Pasta Imperfect - By Maddy Hunter Page 0,52

bottom. We both remembered seeing her on the gallery because she was with that snot, Keely, but neither one of us spoke to her. The police were insistent that we had to know more, though, so the questioning went on forever. I was afraid they were going to haul us to the police station for more interrogation, but they finally let us go."

"After taking our names, local address, and passport numbers," Brandy Ann added. "I mean, what was the point? We had to have been halfway down the stairs when she took her leap. How could we have affected anything? Telekinesis?"

"Hey!" Amanda snapped her fingers. "That might make a good story. The first parapsychological romance. Could be groundbreaking."

"Where was Fred?" I asked. "Didn't he climb to the top with you?"

"Fred is such a dweeb." Amanda gave her nose a dangerous rub. I held my breath, hoping she wouldn't need stitches afterward. "He has like...no self-esteem. We found him moping around the baptistry, so we asked him if he wanted to join us, and he thought that might be okay, but first, we had to apologize to him for taking off without him yesterday morning. The guy is such a loser. I can't believe he knows the first thing about writing a romance."

I shrugged. "I thought that's why he signed up for the trip. To learn from the experts."

"Well, he's not going to learn anything, is he?" said Brandy Ann. "Not with everyone's lecture notes going up in smoke. He was all over us for pointers yesterday, but it was way too hot on those stairs to talk shop."

"So where was he when Jeannette fell?" I asked.

Brandy Ann pumped her arm unconsciously, giving her biceps a practiced caress. "He wanted to stay a little longer up on the gallery, so Amanda and I headed down before him. Kind of surprised me that he wanted to stay longer. He has a thing about heights."

So Fred had stayed behind? Hmm.

Amanda stopped suddenly, looking me up and down. "There's something different about you today, but I can't figure out what."

Oh, boy. People were noticing! I primped my freshly shorn locks. "I got my hair cut."

She studied my shiny new coif. "Nah. That's not it."

"Have any of you seen restroom signs?" Jackie asked, pulling up behind us as we rounded a wing of the cathedral.

Up ahead, the umbrella stopped moving, and those of us at the rear of the pack slowed our pace, spreading out along the paved terrace at the front of the cathedral. Fifty feet in front of us stood the Leaning Tower, in all its crooked glory. "Duh tower took one hundreyd seventy-seven years to build," Giovanna shouted out to us. "In tirteen fifty, it leaned one-point-four meters off vertical. In nineteen ninety-tree, it was leaning five-point-four meters off vertical."

Wow. Five meters off vertical. I imagined the statistic would be even more impressive if I knew how long a meter was.

"If you need a restroom, I think it's over that way," Amanda whispered to Jackie, indicating a long butterscotch-colored building north of the cathedral. "Duncan pointed it out on our way in."

With a nod to me, Jackie pattered off, her latex-soled sandals barely making a sound on the stone terrace. Poor Jackie. Her feet must be really sore to be wearing flats today, especially since heels would have looked much better with her new trumpet-skirted sundress. Or maybe it was a question of balance. Considering her insomnia last night, she might have fallen off her stilettos.

"Duh tower was closed to duh public in January of nineteen ninety," Giovanna continued. "But duh engineers work hard to correct duh tilt, so it will reopen agayn next year, in Deceymber, a full tirty-eight centimeters straighter."

I wondered how much that was. A couple of inches or something? I angled my head to the pitch of the tower, then slowly returned to vertical. I appreciated the problem that the tower might be in imminent danger of collapsing, but I wondered if anyone had stopped to consider the economic disaster that would occur if the engineers got too successful. I mean, who was going to slap down money to see the Lineal Tower of Pisa?

Chirrup chirrup. Chirrup chirrup.

Hurrying away from the group, I snatched my phone from my shoulder bag. "Hello?"

"Buon giorno, mi amore," Etienne said in his beautiful French/German/Italian accent. Unh, I loved it when he whispered Italian to me. Made my toes curl like a fresh perm.

"A friend in the department owed me a favor, so