by Maddy Hunter
“And?”
She winced guiltily. “It wasn’t. He needs lots more practice.”
“Good morning, everyone!” Duncan’s voice suddenly filled the room. “Or should I say, buon giorno?” He strode into the dining room, positioning himself in a central location where he could be seen and heard by all of us, and rattled off a spate of Italian that was as incomprehensible to me as an aria sung by one of the three tenors, but just as captivating.
“For your benefit, allow me to translate,” he continued. “I have a few announcements for you this morning.” As George eased gingerly into a chair beside Nana, Duncan raised a thick manila envelope above his head.
“This just arrived by messenger. Partial reimbursement for the loss of your belongings in Rome.”
I cast a look about the room, noticing my red silk halter top on a perfect stranger, and my sleeveless button-front blouse on someone else. Was there anyone on this tour who hadn’t ripped off a piece of my wardrobe?
“If you’ll remain at your tables, I’ll come around to distribute the funds. I have money for everyone except” — his eyes roved the room until they settled on me — “everyone except Emily, who’s the only person on the tour lucky enough not to have had her clothes go up in flames.”
My eyes grew wide. My mouth fell open. No money for me? But…but…he had to give me something! Okay, it was a minor technicality that I still had clothes, but the thing was, EVERYONE ELSE WAS WEARING THEM!
“This is a free day for you, so visit some of the open-air markets and replenish your travel supplies. Tomorrow we’ve decided to treat you to an unscheduled day trip to Pisa, with all entrance fees paid by us.”
Oohs. Aahs. Titters. George stuck two fingers in his mouth to whistle, then froze up like a rusty pipe halfway through. I shot him a panicked look. “What’s wrong?” I mouthed.
“Old rotator cuff injury.” He hedged. “It flares up sometimes when I move the wrong way.”
Right. Like when he tried to become a human pretzel. I massaged my temple. Oh, God. And this was only day two.
“The Leaning Tower won’t be reopened until June of next year,” Duncan went on, “but Pisa itself is a great place to spend the day. I’ll assign a nine-fifteen departure time for tomorrow morning and to make sure you don’t forget, I’ll post the time in the lobby as a reminder. Any questions?”
I saw a woman wave her hand in the air and when she stood up, I noticed something else. She was wearing my favorite lemon yellow sundress with the thin shoulder straps and fit - and - flare shape! AARGHHH!
“How are we supposed to find our way around Florence without getting lost?” the woman asked.
“I have city maps for each of you. I’ll leave them at the front desk, so grab one before you head out.”
I darted a look around the room — at all the strangers wearing my clothes — and started to hyperventilate. A sheen of perspiration bathed my throat. I became paralyzed by a single thought. What if I never got my entire wardrobe back? Oh, my God. I’d spent forever poring over Victoria’s Secret, Spiegel, and Nordstrom catalogues to find just the right clothes for this trip. I wanted my stuff back! Now!
“My last item of business is information that I wish I didn’t have to share with you,” Duncan announced. “There was an accident on the stairs last night. Some of you might have been awakened by the commotion in the lobby. One of our tour guests tripped on the runner and fell down the entire flight of stairs. Unfortunately, she didn’t survive the fall.”
Gasps. Murmurs of shock. “Who was it?” Dick Teig called out.
“The guest’s name was Cassandra Trzebiatowski. From Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania.”
A perfect example of why including last name and place of residence on your standard three-by-four-inch name tag was often optional.
“We’ve notified her family, and they’ll be flying someone over to handle all the necessary arrangements for the body. In the meantime I can’t stress enough how important it is for you to watch your step on the stairs and to use the handrail. Let’s try to avoid another tragedy while we’re in Florence.”
A hush fell over the room. I heard George whisper to Nana, “What’s the body count now, Marion? Five or six? I’ve lost track.”
I slumped forward, holding my head in my hands. Nana patted my back with a sympathetic hand.
“You didn’t have nothin’ to do with this, Emily, so try not to fret about it.”
“I’m cursed. I really am. I’m right up there with the Red Sox and the Cubs.”
Nana’s hand worked faster. “Listen to me, dear. If you want drugs, I can help. There’s no shame in takin’ somethin’ that’ll help you cope.” She rummaged in her pocketbook and slapped a small plastic tube onto the table. Anbesol. Extra strength.
