Thursday#2
“Yeah.”
She handed it back. “She called it in. I thought she was going to pick it up later. Doesn’t matter. It’s ready.”
Ten minutes later, two bags of miscellaneous cake stuff and three five-pound tubs of icing heavier, the Defender was heading north.
He glanced over. Rocko was blinking the blood out of his eyes from the second whack. He had an incredibly thick skull.
“Try not to get blood on that cake stuff.”
“Fuck you,” Rocko said, shaking the blood off his face and onto one of the tubs of fondant.
Shane sighed. “You set up the Two Rivers hit. Who hired you and who was the target?”
Rocko turned his beady little eyeballs toward him. “Who are you?”
Shane sighed. “My name is Shane.”
Rocko spit on him. “Fuck you, Shane.”
“Rocko, we can do this hard or we can do this easy. You got paid five thousand for a contract You subcontracted Vinnie ‘Can of Tomatoes’ Marinelli two thousand to do the actual job. He subcontracted it to a dumbshit named Macy for five hundred. Both Vinnie and Macy are dead. I killed them. The job isn’t done. So whoever paid you isn’t gonna be happy. Who paid you?”
“Fuck you.”
Shane crossed an old turn-bridge over the Savannah River. He saw a sign for the Savannah National Wildlife Refuge and turned off, drove down a one-lane dirt road, then onto what could barely be called a track until he was pretty sure they were deep into the swamp. Then he stopped the Defender, got out, went around to the passenger side and opened the door, quickly stepping back, Glock at the ready. “Get out.”
“You going to kill me?” Rocko demanded.
“Not if you tell me what I want to know.” Shane reached into his pocket and pulled out an airline voucher. “Then you take this to the Savannah Airport, get on a plane, and no one around here ever sees you again. Got it?” He slapped the voucher down on the hood of the Defender.
Rocko’s eyes shifted from the voucher to Shane. “Bullshit.”
“Who gave you the contract and who was the contract on?”
A very large alligator basking in the sun about fifty feet away was eyeing them, perhaps sizing them up for a snack. Shane squinted. The gator had a scar where one of its eyes should have been. It was a hard life everywhere, even in the swamp. The one-eyed reptile slid into the water with a splash and began to lazily move toward them.
Rocko heard the splash and glanced over his shoulder. “I took an oath. I ain’t violating it.”
“What are you talking about?”
Rocko frowned. “To make my bones with the mob, I gotta stick with the oath, right? I can’t violate the contract. It’s like, ya know, that doctor-patient thing. Or when a lawyer talks to a client.”
Spare me from idiots,Shane thought. “That’s movie bullshit.” A mosquito landed on his neck and took a bite. Halfway from its resting spot, the gator had paused, sizing up the situation with one eye. Shane figured it had more brains than Rocko.
Rocko’s head moved back and forth on his bull neck. “Can’t squeal. Mob oath.”
“Mob oath. You telling me Don Fortunato hired you?” Shane asked.
Rocko’s eyes widened. “You from the Don?”
“If I was from the Don, would I be asking you if the Don hired you?”
The furrow appeared in Rocko’s forehead as he tried to figure that out. “I’d like to work for the Don.”
Scratch the Don,Shane thought. He saw the muscles in Rocko’s shoulders begin to bulge and he knew what he was doing and he also knew that the plastic flex-cuff probably wasn’t going to hold. The tattoos on Rocko’s arms were rippling now from the effort. A naked woman on the right bicep was swaying seductively.
“Rocko,” Shane said with a deep sigh. “I really don’t want to kill you. But I will if you come at me. Think, damn it. There’s no mob oath if you’re not working for the mob. So you can tell me.”
The flex-cuff went with an audible pop and Shane shot Rocko in the left thigh as he started to charge at him. Cursing, the weightlifter grabbed the leg and hopped about.
“I told you not to do that,” Shane said.
The gator was moving forward again, smelling blood.
Shane moved toward the truck. “Rocko, we need to get out of here.”
“Fuck you,” Rocko said, hopping away from the Defender. “I can’t believe you fucking shot me.”
“I’ll shoot you again if you don’t tell me who the contract was on. Agnes Crandall?”
Rocko was in too much pain to hide the look of recognition that flickered across his face at the name.
“Okay, got that. Now tell me the guy who hired you and I’ll get you back to the truck before the gator gets you,” Shane said, and when Rocko looked even more stubborn, he added. “I’m telling you, you dumb fuck, there is no mob oath.”
