Say No Moor

by Maddy Hunter

  “Was you really kidnapped and held hostage in a tunnel?” Nana asked a now-conscious Bernice.

  Margi clasped her hands beneath her chin. “That’s so romantic.”

  “Very reminiscent of a Daphne du Maurier novel,” commented Tilly.

  “That police fella thought you might have wandered off the cliff when you went missing,” said Dick Teig. “But just so’s you know, the edge of the cliff is a lot closer to the inn now, so if you get a mind to do that, you won’t have so far to walk.”

  “Except that the inn isn’t there anymore,” lamented Alice.

  “The shell’s still standin’,” clarified Nana. “It’s the insides what got torched. And it’s all on account of them Cacciatore folks what was holdin’ us at gunpoint. It’s a shame you missed it, Bernice, but bein’ in a tunnel sounds like it was a lot more excitin’.”

  “Did you see how wide her eyes just got?” hooted Dick Teig, motioning toward her face.

  “Looks like she wants to say something,” said George.

  “Too bad she’s wearing that oxygen mask,” observed Osmond. “You suppose she really needs it?”

  “No touching the oxygen mask!” I warned as I popped out of my chair.

  Lucille regarded her from the foot of the bed. “Since you’re only able to speak with your eyes, Bernice, this might be a good time for you to process the really bad news with the least possible strain to your voice. Your cell phone is toast. You lost it in the fire.”

  “You wanna see the fire?” enthused Dick Teig.

  Whipping out their phones, they began flipping through screens.

  “Hold it!” My voice rang through the room with surprising authority. “C’mon, guys. You arrive at the hospital to visit Bernice and two minutes into the visit you’re already grabbing your phones? What happened to comradery? To simple conversation? What happened to sentiments like ‘We’re glad you survived that horrifying experience and you’re not injured, Bernice. We missed you when you were gone, Bernice. Is there anything we can do for you, Bernice?’”

  “Maybe you didn’t notice,” Helen Teig said to me in an undertone. “She can’t talk.”

  “It’s on account of the oxygen mask, dear.” Nana cocked her head to study the contraption better. “I never seen one that big before.”

  “I bet it’s leftover from World War I,” offered Margi.

  “You’re missing the point,” I chided. “You don’t need your cell phones at a time like this. Talk to her. Tell her what happened to you while she was missing. Remember how engaged you were with each other when you had your phones packed away and what a good time you had? Remember how nostalgic you got for the pre-cell phone days, when you actually spent time talking to each other? Do you really want to go back to the same old routine of having your noses stuck in your phones all the time and not giving a flip about what’s happening around you?”

  Shoe scuffing. Shoulder slumping. Gaze lowering.

  Uff-da. Had I finally succeeded in getting through to them?

  “So what do you say about putting your phones away and entertaining Bernice with a few personal stories that can’t be found on the internet?”

  They exchanged long, guilt-ridden glances with each other before Dick Teig looked at me and announced rather emphatically, “Nah.” He held up his phone for Bernice’s perusal. “Some fire, huh? I’ve already got twenty-three hits on YouTube. And that’s only since last night.”

  “I’ve got twenty-six,” boasted Dick Stolee.

  “I titled mine The Towering Inferno,” said Osmond, “and my hits have already passed the century mark.”

  “Wasn’t that the title of a movie?” asked Lucille.

  “It certainly was,” said Margi. “No wonder Osmond has so many hits. People think they’re gonna see an old Steve McQueen flick.”

  “Osmond plagiarized a movie?” quipped Helen. “If he gets arrested for copyright infringement, who’s gonna conduct our polls?”

  Their voices rose to a crescendo as they fought to show Bernice their fire footage, arguing over whose clip would go viral first. Amid the chaos I heard the digital chime of my own cell phone, so I headed for the relative quiet of the corridor as I dug it out of my shoulder bag.

  “Etienne? Is the retreat over? Did you get to meet the Pope? I’ve missed you so much. Please tell me you’ll arrive in Lyme Regis when you’re supposed to. I can’t wait to see you.”