“I don’t have a toothache.”
“Don’t matter. This stuff will numb you up real good whatever your problem is.”
I lowered my forehead to the table and groaned.
“Try to get a grip, dear. Remember what happens when you get stressed.”
Remember? Good God, how could I forget? I got hives. But not just normal hives. I got…I shot straight up in my chair. Of course! Why hadn’t I thought of it before? I grabbed Nana’s face and kissed her. She was such a genius.
“Any other unfinished business you’d like to discuss before we break for the day?” Duncan asked.
I stabbed my hand in the air and, when Duncan acknowledged me, scooted my chair back and stood up. “Hi. I’m Emily. The person whose suitcase some of you helped empty last night.”
Preening. Giggling. Wide smiles.
“I can see that many of you are wearing the clothes you borrowed from me, and I just wanted to say you look really great. I hope my wardrobe can add to your trip in some small way.”
Cheers. Hoots. Scattered applause.
“You probably thought this was going to be a long speech, but that’s all I really wanted to say.” I waved to everyone in the room and started to sit down, only to pop back up and press my hand to my forehead to indicate my forgetfulness. “I’m sorry. There is one more thing I forgot to mention.”
The applause died down. I smiled sweetly into the faces that peered up at me. “I have this embarrassing skin condition that’s highly contagious, so if any of you start breaking out in a gross-looking, itchy red rash all over your body, don’t get too upset. If you get treatment quickly enough, the damage to your liver will be only minor. And you’ll be happy to know that the recommended treatment is known to have caused infertility in only five of twelve lab rats, which means, you can look great in Italy and still have children! Maybe. Isn’t that great?”
I maintained my smile as half the room made a sudden stampede toward the door.
I might be from a little town in Iowa, but I hadn’t just fallen off the turnip truck.
Chapter 5
I was loitering in the hotel lounge a short time later, impatiently waiting for Jackie, when I saw a familiar face grab a map off the front desk and blow past me like a Ferrari. “I’m sorry about your roommate,” I called toward Brandy Ann as she headed for the door.
She ground to a quick stop and turned around, her eyes locating me amid the dozen guests who were huddled in tight knots, examining their city maps. She hazarded a tense smile and retraced her steps back to me.
“You heard, huh?” She ranged a look around the room. “I guess everyone has heard by now.”
“Duncan told the group at breakfast.”
She nodded. “I don’t do breakfast. Too many carbs and refined sugars in breakfast food. A person would be better off opening a vein and injecting cyanide.” She doubled her fist and gave her arm a quick pump, inflating her biceps like a rubber tire. My eyes rounded. My stomach muscles twitched. A person of normal intelligence would not want to get on Brandy Ann Frounfelker’s bad side.
“Really bad luck on Cassandra’s part,” Brandy Ann admitted. “But she brought it on herself. I don’t want to be judgmental, b
ut anyone who owns shoes like that has to have a death wish. They might have looked great with the dress she snitched from you, but look where they got her.”
“You didn’t seem too happy last night that she grabbed my dress away from you.”
“I wasn’t. I even made some inane remark, threatening her. Did you hear me? Heat of the moment. But I got over it.”
Before or after Cassandra fell down the stairs? I wondered.
“The thing is, I can’t let all these petty distractions grab my attention. I need to stay focused on my outline and pages and submit the best entry I can.”
Personally, I considered death more than a petty distraction. “Duncan told me Cassandra had completed two novels and was beginning work on a third. Sounds as if she really knew how to stay focused.”
Brandy Ann barked out a sour laugh. “She paid Keely a ton of money to coach her through those first two books.”
“Cassandra subscribed to Keely’s Internet service?”
“Until recently, when Keely raised her rates. Then Cassandra apparently decided to go it alone. I read some of her work last night. It wasn’t half-bad. She had talent. It’s a shame she’s dead. Like they said in that old movie, ‘she mighta been a contenda.’ ”
“Brandy Ann!” Amanda trotted up beside us, her inch-long hair devoid of spikes, but her nose still armed to open aluminum cans. “I’m ready to make the move. It’s really easy when you don’t have luggage.”
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 —”