Dutch Me Deadly

by Maddy Hunter

  “No problem.” I returned the hug, flattered that she appreciated my efforts so much. “I promise you, we’ll find the boys if it’s the last thing we do.”

  Helen regarded me, deadpan. “She’s not patting you on the back. She’s talking about her eyes. This is the first thing she’s been able to read since last night.”

  Wally called out final instructions as we shuffled toward the exits. “Mind the traffic when you cross the street, people. We have reserved tickets, so we need to congregate outside number one-six-seven Prinsengracht and enter the museum as a group. Any more questions?”

  He paused. “Okay, take note of the church on the corner as you pass by, because it’s where Rembrandt was buried in 1669. It’s called the Westerkerk and was built in 1620 as part of the Canal-Ring development. It’s famous for its fifty bell carillon, which plays Dutch folksongs for sixty seconds every fifteen minutes, twenty-four hours a day. If any of you have read Anne Frank’s diary, you’ll recall she mentions the bells of the Westerkerk by name.”

  I exited through the side door, then corralled my people and herded them toward the traffic light at the corner. “Watch out for the trams,” I cautioned as we crossed to the opposite side. “And bicycles!”

  Prinsengracht was a picturesque canal street with brick pavers, Victorian street lights, shade trees, park benches, and bicycles cluttered against every rail and railing like discarded erector sets. Watercraft motored up and down the canal, filling the air with sounds reminiscent of buzz saws. Houseboats as long as semitrucks lined the opposite side of the waterway, while glass-topped tour boats glided past them, their engines putt-putting along with a muted hum. As we hiked past the church, all fifty bells began ringing in the tower above us, marking the quarter hour with a rousing melody that echoed over the rooftops. The carillon smacked of Old World quaintness and charm, but I wasn’t sure how charming the locals found it at two o’clock in the morning. Then again, maybe the peel of bells became such an ordinary part of their lives, they simply stopped noticing it.

  The reunion group was ahead of us, clumped in a Greek phalanx kind of formation that walled them off from nosy outsiders, like me, who wanted to pepper them with bothersome questions. Is this how they protected the secrets Pete accused them of hiding? By closing ranks? Were their purported secrets relevant to Paula’s drowning? Or were Pete’s accusations the rants of an antisocial genius who’d come unhinged and was trying to cover up his own involvement in the deaths of two women?

  I was sure of only one thing: My instincts told me that someone in the group was a cold-blooded murderer with a deadly axe to grind, and if we didn’t nab him soon, he could very well kill again. But how could I sniff anyone out with all my potential suspects giving me the cold shoulder? If I sent them running in the opposite direction, how would I even get close enough to overhear a conversation or ask a question?

  “Emily, will you stop walking so fast?”

  I looked over my shoulder, a smile forming on my lips. Bingo.

  Jackie and Beth Ann jogged toward me, legs pumping and handbags flopping. “You want to hear the latest?” Jackie asked, wheezing to catch her breath. “I just gave Dietger a piece of my mind for stranding us in the Red Light District last night, and you know what he had the nerve to say?” She nodded to Beth Ann. “Go ahead. Tell her.”

  Beth Ann whipped her notebook out of her coat pocket. “He responded, and I quote—‘You want to go to bed with me?’”

  I let out a snarky laugh. “I think that must be his standard line with all the girls.”

  Beth Ann’s face fell. “How come he hasn’t tried it on me?”

  “He will,” I assured her. “Give him a little time. So what was your comeback?”

  Jackie swept her hand toward Beth Ann in a little ruffles and flourishes gesture. “‘Honey,’” Beth Ann recited, “‘you wouldn’t be able to keep up with me.’”

  “Brilliant!” I nodded my approval. “Clever, succinct, with just the right amount of attitude.” I wish I’d thought of it first.

  Beth Ann regarded her mentor with adoring eyes. “Every off-the-cuff remark from Jackie’s mouth is so brilliant, I’m encouraging her to collate them into a book. I’ve even thought of a title. Off-the-Cuff. Don’t you think publishers would lap it up? I could record everything she says, and we could edit it together. It could be like a witty compendium of everyday proverbs for Generation Xers.”

