Dutch Me Deadly by Maddy Hunter

Author:Maddy Hunter
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Midnight Ink, an imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.
Published: 2011-12-08T22:00:00+00:00

Twelve

BY THE TIME I cleared reception and caught up to the rest of the group, they were congregated in a warehouse room with an uneven brick floor—a room, which, according to the posted captions, once served as the spice grinding area for Otto Frank’s meat seasonings company. The Mainers were lumped together, watching a video on a TV monitor, while my guys huddled in a corner, whispering back and forth and shushing each other as if they were in a library. Jackie and Beth Ann posted themselves on either side of the Mainers, trying to look as inconspicuous as the barrels stacked along the wall.

Looking for a quiet niche where I could collect my thoughts, I wandered toward the rear of the warehouse and poked my head through a door that led into a narrow shed with a slanted roof made entirely of glass. A blaze of sunshine filled the tiny space and spilled back into the grinding area through windows that looked as if they were part of the building’s original outside wall. Without the light from the shed, the grinding room would have been steeped in total blackness, so the skylight made complete sense, despite its being so susceptible to shattering, especially during wartime Holland.

I loved when things made sense and hated when they didn’t, which was the impulse driving me to reexamine my thinking about Paula Peavey.

Had she committed suicide? Was it possible her humiliation had been so profound that her only avenue of escape had been to end her own life? And yet, could someone as insensitive as Paula summon the kind of self-reproach it would take to fling herself into a canal? That’s what made no sense. People like Paula caused other people to jump off bridges, not vice versa.

“You look like you’ve just lost your best friend,” Mike McManus teased as he joined me. “What’s up?”

“Hey, Mike.” I forced a smile as I wrenched myself back to the present. “Just thinking about how lucky we are not to have lived in Nazi-occupied Europe.”

“No argument from me there.”

“So, I see that Mary Lou and Laura made it back to the hotel last night. Thank goodness for that, huh?”

He lifted his brows slightly. “Yeah, thank goodness, but I’m pretty ticked off about the whole thing.”

“Did you figure out how you got separated?”

“Nope, and neither Mary Lou nor Laura want to discuss it. All they’re saying is that they got turned around in the crowd and couldn’t find me anywhere. Guess they never bothered to look on the damn bridge where I stood for three frickin’ hours, looking for them. Would you believe they made it back to the hotel before I did last night? So I blew up in a fit of temper, and now Mary Lou’s not speaking to me. What a great vacation, huh? I’m so glad I came.”

“Excuse me, Emily.” Grace approached us on tiptoe, questionnaire in hand. “If I could bother you for just a moment.”

“Problems with the form?” I inquired.

“And how. I’m having an ethical crisis with question number two.

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