Pasta Imperfect Read online

  Vieni. Vici. Very dead.

  I fell asleep the moment my head hit the pillow — awakened what seemed like hours later by a chorus of voices shouting in Italian just outside my door. I cracked an eye to squint at the ceiling, then reached over to hit the illumination bar on my travel alarm: 1:06. Okay, I knew Italians were night owls, but this was a public building, and some of us wanted sleep!

  I crawled out of bed, shrugged into my Laura Ashley dress, and staggered across the room, thinking fierce thoughts. I threw open the door. “Would you people please —”

  The corridor was empty.

  I looked left. I looked right. I stepped farther into the hallway and peered down the staircase. The voices I’d heard echoed up from the lobby. But they weren’t the voices of rowdy Italian night owls. They were the voices of a half dozen uniformed police gathered around a woman whose lifeless body lay at the bottom of the stairs.

  My eyes froze open in horror.

  And she was wearing my new stretch denim corset dress with the bra straps!

  Turn the page to read critical raves for Maddy Hunter’s bestselling Passport to Peril mysteries…

  Top O’ the Mournin’

  Hilarious and delightful…. I found myself laughing out loud and wiping away tears (of joy) as I quickly flipped the pages. I can’t wait for the next trip!”

  — The Old Book Barn Gazette

  “A delightful cozy that is low on gore but rich in plot and characterizations. There is plenty of slapstick humor…. The mystery is well constructed and the supporting cast yields a number of suspects….”

  — The Best Reviews.com

  “No sophmore jinx here…very funny and full of suspense.”

  — Romantic Times Bookclub Magazine

  “WARNING: Do not munch on Triscuits or anything covered in powdered sugar while reading this book! I nearly choked from laughing so hard…. There was belly laughter, or at least a chuckle, on each page. This is the most fun I’ve had in a while.”

  — The Mystery Company Newsletter

  Alpine for You

  “I found myself laughing out loud…. The word ‘hoot’ comes to mind.”

  — Deadly Pleasures

  “Light and witty…. While we’re all waiting for the next Janet Evanovich, this one will do perfectly.”

  — Sleuth of Baker Street (Ontario, Canada)

  “A debut with more than a few chuckles…. Alpine for You is one to cheer the gloomy winter days.”

  — Mystery Lovers Bookshop

  “A very funny and promising start to Hunter’s Passport to Peril series.”

  — Romantic Times

  “If you’re looking for laughter, you’ve come to the right place…sure to provide giggles and guffaws aplenty. Hunter’s confident voice and her compelling first person narration…mak[es] Emily a complete person with pluck and purpose and personality. The writing style is breezy and accomplished…. First-rate entertainment!”

  Cozies, Capers & Crimes

  “Move over, Evanovich, there’s a new author in town…. One of the best I have read for a long time…. Hilarious. The characters are an absolute hoot.”

  — Under the Covers

  “Delightfully fresh, with a great deal of humor.”

  — Creatures ’n Crooks Bookshoppe

  “As funny as anything by Katy Munger, Janet Evanovich, [or] Joan Hess…. The laughs started on the first page and continued, nonstop, to the last…. This one gets five stars. It’s a winner.”

  — Blackbird Mysteries

  “A compelling heroine, an intriguing hero, and a great scenic tour. I’m impatiently looking forward to the next one.”

  — The Old Book Barn Gazette

  Also by Maddy Hunter

  Passport to Peril mystery series

  ALPINE FOR YOU

  TOP O’ THE MOURNIN’

  Published by Pocket Books

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  An Original Publication of POCKET BOOKS

  POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  Copyright © 2004 by Mary Mayer Holmes

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  ISBN: 1-4165-0517-2

  POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Visit us on the World Wide Web:

  http://www.SimonSays.com

  Dedication

  To my buddies, Tony and Herm, who made Italy so delightful…twice!

  With love~

  mmh

  Acknowledgments

  “Everything comes to those who wait.” Careers have their ups and downs. My writing career collapsed in the early nineties. For the next decade, I struggled to put two words together in the same sentence. When I finally finished what I considered to be the defining work of my career, no one wanted to read it. But I waited, and persevered, and waited some more…and then everything changed.

  My universe is peopled with friends and family who believed in me even when I found it difficult to believe in myself. If not for my connection to them, I still might be struggling to put two words together. I offer my deepest thanks to all of them, and to the following people:

  To Pam Johnson, for her kindness and generosity in introducing me to her amazing agent.

  To Irene Goodman, a.k.a. “the amazing agent,” for the phone call that began, “I love what you’ve written. I want to represent you.”

  To Herm Kuhn, Sue Hubbard, Margaret Dohnalek, Marge and Jim Converse, Sharon Gasser, Barb Schuler, Micki Harper, Linda Kuhn, and Minda Danner, for buying my books in bulk and giving them away to their friends like pieces of penny candy.

  To Margaret Kaufman, for her extra footwork and picture-taking in Florence, and to her companions, Virmati Hitchings, Lisa Wax, Tinker Zimmerman, and Merilee Obstbaum, for becoming part of the research team.

