Dutch Me Deadly

“See what I mean?” I urged. “Why is she getting on Margi’s case? Margi didn’t say a word.”

Nana glanced across the aisle to where Margi was sitting. “Yes, she did, dear. See there? She’s textin’. Seein’s how you’ve been so busy with your new husband and buildin’ your house, maybe you haven’t heard about it. It’s all the rage.”

“You can’t be serious. How can they be texting?”

“These new phones work anywhere in the world, Emily. That’s why they call ’em global smartphones. They got Web access, global positionin’, e-mail with unlimited accounts, textin’, HD video, Wi-Fi, 5X optical zoom, Hulu, Netflix, and a bunch of other stuff I haven’t figured out yet. They’re like the Swiss Army knife of cellphones. We all bought one. The nice folks at Pills Etcetera give us a volume discount. And they come in several attractive colors.”

This was terrible! They’d be texting absurd messages to each other, and I’d have no idea what they were saying or how to fix it.

I pondered that for a half-second before smiling.

On the bright side, they’d be texting absurd messages to each other, and I’d have no idea what they were saying or how to fix it!

“Okay, so why is Bernice talking instead of texting?”

“She’s got arthritis in both thumbs, dear, so she don’t type real good. Sometimes all she ends up sendin’ are punctuation marks and vowels, which don’t make no sense to no one. We kinda get the gist of the question marks, but the semicolons has got us all buffaloed.”

Nana was born in Brainerd, Minnesota, during the era of the Model T Ford. She won the lottery on the same day Grampa’s ice shanty collapsed on top of him, then moved to Windsor City with her millions to be closer to family. She lives in an upscale retirement village that survived the tornado, bankrolled the construction of the senior center water park and reconstruction of Holy Redeemer Church with her investment earnings, and never met a computer she couldn’t hack into. She stands four feet ten inches tall, is built like a bullet, and lives in defiance of my mother, who is always trying to manage her life. Her name is Marion Sippel, and even though she boasts only an eighth-grade education, she’s the smartest person I know.

“Attention, please! May I have your attention?” Our tour director was a middle-aged Kansan named Charlotte whose round little face was as soft and dimpled as the rest of her. Standing in the front of the bus, in a pea-green Passages Tours blazer with jumbo shoulder pads, she clapped her hands in snappy bursts loud enough to wake even the guests who’d turned off their hearing aids. “Can the boys and gir—” Cutting herself off sharply, she pulled a face and began again. “Can the people in the rear of the bus hear me?”

“You bet!” yelled Dick Teig from the seat behind me.

My guys always sat at the back of the bus. It’s not that they’re thrilled to pass up front seats with stunning vistas and unobstructed views; it’s just that when the roads get bumpy, or their water pills kick in unexpectedly, they prefer to be in the “good” seats—the ones strategically located near the bus’s only restroom.

“If you can all hear me, I’ll ask you to look out the windows on the side of the bus where the exit doors are.”

“The right side?” Dick Stolee threw out, obviously worried that the bus might have spontaneously redesigned itself since we’d boarded.

“Right side! Yes!” She clapped enthusiastically. “Who guessed that correctly? Raise your smart little hand so I can see you.”

Two rows in front of me, Dick Stolee slunk down in his seat, taking his smart little hand with him.

“I’m quite sure it was someone in the back. Don’t be afraid to speak up. Do we have a bashful Bobby sitting by the little boys’ room?”

At the sound of muted tinging, Nana unsnapped her phone from her pocketbook and checked the display screen. “It’s a Tweet from George.”

George Farkas had been Nana’s main squeeze since our trip to Ireland, where he had shyly dazzled her with his bald head, unerring sense of direction, and versatile wooden leg. He was now an indispensable part of her life, filling the hole that Grampa’s passing had left in her heart.

“George knows how to Twitter?” I asked, mortified that I was being shown up by eighty-year-olds wielding cut-rate electronic devices.

“He says sendin’ Tweets is like sneakin’ notes in class, only without the paper. George was a real wildman in his grade school days.”

“Did he send you a love note?” I teased as she read the message.

“Nope. He’s tryin’ to guess what Charlotte was before she become a tour director.”

“Nursery school teacher,” I whispered. “Or jail warden.”

As a groundswell of whispers rippled through the bus, Charlotte clapped her hands to restore quiet. “Naugh- ty, naugh-ty,” she scolded, wagging a finger at us. “Only one person at a time is allowed to talk. That’s the golden rule, and I expect you nice boys and—you nice people to follow it.”

Uh-oh. This was getting serious. We were apparently set to travel through Holland by way of Sesame Street. I wasn’t sure how my group was going to feel about being treated like kindergarteners, but I had a suspicion they weren’t going to be too happy.

Ting. Ting. Ting. Ting.

“This Charlotte’s got a real knack for rubbin’ folks the wrong way,” Nana whispered as she opened a sudden flood of incoming messages.

“Now,” Charlotte continued, “take a little peek at the embankment flanking the right side of the road. That’s one of the many dikes that was built to hold back the waters of the South Sea, or Zuiderzee as the Dutch called it, during the time of the Dutch East India Company.”

The embankment was gently sloped and grass-covered and not at all what I’d imagined a dike to look like. It looked more like Civil War earthworks, or an Indian burial mound, which completely contradicted my childhood vision of a brick dam towering over a little Dutch boy who was using his thumb to plug a leak.

“That doggone pesky South Sea flooded the lowlands for centuries, causing tens of thousands of deaths, but in 1932 Dutch engineers cut off its open link to the North Sea by building an enclosure dam. They drained the salty Zuiderzee and divided it into two freshwater lakes, the IJsselmeer and the Markermeer, and save for the tragic North Atlantic storm surge in 1953 that killed eighteen hundred people, Holland has been remarkably flood free.”

“How come I’m seeing what looks like ships’ masts poking above that embankment?” a woman called out.

“Because on the other side of the dike, there’s a marina,” said Charlotte.

“A marina?” The woman sounded skeptical. “You mean there’s water on the other side of that mound?”

Charlotte’s eyebrows flew up like flustered pigeons. “There’s a lake on the other side. Haven’t you heard anything I’ve said?”

“Does that embankment on the right side of the bus have some significance?” Dick Teig shouted out.

“It’s a dike!” Charlotte shrieked, her voice ripping through the bus like cannon fire.

Margi looked up from her phone. “There’s a dike here someplace?”

“Not to alarm anyone,” Dick Stolee cautioned, “but if the lake is up there, and the road is down here, do you know what that means?”

“There’s a lake?” Margi asked, swiveling her head left and right.

“It means the road is below sea level,” said Tilly Hovick. Tilly was a retired anthropology professor with so much knowledge crammed into her head that she didn’t need to use Google as her homepage.

Helen Teig gasped. “We’re below sea level? Isn’t that dangerous? What if the dike breaks?”

Bernice let out a sinister cackle. “Then you better grab your water wings.”

“Are they stored in the luggage racks?” Margi asked as she eyed the overhead compartments. “Do you think they’re sized? If they are, I’ll need a medium, unless they run small, in which case I’ll need a large. I hope they’re not one-size-fits-all. That’s such a crock. How can something that’s big enough to fit over Dick Teig’s head possibly be small enough to fit the rest of—”

“QUIET!”

Tongues stilled. Muscles locked. Thumbs froze.