Pasta Imperfect (11 page)

My gaze drifted from one to the other. “What move?”

Amanda ruffled her hair into disarray and tossed her head back with attitude. I cocked my head to regard the result. Oh, yeah. Big improvement. “We’re going to share a room while we’re here,” she said. “We’re really on the same wavelength, and we need lots of time together to help each other with contest stuff. We could even tie for first place.”

“I thought Keely was going to help you.”

The women sidled meaningful looks at each other. “We’ve decided we don’t need her help,” Brandy Ann announced in a voice that dripped honey.

“Yeah,” Amanda agreed. “Keely is obnoxious. She thinks she knows it all. I don’t want her help, and I don’t want to room with her anymore. So I’m moving in with Brandy Ann. I wanted to make the switch last night, but Keely wouldn’t —”

“Look, we have to go,” Brandy Ann interrupted, pulling Amanda away from me. “We have things to do.”

“What were you going to say?” I called at Amanda’s back.

Amanda threw me an off-balance wave as Brandy Ann dragged her out the door.
Keely wouldn’t what?
I wondered. Agree to change roommates? Hmm. That hadn’t stopped Amanda and Brandy Ann from getting their way though, had it? Was it the mother of all coincidences that Brandy Ann’s room had suddenly “opened up,” or what?

No mistaking it. I was getting a bad feeling about this.

“You can come along with George and me once he shows up,” I heard Nana say close behind me. “Most days, he don’t even need no map.”

I turned around to find her standing with Marla Michaels and Gillian Jones, whose five-foot-by-five-foot Florence map was already resembling a wind - battered kite, and they hadn’t even stepped outside yet.

“We need to get…here,” Gillian said, poking the map with her forefinger. “Duncan says that’s where the clothing stores are.”

“Maybe we should be creative about our clothes situation,” Marla suggested as she smoothed her muumuu over her hips. “We could try lashing some leaves together. Remember? You did that so cleverly in your book about the spoiled dyslexic supermodel heroine.” She touched Nana’s shoulder, making her a captive audience. “What a story, Marion. The heroine was marooned on a desert island with a playboy rodeo cowboy who was trying to fly to Fiji to see the son he didn’t realize he’d fathered by her blind sister. Uh! A real tearjerker. And I did
not
agree with the
Kirkus Reviews
critic who said it should have been entitled,
Dumb and Dumber.
How unkind.”

Hunh. I wondered if Jack had read that one.

Gillian refolded the map into an origami lump that resembled Texas…minus the panhandle. “It’s so nice of you to say that, Marla. The critic certainly ended up eating her words, didn’t she? Who would have guessed that
A Cowboy in Paradise
would go back to press twenty-six times and sell over two million copies?”

“Imagine.” Marla clasped her hands to indicate amazement. “I bet you have a good chance of matching my
Barbarian’s Bride
sales. You only have a meager — what, two million to go? And I’m sure you’ll succeed, especially when the
New York Times Book Review
describes your writing as ‘vibrantly pitch-perfect.’ ”

“Don’t forget ‘deceptively accessible and luminous,’ ” Gillian added.

“Luminous. How could I have omitted luminous? Not to mention, ‘a deft portrayal of the human condition.’ ” Marla placed her hand over her heart. “Well-deserved praise, which just goes to show that the Amazon.com reviewer who said your heroine was ‘too stupid to live’ was way off base.”

Gillian’s mouth lengthened into a stiff smile. “Do you suppose she was the same woman who gave your
Barbarian’s Bride
that blistering one-star review?”

Marla stopped breathing for an instant. Her eyes lasered on Gillian. “That’s the trouble with Amazon. Too many uninformed people handing out opinions. Take
your
one-star review, for instance. The reviewer blasted you for allowing your cowpoke to boink a woman six thousand times and not get her pregnant. I thought the criticism was completely unfounded, and very mean-spirited.”

Gillian heaved a breathy sigh and wadded her map into a new shape that looked suspiciously like a headless crane. Obviously no subliminal implications there.

“If the reviewer had bothered to read to the end,” Gillian sputtered, “she would have understood that Spur had contracted a mysterious disease years earlier that had left him with a low sperm count. He couldn’t
have
children. That’s why he was so hot to find the son he
did
father.”

Spur? The hero’s name was Spur? I cringed. Who’d name a baby Spur?