“Hey, she made me take it, right there on the phone. I took the mob oath?—”
“She?” Shane said.
Rocko glared at him. “Fuck you, I ain’t tellin’ you nothin’ and I ain’t breakin’ the oath, neither.” He turned and began a limping run along the edge of the swamp.
“Damn it, Rocko!” Shane yelled, but it was already over, the gator came out of the water, an explosion of green scales and big teeth, and closed the ground between them in seconds, its jaws snapping shut on Rocko’s leg. Rocko screamed, and Shane fired a couple of rounds into the gator, feeling bad for it, but the bullets seemed to have no effect as it rolled with Rocko into the dark water, dragging him into the depths.
The surface of the water boiled for a few seconds, then became still.
Shane waited to see if Rocko would reappear, but after a couple of minutes he knew Rocko was sleeping with the gator.
He got back into the Defender, pulled onto the dirt trail, and accelerated, heading for the refuge exit. They don’t make ‘em like Rocko anymore, Shane thought as he drove back toward Keyes. Darwin had pretty much explained why. He’d have felt bad except that Rocko’s next stop would have been heading to Two Rivers to drill Agnes in exchange for five large after having sent two assholes to terrify her two nights running. For that, the dumbfuck deserved the gator.
And now nobody else would be showing up to shoot Agnes.
One more stop at a jeweler Joey knew to cash in Agnes’s engagement ring for top dollar and then he could go home and see what was in the bomb shelter. First guess, Frankie’s body. Second guess, five million dollars. Third guess, a bunch of bad survival food and a dozen Playboy magazines from 1982. The third one was the most likely?—
Shane’s sat phone rang, the tone designating the cut out number he had used to call Casey Dean. Shane looked at the text message:
sorry i missed your call.
enjoy the wedding.
see you there. cd.
“Humor,” Shane said to the phone. “Har.” He punched the jeweler’s address into the GPS and wondered what Agnes was making for lunch.
“I know a little more than I did before I left,” Shane said as he drank the tall glass of lemonade Carpenter had brought out onto the porch after lunch. “I know the Marinelli/Macy contract was let on Agnes. I don’t know who let the contract, except that a woman made the call, and Rocko thought it was mob related. Whatever that means.”
“Well, that’s a help,” Joey muttered.
Shane turned on his uncle. “Don’t start with me, Joey. You called me into this mess and you’re still holding something back from me. I think the contract is defunct, given that I’ve taken out the food chain, but I still want to know who hired Rocko in case whoever it is decides to try again. Plus we’ve still got your old pal Four Wheels out in the swamp sending his descendants in here.” He looked at Carpenter, who was leaning back with his lemonade, smiling as he listened to Agnes and Lisa Livia talk in the kitchen. “And then I got this.” Shane handed his cell phone to Carpenter, letting him read the text message from Dean.
“Interesting,” Carpenter said.
“What’s the status of the hatch?” Shane asked him.
“The lock’s burned through,” Carpenter said. “I rigged a hydraulic jack to pull it open when you got back, so whenever you’re ready.”
“Who’s in there?” Shane asked, nodding toward the house.
“Agnes, Lisa Livia, and some woman named Kristy,” Joey answered. “Wedding photographer. A box came full of flamingo pens with pink feathers on their heads, and they’re lookin’ at ‘em.” He seemed bemused by that.
“Why—” Shane stopped when he spotted Xavier pull up to the bridge and park just short of it and Doyle come crawling out from underneath the bridge like some kind of troll. “What the hell is Xavier doing here?”
“Damned if I know,” Joey said.
Xavier got out of his car and came over the bridge, where Doyle met him, but the detective’s focus was on the house as he crossed the lawn, Doyle following, yammering at him.
“Let’s just invite the whole damn town.” Shane looked at his uncle. “You know, Joey, if we find Frankie in there, and anything at all points to you having killed him, there isn’t much I can do to keep Xavier off your ass.”
“I ain’t worried,” Joey said. “I didn’t kill him. I just want to know what happened that night.”
Xavier came up the porch steps, Doyle stomping up next to him.
“What can we do for you, Detective?” Shane asked.
“I understand there’s been some excavation work in the basement,” Xavier said. “I even heard a rumor there’s some sort of bomb shelter out there in the backyard and a tunnel that leads to it. And I heard that you fellows have opened up that tunnel and are getting ready to open the hatch to that bomb shelter.”
