Pasta Imperfect Read online

  I opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came out. If this room looked good to them, what did theirs look like? Oh, God. I didn’t want to know. “Is this your first trip abroad?” I inquired.

  “It’s our first trip anywhere,” confessed Britha. “We’re pretty much homebodies, aren’t we, Barbro? Never been away from Windsor City in our lives, unless you count the time we attended the grand opening of the new Wal-Mart superstore outside of town.”

  “But once we went to Waterloo. Remember, Brit? You caught the flu.”

  Explosive clapping erupted from the downstairs lobby, nearly drowning out the sound of muffled chirruping coming from my room. “My phone,” I announced, retreating back into my room. “Would you ladies excuse me for a moment?”

  “Isn’t that nice that you have a means of communication,” Britha commented. “I don’t believe we have a phone, do we, Barbro? Or a window. Or an armchair. Or a —”

  I upended the contents of my shoulder bag into the chair and grabbed my cell phone. “Hello?”

  “Emily, darling. Where are you? You said you’d call. What happened in Rome?”

  “Um, the hotel burned down, and everyone’s luggage got torched, so we’re in Florence, settling into alternate digs.” I smiled at the twins as they stood statue-still in the hallway, staring at me with hollow eyes. “We’re all fine though, and the tour company plans to give people stipends so they can replace some of their belongings.”

  “I’m so sorry, darling. Did you lose everything? I regret not seeing you in the corset dress with the bra straps that you talked about.” His voice dipped intimately. “I’ve been entertaining sinfully erotic thoughts about you in that dress.”

  My stomach did a little flip-flop as I watched the twins inch closer to my door, stalking my suitcase with their eyes. “Actually, I…uh, I didn’t lose a thing.” I regarded the eager looks on the women’s faces. I regarded my obscenely overstuffed suitcase. I sighed as my conscience got the better of me. “Would you excuse me a moment?” I said to Etienne. “All right, ladies!” I waved my hand toward my suitcase. “I think there might be some slacks and jerseys in there that’ll fit you.”

  They grinned in delight at each other before squeezing arm in arm through the door and approaching the bed.

  “What was that about?” Etienne asked, when I returned to him.

  “Girl talk.” I watched one of the twins remove a few items from the top of my suitcase and place them carefully on the bed. Satisfied that they were as fastidious as I was, I turned my back on them for privacy and walked toward the bathroom.

  “I’m impressed with your tour company, darling. It’s usually impossible to find accommodation in Florence on such short notice. I wonder how they managed it.”

  I wasn’t absolutely sure, but I guessed that someone had dialed 1 - 800 - FLEABAG.

  “Have the complaints been wearing you down?”

  “Not yet. Everyone seems to be rolling with the punches pretty well.” But I suspected all that would change when they flipped on the lights in their bathrooms.

  I heard feet stampeding up the stairs and a loud chorus of voices as the romance contestants stomped onto the landing and paused outside my door to schmooze with each other. I guess this meant the meeting in the lobby had broken up. Unable to hear myself think, I stuck a finger in my ear to block the noise, then stepped into the bathroom and closed the folding door behind me. “Enough about me,” I said to Etienne as I leaned claustrophobically against the sink. “What’s happening on your end of the phone?”

  He laughed seductively. “My luck is holding at the casino.”

  “Maybe you should try your luck in Iowa. We have casinos, you know.”

  His voice grew soft, husky. “Do they have chemin de fer tables?”

  “Iowa has something better than chemin de fer.” I frowned as the bathroom walls vibrated with the increasing noise from the hallway. Jeez, these women were louder than the New York delegation at the Democratic convention. “Iowa has…me,” I said in a breathy whisper. “With or without my corset dress.”

  A pause. Heavy breathing. “Dio Santo, Emily. I wish you wouldn’t say things like that when I’m standing out in public.”

  BOOM! The walls shook. The floor rocked. The sink wobbled. What the —? I shoved open the bathroom door and stopped dead in my tracks. Oh. My. God. No wonder the noise had grown so loud. The romance contestants weren’t gathered in the hall anymore. They were in my room! I looked left and right. My mouth fell open.

  THEY WERE GRABBING ALL MY CLOTHES!

  “I’ve got an emergency here,” I said to Etienne. “Gotta go.”

  “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” I screamed as I rushed forward to enforce order. A silk cardigan sailed over my head. A pair of white capri pants flew in front of my nose. “Put that down. Give that back!” I snatched at the flashes of color that whizzed by. “YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE IN HERE!”

  “This is better than Filene’s basement!” someone yelled above the fracas.

  “STOP IT!” I let out an earsplitting whistle that could stop traffic on a dime, but it didn’t stop these babes. They just kept squealing deliriously, overcome with the kind of frenzied adrenaline rush that happened to folks back home when Farm and Fleet announced their annual “Buy One, Get One Free” sale.

  “I saw it first!” Brandy Ann hissed, tearing something out of Amanda’s hands.

  “It’s not your color!” spat Amanda, grabbing it back.

  “Hey, I want that!” whined an ash blonde, entering the fray.

