by Maddy Hunter
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Fleur de Lies: A Passport to Peril Mystery © 2014 Maddy Hunter
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First e-book edition © 2014
E-book ISBN: 978-0-7387-4001-0
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Cover design by Kevin R. Brown
Cover illustration by Anne Wertheim
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dedication
In memory of World War II veterans Frank Mayer, Gardner Holmes, and George Foley
—three ordinary men who left ordinary lives in ordinary towns to save the world … and did.
With thanks and admiration ~ mmh
acknowledgments
I’d like to extend special thanks to Gail McDonald for suggesting the title for the French adventure. Gail’s great title inspired the awesome cover. Merci beaucoup, Gail!
Thanks to my editors, Terri Bischoff and Connie Hill, for allowing me to write in my own voice. Ask any author. This is invaluable.
Heartfelt thanks to my loyal fans who continue to follow the misadventures of Emily and the Iowa gang with such wonderful enthusiasm. I’ve said it before. You’re the best.
My trip to France was something of a “bucket list” holiday. I’m a huge WWII buff, so it’s been a lifetime dream of mine to visit the D-Day beaches and surrounding villages.
I wasn’t disappointed.
My most memorable moment took place at Pointe du Hoc. As my husband and I waited our turn to climb down into one of the craters caused by Allied bombings on the morning of June 6, 1944, we smiled at a grammar school teacher who was trying to herd her class out of the crater. She was most apologetic that her wayward children were causing a delay, but then she looked at us and asked, “Are you American?” To which we replied, “Yes, we are.” She looked us both in the face and said simply and sincerely, “Thank you.”
My eyes welled with tears. I got a knot in my throat. And I was truly never so proud to be an American.
This book is my humble tribute to the servicemen and women who fought so bravely during that terrible time. They truly were … the Greatest Generation.
one
On June 6, 1944, Allied forces from the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States stormed the beaches of Normandy, France, in the greatest single-day troop movement in recorded history. The operation was called “Overlord,” and its purpose was to establish a beachhead from which troops could punch through German lines to recapture the cities and towns that had lived under Nazi occupation for four horror-filled years.
The British landed on a five-mile crescent of beach code-named “Gold,” which sat in the middle of the string of five D-Day beaches. At the far west end of this sandy crescent, flanked by towering limestone cliffs, lies the seaside village of Arromanches, which boasts an invasion museum, carousel, souvenir shops, and a parade of once-stately homes perched at the lip of the seawall. The houses look long abandoned, their windows boarded up, but in June of 1944, their location would have afforded them panoramic views of the spectacular white sand beach that stretched halfway to England when the tide was at its farthest ebb.
Having just led my group of a dozen Iowa seniors down a flight of stone steps onto the beach, we stood at the base of a high bank of large broken boulders that were stacked against the seawall in an obvious attempt to lessen the destructive force of English Channel storms. “Is the tide in or out?” asked Alice Tjarks as she glanced seaward.
I regarded the half-mile expanse of dry sand and rippled tidal flats that stretched before us. “Based on pure observation, I’d say it’s out.” Iowans can scan a field of budding green leaves and tell you what crop is growing, but asking us to speculate on the status of coastal tides is even more absurd than asking us to demonstrate how to eat a live-boiled lobster.
I’m Emily Andrew Miceli, who, with my husband, Etienne, is co-owner of Destinations Travel Company in Windsor City, Iowa. I leave the office quite frequently to escort a core group of seventy-, eighty-, and ninety-year-olds who’d rather spend their retirement years seeing the world than knitting or playing golf. Etienne sometimes accompanies us, but this go-round, he’s hosting a five-day travel seminar at the agency. So while we cruise the Seine River, traveling from Normandy to Paris aboard a small river ship, with optional tours available to explore historic sites in the French countryside, he’ll be pretty much incommunicado. At least for a few days.
Eleven sets of eyes riveted on ninety-something Osmond Chelsvig, who, as a member of Windsor City’s Board of Elections for longer than half a century, usually settled the group’s most divisive flaps by requesting a show of hands.
Osmond nodded thoughtfully. “Yup. Tide’s out.”
Jaws dropped. Eyes widened.
“You can’t agree with her,” Helen Teig protested. “What happened to a show of hands? You always ask for a show of hands.”
Margi Swanson’s voice rose with sudden panic. “Helen’s right. If we can’t voice our opinions on really stupid things, our whole social dynamic will be destroyed.”
Gasps. Nods. An errant belch.
“C’mon, Osmond.” Dick Stolee delivered a playful punch to Osmond’s bony shoulder. “Call for a vote.”
“Nope.”
Dick paused, his eyes narrowing with suspicion. “Oooh, I get it. Very clever, but don’t think you’re gonna get away with it. I’m onto you, fella. I wasn’t born yesterday. None of us were. And we know exactly what you’re doing.”