  Jackie patted the top of Beth Ann’s head. “Not to toot my own horn, Emily, but my expert coaching has allowed Beth Ann to develop the confidence she needs to open up her mind to great new ideas. Her head is just exploding with them.”

  It suddenly occurred to me that one of the great ideas exploding in Beth Ann’s head might be to co-publish a book riding Jackie’s coattails. If she had a hidden agenda to become a writer, this would certainly get her foot in the publishing door. She could skip all the preliminary hardships that newbie writers experience and be granted an instant “in.” But this was Jackie’s affair, not mine. In the meantime—

  I sidled a glance left and right, and seeing that the coast was clear, motioned Jackie and Beth Ann closer. “I need your help.”

  “Yes!” Jackie tossed her head back and executed a celebratory shimmy that caused all her oversized jewelry to jingle like Christmas bells. “What did I tell you?” she said to Beth Ann. “She always needs help. She just hates to admit it.” She patted her metallic bag. “Can I break out the wigs? I just happen to have stashed a couple in my bag.”

  “I think you can do this without wigs.”

  “Aw, c’mon.” Out went her bottom lip. “But they’re so cute.” She yanked a mop of luxurious blonde hair out of her bag and gave it a skillful shake, allowing the curls to tumble softly into place.

  “Oh, my.” If the temperature hadn’t been so cool, Beth Ann would have melted all over the sidewalk. “Can I wear that one?”

  “You don’t need wigs,” I repeated.

  She touched the fake hair almost reverently. “Okay, but when we do need to wear them, can I wear this one?”

  “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather be a redhead?” asked Jackie as she pulled out a second selection. “With your coloring you could do red quite—”

  “Stoppit!” I hissed. “Do you want to help me or not?”

  After a long-suffering eye roll, Jackie stuffed the wigs back in her bag. “Okay. Shoot.”

  “Thank you. Here’s the deal. The folks from Maine don’t seem willing to talk to me anymore, so—”

  “You could try being a little less abrupt,” sniped Jackie. “That might help.”

  “So”—I dismissed her with an ornery look—“I’d like the two of you to mingle as much as you can, chat them up, and eavesdrop on their conversations as much as you can without being too obvious.”

  “What are we supposed to be listening for?” asked Beth Ann.

  “Any mention of last night, especially anything related to something eventful that might have happened on their walk back to the hotel.”

  “What kind of event are you talking about?” Jackie asked in a coy voice.

  I arched my brow. “If I knew that, I probably wouldn’t need your help.”

  “Oh, my God!” she clapped her hand over her mouth. “Someone whacked Paula Peavey.”

  My mouth fell open. “How—?”

  “Don’t deny it. If Paula were alive, she’d be here today, making everyone’s life as miserable as possible. I needed about a minute to figure that out about her. She’s dead, isn’t she?”

  “I—”

  “So who’s our prime suspect?” she urged. “Besides everyone.”

  Wow. Jack really did boost his brain power when he had his plumbing replaced. “You can’t tell anyone,” I broke down. “Wally wanted to announce it to the whole bus, but he agreed to wait until after our tour to give the Dicks a little more time to show up. I’m so afraid Helen and Grace are going to freak out when they hear about Paula. They’ll jump to the conclusion that th
e boys have met the same fate, and that’ll be all she wrote. No joke. Stress can be a killer at their age. So you have to give me your word. Not a peep to anyone. Promise?”

  “Promise,” they said in unison, making the appropriate gestures over their hearts and lips.

  “EMILY!”

  I popped my head up to find Wally making furious beckoning motions to us from halfway down the street. He waved several tickets in the air and stabbed his finger at a house. “ARE YOU COMING?”

  “Guess we better go.”

  “So how did Paula die?” Jackie asked me as we sprinted down the sidewalk.

  “She drowned. The police say it was accidental.”

  “I’d sure question that,” said Beth Ann as she kept pace behind us. “If they’d seen her face before she ran away last night, they might not have called it an accident.”

