Top O' the Mournin' (31 page)

“Can I help you?” I called down the corridor. “If you’re looking for the man who’s staying in that room, he’s not there.”

The woman angled around toward me, her face sad, her eyes huge and soulful. She regarded me for a heartbeat, then turned her back on me and fluttered away as if on winged feet—to the end of the corridor and straight through the wall, disappearing before my eyes.

Uff da.
I was stressed. I was tired. I didn’t see that.

Did I?

POCKET BOOKS

PROUDLY PRESENTS

PASTA IMPERFECT

Maddy Hunter

Coming Summer 2004

from Pocket Books

Turn the page for a preview of

Pasta Imperfect….

I glanced over my shoulder to find a tall, glossy-haired brunette hustling toward me. She had the face of a madonna, the body of a supermodel, and a sassy style that turned the heads of most men. Her legs were long and tan, and she wore a sexy white mini-dress that fit like a coat of spray paint. She was all sleek angles, graceful curves, and exact proportions, except for her feet, which were big as snowshoes. Her name was Jackie Thum. Before she’d had sex reassignment surgery to become a woman, she’d been a guy named Jack Potter, and I’d been married to him.

“I’m so glad you told us about the dress code here,” she said, straightening the flutter sleeves that fell from her shoulders. “If you hadn’t, I actually might have worn something totally inappropriate today.”

I wondered what she’d consider more inappropriate than white spray paint. I regarded her arms. Oh, right. Spray paint without sleeves.

She removed what looked like a writing pen from her knit shoulder bag, held it to her mouth, and began speaking into it. “If you’re visiting religious sites in Italy, check to see if there’s a dress code. Bare arms and hairy legs aren’t permitted in the church proper of St. Peter’s, however, the clothes police might let it pass if you’re planning to play bingo in the basement.” She snapped the tape recorder off. “They play bingo here, don’t they? It’s a Catholic church. What Catholic church doesn’t play bingo? Can you imagine the haul? I mean, this place can accommodate sixty thousand!”

She held her mini-recorder up for my perusal. “Doesn’t this rock? It’s the perfect thing to help me chronicle your every move. I’ll be James Boswell to your Samuel Johnson.”

Ever since Jack had become Jackie, she’d been searching for her new niche in life. After ending up on the same tour in Ireland with me last month, she’d decided she might like a job like mine, so she signed up for this tour of Italy in the hopes of recording the dos and don’ts of the successful tour escort. I tried not to let it go to my head, but it was kind of flattering.

I looked from the deep copper of her arm to the pale ivory of my own and felt a pang of envy resurface. Sunbathing with Jack had always been depressing. He’d turn warm and golden; I’d turn red and crispy. It didn’t seem fair. “Where’d you get the great tan? I thought Binghamton was cloudy all the time.”

She struck a glamour pose, pointing her high-heeled foot like a ballerina in toe shoes. “Flash Bronzer Magic Mousse.”

“It’s a fake bake?”

“Come on, Emily. Nobody tans for real anymore. Why do it naturally when you can achieve the same effect by doing it chemically? And the best part is, the chemicals they use in sunless tanning products haven’t even killed anyone yet.” She flashed me a smile that suddenly turned to horror. “Oh, my God! Where’s your shoulder bag?”

“Mom has it. She wanted to free up my hands to take pictures. And bless myself.”

“You gave it to your mother? Jeez, that was brave of you. I wouldn’t dare let my bag out of my sight.” She cast a furtive look around her. “Especially in this place.”

I followed her gaze and swallowed slowly. “You wouldn’t?”

“No way. I’ve read about what can happen here.”

I forced myself to remain calm. “But this is the safest place in Italy. Nana said so.”

“Where’d she hear that?”

“She read it. In a travel guide.” I tried to swallow again but there seemed to be a hairball in my throat that I couldn’t get around. “From the library.”

“Jeez, I haven’t checked anything out of the library for years. You know how current the stuff they let you take home is. The 1952 Mobile Travel Guide. The 1964 edition of
Frommers
. You’re gonna find a lot of useful information in those babies.”