“We sure do.” Dick Teig nodded emphatically before shooting his friend a quizzical look. “What’s he doing?”
“We’ve come to expect underhanded stuff like this from Bernice.” Dick Stolee patted the shoulder of a woman with a dowager’s hump misshaping her back and sparkly Mary Janes dazzling her feet. “But we expect better from you, Osmond.”
Bernice Zwerg fluffed the wiry bristles of her over-permed hair and smiled sourly. “Stow the flattery,” she snapped in her ex-smoker’s rasp. “I’m immune.”
“He didn’t mean it as a compliment,” deadpanned
Lucille Rassmuson.
Dick Stolee let out a disgusted snort as he thrust an angry finger at Osmond. “He doesn’t care what the rest of us think anymore. He’s decided our opinions don’t have any value. He’s trashing the democratic process we’ve practiced all these years in favor of a dictatorship that lets him call all the shots. Do you know what this is a sign of ?”
“Maturity?” I suggested.
“Armageddon!” whooped Grace Stolee, whose glee at providing a likely answer quickly dissolved into worry. “Except it better not be Armageddon, because I have dry cleaning to pick up when we get home, and I’ll be slapped with a stupid handling fee if I leave it there for more than a month.”
“Voter suppression!” thundered Dick. “Osmond Chelsvig is guilty of the worst political dirty trick in the book. He’s denying us access to vote!”
More gasps.
George Farkas removed his Pioneer Seed Corn cap and rubbed his bald head. “I thought stuff like that only happened in places that are hotbeds of seething dissention and political unrest, like Egypt … or Florida.”
My grandmother, whose name tag identified her as Marion Sippel, slid her wirerims up her nose to better see our own homegrown political trickster. “Gee, playin’ fast and loose with votin’ rights don’t sound like Osmond.”
“It sure doesn’t,” he admitted. “Show of hands. How many people think I’m trying to suppress the vote?”
I checked my watch and smiled. Back to the old routine in under one minute. There really was an upside to short-term memory issues.
Osmond was exonerated in a classic squeaker—six votes to five. Bernice abstained on the grounds that voter suppression is a fiction invented by left-wing radical extremists and liberal morons, so she refused to vote on a flawed premise.
Tilly thumped the beach with her walking stick, sending up a geyser of fine-grained sand. “Normandy beaches are renowned for their twenty-foot tides,” she announced in her former professor’s voice.
“So we’re safe.” Grace Stolee exhaled a relieved breath. “The water’s out more than twenty feet, isn’t it?”
“Looks like it’s out about a hundred miles,” said Dick Teig, squinting toward the water’s edge.
“Good.” Grace kicked off her shoes and rolled up the hem of her pants. “I have an uncontrollable urge to dip my tootsies in the English Channel. Anyone else game?”
Graduating at the top of her class from Beginners Swim at the Senior Center pool had turned Grace into an unabashed daredevil.
The eleven nonswimmers in the group eyed her with various degrees of envy.
“Showoff,” teased Margi.
“I wouldn’t be caught dead anywhere near that muck,” whined Bernice as she positioned her foot like a ballerina modeling toe shoes. “Not in my new walking shoes.” She rotated her ankle to provide us with both left and right views. “Did I mention they were ridiculously expensive?”
Dick Stolee flung his hands palms up into the air. “That swimming certificate of yours has gone straight to your head, Grace. Where’s my wife? The one whose only uncontrollable urge is to put the toaster away before I’ve finishing using it?”
“Point of order,” Osmond spoke up. “Tides aren’t measured in distance. They’re measured in depth. Vertical depth. Kinda like what happens to the water level of a fish tank when you drain it.”
I blinked at Osmond. He lived in a landlocked state. How could he possibly offer an analogy to explain coastal tides?
“We shouldn’t be asking if the tide is in or out,” advised Tilly. “We should be asking where the high water mark is located.”
Alice ranged a curious glance up and down the beach. “There’s a mark?”
“There should be a long, narrow field of debris on the sand somewhere,” Tilly said as she scanned the immediate area. “Seaweed. Seashells. Crustacean shells. Empty beer bottles. The tide deposits everything at the high water mark.”
“So if we stay above the high water mark, we won’t get swept away by no rogue waves?” asked Nana.
Tilly nodded. “In theory.”
“Spread out!” shouted Dick Teig as he directed the gang left and right, “and if you find any of the crap that Tilly is talking about, give a holler.”
“What if we all find it at the same time?” fretted Margi. “Should we appoint a spokesperson to give an official holler so we’re not all sending out mixed messages?”
“Do we have an official holler?” puzzled George, looking a bit lopsided as his wooden leg sank into the sand.
“My Dick was always fond of ‘Balls’!” Lucille reminisced, hand pressed to her heart out of respect for her deceased husband. “Remember? No one could hold a candle to my Dick when it came to cussing.”
