Dutch Me Deadly

“‘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?”