Dutch Me Deadly

by Maddy Hunter

  “She wore makeup,” accused one woman whose photo showed her younger self in a pageboy and bangs, “and we were supposed to act like we didn’t notice. I mean, no one’s cheeks are that red. Not even if they’re spray painted.”

  “She was so vindictive,” said the second classmate, a heavyset woman with a tight perm. “She hated me, but the feeling was mutual. I heard she lost her position after we graduated and got demoted to housekeeping duties at the rectory. A lot of important people filed complaints about her to the diocese, so she got the shaft. And atheists say there is no God. Huh!”

  “Did you know there was a massive turnover in the teaching staff after we left?” asked Mike. “Keeping us in line for four years wore them all down.”

  “We didn’t wear them down,” corrected Mary Lou. “We kept them on their toes. Our standardized test scores showed that we were a bright class. That’s not bragging. It’s the truth.”

  “The only reason you girls did so well was because you didn’t have us boys in class to distract you,” teased Chip.

  “Wait a sec,” I interrupted. “You all went to the same school, but you didn’t have co-ed classes?”

  Mike nodded. “Boys on one side of the building, girls on the other, with a big auditorium in the middle to keep us separated. The brothers taught the boys and the nuns taught the girls, with a sprinkling of lay teachers thrown in for local color.”

  “Remember Mr. Albert?” Mary Lou asked the group. Then to me, “He taught algebra and geometry to both sides, but he was so shy, he could never look us in the eye. He’d explain theorems while he looked out the window or stared at his shoes. Poor man. Paula Peavey mouthed off to him continually, but he was too embarrassed to punish her. The boys were always playing practical jokes on him, like sticking imbecilic signs on his suit coat or gluing his desk drawers shut. Pete Finnegan thought he was smarter than Mr. Albert, so he never missed a chance to argue with him over the simplest math problems. We made a nervous wreck out of the poor guy. We antagonized him so much, I honestly think he grew afraid of us.”

  “He never threw chalk at me,” said Chip, “so I liked him.”

  I frowned. “Why would he throw chalk at you?”

  “The brothers always fired chalk across the room at us if we gave them wrong answers,” said Mike. “And they nailed us every time. The Xaverian brothers had exceptional throwing arms. I wouldn’t be surprised if a few of them left the brotherhood for more lucrative careers in the major leagues.”

  The heavyset woman beside Mary Lou sighed. “Just think. They’re probably all dead by now. That’s a little depressing.”

  “On the other hand,” Mike announced in a booming voice, “the rest of us are very much alive, so let’s celebrate that.” He gestured toward me. “By the way, this lovely young woman is Emily.”

  I waved a quick hello.

  Mike continued with enthusiasm. “Would you believe, Emily, that not only were we the brightest class to walk the hallowed halls of Francis Xavier High, we were apparently the healthiest and least accident prone? Not one person in our graduating class has died.”

  Chip cranked his mouth to the side and gave his jaw a thoughtful scratch. “Well, that’s not exactly true. What about Bob Guerrette?”

  Smiles stiffened. Limbs froze. Exuberance dissolved into sudden silence.

  “He never graduated,” said the lady with the pageboy picture, “Remember? So he really shouldn’t be included.”

  “Why didn’t he graduate?” I asked.

  “He died,” Mike admitted uncomfortably.

  “We assume he died,” corrected Chip.

  “Everyone assumes he died,” said Mike, “but I wish we knew for sure. It’s tough not knowing. Every time the evening news airs a story about a backcountry hiker in Maine tripping over a decomposed body in the woods, I always wonder if it could be Bobby’s remains.”

  Chip shook his head. “Poor bastard. I’ve often thought about how much he missed in life—marriage, kids, Super Bowl I—”

  “Vietnam,” said Mike.

  “Colonoscopies,” added Chip.

  “Has anyone seen my husband?” asked the lady with the tight perm as she surveyed the near-empty parking lot.

  “What does he look like?” asked Mike.

  “He has hair. Does that narrow it down enough for you?”

