“Flamingos,” Carpenter said. “Tasteful.”

“Downer,” Shane said. “Most likely to be shot by accident on purpose on Halloween.”

Carpenter’s phone rang and he answered it, his face growing serious. “I’ll be right there,” he said finally, and when Shane looked curious, he said, “Lisa Livia. She had a really bad day. If we’re done, I’ll go see her.”

“What’s going on?” Joey asked, coming out of the bathroom, rubbing his head with a towel. He looked out. “Flamingos?”

Shane shook his head. “We’re done. I’m going to shower and then go find Agnes.”

Carpenter nodded. “The flamingos got the blood going, didn’t they?”

“Yeah,” Shane said. “Flamingos. They do it for me every time. If Casey Dean’s target is down there, he can have him.”


By the time the rehearsal dinner ended, Agnes had been ready to go out and stand in the water with Cerise and Hot Pink and scream. Jefferson Keyes had pinched the bridesmaids, Evie had ignored him by drinking steadily, and Lisa Livia had stared like a basilisk at her mother throughout. That, Agnes thought, was entirely understandable, given that LL had gone out to the yacht and confronted Brenda about her theft, and Brenda had flat out denied it and then accused Lisa Livia of breaking her heart with her suspicion. Because LL hadn’t been quiet about it, the rest of the party had found out and had pretty much cut a wide swath around Brenda instead of making her the belle of the party as usual, so that by the end of the evening she was thin-lipped, her eyes narrow and sharp and often as not fixed on Agnes, who was getting all the compliments. Only Taylor had come through, serving a perfect dinner on the beautiful china he’d bought for his catering, and even he had kept up a running commentary that was practically a prospectus for Taylor’s Two Rivers Catering Service. “The best thing you can say about this dinner,” Agnes told Lisa Livia, tying on her Cranky Agnes apron to help with the cleanup, “is that it’s over.”

“The food was really good, and Garth was terrific,” Lisa Livia said as they watched the teenager clear the tables with what was almost a practiced hand, looking like a fine upstanding citizen in the clothes Palmer had bought him and the haircut Palmer had made him get in exchange for the clothes. “And you got a lot of payback tonight. Taylor was all but wearing a hair T-shirt that said, I Married the Wrong Woman.”

“Yes, and Brenda’s going to make him pay for that,” Agnes said. “My heart bleeds for him,” Lisa Livia said, and went back to the house.

Taylor had caught her arm. “Thank you,” he said, and his sincerity was clear.

“Dinner was great,” Agnes said, because that was true.

“The wedding luncheon will be, too,” he said eagerly. “I’m going to make it up to you-”

“Did you sign the house over to me?” Agnes said flatly.

“Barry’s bringing the papers tomorrow,” Taylor said. “When he comes to the wedding. He’s got them drawn up. We’ll do it tomorrow morning. You can call him and ask.”

“Until those papers are signed, you haven’t even begun to make it up to me,” Agnes said. “But the food was terrific.”

When the barn had been cleared for the bachelor party, and Garth had been given money to go into town to the movies so he wouldn’t be corrupted by the sight of the stripper, Agnes had gone down to talk to the flamingos as usual-”Butch is coming for you in the morning, swear to God, but at least you have each other, how’s the shrimp?”- and then gone back to the house where the bachelorette party was in full swing upstairs and finally worked on her column.

Two hours later, she was still staring at her laptop screen. The recipe was done. She had the points she wanted to make: sturdy enough to hold the fondant, tastes great, reflects the personality of the bride and groom, and oh, those Romans, what a bunch of cutups, breaking the cake on the bride’s head. But the column was… blah.

She looked up at Palmer’s groom’s cake, the flamingo cake with the lurid green icing and the equally lurid pink flamingos on the sides and the golf balls on white springs popping out from the layers, topped with the two pink flamingo pens, one with a paper top hat and the other with a paper doily veil. Not blah. And right beside it, Maria’s white wedding cake-with the concentric circles-easy-and the fondant butterflies on springs-a little harder-pearl trim- much harder-and the antique bride and groom-expensive-that was a work of art. I did good, she thought, and relaxed a little before she went to back to the column.

It’s worse than blah, she thought. Anybody could have written this-it’s ordinary. I’m not saying anything new, there’s nothing here that would make people think, “Gee, she’s a great writer, better rush out and get ten copies of Mob Food.” Damn it, what do I know about wedding cake that’s important? C’mon, Cranky Agnes, be brilliant: Your future’s on the line.

