Pasta Imperfect

by Maddy Hunter

  “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?”

  “Sometime before midnight. She probably wanted to scout out some local eatery so she could write a critical review of their three-cheese pizza. You will talk to Duncan about getting me out of that room, won’t you?”

  “Promise.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  I gnawed on that for a long moment. “I can’t let it go. Etienne would discourage me from meddling, but I’m not comfortable with the police’s conclusion. There’s something going on here that doesn’t feel right to me, and my gut tells me it involves Brandy Ann, Keely, and Amanda, either together or separately. I don’t trust them, Jack. I think they’re up to no good, so we better keep our eyes on them.”

  Jackie clapped her hands before tugging on my arm beseechingly. “This is so cool! Surveillance. Eavesdropping. Dirty tricks. Can we wear disguises? Please, Emily? You know how good I am with makeup. I could dress up like a guy! Remember how great I walked when I was a guy? Maybe I could do that again!” She peered down at her feet. “You think anyone will notice that my shoes aren’t exactly butch?”

  I guess her burst of deductive reasoning had only been a passing thing.

  “Wow.” I wasn’t as high above sea level as when I’d stood atop Mount Pilatus in Switzerland, but I was still high enough up to make the bottoms of my feet tingle. The gallery was octagonal in shape, about ten feet wide, paved with white marble, and surrounded by a railing that stood waist high and might have been made of chicken wire. It was kind of like standing on the top tier of a wedding cake and being protected by a border of decorative frosting. Three hundred and forty feet below me, Florence lay in miniature, a jumble of brown and gray buildings squished helter-skelter beneath red terra-cotta roofs — like a third-grade plaster of Paris experiment that someone had accidentally sat on. Flanking the perimeter of the city, a forest of spired trees and lush Tuscan greenery spread toward the surrounding hills and disappeared beneath a cloud of what looked like California smog. Beyond the smog, to the north and west, I imagined vineyards and villas, hill towns and sunflowers, olive groves and…

  “And another thing,” Jackie gasped into her tape recorder, “if you have old folks on your tour, don’t drag them up here, or they’ll all be collapsing from exhaustion and you’ll have to have them airlifted down.” She stood near me, backed against one of the ornate columned arches that winged outward from the cupola. “Say, Emily, I’ve been thinking. Should we have a secret code or a password or something?”

  I focused on the panorama before me, a stiff wind forcing me to hold my camera steady. The roofs. The forest. A little smog for atmosphere. CL
ICK. “We’re keeping track of suspicious people, Jack, not launching nuclear missiles.” I refocused on the bell tower that rose candlestick straight to my left. CLICK. “We don’t need secret codes.”

  A snort of disgust behind me. “No disguises. No secret codes. No passwords. If you don’t mind my saying so, Emily, you run a pretty rinky-dink surveillance operation.”

  “I never would have come up here if I’d known this was going to happen,” I heard a familiar voice complain from somewhere nearby. “Are you sure you don’t need some help up, Barbro?”

  My heart slammed against my rib cage with a sickening thud. Barbro? My Barbro? Oh, no. Had she fallen down? Broken her hip? Shattered a vertebra? Didn’t she realize we were 340 feet up? Oh, God. With my heart in my mouth, I raced through four archways to the south side of the gallery. There, facedown on the terrace, lying in a splash of sunlight beside a plastic sack stamped with the words Farmacia Comunale, I found Barbro Severid. “Oh, my God!” Don’t be dead. Please, don’t be dead. Reverting to CPR mode, I dropped to my knees and flipped her over like a burger.

  Click clack click clack click. “Would it have hurt for you to mention you were leaving?” Jackie scolded as she ran to join me.

  Barbro’s eyes were open, her pupils fixed. “You’re going to be fine,” I chattered over her as I tested for a pulse in her throat. My hands were sweaty. My fingers shook. “The climb must have been too much for her. I CAN’T FIND A PULSE!” I cried at Jack.

  Barbro sat up suddenly. “Are you sure?”

  “EHH!” I screamed.

