Basil Instinct Read Online Free PDF Page B

eyes. “You must never divulge what you—”
    I waved a hand at her. “Fine, fine, no problem, believe me.”
    Even though she was squirming in her chair, she gave me the eyelash flutter that always tells me she knows she’s either lying or about to tell me something she knows I’ll hate. “I am telling the staff”—here she laid the mitt against her chin and tried to look dignified—“that Friday evening we’re entertaining my”—flutter, flutter—“mah-jongg club.”
    I slapped my forehead. “Mah-jongg club? Nonna, you don’t even play mah-jongg.”
    She tried to fold her hands and gave up. “They don’t know that.” I was about to make a crackpot pitch for honesty, but then she added, “You read the invitation, shame on you. So you saw the line about omertà . I just don’t know how far it goes. So I’m not taking any chances.”
    She had a point. Mah-jongg club it is, then.“As for the owner of the house where you’re being initiated . . .” I had her complete attention. “The name is Fina Parisi.”
    With a sudden step backward, Nonna landed in the leather swivel chair. “Are you sure?”
    Something changed, but I couldn’t tell what, exactly. My eyes slid away from her, trying to understand what was different. “Yes. Fina Parisi,” I repeated. “That’s the name.”
    Maria Pia Angelotta gazed past me. “So,” she said finally, barely above a whisper, “Fina Parisi is La Maga of Belfiere.”
    “The what?”
    “La Maga. The chef of all chefs.” Her brown eyes closed softly. “The supreme conjuror of gustatory delights—”
    “Ah, of life and death.”
    She shot me a dark look. “La Maga is in charge for three years. And chosen”—here my nonna indicated something rather mysterious with her big mitt—“in a very complicated process.”
    “Let me guess. Is it secret?”
    She squared her shoulders. “You have no respect.”
    “I have respect, Nonna. When it’s something that lets me look at it. But not this. Not Belfiere. I’m sorry,” I temporized. “Not yet.”
    But my grandmother wasn’t listening to me. Instead, she had a faraway look in her eye. “FinaParisi,” she said slowly, her voice dripping in a thin stream like melted chocolate into Landon’s ricotta pudding.
    I lifted my chin. “Who is she?”
    “Fina Parisi,” said Maria Pia Angelotta, looking me with a strangely neutral expression, “is that strega Belladonna Russo’s daughter.”
    *   *   *
    Belladonna Russo, who owns a restaurant in New Brunswick, New Jersey, is Nonna’s culinary archenemy. Exactly how this came to be so, I’m not sure. All I know for a fact was that they trained together and the bad blood began in their Advanced Sauces class. There was an unfortunate hair-pulling incident followed by a takedown in a puddle of flung béchamel sauce.
    Now, the fact that the daughter of this archenemy happened to head up the Crazy Cooking Club at the precise time when Maria Pia Angelotta was invited to join was somewhat worrisome to me. Was Nonna being set up? And, if so, set up for what? I was baffled, all right, but fencing and dachshunds aside, Fina Parisi screamed for more digging. Why, after all, was this Fina person—a Top Chef finalist, after all—living kind of in our neighborhood? Bucks County, Pennsylvania, is a little far from where Fina Parisi has a part interestin an upscale place in Larchmont.
    Landon, who had disappeared for a while, came back a little later than he usually shows up for work, and he was toting his laptop. Since Maria Pia had gone home early to call vendors for the Friday-evening soirée—she insisted it had nothing to do with avoiding all the merriment of Grief Week here at Miracolo—the office was empty. Landon was looking freshly showered and shaved, but so quiet and distracted that even a megawatt smile from the delectable Jonathan got little more than a thin smile from my cousin. And when no Fosse steps find their way into whatever he’s doing with a