His wife, Jolene, used to claim that half of the secret to success was just showing up, which might be true if it weren’t for the fact that most things in life—in Bobby’s life, at least—were rigged.
Take this meeting, for instance. He’d been grinding the heels of his boots into the same creaky floorboard for three hours now, his eyes boring into the bony backside of some la-di-da left-wing publicist, all so he could be the third speaker at this farce of a community meeting. It had been organized by the so-called Concerned Moms of Fairview to “discuss” the gun store that was slated to open next to the yoga studio.
But Bobby was under no illusions that there would be any discussion—any rational discussion, anyway. The organizers had seen to it by selectively distributing their pink propaganda leaflets, which they euphemistically called “invitations to a community meeting.” They had plastered them all over the winding cul-de-sacs on the edge of town—the ones lined with homes that resembled antebellum hunting lodges surrounded by white horse-country fences. The ones that were owned by people who had never caught their own dinner. Ever.
Bobby lived behind the Waffle House, in a prefab home with a growling Doberman in the yard and a ten-year-old pickup truck in the driveway. No pink leaflet had been left in his box. He’d only heard about it through the cheer-squad grapevine, courtesy of his daughter.
The whack-job publicist, Alexandra something-or-other, was hectoring the beleaguered city council, making about as much sense, as his daddy would have said, as tits on a bull. She’d gone well over her allotted fifteen minutes, making wild accusations that the owner of the proposed gun store had supplied arms to Serbian war criminals, was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, and was mentally unstable.
“We must defend our children,” she shrieked, which made Bobby’s blood boil. That was exactly why people like Bobby needed a gun—to defend their children, their families. Their pretty, naïve daughters who seemed to think that all men were just as sweet and harmless as their daddies.
“We elected you,” Alexandra said, dropping down into that low, scary voice that Jolene had used with their daughter. “We pay high taxes, and we expect service. So don’t tell us there’s nothing you can do.”
The council members, normally so smug, shifted uncomfortably in their folding chairs on the platform at the front of the room.
“Deny their occupancy permit,” she said. “Seize the site for eminent domain and put a park on it. Re-zone the land as agricultural. Find someone who will pay the strip mall a higher rent.” She stabbed her finger in the air for emphasis. “Do your job.”
There was a moment of silence. Then, as Alexandra spun on her heels and strode back to the front row, her pink-shirted acolytes burst into rapturous applause. Bobby turned around to search the crowd for allies. But the only person not applauding was a flinty-eyed man in a dark suit, wearing an NRA button on his lapel, probably the local chapter representative who Bobby had talked to that afternoon. The gun store owner hadn’t even bothered to show up. Bobby couldn’t decide if that was smart or cowardly.
Alexandra was now squeezing the hands of her numerous well-wishers as if she were the queen. Which she probably was, in a way. Bobby got the feeling that she’d been homecoming queen, prom queen, queen of the Peach Blossom Festival. She was regal in that annoying, smarmy kind of way—completely unlike the second speaker of the night, her plump, mousy friend, who was staring at the microphone as if expecting it to attack.
Bobby held his breath. If fifty-one years of hard living had taught him anything, it was to never underestimate the power of an angry woman. And this woman, he could tell, was a volcano about to erupt.
* * * *
As Tiffany edged up to the microphone, the thunderous applause from Alexandra’s speech echoing in her ears, her mouth went dry.
“Name?” The chairman’s pen hovered over his legal pad.
“Tiffany,” she whispered into the mic. “Tiffany Schlimowitz. Concerned parent and—and—”
She could barely breathe, much less talk. She felt as if the council members were glaring down at her, and as if every other eyeball in the room were boring into the back of her skull. Tiffany desperately tried to remember the pointers Alexandra had given her. To be herself, to be authentic. Which was hard to do since Tiffany was pretty much never authentic. Oh, how she envied Alexandra. She was always effortlessly at ease in that understated old-southern-money sort of way. And she was a master wordsmith. Alexandra always spoke in full, complete sentences, no “ums” or “ahs,” as if she were reading from a teleprompter. Alexandra was clever like that—that’s why she was a publicist. Tiffany was not; that’s why she was an unemployed dental hygienist who pretended to have found fulfillment as a stay-at-home mom.