  To Terri Bischoff and Linda Vetter, owners of Booked for Murder, for their enthusiasm in promoting a local mystery author.

  To Johanna Farrand, for the tongue-in-cheek cover copy she so cleverly pens.

  To Jeff Fitz-Maurice and Paolo Pepe, for their artistry and imagination in designing my dynamite book jackets.

  And most especially, to Christina Boys, my extraordinary editor, for her unflagging encouragement, ultra-efficiency, eye for detail, uncanny ability to know what needs fixing and how to fix it, and on a more personal level, for her grace, thoughtfulness, laughter, and breathless chats. You are a special gift in my life — a gift that was well worth waiting for.

  Maddy Hunter

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 1

  There are lots of things you can’t do in Rome.

  You can’t leave your belongings unattended without fear of having them ripped off. You can’t talk in the Sistine Chapel. You can’t exit the Colosseum the same way you entered. You can’t buy a ticket aboard a bus from a vending machine that’s out-of-order. And you can’t take pictures in St. Peter’s Basi
lica.

  Don’t get me wrong. You can try to take pictures of the towering marble columns, the gilded arches, and the dazzling mosaics, monuments, and altars. The Vatican encourages all kinds of photography. But the thing is, everything is so big inside the basilica, you have to stand really far back to get your shot.

  Like Tuscany.

  “How do you s’pose they keep the floor in this place so shiny?” Nana asked as we stood near the monstrous holy water stoups in the nave of St. Peter’s.

  I marveled at the acres of gleaming marble that stretched before us. There was only one way to keep this floor looking as polished as an Olympic ice-skating rink. “Zamboni,” I concluded.

  Nana sighed with nostalgia. “Your grampa always wanted to drive one a them Zambonis. He said watchin’ that machine resurface the ice sent chills up his spine. I never had the heart to tell ’im it wasn’t the Zamboni what give ’im chills. It was his underwear. Cotton briefs don’t cut it at a hockey game. You gotta wear thermal.”

  Nana stood four-foot-ten, was built like a fireplug, and despite her eighth grade education, was the smartest person I knew. To kick off the first day of our Italian tour, she was dressed in her favorite Minnesota Vikings wind suit and wore a Landmark Destinations name tag that identified her as Marion Sippel.

  I never wore a name tag, but all twelve seniors in my tour group knew me as Emily. Emily Andrew — the theater arts major who’d gone off to the Big Apple to become a serious stage actress, even landing a minor role in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, only to return home to Iowa after my husband ran off with the dreamboat who donned Joseph’s dreamcoat every time the lead actor was under the weather. Life has a way of turning lemons into lemonade though. I applied for an annulment, which returned me to “virgin” status in my mother’s eyes, and I found permanent employment at the Windsor City Bank as the well-paid coordinator for its Senior Travel Club. I arrange day-trips throughout Iowa during the year and holidays abroad through national tour companies. Then I get to accompany the group as an official escort. It’s a dream job that suffers only one major drawback.

  People keep dying on me.

  Nana assessed the floor with a critical eye. “You s’pose the floor’s as slippery as it looks? This would be a bad time to fall and break my hip.”

  Unh-oh. I’d had a feeling all day long that some calamity was about to happen. It was like a ripple in the order of things. A disturbance in the force. Ever since my eerie encounter at an Irish castle last month, I’d flirted with the idea that I might be possessed of some kind of sixth sense, but to be honest, I hoped I was wrong. Living through disaster was bad enough. Being able to predict it would be right up there with tooth extraction by rusty pliers.

  “The floor only looks like ice,” I assured Nana, checking out her size five sneakers. They weren’t Nike or Converse but appeared to be some off-brand she’d bought at Wal-Mart for ten bucks. She might be a lottery - winning multi-millionaire, but she still knew how to save a dime. “Do those have latex bottoms?”

  She shuffled her feet, making a loud, squeaking noise. “You betcha.”

  “You’re all set then.” But I suddenly realized I was hesitant to let her out of my sight. “Do you ever have feelings you can’t explain, Nana?”

  “Female intuition,” she groaned. “Awful thing. I’m glad I don’t get them intuitive twinges much anymore, and when I do, it’s usually gas.” She fixed me with a fretful look. “You’re taller’n me, Emily. You see George anywhere out there?” She glanced around to see who was within earshot before whispering close to my ear, “Him and me have big plans these next two weeks…if we can steer clear of you know who.”

  George was George Farkas, an Iowa retiree with a prosthetic leg, a great sense of direction, and an expandable body part that was reputed to be of mythic proportions. He and Nana had developed the hots for each other on our trip to Ireland, but they hadn’t wanted to raise eyebrows back home, so they’d kept the relationship under wraps. They’d been thinking of this trip to Italy as an extended date, until the unthinkable happened.

  My mom got talked into coming along.

  Nana went up on tippy-toes and in her best imitation of a periscope in search of enemy vessels, scanned the cavernous depths of the basilica. “You think I’ve lost her? She’s been stickin’ to me like denture cream ever since we left Des Moines. I swear when we get back home, I’m gonna strangle your father.”