  Elbows flew. Hips bumped. Bodies tangled. “Give it up before I flatten you!” cried Brandy Ann, sounding not at all refined.

  “It has my name on it!” screamed Amanda.

  “It’s my ticket to fame!” snarled the blonde. “One look at me wearing this thing and Gabriel Fox will be eating out of my hand. Knock yourself out with your outlines, girls, but in this little number, I’ll have the inside track without having to write one word. And you’re not going to cheat me out of it! So…LET GO!”

  “You guys are taking all the good stuff!” hissed a strawberry blonde, lunging at the trio. “That’s just my size. Hands off!”

  Growls. Grunts. I got sandwiched between two women and spun around. When I looked back toward the wrestling match, I saw a crumpled wad of denim fly into the air and land in the hands of…

  Denim? “My corset dress!” I wailed, scrambling over backs and shoulders to reach it. “Don’t you DARE take my dress!”

  “You’re going to rip it!” cried the strawberry blonde.

  “Am not!” yelled the ash blonde. “It’s that new denim. It stretches!”

  “Get off me!” screamed Brandy Ann. “You…I…if you don’t let this dress go, I swear I’ll kill you!”

  “Out of the way!” a burly woman barked at me, propelling me toward the outer fringes of the mob with a solitary bump of her hip. I recovered my balance before I slammed into the wall and inhaled an angry breath. Okay, that did it! There was no use talking to these dames. They were way beyond reason. But I knew one thing. They were getting out of my room, and they were getting out now!

  I marched to the armchair where I’d dumped the contents of my shoulder bag and plucked my address book out of the clutter. I flipped to the back cover, spied the number I wanted, and punched it into my phone.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, Duncan. This is Emily.”

  “What? Emily? Can you speak up? WHAT’S ALL THAT NOISE? WHERE ARE YOU? THE TRAIN STATION?”

  “I’m in my room!” I yelled. “But I’m having a slight problem with crowd control, so here’s what I need you to do!”

  After delivering my message and signing off, I dropped my address book back into the chair and waited. One minute. Two minutes.

  BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRG! BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRG! BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRG!

  “What’s that?” someone shouted.

  “Sounds like the fire alarm,” I shouted over their heads.

  I heard a collectiv
e gasp followed by a frantic, “Get out! Get out! The hotel’s on fire!”

  “You’ve gotta be kidding!” someone shrieked. “Not this one, too!”

  Deafening screams. Major pushing and shoving. They shot out the door and pounded back down the stairs, leaving my room in utter disarray and my suitcase cleaned out of everything except shoes and underwear. Britha and Barbro clung to each other by the bed, looking severely shell-shocked. “If we need to vacate the building, would now be a good time to do it?” Britha asked.

  I stared slack-jawed at my suitcase. I stared at Britha and Barbro. They looked so terrified, I ignored my own woes for the moment and hurried over to give them a reassuring hug. “It’s not a real fire,” I soothed. “It’s just a drill. I can tell by the ring.”

  They sagged against each other with relief. “We’re sorry about what just happened, Emily,” Britha explained. “We didn’t think to close the door, but we should have. When those romance gals saw us picking through your things, they thought it was a free-for-all. We didn’t know how to stop them!” She paused, her expression changing suddenly from anguish to delight. “We did make our selections though. I’ve seen young people wearing clothes like this in the library, but I never thought we’d have a chance to wear them ourselves. Isn’t that right, Barbro?”

  Barbro nodded as Britha whipped out two pairs of cigarette pants and two bodysuits from behind her back. “This is so exciting. Look, Emily.” She stretched my nude-colored bodysuit to and fro like a piece of softened taffy, then regarded me with the devil sparkling in her seventy - three - year - old eyes. “Spandex.”

  It was close to midnight when I finally hit the shower. To keep the toilet paper and towels dry, I piled them outside the bathroom door before I turned on the water. Surprisingly, the pressure was really good. Spray hit all four walls like a category three hurricane and started filling the sink. It made me think I could do handwash laundry while I showered…if I had any clothes left. Why had I let the twins keep my only remaining articles of clothing? I was such a pushover. But what else could I have done? When Britha held that bodysuit up to herself, she looked like a twenty-one-year-old about to order her first legal Bud Light. How could I have grabbed it away from her?

  I observed the pool of water gathering at my feet. Hmm. Drain was a little slow.

  I tried to rationalize the lunacy of my decision by reminding myself that the twins’ father had been a Lutheran minister who’d probably frowned upon beer, bingo, patent leather, and any kind of stretch microfiber. Introducing them to spandex could change their whole lives! I mean, look what it had done for the NFL.

  I turned off the shower and slogged through two inches of water for my towel, hoping the backup didn’t leak through to the ground floor. I stared at the clogged drain and wondered how to say “Drano” in Italian.

  I heard an odd thump in the hallway as I was drying myself, but I wasn’t about to check it out wrapped in a towel the size of a linen napkin. I cocked my head to listen more closely, but when I didn’t hear any follow-up commotion, I chalked it up to typical hotel sounds, finished toweling dry, and climbed into bed.

  I fell asleep the minute 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 to 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!

