The Wicked Wife (Murder in Marin Book 2) by Martin Brown Read Free Book Online Page B

major career advancements.  
    Social news was also an essential part of the mix. For many readers, this was the first item that they turned to every week. Who was entertaining the staff of the British Consulate at their Ross home? Who was going through a messy divorce in Mill Valley? What couple just returned from a long anticipated dream vacation? What proud family had twins that were both just accepted to Stanford?  
    Of course the comings and goings of celebrities were always of interest. Sylvia, for example, covered the news of Robin Williams moving back to Tiburon, the town he first lived in as a teen. Later, she interviewed neighbors after his tragic death there.  
    In Sausalito, Warren Bradley had traded more heavily in pure gossip, both benign and malicious. On the other hand, Sylvia was a social butterfly with no taste for creating the web of biting comments that Bradley enjoyed spinning each week.  
    After Warren’s death, knowing that his biting comments about many of his neighbor’s significantly increased the number of suspects in his brutal slaying, Rob made himself a promise to watch more closely what his community columnists were actually writing about their neighbors.
    Rob, as is the case with so many community newspaper publishers, had no funds to compensate his corps of community reporters. In truth, however, the arrangement was a win/win for both writer and publisher: giving the reporter a prominent place in his or her community, and giving Rob a needed aspect of local news coverage that he could not otherwise afford.  

    Sylvia’s, husband, Jack, was a financial analyst working for the University of California system, which had two huge institutions in the area, one in San Francisco, and the other in Berkeley. They lived a comfortable life in a home they had purchased in Belvedere in the late 1970s. At age fifty-eight, her weekly columns, Belvedere Buzz and Tiburon Talk , were as close to achieving her dream of becoming a journalist as she would likely ever come.  
    Better still, it made Sylvia a bit of a local celebrity and earned her the status to attend such exclusive gatherings as this informal welcoming event introducing the enchanting and internationally celebrated supermodel to Peninsula society.  
    Best of all, Sylvia had a love of people. Their lives, their hopes and disappointments were for her an endless source of fascination. She earned nothing for her columns, but loved it all the same.

    Just a few days before the gathering at the Adams’ home, William’s “get to know Willow,” event had grown from forty invitees to nearly one hundred.  
    That, of course, did not bother Willow in the least.
    Everyone in Belvedere society had an opinion about Willow and William as a couple, regardless of whether or not they had personally met the internationally recognized model. Someone famous enough to have graced the cover of People, and who lent her celebrity to the best selling perfume in San Francisco, New York, Paris, and Hong Kong was bound to generate both excitement and interest.  
    Willow and William were Topic Number One, be it at any of the two local yacht clubs—the St Regis in Belvedere, and the Corinthian, on Main Street in downtown Tiburon—to the local choral society, the many local church social groups, or the BWPL—Belvedere Waterfront Preservation League.  
    So, naturally it was a story that demanded the attention of Sylvia and her popular column.  
    As Rob suggested, Sylvia quickly got busy gathering quotes, beginning with one of the grand dames of Peninsula society: Pamela Botherton, the longtime wife of Marin County Superior Court judge, Peter Botherton.  
    Pamela took a few moments to collect her thoughts. In fact, just two nights before, she had asked her husband, “Peter, what in the world is William Adams doing with that Willow Wisp woman?”
    Peter, who thought that neither Adams social nor love life were any of his concern, shrugged, mumbled something