the next picture. Moreover, he didn’t want to see that face.

Marshall flipped to the grainy photo from Bree’s security camera. Held out the phone.

Sure enough, Adam had a hard time pointing his eyes that way. He glanced nervously at his wife, the ceiling, the window, but finally he had to look.

Micro-surprise, micro-relief. Whatever woman’s face he’d been expecting to see, it wasn’t this one. Interesting.

“I don’t know her.” He really didn’t.