by Maddy Hunter
I practically had a head-on collision with Nana when I walked out the door of the boutique. I grabbed hold of her so as not to knock her down. “You’re going someplace in a hurry,” I laughed.
“I’m headin’ back to the bus for a nap. I’m all used up. But I can’t figure what did me in—sittin’ in the hospital waiting room ’til the wee hours a the mornin’, or those three Shirley Temples I knocked back at the chateau last night. Don’t tell your mother about the cocktails. She don’t think a woman a my advanced years should be drinkin’ ardent spirits.”
I made a gesture of buttoning my lip. “It’ll be our secret. But, Nana, a Shirley Temple is nonalcoholic. It’s not that potent.”
“At seventy-eight, strawberry Ovaltine can be potent.”
“I’m not sure the bus will be open if you head back to the parking lot.” I yanked my Swiss Army knife out of my coat pocket to check the time. “We still have another hour before we leave. I’m going to head over to the spa grounds, sit on a bench, and write out a few postcards. You’re welcome to come with me and take a nap on the bench.”
“Lead the way.”
“Where’s Bernice?”
“She’s staked a claim on a table at a little outdoor café where she says she’s gonna stay ’til just before the bus leaves. She’s been doin’ too much walkin’. Her bunions are killin’ her.”
We dodged tourists and scurried out of the path of strollers as we headed toward the lake. When the spa came into view, I noticed a man on the bench where Dick Rassmuson had been sitting when I left. As we drew closer, I realized my lecture had fallen on deaf ears because the man sitting on the bench was Dick Rassmuson. He’d probably been getting an eyeful for the last forty-five minutes and acting like a real jerk.
I stomped in front of him. “Okay, Dick. Hand over your film.” I was probably overstepping my bounds as an escort, but it was worth a try. Maybe I’d catch him in a weak moment.
Dick didn’t respond. His head was hanging forward on his chest, like he was taking a nap, but his eyes were wide-open. Unh-oh.
Nana bent down to look at him. “You s’pose he knocked back one too many Shirley Temples last night, too?”
His skin looked kind of purple and waxy, his lips were really pale, and his hands were tinged blue. I tapped him on the shoulder. “Dick?”
No response. I was getting a very bad feeling about this. I pressed my fingers to his neck. His skin was still warm, but he had no pulse. I stepped back from the body and grabbed Nana’s hand. “I don’t want to jump to any conclusions, but what does this look like to you?”
“Looks like a dead Dick.”
Chapter 12
“That’s what it looks like to me, too.” I sucked in a resigned breath and struggled to remain calm. “He’s dead.” When I said the words aloud, the full impact of the situation hit me. “OH MY GOD! HE’S DEAD! This is all my fault! He said he didn’t feel well. He said his chest was pounding. He said he needed mouth-to-mouth. I didn’t believe him! I could have saved him! Oh my God. I killed him!”
“The man dropped dead, Emily. We’re old. It happens.”
She had a point. But still, “You don’t think I’m to blame?”
“I think all those cigars he smoked was to blame.”
That made me feel a little better. I cocked my head to look at him from another angle. “What do you suppose killed him?”
“Looks like he had the big one.”
Nana was probably right. There was no blood. No visible bruising. No obvious gunshot wounds. He had a heart condition. He’d probably suffered a heart attack. I mean, according to Shirley Angowski, he’d already been playing with fire by taking pills for impotence with his heart medication. That made him a prime candidate for a heart attack. Unless…
I sucked in my breath again. Unless someone had poisoned him with the same dimethyl sulfate that had killed Andy and made his death look like a heart attack. Oh my God! Was Dick Rassmuson the killer’s third victim?
Okay. I was really creeped out now. “I need to find Wally,” I said in a rush of breath.
“He had lunch at the same outdoor café that Bernice and me ate at. Maybe he’s still there.”
“You want to come with me?”
“I better stay here with the body.”
“Are you sure you want to do that?” It wasn’t like Dick was going anywhere, and guarding a corpse wasn’t one of the highlighted activities on Nana’s holiday itinerary.