“I found it,” offered Nana.
“Eww, did everyone hear what Marion just said?” Alice used her KORN radio voice to be heard above the din. “She’s got a winner.”
“What’d she say?” asked Dick Teig.
“I said, I found it,” Nana repeated.
“Works for me,” agreed Osmond. “Show of hands. How many people think we should call out, ‘I found it!’ when we—”
“We don’t need no show of hands,” Nana blurted in exasperation. She held up her new and improved iPhone and jabbed the screen with her forefinger. “It’s right here on YouTube. Some fella downloaded a bunch of photos showin’ what Gold Beach looks like at high tide.” She touched her fingertip to the screen. “Check your messages.”
Like gunslingers going for their guns, they went for their phones. I would have gone for mine, but I was guessing I wasn’t in Nana’s “Golden Oldies” email loop, so my inbox would probably be empty.
“This has gotta be a different place than where we’re standing,” scoffed Dick Teig as he studied the photo Nana had sent him. “Where’s the beach?”
I peeked over Dick’s shoulder at a stunning image of white-capped waves swallowing up the sand all the way to the seawall.
“I think it’s under the water what’s crashin’ against them rocks there,” said Nana.
Heads swiveled toward the seawall, causing eyes to widen with fear as the reality of the situation set in. Helen dropped her gaze to her shoes, regarding them with mounting alarm. “Do you know what this means? If we stay where we are, when the tide comes in, it’s going to roll over all of us. We’ll be buried under twenty feet of water!”
“You better hope your eyebrow pencil is waterproof,” Bernice taunted her.
Helen gasped as she touched her painstakingly drawn brows. “It’s nonsmear and hypoallergenic, but I don’t know if it’s waterproof.”
Her husband pulled a permanent marker out of his shirt pocket. “I gotcha covered,” he snorted proudly. “Green’s not your normal color, but it was the only one left on the shelf. Close enough, right?”
Sure, if she were an avocado.
“Well, I won’t be under water,” boasted Grace, clacking the soles of her shoes together to rid them of sand. “I’ll be doing my award-winning dog paddle to that ramp over there. I told you people it was time we learned to swim, but nooo. Swimming was too boring for you.”
Alice frowned. “I thought we said it was too wet.”
“Low-impact breakdancing had a much better time slot,” defended Lucille.
“And we got to wear them slinky spandex unitards.” Nana gave her eyebrows a little waggle.
“And we couldn’t complain about the reduced rates we got when our instructor made a group appointment for us at the chiropractor’s,” conceded Margi.
“Okay, people, listen up.” I waved my arm above my head to indicate a time-out. “No one’s going to get buried under twenty feet of water.”
“Nineteen point four feet to be exact,” amended Tilly. She held up her iPhone and shrugged. “I just Googled it.”
“None of you are
going to be buried by a sudden flood tide,” I reiterated. “It’s going to take hours for the water that’s down there”—I threw my hand in the direction of the Channel—“to work its way up here.” I nodded toward the seawall.
“Six hours and thirteen minutes,” said Tilly, eyes glued to her iPhone.
“Over six hours!” I repeated. “So you need to lighten up. You’re on one of the most historic beaches in the world. Do a little beachcombing. Take a few pictures. You’re safe.”
“How do you know?” argued Bernice. “Are you the resident expert on Normandy tides?”
“No, but I’m the resident expert on schedules, and according to ours, we have to be back on the bus in a little over an hour, so we’ll be gone before the tide becomes an issue.”
Panic swept over them like a flash fire.
“Why didn’t you tell us that earlier?” chided Dick Stolee as he wrapped his hand around his wife’s arm. “C’mon, Grace, put your shoes back on. We’ve gotta get back to the bus. We’re late.”
Feet shuffled. Arms flapped. Sand flew.
“You are not late!” I pleaded as they stampeded back toward the stairs. “You have a whole hour. The bus will not leave without you!”
“We can make it on time if we don’t lallygag,” Dick Teig exhorted the troops.
“How far away is the bus parked?” Lucille gasped out from the back of the pack.
Nana charged up the stairs in her size 5 sneakers, muscling out Bernice and Dick Teig to arrive at the top first.
Wow! That low-impact breakdancing class of hers had really improved her range of motion and stamina.
“Hold it, everyone!” Margi paused against the handrail halfway up the stairs. “I wanna get a picture of the high water mark.” She took aim at the beach with her iPhone. “Did we ever find it?”
When they were all safely off the stairs, I called out one last essential nugget. “If you need to use the comfort station, the entrance is on the outside of the museum.” I gestured to the building beyond the carousel that called itself the Musée du Debarquement. “And don’t be surprised if you have to cough up some money to use the facilities. I warned you about this before we left home, so have some coins ready.”