  “Exactly!” I agreed, realizing that Beth Ann’s uterus made her far more perceptive than Wally.

  “They might have called it a suicide.”

  “What?”

  I slowed to a stop as Jackie and Beth jogged ahead.

  Suicide?

  A prickly sensation crawled up my spine.

  Shoot. I hadn’t thought of that.

  Twelve

  By the time I cleared reception and caught up to the rest of the group, they were congregated in a warehouse room with an uneven brick floor—a room, which, according to the posted captions, once served as the spice grinding area for Otto Frank’s meat seasonings company. The Mainers were lumped together, watching a video on a TV monitor, while my guys huddled in a corner, whispering back and forth and shushing each other as if they were in a library. Jackie and Beth Ann posted themselves on either side of the Mainers, trying to look as inconspicuous as the barrels stacked along the wall.

  Looking for a quiet niche where I could collect my thoughts, I wandered toward the rear of the warehouse and poked my head through a door that led into a narrow shed with a slanted roof made entirely of glass. A blaze of sunshine filled the tiny space and spilled back into the grinding area through windows that looked as if they were part of the building’s original outside wall. Without the light from the shed, the grinding room would have been steeped in total blackness, so the skylight made complete sense, despite its being so susceptible to shattering, especially during wartime Holland.

  I loved when things made sense and hated when they didn’t, which was the impulse driving me to reexamine my thinking about Paula Peavey.

  Had she committed suicide? Was it possible her humiliation had been so profound that her only avenue of escape had been to end her own life? And yet, could someone as insensitive as Paula summon the kind of self-reproach it would take to fling herself into a canal? That’s what made no sense. People like Paula caused other people to jump off bridges, not vice versa.

  “You look like you’ve just lost your best friend,” Mike McManus teased as he joined me. “What’s up?”

  “Hey, Mike.” I forced a smile as I wrenched myself back to the present. “Just thinking about how lucky we are not to have lived in Nazi-occupied Europe.”

  “No argument from me there.”

  “So, I see that Mary Lou and Laura made it back to the hotel last night. Thank goodness for that, huh?”

  He lifted his brows slightly. “Yeah, thank goodness, but I’m pretty ticked off about the whole thing.”

  “Did you figure out how you got separated?”

  “Nope, and neither Mary Lou nor Laura want to discuss it. All they’re saying is that they got turned around in the crowd and couldn’t find me anywhere. Guess they never bothered to look on the damn bridge where I stood for three frickin’ hours, looking for them. Would you believe they made it back to the hotel before I did last night? So I blew up in a fit of temper, and now Mary Lou’s not speaking to me. What a great vacation, huh? I’m so glad I came.”

  “Excuse me, Emily.” Grace approached us on tiptoe, questionnaire in hand. “If I could bother you for just a moment.”

  “Problems with the form?” I inquired.

  “And how. I’m having an ethical crisis with question number two.”

  I angled my head to read the line she indicated. “‘What is subject’s hair color?’”

  “That’s the one. What am I supposed to say?”

  “Uh—steel gray? Salt and pepper? Plain old gray?”

  She gnawed her bottom lip like a squirrel gnawing a nut. “Here’s the thing. If I’m going to be absolutely honest, I’d have to list his actual hair color as ‘bald,’ and his fake hair color as gray, but Dick would be mortified if I told the police he’s wearing a toupee. You know how sensitive he is about his hair loss. So should I keep his secret and tell the police he has a thick head of natural hair, or should I spill my guts and admit he’s bald, which will crush his ego if he finds out?”

  “Well …” How did I not see this coming? I could hardly wait until she got to the hard questions. “Having a visual description of Dick will help the police find him. So you need to ask yourself, what’s more likely—that Dick is still wearing his toupee, or that he discarded it?”

  “He better not have discarded it!” Her eyes spat fire. “I could have remodeled my kitchen for what it cost him to buy that thing. It’s real hair! Harvested from virgins living on a mountaintop in some remote part of India and FedExed to Iowa overnight.”