“I’m the Legion a Mary’s official representative for visitations at Heavenly Host Funeral Home, so I’m pretty used to hangin’ around dead people these days.”
I dumped my purchases onto the other end of Dick’s bench. After getting directions from Nana, I sprinted down the street toward the café. Wally was seated at a table drinking café latte. He was sporting what looked like a new green alpine hat to keep the sun out of his eyes. I grabbed him by the arm and urged him to his feet. “Nice hat. You need to come with me. We have a crisis.”
“What kind of crisis?”
“You need to come now. Leave some money for the bill.”
He slapped some coins onto the table and stumbled behind me as I dragged him into the street. “This had better be good,” he complained. “I was only halfway through that café latte.”
“Dick Rassmuson is dead.”
“WHAT?”
“Can you walk a little faster?”
“How do you know he’s dead?”
“Because he’s not breathing!”
“Shit,” he said, doubling his pace. “SHIT!”
“It looks like a heart attack.”
“Great. This is just great. We’ll never get him out of Germany if he’s dead.”
“Why not?” I hurried him toward the spa grounds.
“Because it’s Germany! They don’t like foreigners dying in their country. You wouldn’t believe the paperwork. This happened to one of my colleagues a few years ago. An elderly man died, and the authorities kept the whole tour group confined for over a week asking questions, administering polygraph tests. It was a disaster. Triangle Tours lost a lot of money on that one because they had to reimburse everyone for the inconvenience plus pay for their lodging in Germany. If the same thing happens to us, Triangle is out a lot of money again, and I’m probably out a job. Shit.”
It seemed this information might have warranted a footnote in the brochure. Triangle Tours strongly suggests you not die while visiting a foreign country, Germany in particular. Of course, there was no guarantee Dick Rassmuson would have heeded the warning, especially if it had been written in fine print.
Nana was sitting on the bench beside Dick when we arrived, shooing away flies with her handbag. I admired her courage for daring to sit that close to him. “I thought if we both sat here sayin’ nothin’ to each other, people would think we were married and wouldn’t pay us no never-mind.”
Wally felt for a pulse.
“Well?” I asked.
“Shit. He’s dead.”
“So now what do we do? Call the police?”
“NO! No police. We gotta get him out of here. We gotta get him back on the bus.”
I thought about that for a full millisecond. “ARE YOU CRAZY?”
“Look, Emily. He can’t stay here. We have to get him back to Switzerland and then we can call the Swiss police. The Swiss are much more understanding about people dying on them than the Germans. We’ll tell them he died in his sleep on the bus.”
“But that’s a lie! We could end up in jail for obstructing justice, for perjury, for—”
“You better decide what you’re gonna do fast,” said Nana. “These flies are gettin’ thick.” She swatted Dick’s arm with her handbag. He fell sideways and toppled off the bench.
“Oh geez,” hollered Wally. We both seized an arm, hiked him up, and heaved him back onto the bench.
“You’re lucky rigor mortis hasn’t set in yet,” said Nana.
Wally looked apoplectic. “Okay, Emily, here’
s the deal. You help me get him back on the bus, and I’ll take full responsibility for the consequences. I won’t mention your name. You won’t even have to talk to the Swiss police when we get back. But we have to get him out of here before anyone else notices he’s dead.”
I didn’t feel real comfortable about this, but I supposed the bottom line was, Dick was dead, and there was nothing we could do to bring him back. We wouldn’t know how he died until an autopsy was performed, and since all the other autopsies had been performed in Lucerne, this one might as well be too. I just hoped we wouldn’t be leaving vital evidence behind when we moved him. “All right,” I conceded. “I’ll help you.”
“When are you gonna tell Lucille?” asked Nana. “She’s bound to notice he’s not breathin’ at some point on the bus ride home.”
Wally’s eyes glazed over. “Shit. I forgot about his wife.”
“Lucille won’t be a problem,” I assured him. “They had a big fight in the cafeteria. They’re not speaking. They had no intention of sitting with each other on the way back to Lucerne anyway.”
“Good. That’ll buy us some time.”
But it did nothing to solve our immediate problem. “Okay, how do we get him back to the bus without attracting attention?”
