Dutch Me Deadly

to each other?”

I froze in place. “E-mails?”

“Yeah. E-mail accounts are really easy to break into. Mary Lou and Laura reconnected on Facebook right after Laura’s husband passed away, and they began to correspond by e-mail—the usual chitchat about kids and grandkids and a lot of talk about plans for the reunion. They did a lot of reminiscing, too. Mostly about how mean Paula Peavey had been in high school and wondering if she’d dare show up at the reunion.”

But Paula had shown up and, from what I’d seen, had been acting as mean as the teenager she’d once been. Had I missed an angry exchange between the three women? In the Red Light District? After the group had split up? Is that why Mike hadn’t been able to find Mary Lou and Laura that night? Had the two women run into Paula on the way back to the hotel and dealt with her once and for all?

No. I didn’t want to point the finger at Mary Lou and Laura. I liked them too much.

“Excuse me, Emily.” Alice flashed her phone in front of me. “I know I’m supposed to be researching Mike McManus, but I ran across this and thought you might want to see it anyway.” She pressed a button that activated a murky, reddish-yellow image of a sidewalk.

“What am I looking at?” I squinted at the screen.

“Video from our hotel’s surveillance camera on the night Paula Peavey died.”

I stared at her, wide-eyed, my voice dropping to a whisper. “You accessed a surveillance camera? A private surveillance camera that’s probably protected by all kinds of Dutch laws?”

“Oh, sure. It’s a high-tech system, but the software program was really easy to hack into. Your grandmother—”

I slapped my hands over my ears. “I’m not listening. Just play the video. Then erase it!”

I continued looking at the same image on the screen. Sidewalk. Sidewalk. Heavyset man and woman coming into the frame. Walking quickly. Looking over their shoulders as if afraid they were being followed. Pausing. Looking both ways.

I studied the screen more closely. Who was that? The Hennessys? Mindy thrust her arm in the direction from which they’d come. Ricky getting in her face, his body language implying that he was yelling. What was she pointing at? Why was he yelling? Who did they think was following them?

Mindy crying. Ricky yelling some more. Mindy storming out of frame. Ricky pulling something that looked like a scarf out of the pocket of his letter jacket. Ricky rubbing the material against his cheek before crumpling it into a ball. Ricky disappearing from the frame in the direction of the canal. Ricky walking back into frame without the scarf in his hand. Hmm. What had he done? Thrown it into the canal? Whose scarf was it? And why did he have to get rid of it? Black screen.

“Do you still want me to erase it?” asked Alice.

Did I? I hedged. “Nnnnot quite yet.” Damn. If the police caught up to us, we’d all be sharing a cell in the Big House.

Ting!

“Text message alert!” Alice and Osmond tittered in unison.

I opened my message. From Jackie: “Mrs. S. just helped me hack into the AZ Dept. of Motor Vehicles. Here’s the most recent driver’s license photo for Norman Peewee Crowley. Notice anything?”

I switched screens to access the photo.

Nuts. The guy in Norman Crowley’s license photo wasn’t the same guy who was on the trip with us.

I sucked in my breath. Holy Crap! So if our Peewee wasn’t the real Peewee, who the heck was he?

Ting!

From Jackie: “Told you so.”

I swung around to find her kibitzing with Nana beneath a streetlight that looked to have been imported from Victorian England. She acknowledged my reaction with a self-satisfied smile before tossing her head toward Mike McManus, who was chatting with the fake Peewee. She typed a quick message that arrived almost instantly.

“What now?”

A hand clapped down on my shoulder. I turned around to find Wally standing grim-faced behind me. “Could I speak to you privately, Emily?”

A mantra kept playing in my head as I followed him through the crowd to a spot that was beyond earshot of the tour group. Please don’t tell me the Dicks are dead. Please don’t tell me the Dicks are dead.

“I owe you an apology,” he said without preamble.

“For what?”

“You were right. I was wrong.”

“Well, good for me.” I had no idea what he was referring to. “So, what was I right about?”

“You said the police would want to investigate Paula’s death more closely after the autopsy, and you were spot-on.”

I kinda remembered saying that, but I’d said so much over the last twenty-four hours that I was having a hard time keeping it all straight. But one thing seemed clear. “Are you saying the police are back on the case?”

He nodded. “It was because of the bruising that showed up post-mortem. The medical examiner determined Paula’s death couldn’t have been an accident. You were right about that, too. She didn’t fall. She was pushed.”

Seventeen

The canal ride had been a blur.

I vaguely remember ducking as we’d motored beneath bridges low enough to knock our heads off, oohing as we’d passed a quiet commune of whitewashed almshouses, and aahing as we’d sped along the Canal of Ghent with its buzzing boat traffic. But mostly what I remember was wishing I hadn’t been right about Paula Peavey.

Things had gotten entirely too complicated.

Had Mary Lou and Laura teamed up to push Paula into the canal? Or had Mindy and Ricky Hennessy beaten them to it? Chip Soucy had sidestepped the question about whether he’d seen Paula after the blowup in the Red Light District. Was that because he’d taken a long look at her before he’d pushed her into the water? Were my suspicions about the Bouchards legitimate? Or was I doing nothing more than grasping at straws?

And what about Pete? Could Mary Lou and Laura have ganged up on him, too? But why would they want to? They’d had little to do with him in high school and even less to do with him afterward. Chip and the Hennessys might have wanted the IRS out of their financial hair, but would they have murdered Pete to resolve the problem? Why did the Hennessys look so guilty on the surveillance video? What was with the scarf that Ricky had gotten rid of ? And if Peewee wasn’t Norman Crowley, who was he, and why was he here?

Most puzzling of all, was any of this connected to Charlotte’s death?

I grabbed the handrail on the seat in front of me as the bus exited the off-ramp on three wheels, sending packages flying and our stomachs into our throats.

“I have motion sickness pills!” announced Margi as she waved a carton over her head. “A sampler pack. In six delicious flavors.”

I placed a steadying hand on Nana, who sat calm as a clock beside me, flipping through the most recent photos she’d shot with her camera phone.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” I sputtered when the tires stopping screeching.

“Don’t pay him no mind, dear,” she advised without looking up. “I spent fifty years ridin’ with your Grampa Sippel. Compared to him, this fella’s a regular Mario Andretti.” She angled her phone toward me. “Isn’t this a nice shot of Wally and Beth Ann?”

It was a head shot of the two of them, eyes twinkling and smiles stretching from ear to ear. “You must have taken this before Wally found out about Paula’s autop—” I froze mid-word, the final syllable sliding back down my throat. Wally had asked me to keep mum about the autopsy results until we got back to Amsterdam and received further instructions from the police. Good going, Emily. Way to keep mum.

I sidled a look at Nana. On a brighter note, if her attention had wandered, maybe she hadn’t heard me.