He picked up his air mattress. “If anybody came, I wanted to be close.”

Agnes nodded. “Oh. I would have let you sleep with Rhett if I’d known you were that worried.”

He thought about telling her that it wasn’t Rhett he was protecting, and then wondered if she’d have offered to let him sleep with her, and then wondered if that would have been a good idea. Then he watched her go around the counter and into her dangerous kitchen, wondering if she was naked under the thin red sweats she was wearing, which answered that question. At least for him it did. If it came to it, she’d have to do her own deciding.

Focus on the problem, he told himself. Then get back to work before Wilson blows a gasket.

Rhett flopped down beside Shane when he sat down at the counter. The table was right there, but he couldn’t watch Agnes from the table.

Agnes put on her red-framed glasses and opened the large double door refrigerator. She loaded her arms with food, and then she shut the refrigerator door with her hip and came toward Shane to dump the stuff on the counter in front of him and take down a pan from overhead, every move effortless and efficient and distracting, especially with all of Agnes moving softly under her sweats.

“So why would anybody want to kidnap Rhett?” Shane said, mostly to get his mind off Agnes, since he was pretty sure the answer was going to come from Joey. “Was anybody asking about him before this?”

“Kind of.” Agnes took a white apron off a hook by the door and put it on-it said cranky agnes’s mob food on it under a drawing of Agnes in her glasses-and tore open a package of sausages wrapped in butcher’s paper and tumbled them into the pan. Then she turned on the heat under it, took down a wicked-looking fork from the magnetic rack, and began to poke the meat with it, not looking at him.

“Kind of.” Shane watched her. She didn’t look happy.

She turned and bent to look under the counter for something, her sweatpants pulling tight over her round butt. Agnes would never make a supermodel. Agnes was, Shane thought with a great deal of restraint, pattable. “What kind of kind of?”

She put a bowl on the counter and took down a wire whisk. “Right before the kid got here, Joey and I were on the phone and he asked about Rhett. So Joey might know something if you ask him. Coffeemaker’s over by the sink if you want some.”

“Okay.” Fuck. Joey again.

Shane went around the end of the counter and found a big white coffeemaker and a coffee canister in the corner just as the meat in the pan began to cook. The smell hit him like a wave: Joey’s Italian sausage. Joey’s Italian breakfasts from when he was a kid.

Forget that. Shane opened the jar and stared at beans instead of powder. “Uh.”

Agnes came over, reached into the cabinet, took out a grinder, placed it on the counter, and then went back to her bowl. She splashed in a little cream and began to whisk the eggs, probably with more force than necessary. “I trust Joey. Joey is the best guy I know.

Joey would never hurt me. Joey called you to come protect me.”

“Yeah.” But the old bastard still knows something, and he’s gonna tell me about it. Shane hit the top of the grinder, probably with more force than necessary, and it burst into action, the odor of the ground beans filling the room, competing with the treacherous smell of the sausage while he tried to imagine what his uncle might be up to. When the beans were ground, he had to go past Agnes to fill the pot with water and was careful not to brush against her. Her hair was all tangled curls and she had no makeup on and her skin was rosy with sleep, and that was messing with his concentration, plus there was the damn Italian sausage of Joey’s. He’d been in a lot of treacherous places, but Agnes’s kitchen was topping them all.

He poured the water in the coffeemaker, closed the top, pressed the button, and leaned against the counter to wait, searching for a safe topic that might tell him more about the mess he was pretty sure she was in. “So who’s Taylor?”

Agnes frowned at him. “What do you mean, who’s Taylor? You met him last night.”

“He have anything to do with the Thibaults and the mob?”

“Taylor?” She took another pan down from one of the hooks above her head, set it on a burner, turned the heat low under it, and picked up the butter. “No. God, no. Taylor is a local boy making good. Well, he’s forty-four, so the boy part is probably pushing it. He’s worked his way up through the kitchens of most of the area restaurants, and now he’s chef on the best restaurant on the Island over there on the other side of the Intracoastal.” She nodded in the direction of the water. “He’s a real self-made man, a hard worker, and a truly good chef. We’re just about finished with a cookbook that’s going to be a bestseller because his recipes are great, and that’s going to set up the catering business he’s going to run out of the barn he just renovated here. He has nothing to do with the mob and absolutely no reason to send anybody after Rhett You choosy about your eggs?”

“I don’t want eggs,” Shane said. “You don’t need to feed me. Would he gain anything if you died?”

“I want to feed everybody.” Agnes flipped a chunk of butter into the pan. It slid across the surface and then began to melt slowly, lighting with the coffee and the sausage for Best Morning Smell, Kitchen Division. “If I died, he’d get Two Rivers. We have a partnership agreement for the cookbook and the catering business, so the survivor gets it all. But he needs me to finish the Two Rivers Cookbook-his future’s riding on that book. It wasn’t him.” She picked up the red pepper, ran a knife around the stem, twisted it, and popped out the core with one smooth motion.

Shane was impressed. “Did your mother teach you to cook?”

“Oh, please,” Agnes said, taking down a knife. “My mother barely ate. She had a waistline to maintain. I didn’t taste butter until my best friend’s mother melted a chunk of it in a pan in front of me right here in this kitchen when I was fourteen. After that, there was no turning back. Any boy with a milk shake and a cheeseburger could have me.”

“That explains Taylor,” Shane said.

“Humor. Har.” Agnes began chopping the pepper with machine gun-like efficiency.

“A catering business. I thought you were a newspaper columnist.”

Agnes shot a guilty glance at her laptop, and kept chopping. “I am. But Taylor wanted the catering business and I wanted Two Rivers. So we bought it from Brenda together. I can write anyplace.”

“Brenda,” Shane said, remembering Joey last night on the phone saying, “the old Fortunato place.”

“Brenda Dupres,” Agnes said, introducing the pepper to the butter. “The Real Estate King’s widow and the closest thing to a mother I ever had. Closer than the one I did have, anyway. She’s the one who fed me butter. Fabulous cook, throws terrific parties, knows-”

“Brenda Fortunato,” Shane said.

“That was before the Real Estate King,” Agnes said. “And before I knew her. Mr. Fortunato was sleeping with the fishes by the time Lisa Livia brought me home with her.”

Cousin Lisa Livia. Vague memories of an intense dark-haired girl time back. And Aunt Brenda. Good food, he remembered. Fancier than Joey’s, but that was before Joey had sent him to military school and everything in his old life had stopped like a slammed door.

Fuck that. He inhaled the melting butter and put his mind back on the problem at hand. “But this wedding will be Fortunato not Dupres. The bride’s mother is a Fortunato.”

“Lisa Livia? Yes.”

“What about her father?”

Agnes hesitated and then said, “He’s not around. LL never married him, so Maria’s a Fortunato, too.”

Great. All Fortunatos, all the time. “What happened to him?”

“Nobody knows,” Agnes said, turning away. “He was a bad choice. Twenty-seven-year-old wiseguy meets an eighteen-year-old high school senior. Lisa Livia went bananas for him until she caught him cheating. Then she went off on him and he hit her and that was it for LL.”