Dutch Me Deadly Read online

  Uh-oh. She obviously didn’t understand how important it was to an eighty-year-old with two hip replacements and a bum knee to be first off the bus. Claiming that honor not only gained the person rock star status, it earned him the kind of respect and awe usually reserved for people who could actually stay awake for events scheduled after luncheon buffets. Charlotte’s edict could destroy the whole social dynamic of our group! What was she thinking?

  I could sense rebellion brewing when only a few hands crept into the air.

  Charlotte twisted her mouth into a pouty contortion. “I see. You’re trying to be difficult. Is it any wonder I’m popping anti-anxiety drugs like Tic-Tacs? I just knew you people were going to be trouble. Well, put this in your pipes and smoke it: I’m in charge. You’re not. So there!”

  She flung herself back into her seat. Nana leaned toward me. “You s’pose she forgot there’s no smokin’ on the bus?”

  I hung my head and sighed. Eight whirlwind days in Holland. The trip had sounded so short. Now, I realized, it was going to be way too long.

  Oh, God.

  Two

  As we sped along the two-lane road that hugged the dike, I realized that Iowa and Holland had a lot in common despite being separated by the North Sea, the Atlantic Ocean, and half a freaking continent. Both places were flat as ironing boards, with acres of level fields stretching as far as the eye could see. But while Iowans grew grain, the Dutch grew hay. While Iowa cornfields were crosshatched with a precise grid of gravel roads, Dutch hayfields were crosshatched with a precise grid of narrow canals. Iowans raised prize-winning hogs that became Blue Plate Specials; the Dutch raised woolly sheep that became winter sweaters. Iowans bought John Deere equipment to cut their grass; the Dutch bought scruffy sheep to eat theirs.

  “Wow, look at that house.” I pointed out the window at a fairy-tale cottage made of rose-colored brick and trimmed with decorative gingerbread. The roof was a steep pyramid of red tile, the windows were offset with white shutters and window boxes, and the front lawn was a topiary maze surrounded by circular gardens and elegant footbridges. “It’s straight out of Cinderella.”

  “Uh-huh,” Nana muttered as she studied her phone’s display screen.

  Two seconds later, we were past it. “You missed it.”

  “Uh-huh.” Her thumbs flitted over her keypad.

  I gave her arm a playful nudge. “I hope you realize you’re missing all the scenery that you spent an incredible amount of devalued money to see.”

  “I know, dear. But this is real important. The Dicks wanna start a movement to protest the way Charlotte’s handlin’ things. They say all our freedoms are bein’ threatened, so we need to take back our tour before it’s too late.”

  I tried unsuccessfully to suppress a grin. “By asking you to leave the bus without trampling each other, Charlotte isn’t exactly depriving you of all your freedoms.”

  “It’s a slippery slope, Emily. She might start by tellin’ us we can’t be first off the bus, but what’ll be next? No more textin’ while we’re in transit?”

  I’d like to suggest that one myself.

  “You got any ideas about what we can call ourselves, dear? Tea-baggers is already taken. Carpetbaggers don’t make no sense now that wall-to-wall is out and hardwood is in. Helen come up with Handbaggers, but the Dicks say they’re not gonna join any movement where they gotta carry a purse.”

  “Way too emasculating,” I agreed. “You could go generic and call yourselves anarchists. Then you could eliminate any fashion accessory problems.”

  Her eyes lit up behind her new glasses. “I like that. Lemme see if it flies with the gang.” She poised her thumbs over her keypad. “How do you spell that, dear?”

  As I provided the correct spelling, the bus decelerated into the breakdown lane and coasted to a complete stop near a pristine complex of multi-level town homes that boasted steeply pitched roofs and paint jobs in pink and charcoal. Charlotte stepped into the center aisle, her gaze lasering down the length of the bus. “Before we exit to see the windmill, I want you all to synchronize your watches. It is now precisely 10:06, so please set your watches. Ten. Oh. Six.”

