“Yes, ma’am,” Three Wheels said, and began to eat as if he’d never seen food before.

She almost felt sorry for him, but he’d broken into her kitchen, pointed a gun at her, and tried to take her dog, so the hell with him.

She started the coffee brewing and melted butter in the microwave, then dumped flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt in a bowl just as Shane and Xavier came through the back door from the porch, followed by Rhett, who immediately flopped down in a patch of sunshine and fell asleep. Well, it was a long walk up from the yard. She smiled at Xavier-see how friendly and unworried I am?-and said, “Detective Xavier, what brings you out here so early in the morning?”

“The smell of that wonderful coffee brewing in your kitchen, Miss Agnes.”

“It reached all the way into Keyes, did it?” Agnes smiled wider at him, trying to make the words warm instead of sarcastic. “Well, then I’ll pour you a cup as soon as it’s ready.”

“I’d appreciate that.” Xavier nodded to Three Wheels, who crammed the rest of his piece of toast in his mouth. “And who might this be?”

“This is-” Agnes began, and then Doyle came in from the front of the house, calling “Top of the morning!” Agnes crossed her fingers mentally and then said to Xavier, loud enough that Doyle could hear, “This is Doyle’s assistant. He’s helping with the painting, trying to get the house finished for the wedding.” She turned to Doyle. “Pancakes coming right up, Doyle.”

Doyle’s bushy white eyebrows had shot up, but she met his eyes and he nodded. “All right, darlin’. I could use… some pancakes.”

Thank you, Doyle, she thought, and turned back to Xavier. “Did you come for breakfast, Detective?” Please God, say no. Three Wheels will never be able to fake it through a whole breakfast.

“No, Miss Agnes, I came for your basement,” Xavier said. “I’ll just be going down there now.”

Agnes looked at Shane.

“I’ll just be going with him,” Shane said.

Agnes nodded. It was a real shame she wasn’t going to be sleeping with him anymore. A man that fast on the uptake was a treasure. Of course, given his line of work, a man slow on the uptake was dead.

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.

Shane held the ladder steady as Xavier climbed down, tackle box in one hand, but when he got to the bottom, he ignored the center of the room to detour over to the ancient bar, nodding to the mildew-speckled Venus as he passed her.

Shane pointed at the concrete floor. “The boy hit there.”

Xavier nodded. “Thank you, son. My concern today, though, is what happened twenty-five years ago in here.”

Fucking Joey, Shane thought as he watched Xavier open up the tackle box. “Twenty-five years ago?”

“Long ago in the mists of time, son, your uncle ran arm in arm with the manwho owned this house, one Frankie Fortunato.” Xavier took out the can of luminol and began walking slowly around the room, spraying. “Who subsequently disappeared. As mobsters are sometimes wont to do. You do know your uncle Joey was once with the mob?”

“Yep. But he left that behind a long time ago. He’s an honest man, my uncle.” Maybe.

Xavier laughed with genuine amusement as he sprayed. “Joey the Gent? He’s got more stories than the library. And most of them are indeed fiction, but I’m interested in the nonfiction ones.” He put the luminol can down on the old bar and reached into the kit and pulled out a bulky light, which Shane recognized as infrared. “Care to turn off the overhead?”

Shane flicked off the light as Xavier flipped on his own.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Xavier said.

No, you won’t, Shane thought, looking at the dragged blood trail that led straight into the wall. But Joey might well be.

Agnes listened to Lisa Livia’s cell phone ring as she put the pancake platter on the table, the phone crammed between her ear and her shoulder.