  “I love you, bella. Yes, I’m scheduled to arrive on time.” A pause. “You sound a little breathless. Is anything wrong?”

  “Wrong?” I hugged my phone to my ear as if, in doing so, I might allow his voice to wrap around me in a warm embrace. “What could possibly be wrong?”

  the end

  About the Author

  © Photo Express

  After experiencing disastrous vacations on three continents, Maddy Hunter decided to combine her love of humor, travel, and storytelling to fictionalize her misadventures. Inspired by her feisty aunt and by memories of her Irish grandmother, she created the nationally bestselling, Agatha Award–nominated Passport to Peril mystery series, where quirky seniors from Iowa get to relive everything that went wrong on Maddy’s holiday. Say No Moor is the eleventh book in the series. Maddy lives in Madison, Wisconsin, with her husband and a head full of imaginary characters who keep asking, “Are we there yet?”

  Please visit her website at www.maddyhunter.com or become a follower on her Maddy Hunter Facebook Fan Page.

  coming soon from midnight ink

  Following is an exerpt from book 12

  in the Passport to Peril series,

  catch me if yukon

  “Thar she blows!” shouted Dick Teig in an effort to channel the spirit of Melville’s infamous Captain Ahab.

  Gliding through the waves in slow motion, plagued by flocks of screeching gulls, the humpback spewed a column of spray into the air to the excited ooohs and ahhhs of the hundred-plus guests aboard the tour boat Kenai Adventurer.

  “Oh, wow,” Dick enthused as he stood mesmerized at the starboard rail where the rest of us were shoehorned together, gawking into the water below, angling our cell phones left and right to avoid shooting video of each others’ heads.

  “This footage is going straight to YouTube,” hooted Dick Stolee, who, as the group’s tallest member, enjoyed the luxury of having the best unobstructed view. “You wanna bet this baby’s going viral? The likes are gonna pile up faster than pancakes at a church breakfast.”

  “Didn’t no one tell you?” my grandmother asked from farther down the rail. “We’re not doin’ YouTube no more. We found a new website what links to real global news agencies with real bylines, so we’re sendin’ our stuff there instead.”

  “We decided that for folks who’ve been doing this as long as we have, it was time to leave the ranks of YouTube behind and graduate to a more professional platform,” explained George Farkas.

  Nana nodded. “It’s our best chance to join the big leagues before we die.”

  “How come nobody told me?” complained Dick as the whale arched its back and with a muted whoooosh sluiced downward into the ocean’s depths, its fluked tail rising out of the water in an aquatic salute that made it appear more like a member of a synchronized swim team than a mammal whose massive bulk tipped the scales at a modest forty tons.

  “We took a vote on it,” ninety-something-year-old Osmond Chelsvig recalled. “At the gluten-free luncheon at the senior center last week. Weren’t you there?”

  “He was in the little boys’ room,” droned Dick’s wife, Grace. “He’s never going to get the timing of that water pill down right.”

  “I can’t see a doggone thing,” bellyached Bernice Zwerg in her ex-smoker’s rasp from somewhere behind us. “Time for you rail hogs to stop being so selfish. Get out of the way. I can’t see through you. I left my x-ray vision back on the
bus.”

  I cranked my head around to find her standing behind Dick Stolee, where the only thing she had a breathtaking view of was the back of his jacket. Shuffling backward, I grasped her arm and dragged her through the horde of onlookers to position her in front of me. “How’s that?”

  She peered over the rail. “Where’s Moby Dick?”

  “Submerged.”

  “So how long do I have to stand here before he flashes us again?”

  “Don’t know. I don’t think whales run on timers.”

  I’m Emily Andrew-Miceli, who with my former Swiss police inspector husband, Etienne, own and operate Destinations Travel out of Windsor City, Iowa. We cater to a subset of seniors who’ve marked “world travel” as the first item on their bucket lists, and we’re proud to have a stable of twelve regulars from Windsor City who keep the agency in the black: eight fairly normal adults, one chronic complainer, two Dicks, and my eighth-grade-educated, computer savvy, lottery winning, martial arts–trained grandmother, Marion Sippel.