“Homeowner,” Tiffany finally blurted out. “I live at fifty-two Elm Street, right behind the gun store site. It’s going to ruin our property value. No one’s going to want to live there after the gun store opens. Well, unless they’re a gun nut, anyway.”
Her attempt at a joke fell flat. No one else joined her peal of nervous laughter.
“My husband makes a good salary,” she babbled on. After all, she didn’t want anyone to think Marv wasn’t a good provider. “But we’ve been helping out family with their medical bills, so money’s tight. Our house is our main asset.”
There were sympathetic murmurs behind her, but she wondered how sympathetic they’d be if they knew that Marv’s largesse mostly went to help her strung-out younger sister, who’d been in and out of rehab more times than she could count.
“And my daughter goes to the preschool across the street. We’d have to walk past the gun store every day.”
There was a groan from the other side of the room, the deep rumble of a man who’d smoked too many Marlboros and clearly thought she hadn’t the sense God gave a goose. Tiffany snapped her head around. It was just as she had thought—the sound was coming from that big oaf in the cowboy boots, the pervert who’d been ogling Alexandra’s shapely rear end while waiting for his turn at the other mic.
“Excuse me?” Her voice, which had been soft and quavering, suddenly boomed into the microphone.
He ground his heel into the floor and hitched up his enormous silver belt buckle, which made her hate him even more. Her stepdad had owned a belt like that. She had never forgotten how it glinted in the light right before she felt the snap of leather on her skin.
His silence grated on her. Her stepdad had been silent like that too.
“Well, out with it,” she snapped. “If you have something to say, then say it.”
He shrugged. “I have to walk past the yoga studio every day, whether I want to see you ladies in your yoga pants or not. You don’t see me complaining about that.”
“Course not. I’m quite sure you enjoy it.”
This time, the crowd laughed.
“But what if I didn’t?” the oaf asked. “What if I decided I didn’t like the looks of your house? Should I be able to ask the city to tear it down?”
“I’m not against the gun store because it’s ugly as sin. I’m against it because it’s dangerous.”
From there, things devolved into a shouting match. The oaf told some long-winded, cockamamie story about a woman who shot a coked-up intruder with one arm while cradling her breastfeeding infant in the other. Tiffany dutifully recited the alarming statistics on gun violence, which she had cribbed from Alexandra’s pink fact sheet. She noted that the Second Amendment might allow him to own a gun, but it didn’t say anything about buying it around the corner from her house. “You could buy it in Nashville,” she said. “Or Montana, for that matter.”
“I could say the same about your arugula,” he countered, “or your kale chips or your quinoa. Should I move to have the city council ban the sale of arugula within city limits?”
“Arugula doesn’t kill people.”
“Well, guns don’t kill people either. People kill people.”
“People with guns,” Tiffany said, “kill people.”
The big oaf was just opening his mouth—probably winding up for another ridiculous story—when the chairman suddenly shouted, “Meeting adjourned!”
Tiffany was elated. For once in her life, she’d had the last word.
* * * *
If Tiffany were the dutiful wife and mother that she sometimes wanted to be and sometimes just pretended to be, she would have gone straight home. But instead she decided to go out for a celebratory drink with Alexandra.
One drink turned into two, and two soon turned into three—well, for Tiffany, at least. Alexandra just kept sipping her lone glass of red wine, probably because she was worried about maintaining her perfect figure. By Tiffany’s fourth shot of bourbon, Tiffany was feeling quite proud of her performance—and even more outraged at that oaf who’d had the audacity to interrupt her.
“What chutzpah,” she shouted, using one of Marv’s favorite words. It sounded ever so more sophisticated than the word she would have used before she met Marv, when she was plain old Tiffany Jenkins from a no-name backwoods hollow.
“I’ll say,” Alexandra tut-tutted, taking a sip of wine. “Mansplaining like that.”
“Mmmm.” Tiffany had no idea what that meant, but the “man” prefix told her it must be some kind of feminist bugaboo.
“Interrupting you like that. This man is the rudest piece of trailer trash that ever lived. And the most ignorant.”
Tiffany squirmed in her seat, the way she always did when someone casually tossed out the phrase “trailer trash.”
“Who does he think he is?” Alexandra went on. “Some action hero? It’s pathetic, that what it is. He’s probably some unemployed bubba who sponges off his mom and compensates for his sense of emasculation by shooting tin cans in the woods. Like I said, pathetic.”
