Here Comes the Body. Maria DiRico
Paluski nuptials when a young couple appeared in her doorway. The girl cast a wary glance around the office. “Are you our new event planner?”
“Yes, hi, I’m Mia Carina. I’ll be taking over for Cammie. I’m so happy to be working with you. Come on in.”
The couple introduced themselves, stepped into Mia’s office, and stood there. She realized there was no place for them to sit. “Be right back.” She raced into Cammie’s office, grabbed two metal chairs, and dragged them into her office. “Sorry about that.”
“No worries, happy to wait for you.” John, the groom-to-be, said this with a suggestive smirk. Alice, his bride-to-be, rolled her eyes. They were in their mid-twenties, if that. He had slicked-back brown hair and the build of a weightlifter. She wore the uniform of the animal technician she was, scrubs covered with cartoons of cheerful puppies and kittens. The animals’ happy expressions contrasted with the sour one on Alice’s face.
“Okay, so let’s start with the wedding,” Mia said, adopting a tone that she hoped combined a businesslike attitude with a touch of warmth and enthusiasm. She scanned the open file on her computer. “I see all the vendors are confirmed. All we need is the final decision on the size and flavors of your wedding cake.”
“Just make it bigger and better than my sister’s,” Alice said.
“Oh,” Mia said, thrown. “I’ll have to look that up. Did she get married here?”
“Yes.” Alice’s sour expression grew more sour, if such a thing was possible.
“Lemme bring you up to speed.” John leaned in toward Mia, who instinctively leaned back. “Alice and Annamaria are twins. And they hate each other.”
“She’s always holding it over my head that she’s younger than me but got married first,” Alice grumped.
“You’re twins,” Mia said. “How much younger can she be?”
“A whole friggin’ minute. Which she never lets me forget. She always does better than me. She even got the prettier name. Who’s named Alice anymore? All I want is for my wedding to be better than hers. A bigger cake, a bigger band, a bigger horse-drawn carriage. I want it bigger and better in every. Single. Way.”
Mia’s skin began to tingle. It was the tingle she got when a customer with a black platinum card walked into Korri Designs. The tingle of a potential up-sell. She made a show of scanning the couple’s file. “I’ll look up your sister’s wedding and confirm that every one of your choices is ‘bigger and better.’ But I can tell you right now that you won’t be able to get a bigger horse-drawn carriage than the one you ordered. What do you think about arriving by boat?”
“By boat?” A gleam appeared in Alice’s eyes.
“Think about it.” Mia gave her voice a hypnotic edge as she painted a picture for the future bride she had hooked on a line. “Roaring up to Belle View on a powerboat. One of those beautiful vintage wooden models. Your veil floating behind you in the breeze as every guest stares at you in wonder, awed and inspired by your majestic arrival.”
A sly smile replaced the sour look on Alice’s face. “I love that. Go for it.”
“Great.” Mia shelved the seduction and returned to business. “I’ll price out some options and get back to you with them. Now, John, do you want to talk about your bachelor party?” She framed the question in a way that gave Alice the option of leaving, which she didn’t take. Mia got the impression she kept her fiancé on a short leash—with a choke collar.
“I can’t believe it’s only two days away,” the groom-to-be enthused. “Did you get the oysters? I want all sexy food like oysters.”
“They’ve been ordered.” Mia checked the file. “We haven’t received your party favors yet.”
“Condoms with the party date on them,” John said with pride. “It was my idea.” This engendered another eye roll from Alice. His brow creased with worry. “They’re gonna get here on time, right?”
“They’ll be here. If worse comes to worst, I’ll make the company overnight them and pay for shipping.”
“That’s a girl. And the cake, that’s all set? The one the stripper jumps out of?”
Mia perused the computer screen. “All set. There’s a note here to confirm the . . . entertainment.”
“As long as someone hot jumps out. I don’t care who it is. Hey, if she can’t make it, feel free to jump out yourself.”
John laughed, then let out a yelp of pain as Alice elbowed him and said, “That’s sexual harassment, idiot.”
“No it ain’t. It’s flirting. What, is that against the law now? What kind of world do we live in where a guy can’t say something nice to a girl?”
It was John’s turn to look sour. Alice once again rolled her eyes. She was doing this so much Mia feared she’d detach her retina. “Everything is in great shape,” Mia said, trying to defuse the tension and bring the awkward appointment to an end. “If you have any questions or concerns, call me anytime day or night.” She extricated two of her new business cards, then stood up and handed the “happy” couple each a card. “Get ready for the most exciting night of your lives.”
John pumped a fist in the air. “Saturday night, baby.”
This earned him another elbow in the ribs from Alice. “She’s talking about the wedding, not your stupid bachelor party.”
“I’m sure both events will be unforgettable,” Mia said in as neutral a tone as she could muster up.
The betrothed couple departed, arguing their way out the door. Spent, Mia closed her eyes and fell into her office chair, which rolled backward a few feet. Jamie’s right, she thought. The biggest events in people’s lives can be the most stressful—on me. She opened her eyes and inhaled the rejuvenating scent of Ravello’s flowers. This led to an idea. Could her father have dipped a toe in the dating waters prior to falling for his floral arrangement teacher?
She left her office and went in search of Ravello’s, which she found at the end of the hallway. It was lunchtime, which could only mean one thing—Ravello was having the pasta of the day at Roberto’s Trattoria. It was the one aspect of the mobster’s life where he was obsessive-compulsive. As predicted, his office was empty. Mia stepped behind his desk and opened the Internet browser connection on his computer. Knowing her somewhat-Luddite of a father, she assumed he never cleared his search history, which proved to be true. She scrolled down until she finally saw it: a search for Meet Your Match, which Ravello’s poor typing skills had misspelled as Meeet Your Match. “Oh boy,” she muttered.
Mia closed the browser and returned to her office. She needed to talk to someone about the situation, and she knew exactly who: her older brother, Positano “Posi” Carina. Mia sat down at her desk and tapped out an address on her keyboard. A website for the Triborough Correctional Facility appeared on her monitor. She dialed the number on the screen from the landline on her desk, then pressed through a series of numbers until she finally reached a human being. “Yes, hi. I was wondering what your visiting hours are today. I need to talk to an inmate.”
Chapter Three
Mia sat across from her brother at a beat-up table in the correctional facility visiting room. A guard leaned against a wall, checking his cell phone. Triborough was a minimum-security facility whose mission was to transition offenders to life outside the big house. Mia had been greeted at the entry like a long-lost friend. It wasn’t her family’s first stint in the place.
Posi’s prison grays did nothing to detract from his model-handsome looks. But he was glum today. “You got nothing? Not one bite?”
“Sorry.” Mia had done her brother a favor and shared his mug shot on social media with the hashtag, #anotherhotconvict. Posi had hoped to become a viral sensation, like a