“You sure heard a lot,” Joey muttered.
“And where is Detective Hammond?” Shane asked, not wanting that doofus wandering around unsupervised.
“Detective Hammond appears to have taken a long lunch break,” Xavier said. “I believe at the marina. Missing all the excitement, that boy is. Sort of like when they opened Capone’s vault on TV.”
“There was nothing in Capone’s vault,” Shane noted.
“I’m hoping for better results here,” Xavier said.
“Some could say you was trespassing,” Joey said.
“Some say you might have some trouble if that bomb shelter gets opened,” Xavier said.
“Like who?” Joey demanded.
“Oh, there’s been a lot of talk.” Xavier pulled a piece of paper out of the pocket of his white coat. “For example. This here is Miz Agnes’s criminal record. I was quite surprised to note the contents. Turns out she’s wielded a frying pan before with violent effect.”
Shane looked at Joey and noted that shut the old man up for the moment.
“I also heard your Miz Agnes is pretty handy with a cooking fork to the neck.”
Fucking Taylor,Shane thought. There was going to be one fewer chef in the world shortly.
“Somebody swear out a complaint?” Joey said, still cool.
“No,” Xavier admitted, and Shane thought, Not Taylor then, somebody Taylor told. The detective scowled toward the river. “What the hell is that noise?”
“Flamingos,” Joey said. “So all you got is some gossip and some old paper, I don’t?—”
Agnes came out onto the porch with Lisa Livia and a trim brunette draped in cameras. Opening the shelter was not going to be the clandestine affair Shane had had in mind. He had indeed forgotten what Keyes was like. He looked toward the bridge, expecting to see the local high school marching band come across with cheerleaders and the rest of the town population.
“I brought a flashlight” Xavier cheerfully held up a heavy-duty light
“I rigged lights,” Carpenter said. “You won’t need it”
“Can we get this over with?” Lisa Livia said, and Shane could feel the edge coming off her, nothing like her usual voluptuous vibe. He glanced at Agnes and she nodded curtly, but her tension was for LL, standing at her elbow, and he remembered that for Lisa Livia, Frankie wasn’t some dead mobster, he was her father, and they might be about to open his tomb.
“You sure you want to?—”
“Yes,” Lisa Livia snapped, and Shane led the way into the house, past the kitchen table that held a box full of lurid pink pens with feather tops, and down the ladder, holding it in place as everybody else climbed down.
They all waited in the rec room while he and Carpenter went down the fifty-foot tunnel and manned the hydraulic jack. It was a complicated arrangement of cables and blocks of wood that Shane didn’t even attempt to figure out He had enough of a headache trying to figure out who was trying to kill who and why.
“Grab that,” Carpenter said. Shane grabbed the lever indicated. “Ready?” Carpenter asked. Shane nodded. “Let’s do it.”
In concert, they began to apply pressure. At first there was no obvious result except a tightening of the steel cables. Then an ominous creaking of the wood blocks, the cables ran over. “Don’t worry,” Carpenter said. “I’ve done this kind of thing before.”
“Opened twenty-five-year-old bomb shelters?”
“I opened a bank vault once that had been shut for sixty years.”
“What happened?” Shane said as he leaned into the level.
“Wall cracked a little,” Carpenter said, and Shane looked up at the arched ceiling above him.
“How much is a little?”
“I got it open. It’ll pop, just like?—”
The hatch popped open with a whoosh and a creak of rusty hinges that echoed down the tunnel and through the house.
Voices rose from the other end of the basement, a babble of questions and some contention.
“It’s all right,” Shane called back.
“No, it isn’t,” Agnes yelled back to him. “Brenda’s here.”
Brenda’s voice floated down the tunnel. “Is the shelter open?”
“No,” Shane called back, but she came tapping down the long tunnel in her heels, and the rest of them followed her. He sighed and turned toward the open hatch and stepped over the lower edge.
The first thing he saw was a safe, its door wide open.
Inside the safe was a frying pan, its rim crusted with very old blood.
Inside the frying pan and piled around it in the safe were empty money wrappers. Lots and lots of them. Enough, Shane thought, to go around five million dollars.
“Oh, my God!” Brenda said, her voice full of drama.