Tiffany bit her lip. “I know it’s not very charitable of me to say, but there’s a part of me that wishes he would shoot himself or a family member and then, just as they lay dying, he’d think—”
“‘Those women really were right. I really was seven times more likely to shoot myself or a loved one than to kill an intruder.’”
When Alexandra said it like that, it sounded kind of silly. But it wasn’t silly, not really. “Sort of. I mean, I didn’t think he’d actually remember the statistic, but I was so mad at one point that I was just picturing him bleeding out all over the floor, thinking, ‘yeah, that chubby lady that I kept interrupting was right after all.’”
“I wish.” Alexandra scrunched up her perfectly tweezed eyebrows and grimaced. “But I doubt it. I don’t think there was much going on up there.”
“Well, dumb or not, he gave me the creeps,” Tiffany said. “I hope he’s an out-of-towner because I don’t want to run into him ever again.”
“What was his name? Cooper?”
“Carter,” Tiffany said with a shiver. She’d peeked at the list of speakers, and the name was now emblazoned in her memory. “Bobby Carter.”
Alexandra had raised her glass to take a sip, but now abruptly placed her wineglass back on the table. “Carter, you said? Bobby?”
“Yeah, why? You know him?”
“I think,” Alexandra said slowly, “his daughter’s in my basement right now.”
Tiffany looked at her blankly. She tried to imagine what Bobby’s daughter would be like—probably a foul-mouthed, frizzy-haired girl who wore too much eye makeup, had a roll of fat oozing out of the top of her waistband, and was playing it fast and loose with the boys. She couldn’t imagine how such a girl would end up in Alexandra’s palatial basement—the one with the movie theater, billiard table, and gleaming polished wood bar. Unless, she supposed, she was there to rob it.
“Madison’s having a few of the girls from the cheerleading squad over for a sleepover tonight, and I think one of them is Emily Ann. She’s a blond, leggy thing. She seems smart, too.”
“Must get her brains from her mother.”
“Most kids do, don’t they?”
Tiffany tried to return Alexandra’s knowing, smug little smile, but her sinking heart seemed to drag the corners of her mouth down with it. She wondered if that’s what people thought when they saw her with Micah. Ah, they probably thought, that explains it. Rebecca—age four-going-on-fourteen and already able to read—got her brains from Marv; Micah—six years old, not quite potty-trained, and the bane of his special ed teacher’s classroom—got his brains from Tiffany.
“She must have gotten her last name from her mother, too,” Alexandra mused, swilling the wine in her glass. “I guess he’s her stepfather, technically, because she goes by Wilkins. Emily Ann Wilkins.”
The hairs stood straight up on the back of Tiffany’s neck. “That’s the name of the girl who volunteers in Micah’s classroom once a week.”
Silently, she prayed for Alexandra to be wrong—even though she knew that perfect, brilliant Alexandra never was. Emily Ann was this beautiful, benevolent blond goddess. Micah and everyone else adored her. She was exactly the kind of girl who should never be alone with the likes of Bobby. And to have him as a stepfather—well, Tiffany knew a thing or two about stepfathers. None of them good.
“Does she?” Alexandra clipped a stray platinum-blond tendril back in place. “That sounds like something she would do.”
Tiffany may have been imagining it, but she caught a faint whiff of disapproval in Alexandra’s voice.
“The kids adore her.”
“Oh, I’m sure they do. As do the older kids, especially the boys.”
There was a gleam in Alexandra’s hazel eyes. Maybe it was just the flickering candlelight, but it seemed like something more to Tiffany. Malice, perhaps, or envy, or just sheer admiration. Or perhaps Emily Ann had attracted the attention of some boy Madison had her eye on. Alexandra certainly wouldn’t cotton to that.
Tiffany decided to play along by naming an admirer that Madison couldn’t possibly be pining after. “Bradford Jennings is always hanging around when Micah’s class gets out. He’s always trying to impress Emily Ann with his Eagle Scout project or science fair project or something.”
“Bradford Jennings! Bradford—oh, but that’s ridiculous!”
Alexandra was right, of course. It was ridiculous. Bradford was a scrawny, socially awkward, pockmarked little gnome of a boy who was always squinting into the light as if he’d just emerged from some cave.
But if Emily Ann herself ever thought this, she kept it entirely to herself. She was all sweetness and light whenever he accosted her, thrusting his science fair trophy or prize-winning guinea pig into her hand like a victorious knight returning to his fair maiden.
