Murphy's Law Read Online Free PDF Page B

Snail needed all the help fate could give it. The Snail was the nonna , the grandmother, of all the contrade, the contrada that had gone the longest without a victory. Seventeen long years in the desert…seventeen long years with the grandmother’s bonnet that was a mark of shame. Surely this year…
    Murder is so…so un-Sienese, he thought, as he walked along the cloister skirting the central courtyard of the Certosa. Why risk spending your life in prison where the food was bad and the company worse, just to kill someone?
    Particularly since God or biology—depending upon your personal philosophy—would eventually take care of that problem in time. You just had to wait, that was all.
    With a sigh, Dante walked toward Miss Murphy and his duty.
     
     
    Perfect Murphy luck. Cross the Atlantic to get rid of one Rossi only to find another one on the other side, Faith thought as she walked on the herringbone brick walkway.
    The cloister was spectacular, as if the careless gods who botched looking after the Murphys were trying to make up for years and years of things gone wrong. A large grassy swath with an enormous oak so old the first branch was a hundred feet from the earth, a wishing well with an ornate wrought-iron cupola, broad topiary evergreens, all ringed by the graceful arches of the arcade. And roses. Everywhere. In full, spectacular bloom.
    The intense smell of roses, ancient tightly-furled roses with bees hovering over them just waiting for the day to heat up enough to entice them to open, tickled her nose.
    Trust Kane to get offed in a gorgeous place.
    Faith was sure her own fate was to end up a week-old dead body in some musty motel in Bumfuck, Nowhere, with the wind whistling down from the North Pole. She’d be dead for days and days, and they’d find her body by the smell.
    Down the ramp. Through the archway.She entered the smaller courtyard—the one she’d seen from her window this morning, delicate and welcoming—and counted four doors. Sala San Francesco, a terracotta tablet informed her.
    Faith knocked briefly, and then walked in. It was high-ceilinged with cream-colored stucco walls and the vestiges of a fresco on one wall. Some anorexic saint calling down miracles from heaven. Or food.
    Chairs in rows in front of a steel desk. Classic classroom. Clearly, the room was used for lectures on some thorny topic, because the chairs looked lethally uncomfortable, with tiny hard seats and spindly legs. She thought of some of her obese students back home. They’d never get an education over here.
    Behind her, she heard the door open then close.
    The Commissario, whatever that was. Of the Siena police, he’d said. She didn’t know what rank Commissario was, but it sounded pretty high.
    Commissars in Soviet Russia had held the power of life and death over people , she remembered reading.
    It was an insane coincidence having a Rossi show up to investigate Kane’s murder. The same Rossi cousin Lou had urged her to call when she’d told Lou she was, improbably, going to Siena, Italy.
    It had been a welcome surprise when Kane had called at the last minute to say Tim Gresham was sick and she was taking his place at the Quantitative Methods Seminar in Siena. It beat sitting in her room, burning with humiliation.
    She had had two hours to pack and had met Lou as she was rushing out of the building they shared. Sort of shared. Faith low-rented a damp studio in the basement and Lou owned the spacious penthouse, but it was the same building.
    Lou’s father taught at Southbury and she’d met Lou at a university fundraiser. They’d discovered they lived in the same building and, improbably, she and Lou had become best friends.
    Lou had introduced her to her brother Nick, who in turn had introduced her to sex—good sex, at any rate—which had led her to Siena and murder and another Rossi.
    Nothing like circularity.
    Just before leaving, Lou had pressed a piece of paper in her hand. “Here’s my cousin’s