Maddy Hunter - Pasta Imperfect: A Passport to Peril Mystery

I was loitering in the hotel lounge a short time later, impatiently waiting for Jackie, when I saw a familiar face grab a map off the front desk and blow past me like a Ferrari. "I'm sorry about your roommate," I called toward Brandy Ann as she headed for the door.

She ground to a quick stop and turned around, her eyes locating me amid the dozen guests who were huddled in tight knots, examining their city maps. She hazarded a tense smile and retraced her steps back to me.

"You heard, huh?" She ranged a look around the room. "I guess everyone has heard by now."

"Duncan told the group at breakfast."

She nodded. "I don't do breakfast. Too many carbs and refined sugars in breakfast food. A person would be better off opening a vein and injecting cyanide." She doubled her fist and gave her arm a quick pump, inflating her biceps like a rubber tire. My eyes rounded. My stomach muscles twitched. A person of normal intelligence would not want to get on Brandy Ann Frounfelker's bad side.

"Really bad luck on Cassandra's part," Brandy Ann admitted. "But she brought it on herself. I don't want to be judgmental, but anyone who owns shoes like that has to have a death wish. They might have looked great with the dress she snitched from you, but look where they got her."

"You didn't seem too happy last night that she grabbed my dress away from you."

"I wasn't. I even made some inane remark, threatening her. Did you hear me? Heat of the moment. But I got over it."

Before or after Cassandra fell down the stairs? I wondered.

"The thing is, I can't let all these petty distractions grab my attention. I need to stay focused on my outline and pages and submit the best entry I can."

Personally, I considered death more than a petty distraction. "Duncan told me Cassandra had completed two novels and was beginning work on a third. Sounds as if she really knew how to stay focused."

Brandy Ann barked out a sour laugh. "She paid Keely a ton of money to coach her through those first two books."

"Cassandra subscribed to Keely's Internet service?"

"Until recently, when Keely raised her rates. Then Cassandra apparently decided to go it alone. I read some of her work last night. It wasn't half-bad. She had talent. It's a shame she's dead. Like they said in that old movie, 'she mighta been a contenda.' "

"Brandy Ann!" Amanda trotted up beside us, her inch-long hair devoid of spikes, but her nose still armed to open aluminum cans. "I'm ready to make the move. It's really easy when you don't have luggage."

My gaze drifted from one to the other. "What move?"

Amanda ruffled her hair into disarray and tossed her head back with attitude. I cocked my head to regard the result. Oh, yeah. Big improvement. "We're going to share a room while we're here," she said. "We're really on the same wavelength, and we need lots of time together to help each other with contest stuff. We could even tie for first place."

"I thought Keely was going to help you."

The women sidled meaningful looks at each other. "We've decided we don't need her help," Brandy Ann announced in a voice that dripped honey.

"Yeah," Amanda agreed. "Keely is obnoxious. She thinks she knows it all. I don't want her help, and I don't want to room with her anymore. So I'm moving in with Brandy Ann. I wanted to make the switch last night, but Keely wouldn't --"

"Look, we have to go," Brandy Ann interrupted, pulling Amanda away from me. "We have things to do."

"What were you going to say?" I called at Amanda's back.

Amanda threw me an off-balance wave as Brandy Ann dragged her out the door. Keely wouldn't what? I wondered. Agree to change roommates? Hmm. That hadn't stopped Amanda and Brandy Ann from getting their way though, had it? Was it the mother of all coincidences that Brandy Ann's room had suddenly "opened up," or what?

No mistaking it. I was getting a bad feeling about this.

"You can come along with George and me once he shows up," I heard Nana say close behind me. "Most days, he don't even need no map."

I turned around to find her standing with Marla Michaels and Gillian Jones, whose five-foot-by-five-foot Florence map was already resembling a wind - battered kite, and they hadn't even stepped outside yet.

"We need to get...here," Gillian said, poking the map with her forefinger. "Duncan says that's where the clothing stores are."

"Maybe we should be creative about our clothes situation," Marla suggested as she smoothed her muumuu over her hips. "We could try lashing some leaves together. Remember? You did that so cleverly in your book about the spoiled dyslexic supermodel heroine." She touched Nana's shoulder, making her a captive audience. "What a story, Marion. The heroine was marooned on a desert island with a playboy rodeo cowboy who was trying to fly to Fiji to see the son he didn't realize he'd fathered by her blind sister. Uh! A real tearjerker. And I did not agree with the Kirkus Reviews critic who said it should have been entitled, Dumb and Dumber. How unkind."

Hunh. I wondered if Jack had read that one.

Gillian refolded the map into an origami lump that resembled Texas...minus the panhandle. "It's so nice of you to say that, Marla. The critic certainly ended up eating her words, didn't she? Who would have guessed that A Cowboy in Paradise would go back to press twenty-six times and sell over two million copies?"

"Imagine." Marla clasped her hands to indicate amazement. "I bet you have a good chance of matching my Barbarian's Bride sales. You only have a meager -- what, two million to go? And I'm sure you'll succeed, especially when the New York Times Book Review describes your writing as 'vibrantly pitch-perfect.' "

"Don't forget 'deceptively accessible and luminous,' " Gillian added.

"Luminous. How could I have omitted luminous? Not to mention, 'a deft portrayal of the human condition.' " Marla placed her hand over her heart. "Well-deserved praise, which just goes to show that the Amazon.com reviewer who said your heroine was 'too stupid to live' was way off base."

Gillian's mouth lengthened into a stiff smile. "Do you suppose she was the same woman who gave your Barbarian's Bride that blistering one-star review?"

Marla stopped breathing for an instant. Her eyes lasered on Gillian. "That's the trouble with Amazon. Too many uninformed people handing out opinions. Take your one-star review, for instance. The reviewer blasted you for allowing your cowpoke to boink a woman six thousand times and not get her pregnant. I thought the criticism was completely unfounded, and very mean-spirited."

Gillian heaved a breathy sigh and wadded her map into a new shape that looked suspiciously like a headless crane. Obviously no subliminal implications there.

"If the reviewer had bothered to read to the end," Gillian sputtered, "she would have understood that Spur had contracted a mysterious disease years earlier that had left him with a low sperm count. He couldn't have children. That's why he was so hot to find the son he did father."

Spur? The hero's name was Spur? I cringed. Who'd name a baby Spur?

Nana tapped Gillian on the arm. "Might not a been the mysterious disease what caused Spur's condition. Mighta been his underwear. If it's too tight, it can cause a fella's privates to heat up somethin' fierce and to kill off all the little buggers. I seen it on the Discovery Channel. You recollect whether your cowboy wore boxers or briefs?"

"I can answer that," Marla piped up. "Gillian is so inventive. Spur wore a palm leaf the size of an elephant ear. It was the only thing on the island big enough to cover his 'ten inches of flaming virility.' I thought it was quite masterful how he avoided setting fire to the whole island. Every time he whipped off his palm leaf, I wasn't sure if the heroine was about to get ravished or incinerated!"