  She pressed her fingertips to the side of her throat and began to search herself. “Don’t worry, dear. It must be here.”

  “My goodness,” Britha cried as she shuffled into view. “What’s all this commotion? What are you doing to my sister?”

  “Emily can’t find a pulse!” Jackie wailed. “Stand back. She’s about to start CPR.”

  “Where’d it go?” Barbro sputtered, testing her throat. “Don’t know, don’t know.” Shrugging, she thrust her hand onto my lap. “I insist. Try my wrist.”

  “Hurry up, Emily,” Jackie prodded. “She could be dead.”

  “SHE’S NOT DEAD! She’s sitting up!”

  “You can’t go by that! It could be a delayed muscle reaction.”

  “Look, Barbro,” Britha said, circling around me. She opened her palm for all of us to see. “I found it. It must have ricocheted off the bottom of the railing and landed behind that column over there. But it’s broken.” She held up a clip-on earring that was a whorl of multicolored blue beads. “Brand-new. Isn’t that a shame?” She wiggled the metal clip in the air to show how it was dangling like a loose tooth. “I guess we’ll just have to look for new ones.”

  I regarded Britha curiously. “You mean, she didn’t collapse from exhaustion?”

  “Barbro collapse? Goodness, no. She was helping me locate my earring. She’s very eagle-eyed. And quite thorough.” Britha touched her hand to her ear and massaged the naked lobe. “But I do feel undressed without my earring. We always wear earrings to finish off our outfits, don’t we, Barbro?”

  “We always do. That’s true, that’s true.”

  Jackie nudged my leg with her foot and when I peered up, she slanted an odd look at Barbro. I warned her off with my eyes. “Well,” I addressed Barbro, slapping my thighs, “now that we know you’re not dead, let’s get you back on your feet.”

  When we had her upright again, Jackie handed Barbro her plastic Farmacia Comunale sack then stood back and gaped at the two women. “Wow, you two are twins! I never would have guessed.”

  I stared at Jackie, deadpan. “You never would have guessed? They look exactly alike. How could you not have guessed?”

  She dropped her chin and narrowed her eyes at me. “Excuse me? Don’t twins usually dress alike? Please note. They’re not dressed alike. It’s very misleading.”

  Britha smiled at Jackie with indulgent eyes. “You’re very…tall, aren’t you, dear?”

  Jackie looked from Britha, to Barbro, and back again. “You’re like little cookie cutters of each other. That’s so cool.”

  “Uff da!” I said, giving the twins the once-over. “I got so caught up with Barbro, I didn’t even notice what you were wearing! Would you look at you? Turn around now. Let me see.” I made a little twirling motion with my finger.

  Grinning, the twins spun around slowly, modeling the spandex bodysuits and cigarette pants they’d borrowed from me yesterday. “This is the first time in our lives that we haven’t dressed alike,” Britha confided. “It takes some getting used to.”

  The clothes fit like sausage casings, which shouldn’t have been flattering to seventy-three-year-old spinsters who’d never been reconstructed by a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon, but the twins were so slim and trim, they looked like prototypes for Medicare Barbie. “You two look great!” I gushed.

  “All thanks to you, dear,” Britha said, “although —” She locked arms with Barbro and exchanged an anxious look with her. “Please don’t think us ungrateful, but we did have a tiny question about your…skin condition.”

  “Skin condition?” Jackie frowned at me. “You have a skin condition?”

  I brushed off the question. “It’s nothing. Really.”

  “Unh-oh.” Jackie wagged her finger at me. “Are your hives back?”

  “No, my hives aren’t back.”

  “You said it was highly contagious,” Britha added. “So we were wondering if there was a chance we might catch it.”

  Jackie skated back a step. “Athlete’s foot? ’Fess up. It’s athlete’s foot, isn’t it?”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “Psoriasis?”

  Barbro clung to her sister’s arm. “The symptoms do inspire dread. You go bald, insane, then you’re dead.”

  “Holy crap!” screamed Jackie. “It’s leprosy, isn’t it! You have leprosy!”

  “We’re not so worried about growing insane and dying,” Britha explained, “but we’d rather not go bald.”