  She waited a few beats, looking pleased that everyone seemed to be following instructions and no one was giving her grief. “We’re scheduled to be here exactly fifteen minutes, so don’t squander your time. Take your photos, then head directly back to the bus so we can continue on to Volendam. We won’t wait for stragglers. If you miss the bus, you’re on your own.”

  Hmm. That seemed a bit excessive. I wondered who’d established that policy—the tour company or Charlotte? I bowed my head close to Nana’s. “Does your movement have any age requirements?”

  “When Dietger opens the front door, I want you all to file out in an orderly fashion,” Charlotte announced. “One row at a time. Right side first. And remember what I told you. Stay on the sidewalk!”

  The door shushed open. Dietger vacated his driver’s seat and hustled down the stairs. Charlotte clapped her hands as if she were keeping time to a military march and started herding guests into the aisle and down the stepwell. I fished my new digital camera out of my shoulder bag and slid to the edge of my seat, pumped to hit the pavement.

  “Is everyone jazzed to see the windmill?” I asked my guys.

  “We’re not going, dear,” Nana informed me as she poked her keypad with the tip of her forefinger.

  I stared at her, nonplussed. “Not going? You have to go. It’s a windmill. The most iconic symbol in all Holland.” Well, besides wooden shoes, tulips, and Hans Brinker’s silver skates. I shot to my feet. “Cellphones down! Refusing to participate in the tour experience should not be part of your movement. Why are you boycotting the windmill?”

  “She lost me at ‘synchronize your watches’,” complained Dick Stolee. “I haven’t figured out how to adjust mine yet. The counter clerk at Walmart set it for Dutch time when I bought it last week, but it’s still off by a few minutes.”

  I gaped at him. Dick was such an accomplished gearhead that he could have Humpty Dumpty put back together again before any of the King’s men ever thought to yell, “Compost heap!” What kind of watch had he bought, besides “on sale” and “dirt cheap”?

  “Do you have the instructions handy?” I asked as the seats in front of us began to empty.

  “Yup, but I can’t read them.”

  The inability to read the small print on manufacturers’ labels was a growing problem among seniors battling cataracts, glaucoma, and macular degeneration. Happily, I’d racked up a perfect score on my last vision test, so small print was my specialty. “My eyes are a little younger, Dick. Do you want me to take a look?”

  He held the instruction sheet out to me. “Can you read Chinese?”

  “My phone has an app for that!” enthused Margi. “Chinese checkers, Chinese calendar, Chinese—”

  “Truth is,” Nana piped up, “fifteen minutes is cuttin’ it way too close for us, dear. We’d be so pressed for time, we’d be leavin’ by the front door and climbin’ right back on by the rear. We’d look like we was doin’ one a them Chinese fire drills.”

  Margi let out a sullen breath. “I don’t have an app for that.”

  I knew better than to hassle them when they were fretting over time issues. An Iowan is so genetically hardwired to be punctual that being “on time” to him means being jawdroppingly early, kind of like an early-warning smoke detector that goes off a week before the fire starts. In a recent survey asking what Iowans feared most, 99 percent of respondents said “being late.” The remaining 1 percent indicated in order of priority: having my watch stolen, breaking my watch, my alarm clock not going off, dead battery in my watch, and “Dude, none of your f-ing business.” Iowa was obviously being overrun by a flood of transplants from North Jersey.

  “So what are all of you planning to do while the rest of us are oohing and ahhing over the windmill?” I squeezed past Nana into the center aisle.

  “We’re going
to update our status on our Facebook pages,” announced George. “If we don’t update on a regular basis, people start thinking we’re dead.”

  “If you don’t start participating in the tour, I’m going to think you’re dead,” I threatened. “Let’s get with the program, people. Interact. Socialize. Have fun!”

  “I thought we were having fun,” objected Helen.

  “Show of hands,” insisted Osmond as he rose to his feet, pen and tally sheet at the ready. “How many people are having fun?”

  Heaving an exasperated sigh, I hurried down the now empty aisle, appalled that my guys had adapted to the “information age” so well that they’d become mobile-phone junkies. They were as addicted to texting and social networking as Hollywood was to Botox and breast implants. This was terrible. I needed to call Etienne. How could we plan the photo exchange we’d talked about if none of our travelers looked up from their cellphones long enough to take any?

