Dutch Me Deadly

“Good enough?”

The door burst open. Tilly and Alice scuttled inside, pulling up short when they spied Nana. “Found you!” Tilly said breathlessly. “They’re stuck on question one-thirty-two. ‘If the subject could come back to earth as a vegetable, what would it be?’”

“Back to earth from where?” asked Nana.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Alice. “The Dicks don’t like vegetables.”

I hung my head. Oh, God.

“This is real bad timin’, girls,” Nana said apologetically. “Emily was about to tell me somethin’ I gotta keep under my hat.”

Tilly regarded me with doe eyes. “I’m so sorry, Emily. Alice and I would be happy to leave.”

Alice nodded agreement. “If we go now, we might even catch the tail end of the debate.”

“Debate?” I asked.

Tilly’s voice crackled with self-restraint. “Helen said she could picture Dick coming back as a tomato, but Bernice decreed that he’d have to come back as something else, because a tomato isn’t a vegetable. It’s a fruit.”

“So Osmond is compiling a list of every fruit and vegetable known to man so the girls can see what their options are.” Alice sighed. “And naturally, there’s been some disagreement. Breadfruit was particularly contentious.”

“Well, don’t go back without armin’ yourselves first,” instructed Nana as she mined the contents of her pocketbook. “Where’d I put them things? They’ll help you to end things real quick.”

“Nana!” I started to hyperventilate as I imagined my grandmother being hauled off to jail on weapons charges. “Oh, my God. What are you packing?”

She opened her palm. “Earplugs.”

Hearing a sudden chorus of voices in the hall, I fired a glance at the door just as Margi came barreling through. “Told you so,” she called back into the hall. “They’re all holed up in the potty.”

Helen and Grace rushed into the room as if their hair were on fire.

“Wally wants everyone back in the cafeteria,” snapped Helen in her drill sergeant’s voice. “And you’re already late, so move it.”

“He has a big announcement,” said Grace.

Unh-oh. Sounded as if he was going to break the news about Paula.

Beads of sweat started popping up at my hairline. I needed to stay close to Helen and Grace. Lord, this was going to be brutal on them.

“I wonder what all the intrigue is about?” tittered Margi. “Do you think he’s going to change the itinerary again?”

Nana gave a little suck on her dentures. “If you was to ask me, I’d say he probably wants to tell us about that poor Peavey woman. I suspect them folks from Maine are gonna be real devastated when they find out.”

What? I blinked dumbly. “You know? But—you can’t know. No one knows! How do you know?”

“About the Peavey woman?” asked Nana.

“Yes, about the Peavey woman.”

“Bernice told us,” said Margi.

My jaw dropped like an anvil. “How does Bernice know? No one knows. She can’t possibly know!”

“She knows,” said Nana.

“But—” I felt my throat constrict as I studied Helen and Grace. I hurried over to them, blubbering words of encouragement and consolation. “Please don’t jump to the conclusion that the boys are going to suffer the same fate as Paula. I promise you, they’re not dead. They’ll show up. I guarantee it. They’re alive, and well, and probably just made a wrong turn somewhere. In fact, I bet they’re back at the hotel even as we speak.”

“I hope not,” said Helen. “If they stay lost just a little longer, we’ll have a shot at finishing these stupid questionnaires.”

I frowned as she scooted everyone out the door.

What?

Nana crept back into the restroom and shuffled over to me. “Sorry about the interruption, dear. I thought they was never gonna leave. Now, what was it you wanted to tell me?”

Fourteen

“Emily don’t know nuthin’ about text messagin’, so we’re gonna have to vote by secret ballot.”

Groans. Whines. Eye rolling.

I regarded the gang in exasperation. “Hey, I admit it. I’m electronically challenged, but in fifty years, when everyone else’s thumbs are paralyzed with arthritis, I’ll be seen as a visionary. You’ll see. The proof will be in the pudding.”

Margi raised her hand, her face alit with anticipation. “Are we having dessert?”

The day had been so emotionally draining, we’d decided to hang up our walking shoes and eat dinner in the hotel dining room rather than hoof around Amsterdam, trying to find a fancy restaurant. I requested a group meeting in my room afterward, so we were all present, except for Jackie and Beth Ann, who’d stopped for an after-dinner drink in the lounge. I’d invited Wally, too, but having just returned from the police station, where he’d delivered the completed questionnaires and had the Dicks declared officially missing, he said he needed to spend the evening with his laptop.

“I’ll get right to the point,” I began. “I need your help.”

They came to attention like eager pups, eyes forward, ears perked, tongues practically hanging out of their mouths.

“I’m hoping if I tell you what I’ve learned in the last two days, you might be able to see something I’m missing. I know accidents happen all the time, but if you ask me, three fatal accidents in two days smash the law of averages.”

“Three?” argued Bernice. “How about five? Have you forgotten the Dicks? You’re all just too lily-livered to talk about them.”

Silence ensued, followed by a collective intake of breath that sucked all the air from the room. Grace snatched up Tilly’s walking stick and brandished the rubber end cap at Bernice’s chest. “One more comment like that, Bernice Zwerg, and you’ll be looking at a major time-out in the potty, minus your hearing aid batteries. And we won’t need to vote on it.”

“Grace’s edict carries by unanimous consent,” declared Osmond. “Put a lid on it, Bernice.”

I leveled a piercing look at her. “And while we’re on the subject of hearing aids, would you like to tell me how you heard about Paula’s death before Wally announced it to everyone in the cafeteria?”

She folded her arms across her chest and tucked in her lips. “No can do. I plead the fifth.”

“Don’t pay Bernice no nevermind,” Nana urged. “Go on with what you was gonna tell us, dear.”

After providing them with a brief primer on who was who in the Maine contingent, I told them everything I’d learned over the last two days, starting with Paula Peavey’s fondness for humiliating people and Pete Finnegan’s offer to neutralize her. I recounted my dinner on the canal cruise, where Gary Bouchard had accused Ricky Hennessy of ruining his prospects for a basketball scholarship, where it became obvious that both Gary and Pete had benefited from the death of a fellow classmate, and where I’d learned just how mercilessly the people at my table had mocked Laura LaPierre. I pointed out how both Charlotte and Paula had crossed Pete and ended up dead, and how Pete had threatened to ruin all his classmates by revealing secrets he’d known about them for years. “But before he can make good on his threat, he ends up dead himself.”

“Did anyone from Maine know Pete was a ticking time bomb?” asked Tilly.

“Mike McManus,” I said, then recalling the scene outside the secret annex, “and Peewee, I think.”

“Pushing Pete down the stairs would have been a pretty convenient way to shut him up,” said George. “You