Dutch Me Deadly

Smiles stiffened. Limbs froze. Exuberance dissolved into sudden silence.

“He never graduated,” said the lady with the pageboy picture, “Remember? So he really shouldn’t be included.”

“Why didn’t he graduate?” I asked.

“He died,” Mike admitted uncomfortably.

“We assume he died,” corrected Chip.

“Everyone assumes he died,” said Mike, “but I wish we knew for sure. It’s tough not knowing. Every time the evening news airs a story about a backcountry hiker in Maine tripping over a decomposed body in the woods, I always wonder if it could be Bobby’s remains.”

Chip shook his head. “Poor bastard. I’ve often thought about how much he missed in life—marriage, kids, Super Bowl I—”

“Vietnam,” said Mike.

“Colonoscopies,” added Chip.

“Has anyone seen my husband?” asked the lady with the tight perm as she surveyed the near-empty parking lot.

“What does he look like?” asked Mike.

“He has hair. Does that narrow it down enough for you?”

The sound of screeching tires and blaring horns suddenly filled the air. I fired a glance toward the main street, my heart stopping in my chest as I replayed an image of Nana sprinting in front of Bernice to be first out of the parking lot.

“What do you suppose all that ruckus is about?” asked Mary Lou.

Shouts. Echoing cries of distress. A cacophony of car horns.

“S’cuse me.” Overwhelmed by a surge of panic, I raced toward the street as if I were wearing tennis shoes instead of leather ankle boots with four-inch heels. Traffic had slowed to a standstill.

Drivers were stepping out of their cars and rubbernecking to identify the cause of the holdup. Turning the corner, I saw an ever-widening circle of pedestrians gathered on the sidewalk, their eyes riveted on the street.

Oh, God.

What if my guys had been texting each other while they were crossing the street? What if—

I saw legions of tourists on the perimeter of the crowd, but no Nana, no Tilly, no George.

Oh, God!

Spying a familiar face, I ran toward him. “Do you know what happened?” I asked Pete Finnegan.

He regarded me, stone-faced. “Dunno.”

I stood on my tiptoes, unable to see over the bystanders’ heads, but I wasn’t about to let that stop me. Squeezing around a baby carriage, I created a tiny opening and excused my way through the crowd until I reached the curb, where I stared in numb horror at the scene before me.

The tortured wreck of a bicycle lay on its side, surrounded by loose Brussels sprouts, a smattering of broken eggs, and a woman’s walking shoe. The cyclist was curled in a fetal position nearby, his trousers ripped, his face and hands bloody, being attended by several people who were yelling desperately into cellphones.

A dozen feet away, in a swirl of diesel and exhaust fumes, a woman in a pea-green blazer with jumbo shoulder pads lay facedown on the pavement, seemingly unaware of both the foul air and the people who were hovering over her. Her legs were twisted into impossible angles. Her shoeless foot hung limply from her ankle. She neither coughed, nor groaned, nor moved.

She was still. Absolutely still.

“I know that woman!” I cried, hoping that someone who spoke English would understand me. “Her name is Charlotte.”

The cyclist fought to sit upright. Propping his elbows on his bent knees, he braced his head in his hands and threw an anguished look at Charlotte’s lifeless body. He let out a tormented sob, then wailed something in a language I couldn’t understand.

It was gut wrenching. The poor man was so beside himself with grief that I felt guilty bearing witness to his heartache. I blinked away tears as I turned to the woman standing beside me. “Do you know what he’s saying?”

“Ja. He says, ‘Damn these tourists. They’re going to be the death of me.’”

Four

If the cellphone reception in our Amsterdam hotel lobby had been subpar, my conversation with Etienne might have been reduced to a few minutes of frustrating static, but aided by a profusion of cell towers in the area, I was able to recount the tale of our most recent tribulation with landline clarity.

“So the bus driver dropped us off at our hotel about a half hour ago, and we’re supposed to leave again in twenty minutes for a dinner cruise on the canal. Not that anyone can think about food right now. But our driver informed us, and I quote, that ‘the show must go on.’ Why are Europeans so fond of American cliches? Don’t they have any of their own?”

I waited a beat for him to answer. When he didn’t, I figured the call had been dropped despite the good reception. “Hello? Etienne? Are you there?”

“Your tour director is dead?”

I winced. This wasn’t exactly the kind of event we could highlight in our travel brochure. “She warned us about the bicycles, but she apparently forgot to heed her own warning.”

“Your tour is one day old, and already you’ve transported a body to the morgue?”

“C’mon, sweetie. You’ve visited Holland. You know what bicycle traffic is like around here. An accident like that could happen to anyone.” I paused. “I guess.”

He muttered something in French, or Swiss-German, or Italian. I couldn’t tell which.

“Here’s the thing,” I explained. “Charlotte was a terrible tour director. No one liked her. Actually, that’s an understatement. Everyone hated her. She was controlling, and petulant, and treated us like children.”

“So you think the accident happened on purpose?”

“You bet I do.” Etienne had hung up his Swiss police inspector’s badge only a short time ago, so his law enforcement genes were still easily stimulated.

“Did any eyewitnesses step forward?”

I cupped my hand around my mouth and lowered my voice. “That’s the really weird thing. The sidewalk was absolutely choked with tourists, but not one person claimed to have seen anything. How unbelievable is that?”

“Not as unbelievable as you might think, bella.”

The lobby elevator dinged open to reveal the entire Iowa contingent staring mindlessly at their cellphones, heads down, shoulders hunched, and thumbs flying.

“Any number of crimes can be committed in crowds where people are preoccupied with window shopping, talking on cellphones, listening to iPods, text messaging. We’re allowing crimes to happen in plain sight because we’re no longer aware of our surroundings. Too many other distractions vying for our attention.”

I rolled my eyes as the elevator door slid shut with my guys still crammed inside. “Ya think?”

“Do you know if the police are continuing to investigate the incident?”

“According to the woman who was translating the blow-by-blow for me, the bicyclist involved in the accident swore that Charlotte stumbled into the street right in front of him.” The indicator needle over the elevator drifted to the first floor, second floor, third floor … “The police discovered a broken paving stone near the curb, so they put two and two together and decided that she probably tripped over it, stumbled off the curb, and never saw what hit her. Nice, neat, and tidy.”

“A reasonable explanation.”

“Not if you consider the ill will she’d stirred up with the guests. She’d already had one serious run-in with a grouchy guy from Maine who just happened to be in the vicinity when she took her spill. He conveniently