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“Oh,” Agnes said, deflated. “Oh, crap. There really wouldn’t have been an upside to forking him, would there?”
“Aside from the simple pleasure of the act itself, no.” Lisa Livia gave the swing another push. “We have to figure this out. This is bad. We need a plan.”
“A plan.” Agnes nodded, trying to relax with the swing as she thought. “A plan is good. Something that puts the house in my name, not in Taylor’s.”
“Yep.”
“And that makes it mine permanently, so Brenda can’t ever have it.”
“Yep.”
“What would do that?”
“Taylor and Brenda dead.”
Agnes stopped the swing. “LL, get your mind out of the mob. We’re not killing anybody.”
Lisa Livia looked at her, her big brown eyes wide with innocence. “It’s efficient. We’d have to pin it on somebody else so you could keep the house, but there are a lot of people I’m annoyed with we could stick with the blame. Palmer’s best man and his damn practical jokes are bugging the hell out of me. Some jail time would do him a world of good. What’s his name? Downer. Downer is an idiot. Let’s send him to the slammer.”
Agnes started the swing again, fairly sure Lisa Livia was kidding. “Okay, put it down as a backup plan.”
“Yeah, we have to wait until the cops are out of here anyway, you can’t throw a rock without hitting one. That Hammond kid even came out to the boat to ask Maria about the wedding, although I think that was just an excuse.”
“Oh, hell,” Agnes said, “he’s not going to confuse Maria and make her cancel the wedding, is he?”
Lisa Livia shook her head. “My kid is not that dumb.”
“Okay.” Agnes went back to stopping Brenda. “What else is there?”
“Blackmail.”
“I like that. They’re scum, they’re bound to have done something horrible.” Agnes slowed the swing again. “You really think your mom killed your dad?”
“I know she did. That night he disappeared? I saw her drive his Caddy away. She was the only one in it. They said he ran away because they found his car at the airport, but she was the one who drove it away.”
Agnes sat very still. “You were thirteen, LL. How can you?—?”
“Yeah, but I was a thirteen-year-old Fortunato,” Lisa Livia said.
Agnes nodded, dying to be open minded. “What if we found proof? We could blackmail her with that. Unless you wanted to turn her in to the cops now.” It did seem odd, talking like this about Lisa Livia’s mother, until you remembered that Lisa Livia’s mother was Brenda Fortunato. Rasputin’s kid probably had the same conversations.
Lisa Livia was shaking her head. “I couldn’t turn her in. They’d prosecute her, and it would be in the papers.”
“So?”
“My uncle Michael would find out,” Lisa Livia said with obvious patience. “You know, my uncle Michael, the Don?”
“Yeah,” Agnes said. “So?”
Lisa Livia looked at her as if she were insane. “My daddy was the Don’s brother. That means my mother whacked the Don’s brother. You know how long she’d live once he knew she killed him? Maybe ten seconds. I don’t like my mother, but I don’t really want her dead.” Lisa Livia looked out through the screens to the Blood River. “I just want to know for sure.”
“Okay,” Agnes said, suddenly feeling better about her own parents. They’d been neglectful and deceitful and they’d deserted her at ten, but they hadn’t murdered anybody. Point in their favor. “So where do we look for evidence that your mother, uh, whacked your father?”
“The boxes on the Brenda Belle,” Lisa Livia said. “Everything she owns is on that damn boat.”
“You think she’d keep evidence? That sounds dumb. Brenda is a lot of things, but dumb isn’t one of them.”
“I think she wouldn’t know.” Lisa Livia put her coffee cup down. “She has all her papers packed into boxes and I think she doesn’t even know what’s there. She’ll leave the boat sometime today, she’s going stir crazy on there, pacing back and forth, making phone calls and then slamming down the phone, cat on a hot tin boat. The only thing that’s keeping her together is the knowledge that she’ll be evicting you on Sunday and moving back here. She can’t wait to get back here. As soon as she leaves again today, I’ll go through as much of it as I can.”