  I rushed down the stepwell to find Dietger standing by the door with his hand extended to assist me. “Dank u,” I thanked him, testing out my one Dutch phrase as he helped me to the ground.

  Dietger was a rough-shaven Belgian with a gruff manner, wild brown hair that needed cutting, and a physique as compact as a brick port-a-potty. He smoked too much, wore horn-rimmed glasses that gave him the appearance of a sixties government employee, and looked as if he might take his morning coffee black, with a beer chaser. I’d yet to see him smile, but he had dour down to a science.

  He plucked his cigarette from his mouth and waved it toward the rear of the bus. “And the others?” he snapped. “Are they coming?”

  “They’re too afraid you’ll leave without them, so they’re taking preemptive measures by staying on the bus and inventing new ways to antagonize each other.”

  He took a drag on his cigarette and leered at me through a haze of smoke. “You want to go to bed with me?”

  I stared at him numbly. My newly updated Escort’s Manual had no directive explaining how to deal with sexual solicitation, so unless I could pull something useful out of the erectile dysfunction section, I was pretty much on my own.

  Opting for the old standby, I flashed my ring finger at him. “Wouldn’t you know? I’m married.”

  He flashed his ring finger back at me. “So am I married. Four times. So what?”

  Hmm. How could I explain monogamy to a serial adulterer in terms he wouldn’t find insulting? I mean, I had to interact with this guy for the next eight days, so I had to be careful not to generate any bad blood. If he turned out to be the vengeful type, he could break more bones with his bus than I could with my shoulder bag.

  I offered him a perky smile. “Sooo … I don’t think so, but thanks so much for asking.” Scooting around the bus, I darted across the highway and onto the narrow sidewalk, falling in line behind the other guests who were making the short trek to the windmill.

  Abutting the pedestrian walk was a low concrete barrier that was supposed to prevent people from falling into the canal on the opposite side, but if this was the Dutch idea of a barrier, I imagined that swimming might soon overtake skating as Holland’s favorite national sport. The windmill, a spectacular hexagonal structure with four open-grid sails that resembled giant propeller blades, was perched at the foot of the canal, surrounded by open field. The lower third of the building was sided with clapboards painted a dazzling emerald green. The upper two-thirds was overlaid with thatching so meticulously trimmed, it looked as if the building were wearing a mohair sweater.

  As I scrambled to keep up, a man wearing a Bar Harbor, Maine jacket broke away from the group and ambled into the middle of the street, where he got to enjoy an unobstructed view of the windmill without the clutter of heads in front of him.

  Uh-oh. This wasn’t good.

  Our bucolic ambience was suddenly ripped apart by the shrill blast of a whistle. “Get out of the street!” Charlotte screamed, charging into the street, arms flailing. She punished him with another earsplitting blast. “I told you to stay on the sidewalk! Are you deaf ?”

  If he wasn’t before, he sure was now.

  She steamrolled toward him, her expression promising a calamitous confrontation. “I said move! Do you have a death wish?”

  Making no attempt to move, the man snapped a picture of the windmill before locking his sights on Charlotte, skewering her with a look so surly, it stopped her dead in her tracks.

  She swayed on her heels like an off-balance Weeble wobbling back to vertical, then screwed her face into an indignant contortion that promised instant reprisal. Eyes throwing daggers at him, she stuck her whistle back in her mouth and blew with the explosive power borne of a pair of lungs bursting with hot air.

  The whistle shot out of her mouth and skidded onto the street like a skipped rock, bouncing crazily over the pavement until it came to rest at the man’s feet.

  Wow. Charlotte might not look like a guy, but she could sure spit like one.

  The man snatched it off the ground, hefted it in his palm, and with a self-satisfied glint in his eye, hurled it unceremoniously into the canal.

  “My whistle!” Charlotte cried. “You’re going to replace that, mister!”

  He strode past her, leaving her red-faced and fuming as he stepped onto the sidewalk in front of me.