“That’s not my frying pan,” Agnes said from behind him, and he turned and saw them, crowding the door, Brenda with her head turned away, Xavier and Agnes behind her, and next to Agnes, Lisa Livia looking pale and the thin brunette holding up her camera.
“I told you,” Brenda said to Xavier, her voice rich with distress. “I told you. Joey and Four Wheels killed him. I can’t bear to look.”
“Look at what, Miz Dupres?” Xavier said.
“At...” Brenda turned to look into the shelter, at first with dread and then with disbelief. “What... Where’s Frankie?”
“He’s not in there,” Lisa Livia said, her voice as stunned as Brenda’s, and Agnes put her arm around her friend.
Lisa Livia turned and walked back down the tunnel.
“She wanted her dad dead?” Shane asked, and Agnes shook her head, giving him a look that said she’d tell him later.
“Joey came in and moved the body,” Brenda was saying to Xavier, grabbing his sleeve. “Him and Four Wheels. They moved it!”
“How?” Xavier asked, but Carpenter had already moved past the safe and was looking up.
“Hmm,” Carpenter said, and began to climb up an old metal ladder welded to the side of the shelter.
Shane went to see what his partner had seen and realized that there was a door at the top, and when Carpenter pushed on the door and flipped it open, sunlight poured in, and above that, a ceiling, blue with gold stars.
“That’s my gazebo,” Agnes said from beside Shane.
Shane turned back to where Xavier was looking at the frying pan.
“Well, someone got whacked a good one,” Xavier said, and looked at Agnes.
“That is not mine,” Agnes said again.
“This is now a crime scene—” Xavier began and then the earth began to shake. “What the hell?”
“Did you order some trucks?” Carpenter said to Agnes from the top of the ladder.
“Trucks?” Agnes said.
“Five of them. Dump trucks. Heading for your bridge.”
“No,”Agnes said, running for the tunnel.
Shane went to follow her and caught a glimpse of Brenda. She looked like the news about the trucks was making her feel much better.
Agnes ran through the kitchen,past the Venus and Lisa Livia, who said, “What now?” as if she didn’t care, then out through the hall and across the lawn, waving her hands and yelling, “Stop, no, go back,” but the dump trucks kept rolling across the bridge; first one, bumping over the fragile supports, onto the drive, across the lawn and down to the riverbank, where Cerise and Hot Pink honked their rage; then another, the bridge groaning before the truck went to the river; then a third, the supports screaming this time before the truck went on; and then, inevitably, the fourth hitting the bridge, the supports splintering with a crash, that truck sinking into the cut, leaving the fifth and last truck marooned on the other side.
“What are you doing?” Agnes screamed as she got to the bridge, but the driver was just as furious, waving his paperwork at her, asking what the hell business she had ordering five trucks of sand to cross a substandard bridge. “I’m suing you people,” he yelled.
“I didn’t order this,” Agnes yelled back. “What the hell is it?”
The driver pulled out an invoice. “Eighty cubic yards of pink sand, for a wedding at Two Rivers mansion.”
“Pink sand?”Agnes said, dumbfounded.
“Who ordered it?” Shane asked, and she jerked back, surprised to find him beside her.
The driver squinted at the invoice. “A Brenda Dupres.”
Agnes turned and yelled, “Brenda,” but Brenda was already tapping down the steps in her spike heels, looking enraged, a tiny blond D-cup tigress.
“What did you do to my clock?”she said, stamping across the grass, pulling her spike heels out of the earth with vicious energy.
“Some shithead showed up last night to kill me,” Agnes said to her, “and he shot up your damn clock instead. Now what the hell is all this pink sand?”
“Maria wanted a flamingo-themed wedding,” Brenda said, reining in her temper as she drew herself up. “I thought pink sand would fit right in with everything else here. I know how nasty the shore can look when the tide is out. But I never dreamed it would break the bridge.” She looked down to the river, where the first three trucks were dumping their sand on the shore, Kristy dutifully snapping pictures of it all. “One, two, three ...” She blinked her eyes at the truck stuck in the cut. “Four. There should be another truck—oh, yes, there it is.” She waved at the driver on the road to the bridge. “Five.”
“There ain’t nothing more coming out here, lady,” the driver from the wrecked truck said, “except a tow truck.”
“Oh,” Brenda said, sadly. “Looks like it’s the country club for the wedding then.” She smiled at Agnes. “Fiddle-dee-dee.”