“Bradford Jennings,” Alexandra repeated, shaking her head in amazement. “Bradford Jennings!”
Tiffany frowned. Marv didn’t approve of her friendship with Alexandra. Alexandra, he was fond of saying, always got her way, and the lawyer in him found that infuriating. But Tiffany always defended Alexandra, grateful for—if a little mystified by—their friendship. But in spite of what her husband thought, she wasn’t totally blind to her friend’s faults. Alexandra had a petty side—and when it was unleashed, it could be ugly.
“Enough about Bradford,” Tiffany said quickly, eager to change the subject. “Tell me how your business is going.”
“Oh, it’s humming along nicely,” Alexandra assured her, “but I think my speech tonight is really going to kick it into high gear.”
The waitress sidled up to their table to ask if they’d like another drink.
“Sure.” Tiffany was a little buzzed, no doubt about it. She was content to sit here with Alexandra all night, basking in the reflected glow of her brilliant, beautiful friend. By the time she got home, the house would be blissfully quiet, Micah finally vanquished in the nightly battle over bedtime.
The waitress turned to Alexandra. “How ’bout you?”
Alexandra started to nod, but then she suddenly stiffened and shook her head slowly. “I should go home,” she said, “and check on the girls. You know the trouble teenagers can get in when unsupervised, and James—well, you know how clueless fathers are.”
Tiffany nodded because that’s what Alexandra expected of her. But she didn’t actually agree—Marv was a far more attentive parent than Tiffany, even on her best days—nor did she believe Alexandra. James was more than capable of handling a few teenaged girls.
The gleam in her friend’s eye suggested something else entirely—perhaps that she’d had a sudden inspiration.
About what, though, Tiffany couldn’t really guess. A letter to the editor? A protest? A boycott?
Probably something much bigger and better than that, far beyond the limits of Tiffany’s narrow imagination. Because that was one thing upon which Tiffany and Marv actually agreed: Alexandra thought big.
* * * *
By the time the so-called meeting broke up, Bobby was hungry enough to eat the north end of a south-bound polecat. He stopped at the Waffle House for a dinner of chicken-fried steak and hash browns and pulled into his driveway just after ten.
The house was dark and lifeless, except for his Doberman in the yard. Stonewall Jackson bounded over to him the moment Bobby flung his car door open, tail wagging furiously, salivating over the proffered leftovers. Bobby scratched him behind the ears while Stonewall Jackson scarfed down his dinner. At least there was still some love, some loyalty, left in the world—mingled, of course, with self-interest.
Bobby trudged up the steps, Stonewall Jackson at his heels, and slid the key into the lock. “Emily Ann?” he called out as the door swung open. “Are you home, hon?”
There was no answer; the house was silent as a tomb. Was she already asleep? Or out with a friend? He fought the urge to tiptoe into her room and check, the way he had when she was a little girl. He remembered how he used to watch her tiny chest rise and fall, the angelic smile on her face.
Bobby flipped on the light, lumbered over to the mantle, and tapped the little ceramic piano that held his wife’s ashes. It wasn’t the classiest urn, but Jolene had been a piano teacher and the accompanist at their church, so it had only seemed fitting.
“It was awful, hon,” he grumbled in that gruff, affectionate way he used to.
Tell me, Jolene used to say, her bubblegum-pink lips curling into a sympathetic little smile. Then she’d lay her head in his lap and he’d grumble away and she’d soothe him until he could hardly remember why he was upset.
The urn didn’t answer, but he decided to pretend that it had. Caressing it gently, he told Jolene all about Alexandra, that shrieking hellcat, and Tiffany, her mousy and woefully naïve minion, and all the ridiculous arguments they had spewed. “I’d like to be a fly on the wall,” he growled, “when some punk bursts into her bedroom, packing heat. You can bet her last thought won’t be ‘Wow, I’m glad I have no way to defend myself.’”
He had heard Jolene’s gentle rebuke so many times (“Now, dear, I know you’re upset, but that’s not very charitable of you”) that he could almost swear he heard it now.
“You’re right,” he said, frowning. “It’s not very charitable. But it would serve her right.”
Stung by the rebuke from beyond the grave, he moved away from the urn. How ridiculous, he thought, hearing voices, worrying about what my dead wife thinks.
