Dutch Me Deadly (12 page)

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 the 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 provide 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?”

“I’m trying to figure out how Pete might know things that no one realizes he knows, because he claims he’s chock full of secrets that could ruin everyone.”

“Really?” He sounded more amused than skeptical.

“Really.”

“He’s full of it.”

“I have no idea if he is or not, but he sure sounded convinced.”

He looked over his shoulder to find the video on the monitor still playing and the Mainers nowhere in sight. “Where’d everyone go?”

“Next room.” I nodded toward the front of the warehouse, taking note that my guys were still huddled in the corner.

“Gotta abandon you, Emily. Sorry. But I want to catch up with the group before they get too far ahead. I’m not about to let Mary Lou get separated from me again, whether we’re speaking to each other or not.”

“No problem.” As he headed off in the opposite direction, I added a parting shot. “If you run across any skeletons in your closet, let me know, okay?”

“You got it.” But I knew he wouldn’t. He’d looked so uneasy when we were discussing Pete that I found it a bit unsettling. Maybe I shouldn’t have revealed so much to him, but Mike was so nice, he couldn’t be hiding a ragbag of dark secrets, could he?

“Are we ready to move on to the next room?” I asked the gang as I paused by the huddle.

“Emily will know,” asserted Helen.

“Don’t count on it,” said Bernice.

“Emily will know what?” I inquired.

Helen let out a frustrated sigh. “We’ve been going over and over this and we can’t agree. What was Dick wearing last night?”

“It’s question number four on the form,” Grace added helpfully.

I gave them a blank look. “Uhh—”

“What’d I tell you,” droned Bernice.

“That’s a toughie,” I admitted, unable to recall even seeing Dick Teig last night. “Did any of you take a picture of him?”

“I tried,” said Tilly. “When we were in the coffeeshop. With my phone. But I ended up calling a shaman in New Guinea instead.”

“Anyone else take a picture?”

“I wanted to,” said George, “but the buttons on my keypad kept moving around.”

“Nana?” I eyed her expectantly. She was such a photo hound, she had to have taken pictures last night.

She shook her head. “I couldn’t snap the shutter, dear. It was too embarrassin’.”

“Okay, no pictures, but you know for sure he was wearing a
shirt,
slacks, and jacket. Can you remember the color of the jacket?”

“Gray,” said Alice.

“Green,” said George.

“Aha!” I regarded Helen hopefully. “Does Dick own a sage colored jacket?”

Her eyes crinkled at the corners as she pondered the question. “The grandkids bought him a jacket for Christmas a few years back, but I don’t think it was sage. It was more like the color of baby asparagus when you overcook it in the microwave.”

“Black?” asked Margi.

“Morons!” snapped Bernice. “His jacket is denim with a fleece collar that makes him look like he has a flock of sheep living under his chins. What’s wrong with you people? Are you all blind?”

They obviously were last night. “I tell you what,” I intervened, “why don’t you skip this question for now and go back to it later?”

“Am I allowed to do that?” asked Helen.

“You bet. In fact, answering all the other questions might help jog your memory with these earlier ones.”

“I doubt it,” she fretted.

“Unh-unh-unh.” I wagged my finger. “Don’t you dare sell yourself short. Once you put your mind to it, I suspect you’ll be able to remember every last detail of what Dick was wearing last night.”

“I can’t honestly say as I remember the last time I really looked at Dick.” She let out a wistful sigh. “Is his head still big as an inflatable pumpkin?”

“More like an inflatable planet,” said Bernice.

She set a placating hand on my arm. “Maybe no one’s explained this to you, Emily, but when you’ve been married as long as Dick and I have, you notice certain changes in your relationship. Like, you don’t actually see each other anymore. You already know what each other looks like, so what’s the point? Dick could hang around the house in a ruffled tutu, and I could run errands in a sausage casing, and the truth is, neither one of us would probably notice.”

“Oh.” I stared dumbly, a little taken aback. Is this how Etienne and I would end up in a few years? So bored with each other’s company that we’d be blind to each other’s fatal clothing choices?

“Emily and her young man don’t gotta worry about that for another fifty years,” Nana spoke up, “which is about how long it’s gonna take us to fill out these forms if we keep dillydallyin’.”

Nods. Grunts of agreement.

“Before you get back to work,” I broke in as Helen smoothed the folds out of her papers, “please don’t spend all your time filling out forms. We only have two hours, so if you want to see the whole house, you have to get moving. Okay?”

More nods.

“I’m going to continue the tour, so I’ll be on the first floor if you need me.”

“I thought we were
on
the first floor,” said Margi.

“We’re on the ground floor,” explained Tilly. “The first floor is one level up. Europeans number their floors differently.”

“But …” Margi regarded the ceiling in confusion. “I thought we were
on
the first floor.”

“Question number five,” Helen read in a rush of words. ‘“Does the subject in question have any distinguishing features that would make him stand out in a crowd?’”