Nana tapped Gillian on the arm. “Might not a been the mysterious disease what caused Spur’s condition. Mighta been his underwear. If it’s too tight, it can cause a fella’s privates to heat up somethin’ fierce and to kill off all the little buggers. I seen it on the Discovery Channel. You recollect whether your cowboy wore boxers or briefs?”

“I can answer that,” Marla piped up. “Gillian is so inventive. Spur wore a palm leaf the size of an elephant ear. It was the only thing on the island big enough to cover his ‘ten inches of flaming virility.’ I thought it was quite masterful how he avoided setting fire to the whole island. Every time he whipped off his palm leaf, I wasn’t sure if the heroine was about to get ravished or incinerated!”

Gillian crushed her city map into another shape. I pondered the result.
Euw!
Now that was uncalled for.

Gillian regarded Nana. “Marla is much too modest to tell you herself, Marion, but she’s known as the queen of the sensuous love scene. Although…her continued use of the cliché ‘throbbing manhood’ has provided grist for many a romance chatroom. People have actually done surveys, and the consensus is,
it doesn’t throb!”

I clutched my throat, sucking in an astonished breath. It didn’t throb?

“Throbbing is the industry standard,” Marla said offhandedly. “It
always
throbs.”

Gillian’s smile hardened into ice. “It doesn’t.”

“And how would you know that?” Marla challenged.

The ice melted into a smirk. “Because I conducted the survey!”

I cleared my throat and raised a tentative finger in the air. “If you ladies don’t mind my asking, if it doesn’t throb, what does it do?”

“Maybe it quivers,” Nana said thoughtfully. “You know, kind of like a handheld blender. I’m pretty sure your grampa’s quivered.”

“Where’s Sylvia?” Marla bellowed. “Is Sylvia here?”

“I want Philip,” Gillian demanded. “Would somebody
please
get Philip for me?”

I looked from one diva to the other. Oh yeah. These two were the best of friends.

“It says here that construction began on the cathedral in 1296 and continued for over a hundred years.” Jackie was bent over at the waist, sucking in air as she read from her guidebook. “Then in 1420…a guy named Brunelleschi started building the dome and completed the project sixteen years later.” She glanced up at me, gasping. “He must have been on the same time schedule…as the guys supervising Boston’s Big Dig.”

I massaged the stitch in my side and trained a look up ahead at the multitude of stone steps that spiraled blindly to the top of Florence’s famed Duomo. “How many steps…does it say we have to climb?”

She scanned the page. “Four hundred and sixty-three.”

“How many do you think we’ve climbed so far?”

“A thousand. The number in the book must be a mis-print.”

We were pausing for breath on a flight of ancient stone risers that formed a tomblike staircase between the inner and outer shells of the dome. It was 8:55 now, and fairly cool, but later in the day, I suspected this place would heat up like a blast furnace. The passageway was cramped and hardly wide enough for our shoulders. The air was stuffy, the masonry walls cold and implacable, the ceiling a low-arched patchwork of brick and mortar that hung claustrophobically close. A solitary fifteen-watt light, shielded within a mesh cage high on the wall, was our only source of illumination. It was kind of like wandering through a Disney World version of the human ear canal.

Jackie straightened up slowly, retrieved her minirecorder, and spoke haltingly into the unit. “If you want an aerial view of Florence…forget the one from the top of the Duomo. Do yourself a favor. Take the helicopter tour instead.” She shoved the recorder back into her bag. “I don’t get it. How come I’m feeling this climb more than you? Why am I so out of breath?”

“Maybe you’re pregnant.”

She speared me with a narrow look. “I have no uterus. Remember? It’s not standard equipment for transsexuals yet. But speaking of those who have, and those who have not, how would you like to —”

“I am NOT going to act as a surrogate when you and Tom decide to have children, Jack! Forget it. End discussion.”

“My, my. Aren’t
we
testy this morning. Come on, Emily, you can tell me. What’s wrong?” She looked me up and down. “Well, other than your wardrobe is history, and you’ve been shlepping around in the same dress for three days.”

Since she’d slept through breakfast, I’d given her the lowdown on last night’s disasters on the trek over, so she was up to speed with current events. “My wardrobe is not history. I’ll get my things back. You’ll see. I’ve set a plan in motion.”