Agnes turned on her. “No, it is not the country club.”
Anger is not your friend, Agnes.
Neither is Brenda Fortunato, Dr. Garvin.
Brenda smiled. “Agnes. Honey. The baker canceled. The florist canceled.” She took a step closer. “The photographer sent an assistant who doesn’t have a clue what she’s doing. The health inspector won’t let you serve dinner. You tried to kill the caterer.” She took another step closer. “The house is only half-painted. The bridge is out. Your kitchen is a crime scene. And you owe me for a very expensive antique grandfather clock.” She was almost nose to nose with Agnes now. “You simply can’t do it, Agnes. You’re finished.” Her eyes narrowed. “Give up.”
Agnes felt her breath go, felt the old dizziness take hold as the red washed over her again, and then she heard Lisa Livia in her head again, saying, Face it, Agnes, you’re a killer, thought of Shane, putting those two bullets in the guy in the laundry room, walking through the kitchen firing at the guy in the hall until his gun was empty, never losing his temper, no expression on his face at all. Another part of her brain knew that Shane had his arm around her waist, ready to haul her off if she went for Brenda’s throat, but the part of her brain where the red mist lived was changing course, looking at Brenda now, knowing that professional killers did not get mad. They just ended things.
“You listen to me,” she said to Brenda, her voice like ice. “On Saturday at noon, the cake will be beautiful, the flowers will be magnificent, the photographer who is taking pictures of the sand right now will be taking pictures of the bride, the catering will be amazing and legal, and the bridge will not only be back, it will be so strong that twenty trucks could cross it. And the house will be the house you have always dreamed of having, and, as God is my witness, will never have because I will defeat you utterly and completely, I will grind your face in the dust, I will make you nothing before the world, Brenda Dupres, and my kitchen will not be a crime scene because I will have proved that you picked up that goddamned frying pan in that goddamned bomb shelter and whacked your goddamned husband with it twenty-five years ago, and you will spend the rest of your life in an orange jumpsuit in prison where there is no moisturizer and your face will look like old luggage and the only man you’ll be able to seduce is a guard named Bubba with no teeth, so go back to your boat and pray, Brenda, get down on your knees and pray to whatever obscene and vicious god that made you that you do not cross me again because I will destroy you.”
Brenda had stopped, her mouth open, gaping, and Shane had loosened his hold on her, and a silence had fallen over the landscape in general.
“Agnes Crandall,” Brenda said finally, her voice tremulous, “I do declare, you’re insane.”
“And don’t you forget it,” Agnes said, and walked back toward her house.
When Agnes was gone,and a shaken Brenda had picked her way across what was left of the bridge supports to her Caddy parked on the far side, Shane found Carpenter. “Stay here. Check out that shelter. See if you can figure out anything about who came and went via that hatch in the gazebo. And keep an eye on Agnes.”
“Roger that,” Carpenter said, but he didn’t sound happy. “Where are you going?”
“The swamp. I stopped Rocko, now I’m going to stop Four Wheels from sending any more kin to upset Agnes.” He looked back at the house. “I think she’s really upset. She was ... different.”
“What about Casey Dean?” Carpenter looked as close to exasperated as Shane had ever seen him.
“Dean isn’t going to make his move until after the wedding,” Shane said, ignoring Carpenter’s real question, What about the mission?
“How do you know that?” Carpenter said. “Because he sent you a text message and you believe it?”
“Because the Don told him not to do anything until then.”
Carpenter’s face was as impassive as ever, but his eyes said, Uh-huh.
“Fine,” Shane said. “You observe the situation and develop a theory that will get me a line on Dean, I’ll go after him.”
“All right,” Carpenter said. “I’ll work on that. Does that mean you don’t want me with you going after Four Wheels?”
Shane nodded toward the house, where one of Thibault clan was spraying paint with abandon as he finished finishing the house at last. “I’m taking Garth. He knows the terrain.”
Carpenter looked even more doubtful. “I don’t think he’s going to be much help if you run into trouble.”
“I think I can handle one old man in the swamp, even if he is surrounded by his family.”
Carpenter shook his head. “So far we haven’t handled much of anything.”
Shane bristled. “I’m doing all right.”
“You’re not focused. You haven’t been since your uncle called you in Savannah. Have you tried to figure out the big picture in this mission? Because there’s something about this that I don’t like?—”
“Wilson’s given us an op to run,” Shane said, ignoring the instincts that were telling him the same thing. “Take out Casey Dean. I know I screwed up?—”
“Twice.”
