“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?”

Maria shook her head.

“She will. Come on. Let’s see who’s getting up close and personal with the stripper. I’ll bet you six M amp;M’S it’s not Palmer.”

“I don’t want that bet,” Maria said.

“Good girl,” Agnes said, and opened the screen door, looking back at the Venus as she went.

She was looking pretty good. Well, there’s one thing I finally got right, Agnes thought, and then followed Maria down the path to the barn.


When Shane came out of the shower, Joey and Carpenter were gone. He went downstairs and saw that the large round bed was still there below the balcony, but the party appeared to have moved outside toward the lawn and dock, where he heard male voices chanting “Drink, drink, drink.” Yeah, there’s a good time, he thought, and went down the balcony stairs and started for the big house, but paused when he heard a woman’s voice raised in anger coming from the one of the rooms under the balcony.

Great. Some stupid frat boy and an angry stripper. Just what Agnes needed, a scandal the night before the wedding.

The woman’s voice was definitely coming from the door marked office. “You fucking tried to rip us off,” she was yelling. “You think you can short us?”

Downer was probably trying to stiff her, Shane thought. In more ways than one.

“Twenty-five large,” the woman said, and Shane frowned. No stripper got paid twenty-five large. “I want the damn money. Tonight.”

Shane opened the door and paused. In the moonlight coming in the window he could see the stripper, in her miniskirt and bustier, standing at the side of a desk. She had a gun against the forehead of the man seated in the desk chair. The Don’s consigliere, Shane realized.

She turned at the sound of the door, and Shane lunged forward, grabbing her gun hand with both hands as she brought it to bear on him. She smacked him on the side of the head with her free hand, the open palm against his ear, stunning him on top of the damage from the RPG explosion earlier in the day.

Shane squeezed her hand and she dropped the gun just as she brought her knee up hard, missing his groin by scant inches to slam into his right hip as the consigliere scrambled across the room. Shane jerked her arm up and then twisted it, spinning her about as he kicked the gun under the desk.

He put his other arm around her neck in a half nelson and applied pressure, bending the stripper forward, and saw the compass tattoo in the gap between the skirt and bustier.

“Casey Dean’s girl,” Shane said.

She was bent over the desk, her ass in his crotch, just as it had been in Savannah.

“Fuck you,” she said, but she was grinding against him again.

“Didn’t work last time, won’t work this time,” Shane said. “I’ve finally-”

He didn’t finish as she turned her body counterclockwise under him, locking his arm under her body, and smashed her free elbow into his face, the perfect reversal move to a half nelson.

Stunned, Shane let go for a moment, and she slithered out of his grip. She dived for the floor, searching for the gun. He leapt for her just as she decided to make a break for it and grabbed her ankle, and she kicked her foot into his face, breaking free. Shane scrambled to his feet, saw her silhouetted against the door to the room, and jumped, and his momentum shoved both of them through the door and onto the big round bed where she’d stripped, the girl squirming in his arms, trying in get away hum under him where he had her pinned facedown.

That’s when he heard Maria’s voice from the open sliding glass door: “Oh, Cod, Agnes, now Shane’s doing her, too!”

Oh, fuck, Shane thought as the girl elbowed him low.


Maria turned and tried to run and Agnes caught her and said, “Don’t be ridiculous,” and then looked past her to where Shane had a half-naked squirming woman under him on a bed. “Okay, that looks bad,” Agnes said, clamping down on her automatic urge to kill him, “but that’s not what it looks like.”

Maria looked at her, outraged. “How can you be so blind! Look at them!”

Agnes looked at them. Shane was pinning the woman to the bed, bearing down on her, and it was hard to tell, sex and violence being so closely related but… “No,” she said. “I’m pretty sure he’s trying to kill her.”

Maria looked at the bed and then at Agnes. “You’re insane,” she said, and then took off down the path.

“I didn’t mean it the way it sounded,” Agnes said, and went after her. “Maria!” She caught up with her halfway down the path. “I’m sorry, that wasn’t right, I didn’t mean kill kill. I mean, you know, subdue, arrest, Shane’s kind of a cop, and…” Her voice trailed off as Maria shook her head. “Look, the bottom line is Shane wouldn’t do that to me, and Palmer wouldn’t do that to you. Things aren’t always what they look like; sometimes you just have to trust the guy you love.”