  The sound of screeching tires and blaring horns suddenly filled the air. I fired a glance toward the main street, my heart stopping in my chest as I replayed an image of Nana sprinting in front of Bernice to be first out of the parking lot.

  “What do you suppose all that ruckus is about?” asked Mary Lou.

  Shouts. Echoing cries of distress. A cacophony of car horns.

  “S’cuse me.” Overwhelmed by a surge of panic, I raced toward the street as if I were wearing tennis shoes instead of leather ankle boots with four-inch heels. Traffic had slowed to a standstill.

  Drivers were stepping out of their cars and rubbernecking to identify the cause of the holdup. Turning the corner, I saw an ever-widening circle of pedestrians gathered on the sidewalk, their eyes riveted on the street.

  Oh, God.

  What if my guys had been texting each other while they were crossing the street? What if—

  I saw legions of tourists on the perimeter of the crowd, but no Nana, no Tilly, no George.

  Oh, God!

  Spying a familiar face, I ran toward him. “Do you know what happened?” I asked Pete Finnegan.

  He regarded me, stone-faced. “Dunno.”

  I stood on my tiptoes, unable to see over the bystanders’ heads, but I wasn’t about to let that stop me. Squeezing around a baby carriage, I created a tiny opening and excused my way through the crowd until I reached the curb, where I stared in numb horror at the scene before me.

  The tortured wreck of a bicycle lay on its side, surrounded by loose Brussels sprouts, a smattering of broken eggs, and a woman’s walking shoe. The cyclist was curled in a fetal position nearby, his trousers ripped, his face and hands bloody, being attended by several people who were yelling desperately into cellphones.

  A dozen feet away, in a swirl of diesel and exhaust fumes, a woman in a pea-green blazer with jumbo shoulder pads lay facedown on the pavement, seemingly unaware of both the foul air and the people who were hovering over her. Her legs were twisted into impossible angles. Her shoeless foot hung limply from her ankle. She neither coughed, nor groaned, nor moved.

  She was still. Absolutely still.

  “I know that woman!” I cried, hoping that someone who spoke English would understand me. “Her name is Charlotte.”

  The cyclist fought to sit upright. Propping his elbows on his bent knees, he braced his head in his hands and threw an anguished look at Charlotte’s lifeless body. He let out a tormented sob, then wailed something in a language I couldn’t understand.

  It was gut wrenching. The poor man was so beside himself with grief that I felt guilty bearing witness to his heartache. I blinked away tears as I turned to the woman standing beside me. “Do you know what he’s saying?”

  “Ja. He says, ‘Damn these tourists. They’re going to be the death of me.’”

  Four

  If the cellphone reception in our Amsterdam hotel lobby had been subpar, my conversation with Etienne might have been reduced to a few minutes of frustrating static, but aided by a profusion of cell towers in the area, I was able to recount the tale of our most recent tribulation with landline clarity.

  “So the bus driver dropped us off at our hotel about a half hour ago, and we’re supposed to leave again in twenty minutes for a dinner cruise on the canal. Not that anyone can think about food right now. But our driver informed us, and I quote, that ‘the show must go on.’ Why are Europeans so fond of American clichés? Don’t they have any of their own?”

  I waited a beat for him to answer. When he didn’t, I figured the call had been dropped despite the good reception. “Hello? Etienne? Are you there?”

  “Your
tour director is dead?”

  I winced. This wasn’t exactly the kind of event we could highlight in our travel brochure. “She warned us about the bicycles, but she apparently forgot to heed her own warning.”

  “Your tour is one day old, and already you’ve transported a body to the morgue?”

  “C’mon, sweetie. You’ve visited Holland. You know what bicycle traffic is like around here. An accident like that could happen to anyone.” I paused. “I guess.”

  He muttered something in French, or Swiss-German, or Italian. I couldn’t tell which.

  “Here’s the thing,” I explained. “Charlotte was a terrible tour director. No one liked her. Actually, that’s an understatement. Everyone hated her. She was controlling, and petulant, and treated us like children.”

  “So you think the accident happened on purpose?”

