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Xavier looked into the hole. “Why is there a chair in here?”
“I put it in there so people could get in and out,” Agnes said. When Shane and Xavier both looked at her as if she were insane, she added, “It seemed like a good idea.”
“I’ll go get the ladder,” Doyle said, and left.
Xavier set the tackle box on the kitchen counter, and Agnes went back to her pancakes. Anything was better than just standing there, looking Xavier in the eye.
She went to the fridge and got buttermilk, sour cream, eggs, and ham while Xavier gestured to the box and said, “This is my crime scene investigation kit.” He held up a can. “Luminol.” He looked at Agnes. “It detects blood even if someone’s cleaned it up so you can’t see it with the naked eye.”
Agnes cracked an egg too hard and got shell in the bowl. “Blood?”
She picked the shell out and thought of how she’d spilled Taylor’s blood right about where Xavier was standing. She glopped in the sour cream and began to whisk. Whisking was very good for nervous energy, especially with “Tortured, Tangled Hearts” twanging as back-up music.
Doyle came back with the ladder.
“You know,” Xavier said as the ladder clattered into place, “it is kind of strange that those stairs are missing. Seems like someone was trying to hide that room for some reason.”
Agnes kept whisking. “Brenda said she boarded it up because it made her think of her poor departed Frankie and she wanted to forget”
“Poor old widow woman,” Doyle said, his voice full of Irish.
Xavier shrugged. “It was mighty convenient that old Two Wheels?—”
Three Wheels choked on his milk.
“—hit right here where he would fall through and?—”
“You said Agnes was clear,” Shane interrupted.
“I said I believed her story about the events of the other evening,” Xavier said. “Other stories I am not so certain of. Your uncle Joey, for instance ...”
Three Wheels crammed in more toast.
Agnes tried to tune Xavier out, whisking the cooled butter and buttermilk into her eggs and then pouring her wet ingredients into her dry. She folded them together with a spatula and then poured pancakes onto the griddle, sprinkling them with pecans as she thought about hooks for her column—the rise of the two-thousand-dollar wedding cake: a sign of the apocalypse?—but it was all too clear that Xavier was loaded for bear and he’d decided the bear’s name was Joey. Damn it, Joey, what have you been up to? She grated cinnamon on top of the pancakes and was watching them carefully for bubbles, worried for Joey, angry with everybody else, trying to figure out what the hell had happened to her life, when she felt a gentle tug on her sleeve over the counter.
“Ah have to go to the bathroom,” Three Wheels whispered.
“Out in the hall, under the stairs,” she said, talking low. “But you come back, we’re not done with you. You hear?”
“Ah will,” he said, looking down, and she realized he was looking hungrily at the pancakes.
She flipped them, and they landed perfectly golden, the pecans studding them like garnets.
He sighed.
“Okay, then,” she said, and let him go.
She looked over to see Shane at the basement door, holding the dinette chair she’d dropped into the basement, rolling his eyes because she was letting Three Wheels leave the room.
I got Three Wheels covered, she thought. You take care of Xavier.
He pushed the chair under the table and disappeared into the hole, and she put the pancakes on a plate and poured the next batch as Doyle said, “So you be having the law in the basement, I be having an assistant in the bathroom, and somewhere we be having a grieving widow who sealed everything off from devotion?”
“That’s about it.” Agnes looked around her kitchen, saw that everything was under control, and picked up her cell phone.
“You’re a very trusting lass, Agnes,” Doyle said.
“Not so much anymore,” Agnes said, and punched in Lisa Livia’s number.