Wally executed a 360-degree turn, looking, assessing. He snapped his fingers. “The spa. You two sit tight. I’ll be right back.”
Fifteen minutes later he reappeared in a four-passenger motorized golf cart with a canopy. “I told the spa manager who I was and explained that one of my tour members was ill and needed to be transported back to the bus. They’re keeping my passport as collateral until I bring it back. Okay, ladies, let’s load our passenger into the backseat.”
I grabbed an arm. Wally grabbed an arm. “On the count of three,” said Wally. “One. Two. Three!” I yanked. Wally yanked. We clean-and-jerked him off the bench. Momentum sent him flying forward. SMACK! Face first into the canopy of the golf cart. BOOM! Flat on his back onto the ground.
“This is going well,” I said.
“Shit,” said Wally.
“What’s this gizmo on the back of the golf cart?” asked Nana. Wally and I took a peek.
“Looks like some kind of hydraulic lift,” I said. Coloradans knew ski lifts. Californians knew face-lifts. Iowans knew hydraulic lifts, especially Iowans like me, who’d been raised on grain farms around heavy machinery. I hopped into the driver’s seat and fidgeted with a few toggle switches. HRRRMMMM! The lift hummed into action. Ah, the genius of German engineering. I backed the cart up to the body and we hoisted Dick onto the lift. I hit the toggle switch again and Dick levitated upward like an oversize sack of seed corn.
“All right!” said Wally.
We swung his legs around and slid him onto the backseat in a sitting position, then stood back to assess our handiwork. Nana had closed Dick’s eyes, but it hadn’t helped much.
“What do you think?” Wally asked me.
“It looks like we have a dead guy sitting in the back of our golf cart.”
“Maybe you need to gussy him up a bit so he don’t look so dead,” said Nana.
I looked at Wally. Wally looked at me. I stared at Wally’s new green alpine hat and smiled. He swiped it off his head and stuck it on Dick’s at a cocky angle. We assessed again.
“Better,” I said. “But he’s still too exposed.” I snapped my fingers with sudden inspiration. I dug into my shoulder bag and pulled out the sunglasses Shirley Angowski had given me atop Mount Pilatus. I slid them onto Dick’s face. We assessed again. “What do you think now?”
“Perfect,” said Wally. “Hop in. I’m driving.”
“You’re driving?” I objected. “How come you get to drive?”
“Because I’m the one whose passport is on the line if anything happens in transit.”
I looked at Nana. Nana looked at me. One of us was going to have to sit in back with Dick. “You wanna flip a coin to see who gets to ride shotgun?” asked Nana.
Two minutes later we were whizzing across the spa lawn at the breakneck speed of eight miles per hour. Wally shot out onto the pedestrian walkway and banged a sharp left turn. Dick lurched forward and fell over into my lap. “You wanna watch the corners!” I yelled from the backseat as I propped him back up. I straightened his hat and sunglasses and batted a few flies away. “How far to the bus?”
“Be there in a few minutes,” assured Wally.
The driving was slow, with all the tourists crowding the walkway. “S’cuse me!” Wally kept shouting. “We’re trying to get by here!” We spied Bernice as she hobbled in the direction of the parking lot, and when Wally slowed to let a stroller pass, she flagged us down.
“I can’t walk another step. You got room for another passenger?”
“NO!” we yelled in unison. Bernice winced and grabbed her head as if she’d been zapped by chain lightning. I suspected if she wasn’t deaf before, she was now.
Wally zoomed around the baby stroller and gunned the cart. Lars and Solvay Bakke were standing by a bench on the walkway and waved as we passed by. “New hat, Dick?” Solvay called as we slowed for more foot traffic.
Being dead, Dick said nothing.
“Yoo-hoo,” Solvay persisted. Sweat beaded my upper lip. Sweat bathed my palms. We were about to be found out.
“Hey,” Solvay shouted. “Are you too good to talk to us?”
I waved to Solvay, then slid my left hand under Dick’s elbow and popped his arm up so he could wave, too. I figured Dick would have wanted it that way. He wasn’t a snob. He couldn’t help it if he was dead.
We found the bus at the far end of the parking lot. It was completely empty. It was also locked.