  Chapter 4

  Cassandra Trzebiatowski,” Duncan reported in a gravelly voice. “Room 211.” He stood outside my room, rumpled and barefoot — the same way he’d looked when I’d banged on his door an hour earlier.

  “The police speculate she tripped over the runner at the top of the stairs and fell down the whole flight. Snapped her neck in two. Probably died instantly.”

  I remembered the thump I’d heard after my shower and silently berated myself for dismissing it. If she’d died instantly, I probably wouldn’t have been able to help, but that didn’t make me feel any better. Looking toward the staircase, I eyed the tattered piece of rubber matting that served as a runner. “Are they sure it was an accident?”

  “Looks that way. She was wearing three-inch stiletto heels, one of which was sheared off from her shoe and wedged in the floor like an ice pick.”

  “So no one actually saw her fall?”

  Duncan shook his head. “The desk clerk should have, but he was napping in a room off the lobby.”

  “While he was on duty?”

  “This is Italy, Emily. There are no established rules. Only suggestions.” He covered his mouth to hide a yawn, tears welling in his eyes with the exertion. “Sorry.” He shook his head and threaded long fingers through his sun-streaked hair. “I’m used to operating on more sleep than this.”

  Guilt nibbled at my conscience. Unh-oh. “Maybe I shouldn’t have bothered you.”

  “No! You did the right thing. You did great!” He gave my shoulder an unself-conscious squeeze of gratitude. “It’s been a long day though. I’m getting a little punchy.” He gave the top of his foot a vigorous rub with his bare toes, then fanned out all ten, staring down at them distractedly. “I left my shoes in the bathroom while I was taking my shower. Bad move. I don’t think they’ll ever dry out.” He regarded my face then, his expression pained, his eyes like dark bruises. “Damn. I’ve never lost a guest before.”

  My heart went out to him. I knew from experience that the first one was always the worst…until you hit the second, third, and fourth. “You want to come inside for a few minutes and talk?” I opened my door wider for him. With a grateful nod he walked past me and angled himself into my tatty armchair, his powerful frame making the furniture look small and stunted.

  “Five years on the job without a single death.” He sighed miserably. “I had the best record in the company.”

  “Five years?” I seated myself on the edge of my bed, my voice filled with awe. I’d hardly been on the job five hours before I’d suffered my first casualty. I wondered if this was an indication that I should be rethinking my career choice.

  “It’s not that long actually. The odds are obscenely favorable in the tour industry. The chances of someone dying on your watch are astronomically low. Something like a trillion to one. Most guides go through entire careers without losing a single guest.”

  “Entire careers. Imagine that.” I scratched my throat self-consciously. Maybe it was time to reroute the conversation before he thought to ask me about my record. “Did Cassandra have a roommate?”

  Duncan nodded. “I accompanied the police when they told her about the accident, but she didn’t seem too broken up about it. Strange reaction, but I guess it makes sense if you consider the women had probably never spoken to each other until I threw them together tonight. To be honest with you, the roommate seemed a hell of a lot more interested in working on her contest entry than in hearing about the details of the accident. She could hardly wait for us to leave.”

  “I have it on good authority that contests are a really big deal among aspiring romance novelists.”

  He flashed me a crooked smile. “Romance novels. My kid sister devoured them when we were growing up. Two a day when she could get her hands on them, which wasn’t easy considering the nearest bookstores didn’t always carry Engl
ish translations.”

  I eyed him curiously. “Where exactly did you grow up?”

  “Everywhere. My dad was in the foreign service, so we moved around a lot. It was his goal to ensure that our roots never grew too deeply in any one spot, and he succeeded admirably.” He threw me a long look. “That must sound pretty dysfunctional to someone who was born and bred in Iowa.”

  Only one way he could have known that. “You read my travel information sheet.”

  “One of the perks of the job. Actually, I’m required to read all of them. And you know what always strikes me? How you can rarely guess from the look of a person what line of work they’re in. Take the girl with the spiked hair and the screwdriver in her nose. Amanda Morning. She looks like she belongs in leather chaps on a Harley. Right?”

  I nodded, though I suspected she’d need to have a helmet custom made to clear the metal in her nostrils.

  “She teaches acrobatic ballet to five-year-olds.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  He shook his head. “She probably wears a tutu and toe shoes to work. Cassandra Trzebiatowski? Classic beauty. Blond-haired. Blue-eyed. You saw the hot outfit she was wearing tonight. That clingy denim thing with the bra straps?”

  I moaned. I knew that dress would have turned heads.

  “Cassandra looked like the ballet dancer, but she was a tenth-grade physics teacher. And really focused. She wrote on her info sheet that she’d completed two romances and was beginning work on a third. A physics teacher. I never had physics teachers who looked like that when I was in school. Did you?”

  “I had nuns.” I watched him flex his shoulder and slide his hand beneath the placket of his shirt to massage an obvious ache — a casual gesture that struck me as oddly mesmerizing. I gave myself a mental slap. “Should you be telling me all this?”

  “It’s not confidential. The only confidential information on the Landmark travel form is the personal medical history, and you’ll never pry those details out of me.” He winked in a way that dimpled his cheek on one side.