“Good. Let’s talk about me then.” She clasped her hands in a pleading gesture, hung her head, and in a pathetic voice cried, “I hate my roommate! Can I room with you instead?”

Unh-oh. “Who’s your roommate?”

“Jeannette Bowles. A food critic from Burlington, Vermont. She writes a column critiquing all the ski resort restaurants in the New England area. I’d like to write a column critiquing her. Too pushy. Too self-absorbed. Too arrogant. While I was sleeping last night? She drank all the bottled water I’d gone out to buy earlier and left me with the twenty-thousand-lire stuff, which, by the way, tasted so terrible, I spat it out and dumped the rest down the sink. Stay away from that brand, Emily. Where does the hotel get that crap? The local sewage treatment plant? And then she skulked out this morning before I could confront her about it. Plus, with
all
her skill and expertise in the field of journalism, she
knows
she has this romance contest all sewn up and feels
dreadfully
sorry for all the other poor shmucks who are even bothering to enter. Blahblahblah. Yadayadayada. On, and on, and on. Don’t leave me in the same room with her, Emily. I’m bigger than she is. It could get ugly.”

I exhaled a long breath that echoed softly through the stairwell. “Is there anyone on this tour who isn’t having roommate problems?”

Jackie looked gleeful. “Oh, goody. You mean, I’m not the only one stuck with a dud?”

“Amanda Morning thought she was stuck with a dud.”

“Amanda. She’s the one with the spiked hair and the vegetable peeler lodged in her nose, right? I met her the other night at the book signing. I hear she’s writing a groundbreaking zombie romance. You know what they say. Write what you know.”

I rolled my eyes. “Well, she was apparently wanting to ditch her assigned roommate and move in with Brandy Ann Frounfelker, the body builder, when lo and behold! Brandy Ann’s roommate conveniently takes a header from the top of the stairs and Amanda gets her way.”

Jackie’s windpipe rattled with an odd choking sound as she proceeded to suck all the breathable oxygen out of the passageway. “Oh, my God! That’s what’s wrong with you! You think someone deliberately pushed that woman, don’t you?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But that’s what you’re thinking. Out with it, Emily. What do you know?”

I regarded her sternly. “Oh, God, I’m
so
glad you asked. Okay, here’s the deal.” I gave her the blow-by-blow version of what I’d learned about Amanda, Brandy Ann, Keely, and Cassandra, and when I finished, she nodded.

“You’re right. Way too many coincidences. I think she did it.”

“Me too!” I hesitated. “Which she?”

Jackie shrugged. “I don’t know. One of them. You have the roommate thing going with Amanda. She might have given Cassandra a shove to open up space for herself in Brandy Ann’s room, but that seems pretty over - the - top to me.”

Over-the-top to a normal person, maybe, but would it seem over-the-top to someone who wrote zombie romances?

“Brandy Ann has the obvious body strength to push someone down a flight of stairs. You said she read Cassandra’s stuff, so she knew the kind of talent she was dealing with. Seems possible Brandy Ann might have been trying to eliminate her strongest competition, especially if she heard Cassandra threatening to influence Gabriel Fox by offering him sexual favors.”

Sexual favors in
my
corset dress. The nerve!

“Keely has ‘suspect’ plastered all over her. She’d worked with Cassandra. She knew her writing style. If she was the one who did the pushing, it was obviously for one of two reasons: either she wanted to zap her closest competitor, or she was getting even with Cassandra for canceling her subscription to her critique service.”

I stared at Jackie, stunned. “That’s the most extraordinary example of deductive reasoning I’ve ever heard you construct, Jack. I’m impressed. Really.”

She fixed me with a numb look, eyes glassy, jaw slack. “You’re right. It was freaking brilliant. Holy shit! How’d that happen?”

I sighed my frustration. “The only problem is, no one is going to bother listening to us. The police are convinced it was an accident precipitated by faulty footwear. Case closed.”

“But what if they’re wrong?”

I cast around for solutions. “Cassandra was in the room directly across from yours. You didn’t happen to hear anything suspicious in the hall last night, did you?”

“Didn’t hear a thing until Jeannette came clomping into the room at some wee hour of the morning. I hit the sack early to escape being subjected to any more of her self-adulation, so she decided to go exploring. You know how it is with self-centered people. They can’t possibly function without an audience.”

I smiled. She knew about that firsthand. “What time was that?”