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“Listen to me, young lady,” Agnes said, sitting up. “What are you trying to do? Ruin your life? Fine, go ahead. Throw your life away in a big dramatic gesture even though you love Palmer and he’s the one you should be with. What the hell.”
“You want me to forgive him for cheating on me?” Maria said, grabbing on to the bars so she could glare through them. “That’s why you stabbed Taylor!”
“I didn’t kill Taylor,” Agnes said, glaring back. “Although it worries me that you think I did.”
“Of course I don’t,” Maria said, outraged. “I meant the first time.”
“There was a first time?” Hammond said.
“No,” Agnes and Maria said together.
“And anyway, I don’t see you forgiving Shane,” Maria said, changing the subject. “I don’t see you saying, ‘Hey, you boinking the stripper, not a problem, I still love you.’“
“I don’t love him,” Agnes said. “I just met him. And I don’t have to forgive him. He didn’t boink her.”
“You are so naive,” Maria said.
Hammond tugged on her arm. “We have to go. You shouldn’t even be back here.”
“Maria,” Agnes said.
“We’ll get you a lawyer,” Maria said as Hammond pulled her through the door.
“Won’t do you no good,” the blonde said, and then it was quiet, which gave Agnes plenty of time to think.
Not that there was much to think about.
Like, who killed Taylor? Well, he’d been willing to leave Brenda to come back to her and Brenda had almost certainly overheard that, and he’d flouted her to cater the rehearsal dinner, so Brenda was one suspect. And then there was ...
Brenda. That was it. Nobody else would want to kill poor old Taylor. And nobody else would know that Agnes had stabbed him in the throat with a meat fork. And nobody else would be so viciously cruel as to tell Maria a story that would drive her out to the barn knowing Agnes would go with her, and then arrange for Taylor to be there at the same time, and stab him when Agnes was there, and leave him to die slowly in the woods for Agnes to find him. ...
Brenda. Hell, she’d already killed Frankie and Four Wheels; Taylor was just filling out her dance card. Of course it was Brenda. She’d stolen her own daughter’s life savings.
Well, that filled up a minute. Now what was she going to think about?
Well, there was Shane, having sex with a stripper. Of course he was a guy, and guys did tend to like strippers, but he also knew she was waiting for him back at the house, and Shane just did not strike her as the kind of guy who’d do that. Which was odd because ordinarily she was paranoid about that kind of thing and could work up a really good outrage, but Shane boinking a stripper a hundred yards from where she was waiting after he’d promised to come home to her?
Nah. Whatever he was doing, it wasn’t sex. Something energetic and violent, and she really didn’t want to think about where the stripper was now and what she’d done to deserve it. Maybe Taylor was hooking up with her in the afterlife. That was some comfort.
That killed another minute.
Which left her with the rest of her life.
Two Rivers was gone unless she could convince Maria that Palmer was not likely to put on a flamingo hat and screw a stripper. That was so self-evident that she was still having trouble understanding why Maria couldn’t see it?—
“Why a meat fork?” the blonde said.
“Huh?” Agnes said.
“Why’d you do it with a meat fork?”
“I didn’t,” Agnes said. “As God is my witness, I did not kill him.”
“Okay, okay. What did you stab him with the first time?” Agnes sighed. “A meat fork.”
“Why a meat fork?”
“It was the first thing I grabbed. We’d had tenderloin and I’d just washed it and it was on the counter.”