  Filling up the remaining seats on our twelve-day Alaskan odyssey are seven Windsor City locals who are the founding members of a Norwegian-only book club that boasts the jaw-dropping distinction of having been in existence for over forty years. Their reading list isn’t limited to Norwegian books, but club hopefuls have to verify their authentic Norwegian ancestry to join. Three of our regular guests—Lucille Rasmussen, Helen Teig, and Grace Stolee—have belonged to the group for a couple of decades, so it was on their recommendation that the other club members decided to sign up for our tour.

  The girls must have forgotten to mention the unfortunate number of deaths we’ve experienced on our previous excursions.

  Memory loss among the senior set does have its benefits.

  Our boat was hovering close to the rock-ribbed shore of Aialik Bay in the Kenai Fjords National Park, a long inlet flanked by a spine of jagged mountains, towering evergreens that seemed to sprout up from the bedrock, and distant peaks frosted with snow. The sky was cobalt blue, without a trace of a cloud. The sun was so blindingly bright that I needed to squint behind my sunglasses to avoid burning my retinas from the reflections off the water, which made picture-taking a challenge since I couldn’t see what was on my display screen. I could be taking breathtaking close-ups of Dick Teig’s thumb for all I knew.

  “Humpbacks can swim up to twenty-five miles an hour if they get the urge,” our captain announced in a subdued voice over the loudspeaker. I guess he didn’t want to startle the eighty-thousand-pound behemoth that was lurking somewhere beneath our boat. “But most of the time they keep it between eight and ten, which is what I commonly refer to as cruising speed.”

  “I wonder how fast Moby Dick was swimming when he bit off Captain Ahab’s leg?” pondered Helen Teig.

  Bernice choked on a guffaw as she glanced at Helen. “You do realize Moby Dick wasn’t real, right?”

  “Moby Dick wasn’t a humpback,” offered Tilly Hovick in her former professor’s voice. “He was a sperm whale. So you really can’t compare.”

  “I wonder what kind of whale swallowed Geppetto?” asked Margi Swanson as she squirted out a stream of hand sanitizer to create a small germ-free zone on the rail.

  “Probably the same kind that swallowed Jonah,” theorized Lucille Rasmussen. “The kind that spits you back out.”

  “Sounds like some kind of involuntary gag reflex to me,” mused Helen.

  Bernice shook her head. “Morons.”

  The captain’s voice broke out over the loudspeaker again. “Looks like a pod making its way toward us. Six or seven humpbacks. Starboard quarter.” Then, in an obvious tease, “Y’all can swim, right?”

  “Are we on the correct side?” asked Alice Tjarks as she visored her hands over her eyes to scan the water.

  “We’re on the right side,” George spoke up.

  “But what if the right side is the wrong side?” panicked Dick Stolee.

  “Then we’ll miss everything,” fretted Dick Teig. “C’mon, guys. Other side of the boat!”

  “But this is the right side,” I objected as they stampeded across the deck to the opposite side, deserting their plum positions at the rail.

  One of the advantages of living in a landlocked state is that residents aren’t forced to learn unnecessary terms like starboard and port.

  I switched my phone to video and aimed it in the general direction of the humpbacks as they glided together in their own version of a maritime flash mob, geysering water through their blowholes before slithering downward in their languid balletic dives.

  “Hey, Emily, did you hear about the whale watching boat that sank in calm seas off the coast of Juneau last year?” asked book clubber Thor Thorsen as he bulldozed into the space relinquished by the gang. His camera whirred frenetically as he squeezed off a number of shots using a telephoto lens that was as long as my arm. “All the passengers got rescued, but the boat apparently went down like a rock. Don’t know if they ever figured out what caused it to sink, but it makes you wonder if these tour boat companies sometimes underestimate the marine life around here.”

  My stomach bubbled disagreeably at his comment. Like I needed to hear that.

