AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Neither do I, Miss Agnes,” Xavier said, putting on his hat. “Neither do I. I will be forwarding my notes from the investigation to the DA, however. He should be interested.”
He tipped his hat to her and then walked toward the porch steps and stopped when he was opposite Shane.
“You think you know how to do my job, son? You think you know the politics involved when you have to follow the law to get your results? When you have to care about something besides just getting those results?”
Shane glared at him. “You think I don’t care about anything but results?”
Xavier grinned slyly up at him. “I think you do now,” he said, and walked down the steps.
When the police had gone with Four Wheels’s body, Garth had turned to them and said, “The paintin’s done. What’s next?” and somehow, offering him a couple of days off to mourn hadn’t seemed like a good idea. So Agnes had said, “Uh, we need shutters,” and shown them the pictures from Brenda’s house book, and then gone on to explain the idea of the house book, how Brenda had wanted the house to look like this and how this was the best revenge Lisa Livia had been able to think of, that Brenda would see the house she’d always wanted and know she’d never have it, and suddenly four men were determined to get black shutters on the house before dinner.
When Lisa Livia came tottering down the stairs two hours later, two hitmen, a handyman, and a kid from the swamp had shutters unloaded and ladders at the ready, along with new carriage lights for the porches and stone planters for the bridge, exactly like Brenda had planned.
“What the hell?” she said as Carpenter and Shane went up the ladders on each side of her bedroom window. “This racket woke me up, which is saying something, considering Cerise and Hot Pink.”
“We’ve almost got Butch tracked down,” Agnes said, watching Shane wrestle his shutter into place on the brackets. “Once we find him, we’ll get the birds back where they belong.”
Shane looked really good lifting heavy things, she thought. And the shutters, those were really nice, too. She was willing to think about damn near anything to take her mind off the mess to her right, where her bridge used to be. She could tell Lisa Livia that her mother had murdered an old man with her car later. It wasn’t like Lisa Livia would be surprised.
Lisa Livia frowned. “So you have Shane and Carpenter hanging Brenda’s black shutters.”
“It’s like the HGTV Hit Squad,” Agnes said.
“Designed to Kill,” Lisa Livia said.
Shane turned around and yelled, “Is this where you want it?” Agnes gave him two thumbs up.
Lisa Livia shook her head. “I hope he’s getting a lot of sex for this.”
“Not anymore,” Agnes said. “But he had some good times before. And you’ll like this part: He paid for everything with the money he took from the two guys who came out here to kill me. So whoever hired them just redid the outside of my house. It even paid for the paint.”
“Do we know who that is?” Lisa Livia asked. “Some woman, Shane said.”
“Brenda.” Lisa Livia looked up at the windows. “Damn fine shutters.”
“Wait till you see the carriage lights,” Agnes said.
Carpenter smiled down at them and waved with his free hand, the other one supporting about twenty pounds of shutter.
Lisa Livia smiled and waved back, trying not to wince from her hangover. “They used to be grim killers who moved silently through the night, answering to no one. Now they’re checking with you for proper shutter placement.”
“I like to think of it as, ‘Do a window treatment, save a life,’” Agnes said, and went closer to tell them how great the shutters looked.
Three hours later, after the shutters were up, and after a dinner of peppermint tea and whole-wheat toast for Lisa Livia and chicken marsala and new peas for everybody else (the chicken cutlets pounded flat with the back of her frying pan, making Shane roll his eyes but stay out of her way), Agnes started toward the dock with bourbon and coffee only to see the Brenda Belle sitting there like a big wart on the landscape. Shane wasn’t on the high dock, which just confirmed his good sense. She went back through the house where Carpenter was talking softly to Lisa Livia, and then out onto the front porch, where Shane was sitting on the wicker love seat, his hands behind his head, staring down the road, Rhett at his feet, also staring down the road.
“Waiting for something?” she said, setting the coffee and booze down in front of him.
“Yep.”
“Want some coffee while you wait?”
“Yep.”
“Talkative devil.” Agnes poured two cups of coffee and then offered him the bourbon bottle, but he kept his eyes on the road, so she poured that, too. “Got plans for after you’re finished road watching?”
“Yep.”
Agnes nodded. “Anything I should know about?”