Inside her skull, the emptiness echoed for eternity.

Nothing, I got nothing. God, I’m a fraud. The two hundred columns I’ve done up to now have all been flukes. I got lucky. Now the truth is here. I can’t write, it’s all been a fake, I’m going to have to eat worms and die.

Maybe she could do a column on eating worms.

She saved the file and got up and saw the Venus. She looked awful.

Okay, she thought, accomplish something. She got the cleanser out and began to scrub the statue down, getting more vigorous as it became apparent that the thing was made out of some kind of eternal compound that wasn’t going to collapse under her enthusiasm. And once the scrubbing became automatic and the pearly plastic began to shine, she began to think about the week she’d just survived.

Things were good, if you looked at them just right. For example, she’d survived. And she was going to pull off the wedding, with a lot of help from her friends: The lawn was manicured to golf course perfection, the house gleamed in its new white paint, the shutters were up, the stolen landscaping was beautiful, and the gazebo was magnificent. Even the pink sand had a certain kitsch glow to it. And Taylor was going to cater and Maisie was going to do the white daisies with a few pink accents, and Maria was going to wear her white gown down the aisle, and Evie would be relieved and wouldn’t ask questions, and Butch was coming for Cerise and Hot Pink early in the morning so they’d be gone before the wedding, and everything would be beautiful. And at the end of all of it would be Shane-she slowed her scrubbing-he was worth the whole week right there, getting shot at was a small price to pay for a guy like that. She thought about him and scrubbed harder, cleaning the last of the mildew off because he’d be back soon, and she wanted- “AGNES!” Maria screamed.

“Mother of God,” Agnes said, almost dropping her sponge as Maria came running into the kitchen. “What?”

Maria grabbed her arms. “Palmer is in the barn having sex with the stripper!”

“Oh, he is not,” Agnes said, shaking her off and going back to scrubbing the Venus. “This is Palmer we’re talking about. He adores you. And he has much too much good taste to have sex with a stripper. He doesn’t know where she’s been. Or who her people are. He wouldn’t dream of it.” She put the sponge down on the counter and said, “Listen, could you read this column and tell me what’s missing? Because I-”

“Don’t make jokes,” Maria said, her face sheet white with stress and too many champagne cocktails. “He’s just like his father.”

“He is not.” Agnes went over and got her a cup of coffee. “Drink this and stop hyperventilating or I’ll make you breathe into a paper bag. He’s just like his mother. Evie would never have sex with a stripper. Who told you this garbage?”

Maria got a wary look on her face and sipped her coffee. “Somebody who knows about men,” she said finally.

“Oh,” Agnes said. “Brenda called, did she?”

Maria put the cup down on the counter. “She and Taylor had finished up in the barn kitchen and were coming back and they looked through the double doors and saw him. He had that dumb flamingo hat on his head that Downer got him for the party. She knew it was him.”

“Because nobody else could be wearing that hat since Palmer sure as hell wouldn’t have taken it off the first chance he got,” Agnes said.

“She saw his face,” Maria said. “She told me to go down and look.”

“She’s a lying bitch from hell,” Agnes said. “But let’s be adults about this and do what she said. Let’s go find out”

“What?” Maria pulled back.

“Let’s go find out.” Agnes came out from around the counter. “Let’s go down to the barn and see what old Palmer and the boys are doing.”

“We can’t go down there,” Maria said, aghast

“Why?” Agnes looked her straight in the eye. “Afraid you’ll find out he’s innocent?”

“Hey,” Maria said, getting some of her old temper back.

“That’s more like it.” Agnes sighed. “Look, if you don’t want to marry him, don’t marry him. But he’s a good guy. Be up front about it. Don’t let your bitch of grandmother frame him for something he didn’t do. Go down there and tell him you don’t want him.”

Maria swallowed. “I do want him. If he’s really the man I thought he was-”

“Why do you listen to Brenda?” Agnes asked tiredly. “Because she sounds right,” Maria said.

“Well, she isn’t. She preys on your fears to destroy your happiness so she can get this house back.” Agnes opened the drawer in the counter by the basement door and got out her flashlight. “Did your mother tell you what she did to her?”