“I know I screwed up twice,” Shane said, his voice tight, “but I will take out Casey Dean. I’m going after Four Wheels to close out the problems that have been distracting me.”
Carpenter glanced over the house. “You think Four Wheels Thibault is your distraction here? If you don’t get focused, you’re going to end up in a body bag. Casey Dean has also screwed up by not taking us out. There’s something wrong with this whole mission, and it’s going to come down to whichever side stops making mistakes and does the job right. Soon. Don’t forget that.”
“I’m not,” Shane said, not looking back at the house. “I’m closing out one loose end, finishing the job here. Then we take down Casey Dean and move on.”
Assuming we can convince the general population that there’s no five mil at Two Rivers, Joey didn’t kill Frankie, and I can leave Agnes.
Better not to share that with Carpenter.
He went to get Garth.
Lisa Livia was sittingon the counter stool, her feet on Rhett and her forehead on the counter, when Agnes got back to the kitchen.
“I was so sure she’d killed him,” she said into the counter as Agnes went around her to get the bourbon bottle out. “I was positive. I’d seen her driving the damn Caddy away that night. I knew she’d done it. That’s her damn frying pan down there.”
“Well, don’t give up.” Agnes grabbed a glass and poured Lisa Livia two fingers of bourbon and slid it across to her. “You haven’t thought this through. Just because the body wasn’t there today doesn’t mean it wasn’t there last week.”
“You think she could have gotten a twenty-five-year-dead body up that ladder and out through the gazebo?” Lisa Livia said, skepticism thick in her voice.
“I think she’s capable of chopping a twenty-five-year-dead body into paperweights, carting them out in a basket, and selling them to the Daughters of the Confederacy as memento mori.” Agnes poured herself a glass. “We’re talking Brenda here. Do not give up hope. It is still entirely possible that your mother bashed your rather with that frying pan twenty-five years ago, and that he’s still deader than a doornail today.”
Lisa Livia’s lips quirked as she straightened and picked up her glass. “Yeah. No point in hoping that my mother’s innocent and my father’s alive.”
“Exactly.” Agnes lifted her glass. “Why look for a silver lining when there might be a cloud? If South Carolina has the death penalty, there could be an orphanage in your future yet.” She clinked her glass with LL’s and drank, and Lisa Livia laughed shortly and drank, too.
“Okay,” she said when she’d drained her glass. “There’s still hope.”
Agnes looked at LL’s empty glass. “I don’t suppose you’d want to pace yourself.”
“I don’t suppose,” Lisa Livia said, putting her glass on the counter. “Hit me, I’m having a bad day.” She looked over at the Venus. “Hit her, too.”
“She has enough problems.” Agnes looked for something to distract LL from more bourbon, went over to the CD player, and punched up the song she’d been playing that morning before breakfast. “Remember this song? You had this on when you bailed me out after I cracked Rich with the frying pan. You made me sing it with you in the car on the way home, remember?”
Lisa Livia bit her lip and looked away.
“There is no good reason,” Agnes sang as she leaned over the counter to LL, “we should be so all alone.”
LL took Agnes’s bottle of bourbon and poured herself another glass and then joined in, and they belted out the Chicks paean to self-pity. “God, I love the Chicks,” Agnes said when the song was done and she’d moved the bourbon out of LL’s reach. “And God do I need them this week.”
“They’ve gotten us through some real bad times,” Lisa Livia said, pushing her empty glass across the counter as “Hello Mr. Heartache” began. “Hit me. Again.”
“If you could slow down a little,” Agnes said, “I could use some help destroying your mother.”
“Right, the house.” Lisa Livia nodded. “How’s that goin’?”
“I’ve decided to take your advice and embrace the killer within, and I’m trying to be a colder, more effective murderous bitch. No emotion. Run silent, run deep. The female Shane.”
“Oh,” Lisa Livia said. “Well. Glad I could help.”
They looked at each other and Agnes poured them each another drink while they tried to work out a plan. All of Lisa Livia’s ended up with “and sink her damn boat,” so Agnes eventually called a halt to both the planning and the liquid refreshment.
