Why do you always hit them with frying pans, Agnes?

Because that’s what I always have in my hand, Dr. Garvin. If I were a gardener, it’d be hedge clippers. Think how bad that would be.

She punched in 911 on her phone, trying to concentrate on the good things: Rhett was fine, her column would be finished soon, Maria’s wedding was still on track for that weekend, Two Rivers was hers-well, hers and Taylor’s-pretty soon she was going to be living her dream, and her cupcakes were burning but she could make more-

There’s a dead body in my basement and I lost my temper and I hit him with a frying pan many times, 1 was not in control-

“Keyes County Emergency Services,” the police dispatcher drawled.

“There’s a dead body in my basement,” Agnes said, and then her knees gave way and she slid down the cabinet to sit hard on the floor as she tried to explain that the kid had been going to hurt her dog, while Rhett drooled on her lap.

“A deputy is on the way, ma’am,” the dispatcher said, as if dead bodies in basements were an every-evening occurrence.

“Thank you.” Agnes hung up and looked at Rhett.

“I have to make cupcakes,” she said, and he looked encouraging, so she got up to get the blackened cupcakes out of the oven and clean the floor and get back to work, thinking very hard about her column, and Maria’s wedding that weekend, and Brenda’s beautiful house that was now hers, and everything except the dead body in her basement and the goddamned frying pan.

Shane sat on a bar stool, in a shady nightclub on the wrong side of the tracks in a bad part of Savannah, Georgia, and tried to estimate how many people he was going to have to kill in the next hour.