Out o' luck...
I didn't know what the castle had looked like before the renovation, but the end result was stunning. The room was the size of a basketball court. Four velvet boudoir chairs were arranged around the stone fireplace, and hanging over the mantel was a gilt-framed oil painting of some ancient lord astride a horse.
A light tap at my door.
"I'm sorry to bother you, dear," Nana apologized. "But do you suppose you could come downstairs?"
"Is there a problem with your room?"
"Just a small one. There's a dead body in it."
Acclaim for Maddy Hunter's first
Passport to Peril mystery,
ALPINE FOR YOU
"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."
--Black Bird Mysteries
"[A] debut with more than a few chuckles.... Alpine for You is one to cheer the gloomy winter days."
--Mystery Lovers Bookshop
"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
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.
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
POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Chapter 1
T he guidebook says the weather in Ireland is normally wet, except when it isn't, which can be often, or not often at all. The sun can shine, mostly when it's not raining, but it rains most of the time, except when it doesn't.
In other words, the weather in Ireland is a metaphor for my life.
I'm Emily Andrew, twenty-nine-year-old once-married working girl with a degree in theater arts, currently employed as escort for a bank-sponsored group of Iowa senior citizens on a ten-day tour of the Emerald Isle.
Going back to my weather metaphor, my life had been sunny when I'd moved to New York City after receiving my B.A., married fellow actor, Jack Potter, and landed a part in a Broadway play. The rain started when Jack began wearing my underwear. The deluge hit when he left me a note one night telling me he was running off with his leading man's understudy.
When the shock wore off, I did what any native Midwesterner with no money to pay Big Apple apartment rent would do. I moved back to my hometown of Windsor City, Iowa, had the marriage annulled, and found a job where I could use my acting skills. Phone solicitation.
For three years I was the premier fund-raiser for Playgrounds for Tots, until the president of the organization was arrested for fraud because there was no organization.
He went to jail. I went to Europe. Not as a fugitive from justice. I had a long-standing commitment to be my grandmother's companion on a seniors' tour of Switzerland, so off I went, hoping to ease my jobless woes by experiencing the vacation of a lifetime.
It turned out to be an experience, all right. We were promised temperatures in the seventies. Spectacular views of the Alps. Gourmet cuisine. What we got was bone-chilling cold. Dense fog. A steady diet of cornflakes. And three dead guests.
The one ray of sunshine on the trip was that I met the man of my dreams. Etienne Miceli, the police inspector who investigated the three deaths. He's everything my first husband wasn't. Forthright. Dependable. Heterosexual. We've been communicating by phone and e-mail for eight months now, and you might say our relationship is at a crossroads. It's too intense not to be together. But he lives in Switzerland. I live in Iowa. See what I mean about my life? Rain. Sun. Rain. Sun. Not unlike the weather in Ireland.
"Dublin's nothin' like I imagined," said my grandmother. Her voice vibrated as we jounced down one of Dublin's most traveled thoroughfares in the back of a horse-drawn carriage. Nana was known as "a sport" in her retirement village back in Iowa. She'd won millions in the Minnesota lottery the day my grampa passed away, so in her golden years, she had the means to go anywhere and do anything, and she was taking full advantage of the opportunity. "Is it like you imagined, Emily?"
"I imagined rain." I peered skyward in search of storm clouds, but found only a brilliant wash of blue. Windex blue. Like Etienne's eyes. I sighed with the thought. In Dublin for five hours and already I was suffering the first pangs of loneliness. I needed to snap out of it, else it would be a very long ten days.
Our hackney driver tipped his head to the right. "Shaint Shtephen's Green," he said in a lilting brogue. "Firsht enclosed in 1664. Twenty-two acres of manicured lawn, ponds, and quiet in the middle of Ireland's busiest shity."
Cute accent, but he could use some speech therapy for the lisp.
"Remember that statue a Molly Malone?" Nana whispered, referring to the shapely bronze sculpture we'd seen on an earlier walk down Grafton Street. "Why do you s'pose they made her so bosomy? Did you see the cleavage? I bet she was wearin' one of them push-up brassieres. Probably where she got that nickname,'Tart with a Cart.'"
"Wait a minute. I wear a push-up bra, and I'm not a tart."
Nana patted my knee. "Of course you're not, dear. You marry the men you sleep with. I think that's very commendable. Oh, look! A double-decker bus. I've always wanted to ride in one of those. Haven't you?"
I'd never given public transportation much thought. What I really wanted was to be one of the great stage actresses of the century. Windsor City boasted only a small community theater, so the odds were against me, but I remained optimistic. Entering a new century had given me an extra hundred years to make a success of myself.
"Easy, Nell." Our driver steadied his horse as she chafed against her traces. "She's frishky today. To your left is the Shelbourne Hotel." He guided us past the elegant redbrick building where our tour group was scheduled to spend its first night in Ireland. "Built in 1824. They sherve a brilliant afternoon tea in the Lord Mayor's Lounge at half-three."
The wrought-iron railings and flower-glutted window boxes reminded me of the quaint little hotel where Jack and I had honeymooned so many years ago, and, recalling our wedding night, I smiled. Poor Jack. He'd possessed the extraordinary good looks of a Greek god but the brain chemistry of a Greek goddess. And it had taken me only two years to figure it out. Am I a quick study or what? I hoped he'd found happiness with his partner, living in upstate New York, laying kitchen tile, but that didn't seem the kind of existence that would make him happy. Jack was happiest when he was onstage, sporting layers of pancake makeup and eyeliner. But he was probably happier now than when he'd been married to me. And so was I. Mostly because I didn't have to share my underwear anymore.