  “You bet I do.” Etienne had hung up his Swiss police inspector’s badge only a short time ago, so his law enforcement genes were still easily stimulated.

  “Did any eyewitnesses step forward?”

  I cupped my hand around my mouth and lowered my voice. “That’s the really weird thing. The sidewalk was absolutely choked with tourists, but not one person claimed to have seen anything. How unbelievable is that?”

  “Not as unbelievable as you might think, bella.”

  The lobby elevator dinged open to reveal the entire Iowa contingent staring mindlessly at their cellphones, heads down, shoulders hunched, and thumbs flying.

  “Any number of crimes can be committed in crowds where people are preoccupied with window shopping, talking on cellphones, listening to iPods, text messaging. We’re allowing crimes to happen in plain sight because we’re no longer aware of our surroundings. Too many other distractions vying for our attention.”

  I rolled my eyes as the elevator door slid shut with my guys still crammed inside. “Ya think?”

  “Do you know if the police are continuing to investigate the incident?”

  “According to the woman who was translating the blow-by-blow for me, the bicyclist involved in the accident swore that Charlotte stumbled into the street right in front of him.” The indicator needle over the elevator drifted to the first floor, second floor, third floor … “The police discovered a broken paving stone near the curb, so they put two and two together and decided that she probably tripped over it, stumbled off the curb, and never saw what hit her. Nice, neat, and tidy.”

  “A reasonable explanation.”

  “Not if you consider the ill will she’d stirred up with the guests. She’d already had one serious run-in with a grouchy guy from Maine who just happened to be in the vicinity when she took her spill. He conveniently disappeared after the police arrived, but I wouldn’t mind getting him alone so I could ask him a few questions. The bicyclist might have thought Charlotte stumbled into the street, but how do we know she wasn’t pushed?”

  “By the grouchy guy from Maine?”

  “Or by some of the other Mainers. They’re all old high school classmates, so they could be covering up for each other.”

  “Do you think they’re so fond of each other as to risk becoming accessories to a crime?”

  I gnawed my lip as I watched the indicator needle glide back toward the first-floor lobby. “I don’t actually know that any of them like each other. In fact, I think the opposite is true. A few of them really despise each other. Or at least, they used to. Popular kids versus nerds and wallflowers. Bruised feelings. Emotional scarring. Youthful insecurities. The whole nine yards.”

  “I have another call coming in on line one, Emily. Could I trouble you to hold for a moment? I think it’s important.”

  Yeah, but … my call was important, too, wasn’t it?

  The elevator dinged open again.

  “This is the lobby, you morons! Are you going to get off this time?”

  “You’re standing on my foot!” snapped Margi.

  “I can’t move until Bernice moves,” whined Helen.

  “Can anyone see Marion?” George asked desperately.

  They were jammed in the car like college kids in a VW Beetle, hips bumping and arms tangling into knots as they struggled to squeeze through the door at the same time.

  “Press the button to keep the door open!” yelled Alice.

  “I can’t see the selector panel,” fussed Tilly.

  “That’s ’cuz Dick’s stomach is squashed against it,” cried Nana.

  Osmond’s voice rose to a fever pitch. “Well, yank him outta there before his stomach hits the button for the fourth floor again.”

  Amid a cacophony of frustrated grunts and grumbles, Dick got catapulted out the door and into the lobby. With the human log jam broken, everyone else staggered into the lobby behind him, massaging the kinks out of their necks and shoulders like the survivors of a train wreck. I shook my head, wondering if I should declare their phones a health hazard and demand they hand them over to me. One inattentive step in Amsterdam and splat! They’d either be bobbing in a murky canal with the rest of the swill or flattened on the pavement like Charlotte. But they’d never give them up willingly.

  As I watched them bend their heads over their phones again, I made up my mind. If they were to survive Holland, they needed to get rid of the things. I could convince them. I knew I could.

  I just had to figure out how.

  “Sorry, bella.” Etienne came back on the line. “That was your mother.”

  “You ditched me for my mother?”

  “She needed to tell me what time she and your father are picking me up in the morning.”

  Alarm bells began ringing inside my head. “You’re going someplace with Mom and Dad?”

