Pasta Imperfect (12 page)

“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. CLICK. “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 climb?” 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.

“Replenishing all your supplies, I see.” I scrambled to collect their articles.

“There’s a very nice drugstore by the train station,” Britha informed us. “It has everything, except sturdy sacks.”

I stuffed all the items into a gallon-size Ziploc bag I’d tucked away in my shoulder bag for emergencies, then handed the bag to Barbro. “That should hold until you get back to the hotel.”

“You’ve thought of everything,” Britha complimented me. “You take good care of us, Emily, dear. Thank you again. We’re going to take a few more pictures from up here, then we’re going shopping. We’re anxious to see how the prices in the open-air market compare with those at Wal-Mart.”

“Do you need any help back down the stairs?” I inquired.

Barbro smiled sweetly. “You’re nice to ask, but the advice I’d lend, is leave us here and help your friend.”

Jackie’s mouth twitched with annoyance as we circled back to the stairs. “What
is
it with that woman? Why does she talk like that?”

“Occupational hazard.” I stopped to shoot a few more pictures. “She writes sentiments for greeting cards. I think she’s been doing it for so many years that her brain is permanently geared that way.”

“Well, she should get it
un
geared because it’s
really
irritating.” She peeked back toward where we left them. “They’re kind of cute though, aren’t they? Are they really as identical as they look?”

“Yup.” I swung around and captured Jackie in the lens of my camera. “All except for one…elusive…characteristic.”