After all, as far as he could tell, that was the one and only benefit of being widowed. Being able to do what we wanted, when he wanted, how he wanted, without the old ball and chain telling him otherwise.
It was a benefit that he took advantage of far too infrequently.
Besides, he thought as he crept down the hall and into his bedroom, Jolene’s judgment wasn’t always so hot. She had been as soft-hearted as a six-year-old girl, so naïve, so trusting. That’s how she’d ended up with a deadbeat ex, a baby, and no means of support when he’d met her. But, then again, that had worked out in his favor. He’d ended up with a plump, sweet wife and a beautiful baby daughter. An instant family, as his mother liked to call it.
The wooden floor creaked beneath him. He knelt down and rummaged around in the back of the closet until his fingers brushed against a long rectangular case. He pulled it out and then gently pried open the latches. As a shaft of moonlight fell on the steel-gray barrel, he caught his breath. Now that was his idea of beauty—and power.
For half an hour or more, he sat on the cool, scratched pine floor, in the dark, cradling his gun like a baby. This is what those shrieking harpies wanted to take away from him. This peace, this power, the serenity that came from knowing he could protect his family. What was left of it, anyway.
He hadn’t touched his weapon since Jolene’s death. Heck, he hadn’t had the guts to go into the closet, really, other than to retrieve a few shirts. Her things were still in there; her scent still faintly permeated the hot, airless space. He wanted to leave everything just so, as if she had gone away for a quick girls’ trip and would be back any day.
But tonight it felt right. Who knew? Maybe tonight there would be an intruder, some druggie who’d heard that a woman had died of cancer and left behind a whole medicine cabinet of pain pills—or some rapist who’d heard about Emily Ann.
Humming to block out the voice in his head—her voice—that told him he was being paranoid and impetuous, he dove into the closet with a sudden decisive lunge. He grabbed the ammo, loaded the gun, and shoved both cases back into the closet.
With his pistol loaded, he padded off back down the hall. He sat on one end of the couch, next to a dozing Stonewall Jackson, cradled the gun in his lap, and shut his eyes to block out the glare from the streetlight.
Bobby was just dozing off when he was suddenly jolted awake by a squeak. It sounded like a wet sneaker catching on a rough patch of floor. Bobby could hear the gentle pitter-patter of raindrops on his front porch, then the faint sound of footsteps receding down the hallway.
Rubbing his eyes, he clutched his gun and stood up. “Emily Ann? Is that you, honey?”
There was no response.
Bobby took off running, a dark shape flitting in front of him. As the figure passed the open doorway to Bobby’s room, a moonbeam fell on the nape of the intruder’s neck. A neat brown crew cut met a slender, pasty neck.
In a moment, this punk would close the gap to Emily Ann’s door. Bobby’s nostrils flared. His heart beat like a hummingbird’s; bile rose in his throat. He would kill this SOB if it was the last thing he did on this earth. There was nothing more he could do for Jolene, except save her daughter from a fate worse than death.
The gun was cold in his grip. He raised it, then heard a loud crack as the bullet rent the air. Just as the intruder’s hand turned the doorknob to Emily Ann’s room, the man slumped forward, forcing the door open.
“Emily Ann?” Bobby’s voice was hoarse, and his heart was racing. “Don’t be scared, honey. I got him.”
There was no response. Bobby flicked on the light, stepped gingerly over the body, and craned his neck over the threshold.
The bed was neatly made, and there was no sign of Emily Ann. She must have gone out, after all.
Thank goodness, he thought. She was somewhere safe, away from this monster.
With trembling hands, his kissed the warm barrel, laid the pistol gently on the floor, and collapsed onto Emily Ann’s bed. What a night. “Good thing Alexandra hasn’t gotten her way.” He sighed, watching the blood seep across the floor. “Yet.”
Then he reached for the glittery pink landline phone next to Emily Ann’s bed and called nine-one-one.
* * * *
Pleasantly buzzed and clutching a mug of hot chamomile tea, Tiffany curled up next to Marv on the couch. Muting the late-night local news, he planted a kiss on her forehead.
“How was the meeting?”
Tiffany snuggled closer to him and gave him an almost word-for-word account, especially of her row with that blowhard Bobby.
Marv chuckled. “It sounds like you sure gave him hell.”