  Dad had meant well. When Nana’s assigned roommate, Bernice Zwerg, had to cancel her reservation to undergo emergency bunion surgery, he’d suggested my mom take her place. “It’d give you three girls a chance to spend some quality time together.” I’d been a little frightened by the idea. Nana had nearly swallowed her dentures. I’d had to perform the Heimlich maneuver just to get her breathing again.

  Nana wrung her hands beside me. “How’s a mature widowed lady s’posed to carry on a serious flirtation with a fella when the woman’s kid is taggin’ along?” It didn’t seem to matter that the “kid” in this case was fifty-eight years old. I guess the theory was, once your kid, always your kid.

  “There’s George,” I said, spying his bald head, tartan plaid shirt, and chino pants at a second holy water stoup across the way from us. I pointed him out and aimed her in the right direction. “Remember to guard your pocketbook.”

  She massaged her oversized bag with a reverent hand. “We don’t have to worry about no criminal element in St. Peter’s, Emily. This is the safest place in all Italy. It said so in a travel guide your mother checked outta the library.”

  “Well, be careful anyway.”

  Mesmerized by the sparkle and glitter in every corner of the basilica, I dug my Canon Elph out of my shoulder bag and spun in a slow circle, dazzled. Wow. I studied the holy water font in front of me. In my parish church back home, holy water was dispensed in a metal container the size of a soup bowl. Here, it was dispensed in a marble shell the size of a man-eating clam and supported by two cherubs whose heads were as big as wrecking balls. I pondered the cherubs. Weren’t they supposed to be itty-bitty creatures with tiny little wings?

  Obviously, I’d been confusing them with Tinkerbell.

  I wormed my way through the crowd, looking for a shot that would capture the essence of the basilica, and soon found it in the ceiling above me — a gold-toned mosaic of a wave-tossed boat jammed with apostles. Outside the boat, a haloed Jesus stood atop the water, his hand extended in an obvious attempt to prevent a prayerful Peter from sinking to the bottom of the Sea of Galilee. Aha! This was perfect. It had everything. Raw drama. Human emotion. Bible-based special effects. I took aim with my camera.

  I couldn’t fit all the apostles into my frame.

  I changed the setting on my camera to panoramic print. I could fit all the apostles into the frame now, but I was faced with another teensy problem.

  They no longer had heads.

  Okay. So maybe I wasn’t getting any great pictures of the world’s most famous basilica, but on a brighter note, think of all the film I was saving!

  I continued to wander, my shoulder growing numb from the sheer weight of having to shlep my bag around. But I was an escort. I needed to carry a lot of essential stuff. Over-the-counter medications. Itinerary information. Pocketknife. Sunblock. Address book. Post-it notes. Maps. Cosmetics. Cell phone. The bank had decided to spring for the cell phone to spare my having to battle Italy’s notoriously bad phone system in case of emergency. It was a really good one, too — the kind that could handle transatlantic as well as local calls. I was carrying my passport, money, and credit cards beneath my clothing in a neck wallet that the tour company, Landmark Destinations, had sent out to all its guests. They suggested this was the only sure way to protect currency and travel documents from the pickpockets and purse snatchers who preyed upon summer tourists.

  At a side altar mobbed with people, I saw a glossy white sculpture perched high on a plinth behind a glass enclosure — a depiction of Mary cradling the
lifeless body of her Son. Around me, shutters clicked, lights flashed, film whirred. I could feel a palpable kind of energy as people pushed and shoved their way to the front, but I expected their excitement was fueled less from the idea that they were staring at the marble masterpiece than by the fact that this seemed to be the only statue in the whole basilica that could fit inside the frame of a thirty-five-millimeter camera.

  I whipped my Elph up to my eye and zoomed in. I poised my finger on the shutter button.

  “There you are, Emily.” I froze at the sound of my mother’s voice behind me. “Have you seen your grandmother? I’ve been telling her to stay close by me so I can protect her from being crushed to death by the crowd, but she keeps disappearing. I’m afraid this can only mean one thing.” She let out a woeful sigh. “Her hearing’s gone. First thing when we get back home, I’m calling the Miracle Ear people.”

  My mom stood an inch over five feet and was as soft and round as a pigeon — kind of like a Midwestern version of Bette Midler. She had a moon face, round blue eyes that crinkled at the corners, a cap of wavy salt-and-pepper hair, and a fanny pack that bulged at her waist like an Igloo cooler. I looked nothing like my mom. I was taller and thinner, with an unruly mop of shoulder-length dark brown hair, cheekbones you could actually see, and enough fashion sense never to allow a fanny pack anywhere near my waist. Neither Mom nor I had inherited Nana’s bulbous nose or Alfred E. Newman ears. Sometimes you just luck out.

  Mom glanced beyond me, riveting her attention on the glassed-in altar. “Oh, my goodness, Michelangelo’s Pietà. Did you know I have a photo of this very statue from the 1964 New York World’s Fair? You have to get a picture of that, Em. Here. Give me your bag so you can maneuver a little better.” She grabbed my shoulder strap with one hand, gave it a tug, and let out a surprised gasp when it broke loose from her fingers and fell to the floor with an echoing thunk. I stooped down to grab it.