A sudden disturbing thought struck me. What if the information Nana read was out-of-date? What if St. Peter’s wasn’t the safest place in Italy anymore? Oh, my God! What if someone snatched my shoulder bag? My phone. My sunblock. MY AIRPORT CONTACT NUMBERS FOR MY MISSING LUGGAGE! I knew something bad was going to happen with my luggage. I knew it!

I broke out in a cold sweat as I searched out mom’s face in the crowd. “You have to help me find my mother. I need to get my shoulder bag back.”

“How come?”

I stared at her, wide-eyed. “Because of the
thieves,
Jack! Someone might steal my bag!”

“I thought Mrs. S. told you this was the safest place in Italy.”

“She did! But you said—” I hesitated, my mouth hanging open and my mind a sudden blank. I cleared my throat self-consciously. “What did you read could happen here?”

“That you can get picked up by some really hot Italians.”

I waited a beat before thwacking her on the arm with the back of my hand. “Jack!”

“What? I read it in
Europe’s Sexiest Men and Where to Find Them.”

“You’re
married!
What are you doing looking for men?” She’d eloped a month ago with a hair designer named Tom whose specialty was corrective color and infliction of the choppy cut on unsuspecting heads.

“I’m married, Emily. I’m not dead.” She hugged her shoulder bag close to her body. “So you can bet I’m not letting my bag out of my sight. With all these hunky guys wandering around, a girl never knows when she might need to touch up her mascara.”

I rolled my eyes, thinking if I came down with another case of hives anytime soon, I was going to kill her.

“Okay, I made a list, and the next ‘must see’ in the basilica is”—she consulted a paper in the side pocket of her bag—“this way.” She banded her hand around my arm and dragged me down the center nave. We stopped before a mammoth five-sided pillar to regard a bronze statue of a fuzzy-haired man with a beard. “St. Peter,” said Jackie. He was seated in a marble chair beneath an ornate canopy, one hand raised solemnly like Al Gore in a vice-presidential debate, the other clutching a set of keys. I’d read someplace that the body of the statue might originally have been that of a Roman senator, with the haloed head and hands soldered on later. I had to compliment the Italians. St. Peter looked pretty darned good considering he might have been pieced together like Robocop.

“We need to get in line so we can kiss his toe,” Jackie instructed.

I remembered back to my grammar school catechism and wondered what kind of spiritual reward we might receive for paying obeisance to this great saint. Partial indulgence? Plenary indulgence? In the days of the old church, the faithful accumulated indulgences like frequent flyer miles and could use them to get out of hell free. You didn’t hear much about indulgences anymore. Wasn’t that always the way? You just get locked into a great reward system and
boom,
all the perks expire.

“What significance does kissing his toe have?” I asked.

Jackie shrugged. “I thought it was the Italian version of kissing the Blarney Stone. Hey, look. There’s some of the people on our tour up near the front of the line. You see the tall guy in the rose-colored polo shirt? Silver hair. George Hamilton tan. Looks like an aristocrat? That’s Philip Blackmore, executive vice-president of Hightower Books. They tell me he’s a legendary marketing genius. He’s supposedly the one behind Hightower’s switch from literary to more commercial fiction.”

It was Hightower Books who was sponsoring this ten-day holiday to promote its unprecedented venture into the historical and contemporary romance market. The theme of the tour was
Passion and Pasta
and it provided an opportunity for romance fans and unpublished writers to rub shoulders with established writers, editors, agents, and other publishing luminaries. Guests were promised exciting excursions to historic venues, as well as daily lectures from the experts on how to write a best selling romance. My group of Iowans weren’t particularly interested in the romance market, but when a slew of cancellations in the main tour occurred a couple of months ago, Landmark Destinations needed to fill up the empty seats, so they offered me some great discount prices and I’d scooped them up.

“And you see the woman standing to the right of Blackmore?” Jackie continued. “The one in the floral moo-moo with the horn-rimmed glasses and Cleopatra hair? That is none other than Marla Michaels.
The
Marla Michaels. I’m dying.
Dying!”