  “You—I swear you people are going to be the death of me!” she ranted. “If you refuse to obey the rules, there will be conseque—”

  She would have continued had a motorcycle not roared down the street at just that moment, seemingly hot to lay rubber down the length of her spine. With a terrified shriek she leaped out of the way, making a megaphone of her hands to yell after him: “Maniac! You should have your license revoked! You’re a threat to all mankind! I hope you get arrested for noise pollution!”

  “Cussed nuisance,” grumbled the guy in the Bar Harbor jacket, giving no indication which nuisance he found more irritating, the motorcyclist or Charlotte.

  “My group is starting a movement to protest unfair treatment,” I joked as I came up behind him. “They’re actively recruiting membership if you’d like to apply.”

  He stared at me as though trying to figure out who I was and why I was talking to him.

  “I’m Emily.” I extended my hand in greeting. “I’m the official escort for the group at the back of the bus.”

  He was all angles and elbows, like a Disney version of Ichabod Crane, with stooped shoulders, a long face, and thinning gray hair. His lips were razor thin and looked as if they had never learned to smile. His eyes were small and guarded, like those of a man struggling to hide a lifetime of secrets behind them. He probably hadn’t turned seventy yet, but I figured it wouldn’t be long before he did.

  He regarded my hand dully before giving it an awkward shake.

  “We’re the Iowa contingent.” I smiled and waited for him to introduce himself.

  He narrowed his gaze and eyed me warily.

  Okay, so he was a little shy, but I was a whiz with shy people. “There are twelve of us from the little town of Windsor City, in the North-Central part of the state. Have you ever driven through Iowa?”

  “Why?”

  “No reason. Just … just asking.” My smile stiffened on my face. “Lots of corn in Iowa. Do you like corn?”

  “No.”

  “Lots of hogs, too.”

  He stared at me. “So?”

  “So it works out well if you’re partial to pork chops. Have you ever eaten an Iowa chop?”

  “No.”

  “Really? That’s a shame because they’re totally awesome.”

  “So?”

  I could feel my smile crack around the edges and slide off my mouth. There was only one way to deal with people who were this hard to talk to. “It’s been fun chatting with you. We’ll have to do it again sometime.” I waved my camera at him. “Would you like to be in my picture?”

  He scowled and turned away.

  Guess that was another no.

  As the
group pushed forward, I lagged behind, feeling as deflated as a week-old birthday balloon. This was just great. I was traveling with Charlotte the Loon, Dietger the Lech, and Oscar the Grouch. I could hardly wait to interact with the other members of the group. If they all turned out to be as sour as Oscar, it might behoove me to dart in front of the windmill’s rotating blade right now so I could get knocked senseless. Being in a coma for the rest of the tour would probably ruin my holiday, but on the up side, the ongoing drama might give my guys something to text each other about while they camped out on the bus, ignoring all the sights.

  “That’s Pete Finnegan,” said a woman who stopped beside me on the sidewalk. She was a pretty platinum blonde with straight, shoulder-length hair, skin that had withstood the test of time, and blue eyes that snapped with good humor. “He was the valedictorian of our graduating class. Smart as a whip, but he was never big on conversation. A lot’s changed in fifty years. I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw him talking your ear off just now.”

  I stared at her in disbelief. “He only said a half-dozen words. Most of which were no.”

  “That’s pretty typical. He’s a Republican.” She offered me a warm smile. “I’m Mary Lou.” She tapped the name tag that was pinned to her jacket, drawing my attention to a photo of a teenaged Mary Lou O’Leary, a list of high school activities in which she’d obviously participated, and a name in larger print that read Mary Lou McManus. “It was my idea to design our name tags with our graduation pictures as well as our maiden and married names. I mean, we all know what we looked like five decades ago, but none of us look like that anymore. Except maybe Pete. I would have known him anywhere. Still skinny as a rail and looking like he’d be happy if everyone else in our graduating class would disappear.”

  “More like everyone in the world,” corrected a man who ambled up beside us. He draped his arm around Mary Lou’s shoulders and smiled pleasantly. “I’m Mike. Her other half.”