  Thor Thorsen was an impressive physical speciman. Tall and broad-shouldered, with permanently ruddy cheeks and blond hair that was only slightly threaded with gray, his face was more intriguing than it was handsome, his wide-spaced eyes and flattened features making him look as if he had never recovered from an untimely collision with a closed door. He owned a luxury car dealership in town, but he’d recently turned the managerial duties over to his son so he could devote more time to retirement travel and his newfound hobbies, which appeared to be wildlife photography and promoting heartburn.

  “Humpbacks aren’t usually known for their destructive tendencies,” countered Grover Kristiansen as he slid closer to me, his voice both tentative and monotone. A small-boned man attired in fatigue-green polar fleece and a wide-brimmed hat with a chin cord, he looked more like an aging Boy Scout than a former sales manager for a small business. “In fact, near Monterey, California, a group of whale watchers witnessed a pair of humpbacks trying to rescue a baby gray whale from a pod of orcas, and gray whales don’t even belong to the same genus.”

  “Is that right?” Thor muttered with disinterest as he squeezed off a dozen more shots.

  “There’s also documentation that humpbacks have rescued Antarctic seals that were under attack from orcas,” Grover continued with rising enthusiasm, “and seals aren’t even the same species! Scientists think the whales display a higher order of thinking and feeling, just like the great apes, elephants, and humans. And that’s because humpbacks have specialized spindle cells in their brains that—”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Thor cut him off. “You can keep talking, but I’ve stopped listening. Tell you anything?”

  Grover stiffened at the slight but refused to be cowed. “It verifies that you have a very short attention span. You should work on that, Thor. Maybe it’ll help you recommend an actual novel to the book club rather than selected articles from Reader’s Digest.”

  “Two more pods headed our way on the port side,” announced the captain. “This is kind of unprecedented, so we’re going to idle right here for awhile longer so you can soak it up.”

  “This guy better know what he’s doing,” grumbled Thor as he quickly abandoned the rail to charge across the deck, followed by Grover, who chased behind him like a puppy. Which is when I noticed the woman standing beside the deck’s orange life buoy station, eyes wide, a terrified expression on her little moon face.

  “Mom?” I was trying to suppress the fact that my parents were accompanying us on this tour, but I had good reason. Mom’s overprotective attitude in dealing with Nana was so over the top that I usually wore myself out running interference between them, which negatively affected my duties to the other gue
sts. It was not the most efficient business model.

  Mom waved stiffly as I walked the few steps to join her.

  “Are you sure you want to stand this far back, Mom? You can’t see anything.”

  “Of course I can see things, Em.” She bobbed her head toward the shoreline. “Trees. Rocks. Water. The backs of passengers’ heads.”

  “Have you seen the whales?”

  “Oh, I imagine everyone on the boat has seen the whales.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “You haven’t gotten close to the rail to see them, have you?”

  “No, but don’t concern yourself with me. I’m having a wonderful time.”

  In the daily routine of life, Mom usually chose martyrdom over simple fixes. I used to think her preference had something to do with her being Catholic and reading The Giant Book of Saints one too many times as a child. But I’ve come to realize that it’s probably a genetic defect that originated with Nana’s MacCool forebears, who always went out of their way to sacrifice their lives to avenge whatever minor slight had ruffled their kilts that day.

  She switched her attention to the life buoy ring beside her. “I know you’re not familiar with maritime devices, Emily, but would you have any idea how a person would go about detaching this thing if the boat started to sink?”

  “The boat isn’t going to sink, Mom. The tour company wouldn’t still be in business if the whales went rogue and destroyed their boats on a regular basis.”

  “Of course not.” She studied the orange ring with an analytical eye. “It’s probably too small to fit around your grandmother anyway.” She glanced left and right before lowering her voice to a whisper. “I don’t know what she’s been eating lately, but if she doesn’t stop, all her elastic waistbands are going to need extenders. So—” she resumed her normal volume, “a life jacket would be much better. At least they’re adjustable. Maybe the crew can spare a couple.”

  In addition to being obsessively preoccupied with Nana, Mom was obsessively preoccupied with order. Her idea of Nirvana was to be hired as a member of a FEMA team that was tasked with re-alphabetizing the canned goods and magazine sections of grocery stores after major earthquakes or, even better, very large book repositories such as the Library of Congress.