  “Fishing,” he said in a pained voice. “In the wilds of Minnesota. Away from Main Street, cable television, and cellphone towers.”

  “Fishing?” I paused. “Why?”

  “Because your mother set off the sprinkler system when she flambéed lunch for me in the office yesterday, so while the cleaning crew squeegees the water out of the carpet, I’m going fishing with your parents, at their insistence, to help me cope with the stress of the situation.”

  I sat frozen in place, my stomach sliding to my knees. The sprinkler system? “How much damage did—”

  “Another call coming in, Emily. Forgive me.”

  Outside, our tour bus pulled up by the revolving door at the entrance to the hotel, its engine roaring powerfully enough to rattle the window glass. My guys, however, remained in cellphone comas until they noticed a steady stream of Mainers meandering into the lobby from the stairwell, and then they pounced, approaching the newcomers, engaging them in conversation, acting unnaturally friendly.

  Whoa. This was a little weird. My guys never volunteered to break the ice, so what was up with all the spontaneous schmoozing?

  “I’m back,” said Etienne, “but I can’t talk. Our insurance adjustor is on the other line. But tell me quickly. What are the Passages people doing about your tour director issue?”

  “The company is sending us a replacement. We’re expecting him to arrive either late this evening or early tomorrow morning. He’s on holiday at the moment, so he probably won’t be too happy about having his vacation interrupted. Keep your fingers crossed that he’s not another Charlotte. I don’t think any of us could handle an instant replay of that fiasco.”

  “Promise me you’ll contact the authorities if the man from Maine gives you reason to suspect him of something untoward.”

  “I promise.”

  He sighed. “I miss you, bella.”

  “I miss you more.”

  “I’ll call you the minute I return to civilization.”

  “You better! Happy fishing. I love you.” I disconnected.

  Fishing? Etienne? I shook my head. This could turn out to be an even bigger disaster than the Hindenburg.

  “Emilyyyyyyy!”

  I looked up at a woman so tall, she could have played the lead

  role in Attack of the 50 Foot
Woman. Her hair was long and glossy—

  the kind that men imagine seeing fanned over a satin bed pillow. Her complexion was flawless, her makeup so artfully applied that her face could have hung in the Louvre. She was dressed in a leather skirt the size of a man’s handkerchief and a cropped leopard-print jacket that hugged her curves like plastic wrap. A gargantuan designer bag hung over her shoulder—metallic bronze, to match the stiletto-heeled boots that caressed her legs all the way to her thighs. Her name was Jackie Thum. Before she’d acquired breasts and a passion for handbags the size of Delaware, she’d been a guy named Jack Potter, and I’d been married to him.

  “Give me a hug!” she squealed, yanking me off the sofa-bench and hoisting me into her arms like a weightlifter executing the clean and jerk. “I thought we’d never get here!”

  “Where’ve you … been?” I choked out as she bear-hugged the air out of me.

  “Sitting in Kennedy Airport, waiting for the weather to clear.” She set me back on my feet and boxed my shoulders to straighten the lines of my jacket. “I thought we’d never get out of there. And of course, no one met us at the airport this morning, so we had to hire a taxi. Do you know why the Dutch ride bicycles, Emily?”

  “I think it’s be—”

  “Because they can’t afford to pay freaking cab fare. I about blew my whole budget to get to the hotel, only to discover that the tour bus had already left for the day. If we’d known you guys were going to skip out without us, we’d have walked from the airport and saved ourselves forty Euros. So we had to wander the streets of Amsterdam by ourselves, sampling the local pastry products.”

  I scanned the lobby in search of a face. “You keep saying, ‘we.’ Is Tom here with you?” Following my annulment and her gender reassignment surgery, Jackie had moved to upstate New York, where she married a New Age hair stylist who was fast becoming an industry phenomenon despite one prominent distinction.

  He wasn’t gay.

  “Tom is in Binghamton,” she said in a breathy voice, her eyes twinkling with excitement. “I brought someone else.” She fisted her hand on her hip and perused the lobby. “If I can find her.”