“Oh, I did. For once in my life, I had the last word. Of course, my speech wasn’t as good as Alexandra’s, but—”
The words died on her lips as Alexandra’s face flashed across the screen. Wearing that same pink power suit that Tiffany had last seen her in, but with her makeup retouched and her hair fluffed up, Alexandra was standing by a chain-link fence in front of a modest prefab home, surrounded by flashing red lights. At the bottom of the screen was a banner that read, “Live: Shooting on Third Street.”
Tiffany let out a strangled cry and dropped her mug. Hot liquid splatted across her flannel pajamas, scalding her thighs and causing her to yelp.
Marv turned and stared at her. “What?”
“Turn it up,” she said in a hoarse whisper, her eyes glued upon the screen.
Was this what Alexandra had raced off to do? Had she been tipped off by a friend at the TV station that there had been a murder, presenting the perfect opportunity to drive home her anti-gun message?
Tiffany didn’t remember Alexandra checking her phone, but maybe she had been too buzzed to notice. She couldn’t recall Alexandra mentioning any friends who worked at the TV station either, but that didn’t mean anything. Alexandra seemed to have friends—or contacts, at least—everywhere.
The cameraman cut away from the reporter to zoom in on Alexandra, who wore a pinched expression. The words “Alexandra Charpentier, publicist and president of the Concerned Moms of Fairview” flashed across the screen.
“I warned about this very thing,” Alexandra was saying right into the camera, “at the community meeting about the gun store this evening. Guns make us less safe and result in tragic accidents like this one.”
Tiffany snatched the remote out of her bewildered husband’s hands, impatiently flicking through the channels. She didn’t need to hear Alexandra’s speech yet again. But for some reason she wanted—needed—to know who had been killed.
On channel seven, a petite brunette in a blue slicker stood in front of the same prefab house, illuminated by the flashing lights of a squad car. “We’re standing,” she intoned solemnly into a microphone, “outside the home of Bobby Carter. Sources tell us that Mr. Carter shot and killed seventeen-year-old Bradford Jennings, who is mildly autistic and a classmate of Mr. Carter’s stepdaughter—”
Tiffany let out a wail—a keening, really, the way her people did when a loved one died down in their backwoods hollow—and curled up into a fetal position.
Marv rubbed her back soothingly. “It’s always sad when a loved one dies, hon, but I don’t quite understand why you’re so upset. I mean you didn’t know him, did you?”
“No—not really,” she blubbered.
“Okay.” Marv used that faux-patient voice, the one he used when Micah threw a tantrum when they wouldn’t let him watch those annoying Kinder Egg videos for the hundredth time in a row. “Well, it’s sad, of course. But it was a home invasion, hon, and I’m sure Mr. Carter thought—”
Springing up from her fetal position, Tiffany sat bolt upright and regarded her husband with red-rimmed eyes. “Marv,” she said with sudden ferocity, “he didn’t invade the home. He was lured there.”
“Who lured him there?”
“Alexandra, of course.”
Alexandra, Tiffany thought, would do anything to prove she was right about guns being dangerous. She’d do anything to prove she was right about everything—and be the center of attention.
And, Tiffany realized with dismay, she had been Alexandra’s unwitting accomplice. Tiffany had told her that Bradford Jennings was besotted with Emily Ann. All it would have taken was for Alexandra to snatch Emily Ann’s cell phone, send a text to the poor gullible boy, and wait for everyone to play the part they were destined to play.
It was the perfect crime—and the most horrible one Tiffany could imagine.
Marv stared at her, uncomprehending. “Your friend, Alexandra Charpentier?”
Not my friend, Tiffany felt like saying. Not anymore, anyway.
“It’s like you always say,” she said hollowly. “Alexandra always gets her way.”
Even if that meant ending Bradford Jennings’s short and pathetic life and ruining Bobby’s and Emily Ann’s.
Tiffany shuddered. “Always.”
Maureen Klovers is the creator of the Rita Calabrese Italian-American culinary cozy series set in New York’s Hudson Valley, as well as a mystery series set in Washington, DC, starring belly dancer-turned-sleuth Jeanne Pelletier. A former spy and middle-school teacher, she has a keen sense of adventure: she’s hiked through the jungle to Machu Picchu, toured a notorious Bolivian prison with a German narco-trafficker, and fished for piranhas in Venezuela. She’s the mother of a toddler and a black Lab and enjoys testing recipes and speaking Italian.