“I can’t get drunk,” she said as she sipped her last one, knowing she was well on her way. “I have to write a column and make wedding cakes and write a column today. And you have to prepare to be a mother of a bride. All of this mess is making us forget the wedding. Our little Maria is getting married to a rich kid who loves her. To Maria!” She lifted her glass to Lisa Livia.
“I can get drunk,” Lisa Livia said, and then added, “To Maria!” and knocked the rest of her drink back.
“Okay, then.” Agnes put her drink aside and got out her mixing bowl, trying to keep her mind from sliding back to the chaos of real life, because she was going to stay cool and calm. She thought of Shane, walking through the kitchen the night before, firing that gun with no expression on his face. Yeah, that was gonna be her from now on.
“Speaking of Maria ...” Lisa Livia slid her now-empty glass across the counter and picked up Agnes’s full one. “Are you ready for this? Brenda’s been sabotaging Palmer, too. Remember I told you she’s been telling Maria that Palmer is just like his daddy, the drunken whoremonger?”
“Right.” Agnes went to the refrigerator for butter, sour cream, milk, and eggs.
“Well, she’s been telling Palmer that Maria’s marrying him for his money.”
Agnes stopped and turned around, her arms full. “And he believes this garbage?”
“She’s subtle. She just tells him how excited Maria is about living in a big house and having great cars and lots of clothes and big diamonds. He asked me about it, trying to be discreet, poor dork, and I told him Maria doesn’t give a rat’s ass about any of that, but Brenda’s been working on him for a while. He really believes it, and it’s giving him cold feet. And having that moron Hammond hanging around isn’t making him feel any better.”
“Crap,” Agnes said, transferring ingredients to the counter. “Okay, so I’ll fix that, and then we’ll have the wedding, and Brenda will lose the house and die screaming, ‘I’m melting, I’m melting.’“ It sounded like a plan to her, but Lisa Livia looked skeptical.
“I don’t think my mother’s going to be that easy to defeat. Not without holy water and a stake.”
“Reverend Miller will call again tomorrow morning to ask if Maria’s ever been a whore,” Agnes said. “I’ll ask him to bring some holy water to the wedding to sprinkle on Brenda. He’s met her. He’ll understand.”
Agnes went to the sink to fill her measuring cup with water, glanced out the window at the sun sparkling on the water, and froze.
There was an old paint-peeling yacht easing up to the shore, bobbing up and down in concert with the floating dock, taunting her. It banged clumsily against the rubber bumpers and then the engine cut, and Brenda climbed over the side onto the dock to secure the mooring lines.
“Fucking bitch,”Agnes said, and dropped her measuring cup. “What now?”
“Your mother has her goddamned yacht moored off my dock!”
“What?” Lisa Livia came around the counter to look out the window. “I’ll be damned.” She shook her head in reluctant admiration. “She’s getting ready to move back.”
“Bitch,”Agnes said again, staring at the boat. “We’re sinking that damn thing.”
“Now?” Lisa Livia said, sounding sedated but ready.
“No, I have to make cake now.” Agnes went into the pantry and then began taking ingredients off the shelves—cake flour, sugar, baking powder, coconut, plus the supplies that Shane had brought back from Savannah—and then brought them out and dumped them all on the counter.
Lisa Livia caught one of the tubs of icing as it almost rolled off.
“Ick,” she said. “What’s on this? It’s sort of sticky.” She looked closer. “This is blood.”
“Well, Shane picked it up for me.” Agnes got a paper towel and wiped off the tub.
“Thoughtful of him.” Lisa Livia went to wash her hands several times and then poured herself another shot of bourbon. “So, you serious about him?”
“No,” Agnes said. “I’m not even going to sleep with him anymore.”
“Right.” Lisa Livia tossed back her drink, tried to sit down on the stool, and fell on the floor.
“So how we doin’ here?” Agnes went around the counter and helped her up.
“My mother is a liar and a cheat and a murderer,” Lisa Livia said when she was back on the stool. “And she’s had her face lifted. Twice.”
“Well, now I’ve lost all respect for her,” Agnes said.
Lisa Livia regarded her seriously. “You really have changed.”
“I’ve matured,” Agnes said, looking out the kitchen window at Brenda’s yacht. I have a lot on my plate right now and I’m holding on by my fingernails. But as soon as I get a grip here, which is going to be shortly, I swear, Brenda and her boat are going down.
That’s a felony, Agnes. You’ll need a really good plan.
Dr. Garvin?