  Well, duh? I didn’t want to point out the obvious, but it wasn’t the hair that was so flipping expensive. It was the shipping.

  “How is his hair attached?” I asked her.

  “To his head.”

  I smiled indulgently. “Do you happen to know how he prevents it from falling off his head?”

  “Glue. Industrial strength. It does for toupees what mortar does for bricks. It’s formulated with some kind of super-duper bonding agent that makes it impervious to blizzards, tornadoes, and hurricane force winds, so once he plasters it on his skull, he knows his hair ain’t going anywhere.”

  “Well, there you go. You’ve answered your own question. If the glue is that strong, his hair is probably still in place, so the answer to question number two would be steel gray.”

  “Right.” Her mouth inched into a relieved smile. “I wonder why I couldn’t figure that out? Thanks, Emily.”

  “You bet.”

  Mike grinned when she’d left. “That was very considerate of you. As a man who boasts an undue vanity about his own hair, I thank you for urging her to keep her husband’s secret. People don’t respect the right of other people to have secrets anymore. They think everyone’s life should be broadcast on YouTube for public viewing.”

  “Dick’s rug really isn’t a secret,” I confessed. “We all know he wears one. We just pretend like we don’t.”

  “So what kind of questionnaire is your friend filling out?”

  After I explained what it was and how it would be used, he grew pensive. “Paula’s missing, too, isn’t she? Did you elect someone to fill one out for her?”

  I blurted the first thing that popped into my head. “Wally’s taking care of that.” But I saw an opening that I couldn’t ignore. “Why? Did you want to volunteer?”

  “Who me? No way. I wouldn’t be able to describe her without having the entire text censored for use of obscenities, not so much for the way she treated me, but for the way she treated everyone else. Most notably my wife.”

  “Seems unimaginable that Paula doesn’t possess even one redeeming quality.”

  He laughed derisively. “Maybe she does. She’s just doing a damned fine job of keeping it a secret.”

  “Secrets seem to be the topic of the day,” I reflected. “When I broached the subject of Charlotte’s accident with Pete Finnegan back at the museum, he suggested I should direct my questions at the people who are the real professionals at covering up the truth.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I suspect he’s referring to all the reunion people, but I was hoping you might be able to pr
ovide a little more insight.”

  “Sounds like he’s calling everyone a liar.”

  “That was my take. But the real question is, what’s he accusing everyone of lying about?”

  He quirked his mouth and shook his head. “Hell if I know.”

  “He hinted that his classmates have been hiding skeletons in their closets for a lot of years. Do you know anything about that?”

  “Sounds like Pete has finally hit the paranoid-schizophrenia button.”

  “I don’t know.” I paused in thought. “I got the impression that whatever he was talking about related back to the incident with Bobby Guerrette. Chip Soucy filled me in on Senior Skip Day and its aftermath, but Pete’s harangue made me think there still might be unresolved issues about Bobby’s disappearance. Are there?”

  His expression morphed from puzzled to wary. “He disappeared without a trace. That was pretty much the end of it.”

  “Chip told me Bobby invited you to hang out with the innies that day, so you were right there in the middle of everything.”

  His eyes grew pained. “My one big event with the in crowd. What a disaster. Look, Emily, I’d really prefer not dredging all that up again. It was bad enough going through it the first time.”

  “But you saw something, didn’t you?”

  Alarm registered on his sun-bronzed face. “What?”

  “Chip said you saw the car that picked Bobby up.”

  “Oh, right. The one that wasn’t white and wasn’t a station wagon. Hennessy got the best look at it. I just kind of caught a glimpse.”

  “And the police never found the car or the driver.”

  He swallowed with such difficulty, his Adam’s apple bobbed in slow motion. “Yeah. No happy ending.”

  “Did the police ever question Pete about the incident?”

  “Not that I recall. He wasn’t there that day, so they had no reason to question him.”

  “But Chip said Pete was the first person in your class to get his driver’s license, so theoretically, he could have driven by the park without your ever seeing him, right?”

  His gaze hardened. “Can I ask what you’re getting at?”