I gave the woman a quick look-see. “Who’s Marla Michaels?”

Jackie stared at me in disbelief. “Emily! Do you live under a rock? Marla Michaels.
The Barbarian’s Bride? The Viking’s Vixen?”

“Oh.
The
Marla Michaels. The world renowned”—Barbarian? Viking? Of course!—“opera singer.”

Jackie threw up her hands. “Marla Michaels is
only
the most famous historical romance diva in the world! Hightower lured her away from her old publisher by offering her a very lucrative contract that includes theme park rights and extended author tours to exotic places.”

“She’s a romance writer? How was I supposed to know that? I don’t read romances.” I cocked my head and smiled coyly. “But it seems one of us does. How do
you
know about her?”

“The seminar last night? She gave a talk? She autographed books? If you’d been less interested in complaining about your missing luggage and more interested in the theme of the tour, you’d know about her, too. So there.” She nodded her head once, like a punctuation mark at the end of a sentence.

“Right. You read romances, don’t you, Jack?”

She ignored me.

“Oh, my God. I bet you were reading them when we were married! That’s why you were sneaking into the bathroom so much in the middle of the night. You weren’t treating your athlete’s foot. You were reading bodice-rippers!” Wow. He’d kept a lot of things hidden in the closet back then.

Jackie narrowed her eyes at me. “This is the thanks I get for cleaning scum from the toilet and scrubbing mold off the tile? We had the tidiest bathroom in the apartment building, Emily. How do you think it got that way? I’ll give you a clue. Unlike an oven, it wasn’t self-cleaning!”

“Hey, you didn’t have to be so fastidious!”

“Yes, I did! You know how obsessive-compulsive I am!”

“Are you guys in line?” I heard a chirpy voice inquire behind me.

She was one of ours—a flaming redhead in her twenties who was snapping gum like a kid snaps rubber bands. The wording on her pink Landmark Destinations name tag read,
Hi! My name is Keely.

“You’re on the tour!” she said, aiming a finger at Jackie. “I recognize you from the seminar. I would kill for that leather bustier you were wearing last night. Can you believe this? Marla Michaels and Gillian Jones in the same room together? Did we luck out or what?”

“Gillian Jones?” I asked tentatively. “Another romance writer?”

“I’ll say.” Keely popped a bubble then sucked it back into her mouth. “Sixty-four weeks on the
New York Times
bestseller list for
A Cowboy in Paris.
Eighty-six weeks for
A Cowboy in Sydney.
The reviewers said books about cowboys wouldn’t have global appeal. Boy, were they wrong. She’s the most successful writer of contemporary romance, ever.”

“She’s standing behind Marla in line.” Jackie pointed her out.

Gillian Jones was waifishly petite with platinum hair cut close to her head and huge cactuses hanging from her ears. I suspected the over-sized earrings might be her trademark. Zorro’s was a mask. Gillian’s was desert vegetation.

“Marla and Gillian supposedly hated each other for a lot of years,” Keely explained, “but now that they’ve signed on with the same publisher, I’ve heard they’ve become the best of friends. I want to learn so much from them. I don’t mean to brag, but I’ve won every regional First Chapter contest ever offered.”

“That’s great,” I enthused. I had a hard time writing postcards, so I admired anyone who could actually win a contest for putting words on paper. “But you’re unpublished at the moment?”

“Pre-published,” she corrected. “Unpublished gives the wrong impression.”

Right. I guess it would give the impression that…you’re not published.

“But I’m this close”—she flashed a quarter-inch space between her thumb and forefinger—“to getting published.”

“Have you had any nibbles?” Jackie asked with girlish excitement.

“Not exactly.” Keely blew a bubble the size of her head, then had to use her fingers to shove it all back into her mouth. “I need to complete the manuscript first, but finishing up should be a piece of cake.”

“Are you close to the end?” Jackie wanted to know.

“Real close. Only thirteen chapters to go.”

Thirteen
to go?
I couldn’t imagine the fortitude it took to sit down every day and grind out page after page of fiction. I regarded her with even greater respect than before. “How many chapters have you written so far?”