“Damn!” said Wally. “We gotta find Max before people start drifting back.” He checked his watch. “We only have a half hour.”
“More like two minutes,” I corrected. “Remember? Iowans are always early.”
Max, our bus driver, was a big bull of a man who looked as if he might have been a Gestapo commandant before he made the big career move to tour bus driver. I gave the parking lot the once-over and noticed a small group of tidily dressed men standing by one of the other tour busses. “He could be over there,” I said, pointing.
Wally took off like a shot. “He’d better hurry,” said Nana. “Bernice will probably wanna chew on him for not givin’ her a lift, so I expect she’ll be showin’ up any minute.”
I looked over my shoulder to find Wally and Max locked in a heated discussion as they headed back toward the golf cart. Arms flew. Spittle flew. Max unlocked the door of the bus, then headed in our direction.
“We gots to get body to hell into bus,” said Max. English obviously wasn’t his first language. “Man can’t die here. Better he die in Switzerland.” He shoved Dick’s hat and sunglasses at me, then in one motion lifted Dick over his shoulder and carried him up the stairs of the bus. He made his way down the aisle to the back of the bus and unloaded Dick on the rear seat. Whew. Now that the hard part was behind us, maybe I could breathe a little easier.
“I’d better get his hat and glasses back on him,” I said to Wally.
“Right. And we’ll be making some hairpin turns on the way back to Lucerne, so you need to make sure he doesn’t fall over too much. Try to keep him propped against the window.”
“Excuse me?” My part in this was over. I’d helped get Dick back to the bus. What was this propping him against the window business?
Wally looked surprised. “You need to sit with him on the way back.”
“ME? Why me?”
“Someone has to!”
“What about you? You’re the tour guide. I’m only the escort!”
“You’ve done such a good job with him so far, Emily. Can’t you be a team player and follow through?”
“NO!”
“Well, you have to do it anyway because there is no one else. I have to sit at the front of the bus and conduct the sing-along on the way back.”
“I could co
nduct the sing-along,” I protested. “I have a good singing voice. I was in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.”
Wally smiled. “Nice try. I don’t think so. You better get back there and get settled before people start arriving. I need to get the cart back to the spa.”
“But it’s a long drive back to Lucerne,” I shouted, as Wally hopped into the cart. “Shouldn’t Dick be in a cooler or something? What happens if he starts to—you know—smell bad?”
Forty minutes later, as the bus headed out of the resort town of Titisee-Neustadt, Wally made an announcement over the microphone. “Due to a malfunction in the ventilation system, I regret to inform you that the back half of the bus will be a little cool on the drive back to Lucerne. There are blankets in the overhead compartments if you need them. I apologize for any inconvenience this might cause.”
A little cool? We weren’t even on the main road yet and the tips of my ears were starting to freeze. I grabbed two blankets from the overhead compartment and tucked one around Dick and one around me. I know I’d said earlier that I needed to chill out, but this wasn’t exactly what I’d had in mind.
* * *
The weather deteriorated steadily as we headed south. Arriving back in Lucerne, we were welcomed by the normal fare of heavy drizzle and dense fog. I was so cold, I no longer had feeling in my extremities, and my lips were completely numb. I felt like Emily Andrew, human Sno-Kone.
“After dinner this evening there’ll be a group meeting in the lobby for the Iowa contingent,” announced Wally over the mike. “It’s extremely important that all of you attend, so please be there.”
The bus emptied amid grumblings from everyone about the trip home. The people at the front of the bus had been too hot. The people at the rear of the bus had been too cold. I’d have thought the people in the middle would have been just right, but even they had started to complain about an unpleasant odor wafting about the bus. Fortunately, my nose was a cube of ice, so I couldn’t smell a thing. My only problem was hypothermia.
Wally made his way to the back of the bus and clapped me on the shoulder. “Good job, Emily. We pulled it off. I’ll contact the authorities, and they can take it from here. Geez, you look awful. I hope you don’t have frostbite.” He hugged his arms to himself. “Man, it’s freezing back here. No wonder your nose is purple. I’m heading inside the hotel. I’ll wait for the police in there.”