  “How could you do this to me, Emily?” Jackie cried. “After all we’ve meant to each other.” She scratched a sudden itch on one arm, then the other. “Is there a rash involved? Oh, my God! I’ve caught it! I’m going to die! And I haven’t even figured out who I am as a woman yet!”

  I smiled benignly at the twins. “Don’t mind her. She’s a little high-strung.”

  “She should ask her health-care professional about Paxil,” Britha suggested. “Or is it Plavix?” She strained to think. “It’s the one that in most cases doesn’t cause erectile dysfunction, serious heart problems, or death.”

  “Okay,” I said, hoping to restore order. “The truth is, I lied about my skin this morning. But I had an ulterior motive. I’m trying to get my clothes back.”

  Britha made a metronome of her finger. “You lied? Did you hear that, Barbro? She broke a Commandment.”

  “But I do have a skin condition! At least, I did last month. It’s just not active right now. So you’re not going to go bald and die anytime soon,” I assured the twins. “Keep my clothes for as long as you need them. Just get them back to me before we leave, and whatever you do, don’t tell anyone they’re mine!”

  “You made it all up?” Jackie accused, fire in her eyes. She gave it a moment’s thought. “Euw, I like it. You are so clever, Emily.” She embraced me in a bear hug that lifted me completely off the floor. “So,” she said when she set me back on my feet, “I’ve seen enough. Can we leave?”

  “Before you go —” Britha removed her camera from around her neck and held it out to me. “Would you mind taking a picture of us with the rooftops of Florence as a backdrop? No one back home will believe how far up we are. I bet we’re even higher than Lars Bakke’s grain elevator.”

  The standard height against which all things are measured in Nepal is Mt. Everest. In Chicago, it’s the Sears Tower. In Windsor City, it’s Lars Bakke’s grain elevator.

  “What’d you think of that clim
b?” Jackie asked them, as I took the camera. “A real ball-buster, wasn’t it?”

  Oh, yeah. “Ball-buster” was a great term to use in front of women whose father had been a Lutheran minister. I angled Jackie a disapproving look.

  Britha tidied the seams on Barbro’s bodysuit and picked off a speck of lint. “I thought we’d never make it to the top,” she confessed. “Barbro was real fleet-footed, but I’m afraid I slowed us down something fierce. We could have been up here way sooner if I hadn’t had to stop halfway up.”

  Jackie splayed her hand against her chest. “I’m so glad to hear you say that. I was beginning to think it was just me.” She slanted a smug look back at me. “Wasn’t it awful? The shortness of breath? The burning calves? The feeling that your heart is gonna burst out of your chest any moment?”

  “I stopped to tie my shoe.” She heaved a sigh. “But you’re right. It was awful. It must have thrown us off schedule by a good half minute.” She balled her hands into anemic fists and gave them a disheartened look. “My fingers aren’t as limber as they used to be, are they, Barbro? If I’d been smart, I would have bought the shoes with the Velcro closures.”

  “Do I have to do anything besides point and shoot?” I called out to Britha as I peeked through the lens of her superslick digital camera.

  “That’s all there is to it, dear. Oops. Just a minute.” She reached up to remove her remaining earring. “Don’t want to be lopsided.”

  Seeing this, Barbro reached up and with a satisfied smile, removed hers, too. Aw, that was so sweet! They didn’t want to be seen dressed any differently than was absolutely necessary. Boy, twins really had some major bonding going on. “Okay,” I instructed. “Big smiles.” CLICK. “Good one.” Now let me zoom in for a closeup.” A strong gust of wind blew their hair back from their faces like little white haloes. CLICK.

  “Thank you, Emily.” As Britha retrieved her camera and looped the strap back over her head, the bottom of Barbro’s plastic sack gave way, dumping the contents all over the gallery floor. Toothbrushes. Toothpowder. Bar soap. Dental floss. Sewing kit. Band-Aids. Rubbing alcohol. Skin cream. A jar of what looked like petroleum jelly. Aha! They must be getting ready to try out the shower.