Dutch Me Deadly

“Could I borrow yours?” She extended her hand toward me. “If wedding plans are being batted about in Oostende, I need to start making preparations now for my big debut. This is going to be so fabulous, darling! I’m going to be bigger than Vera Wang. Bigger than Carolina Herrera. Bigger than—”

“Oh, put a sock in it,” groused Bernice. “If you get any bigger, you’re going to look like a giant yard ornament.”

“Spoilsport,” sniffed Jackie as she palmed my phone. She stood up, all atwitter as she addressed the table. “I’m so fond of everyone here, I want you to be the first to know. I’m abandoning my life coaching career to pursue something I’m going to be really good at. Wedding planning! So if any of you are thinking about tying the knot in the near future, I’m your girl. And to show you that friendship has its benefits, I’ll even offer exclusive senior discounts.”

Nana’s eyes lit up. “Do you take AARP?”

“AARP, Triple-A, library cards. Whatever you got, Mrs. S. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

“Where’s she going?” Bernice asked me as Jackie exited the dining area.

“She probably wants to find a private spot to make her call.”

“How come she doesn’t talk right here?”

I offered her a sublime smile, accompanied by a meaningful look. “Because she’s trying to be polite.”

Bernice, being Bernice, didn’t give an inch. “You’re so behind the times. Didn’t you hear the conversation? Things are different now. Times have changed. No one cares about politeness anymore. Everyone expects us to be rude.” Her face softened with an almost beatific look. “It’s so comforting.” And as a testament to her convictions, she pulled out her smartphone and powered it up.

“You have to do that right this very minute?” I reproved.

“Yup. I’m gonna purge all those Maine people from my friends list right now. They’re all mental.”

“You can’t hold off until you get back to your room?”

“Psssh. I’ll forget by then.”

It was impossible to ignore her since she was sitting right beside me, so as she accessed her Facebook page, I angled my body in her direction, watching.

“Are you on Facebook?” she asked.

“Nope. I guard my privacy tenaciously.”

“You’re so nineteenth century.”

A page blossomed on her screen, filled with a cartoon of cow heads, bushel baskets of vegetables, and a lot of pictures. I squinted at a number appearing in parentheses after the word “Friends.” “Is that how many friends you have now?” I blinked to make sure I was seeing correctly.

A hush fell over the table as all eyes were riveted on Bernice.

“Yup. This trip helped me crack a thousand.”

“That’s impossible,” argued Margi. “How could you add over three hundred friends since you left Iowa? It’s only been three days. We haven’t met that many people.”

“Persistence. I won’t have quite that many when I finish with my purge, but it’ll be ten times more than the rest of you slackers.” She isolated a photo and tapped her finger to the screen, causing the number in parentheses to decrease by one.

“Was that Margi’s photo you just deleted?” I asked.

“Yup. I unfriended her.”

“You what?” shrieked Margi.

Uh-oh. This wasn’t good. The rest of the gang went for their phones like gunslingers going for their guns, lips compressed, eyes intent, thumbs at the ready.

“I thought you were going to purge the Maine people,” I reminded Bernice.

“I am. That was just a little unfinished business.”

“So how come so many of your photos are headshots of faceless people?” I asked.

“My friends aren’t very photogenic.”

Before she could zap another photo, the number indicating her friend count began dropping faster than Netflix stock after its price hike, leaving her with a sum total of—“Take that!” crowed Margi, as high-fives broke out all around the table—ten fewer friends.

In the space of two thousand years, our methods for fighting foes had switched from eliminating them from the face of the earth, to eliminating them from our computer screens. I don’t know what the military-industrial complex had to say about the new methods, but funeral home directors were really taking a hit.

Ignoring her dinner companions, Bernice called up Mary Lou McManus’s photo, touched the screen, and scrubbed her.

“Wait a minute.” I stopped her as she prepared to go on. “Go back to that generic headshot. There. Mary Katherine Fruth. Mrs. Fruth. She was my first grade music teacher!”

“Imagine that,” said Bernice, skipping ahead to another photo.

“But … why is Mrs. Fruth on your friends list? She died when I was ten.”

Margi gasped so loudly, her new Belgian lace collar got sucked into her mouth. “That’s why her count is so high. She’s friending dead people!”

“Could I borrow that, please?” I asked Bernice as I snatched her phone out of her hand. “Who else do you have in here?”

“Give that back to—”

I shooed her hand away. “Here’s another faceless headshot. H. J. Saterlie. Is H. J. merely unphotogenic or stone cold dead?”

“I used to know a H. J. Saterlie,” Osmond recalled. “He ran the Esso station on the corner of First and Main. But he died about the time Prohibition ended, so I doubt it’s the same fella.”

“It’s the same fella all right,” accused Helen. “Bernice has finally hit an all-time low. She’s having seances to call up the dead, and then she’s communicating with them on Facebook!”

I stared at Helen, wondering if medical research would one day discover a link between the overuse of eyebrow pencils and a decline in cognitive thinking.

“Good news, good news,” tittered Jackie as she strutted back to the table. “Wally suffered a very minor concussion, so he’s going to remain in the hospital overnight, and then he and Beth Ann will take the train back to Amsterdam tomorrow. And what’s even more fabulous, Beth Ann says that Wally is so grateful she’s there with him, she thinks she’s starting to hear wedding bells.”

“I heard bells once,” reminisced George, “but it turned out to be tinnitus.”

Jackie flashed all thirty-two teeth as she snuggled back into her chair, her smile gradually fading as she absorbed the negative energy of her dinner companions. “What’s wrong with you people? Did someone else die while I was gone?”

“I’m outta here,” snarled Bernice, clambering out of her chair. “My water pill just kicked in.”

I craned my neck to follow her progress, and when she’d exited the room, I gave the signal. “Okay, she’s gone. Now you can talk about her. But cut her a little slack. That was a pretty clever way to game the system.”

For the next ten minutes the conversation grew heated as the gang complained about how they’d been hoodwinked.

“I bet she drug up them dead folks and give ’em all fake accounts ’cuz she needed folks to play Farmville with her,” reasoned Nana.

“What’s Farmville?” I asked as I continued to pore over Bernice’s Facebook page.

A collective gasp.

“You’ve never heard of Farmville?” marveled Tilly.

So while everyone explained how Facebookers could partake in the joys of growing fruits and vegetables on a computer screen rather than in an actual rain-soaked field, where they might have to face real mud, real bugs, and real odor from passing pig haulers, I checked out the rest of Bernice’s online friends.

“Doesn’t anyone want to hear about the exciting launch of my new business?” implored Jackie.

Even though a majority of Bernice’s friends were dead, she’d still managed to snare a few live ones. Mike McManus, Beth Ann Oliver, Gary Bouchard, Laura LaPierre, Chip Soucy, and some guests whose faces I recognized, but whose names I hadn’t learned yet. I touched the headshot of a familiar face and was surprised when the screen