Bonnie of Evidence (2 page)

Nana pulled a face. “That’s on account of folks what’s in our age bracket don’t got good eyesight no more.”

“I found a bottle of Jack Daniels in a cache near Lars Bakke’s grain elevator a couple of months ago,” Osmond reflected.

“And you didn’t offer the rest of us a little nip?” barked Dick Teig.

Osmond lifted his ninety-something-year-old shoulders in a helpless gesture. “It was empty.”

“Don’t look now,” Nana said as she shot a glance across the street, “but we got incomin’. And would you look at them long faces?”

The members of Team Five were clumped together at the crosswalk on the opposite side of the street, looking pouty and irritated as they waited for the traffic light to change.

“Do those look like the faces of a team that registered a find?” Dick Teig asked me.

He was right. They looked miserable.
Uh-oh
. “Look,” I urged the gang, “if it turns out they didn’t find it, would you
try
to be sympathetic when they join us?”

“You bet,” said Nana.

“He who laughs last, laughs best,” said Tilly.

George lifted his Pioneer Seed Corn hat to scratch the back of his bald head. “What does that mean anyway?”

Dick Stolee snickered as he elbowed my arm. “Did I call that or what? I’m telling you, Emily. The other teams are going to mop up the floor with them.”

“So how did it go?” I asked in a cheery voice as the five team members trooped onto the sidewalk.

“Why don’t you ask Bernice?” Lucille Rassmuson locked her arms across her chest and pursed her dime-thin lips in what was recognized as the Iowa version of a hissy fit. “She
said
she knew where she was going.”

Lucille was sporting a new, easy-care hairstyle for the trip. Gone were the tight, kinky curls of her home perm, replaced by longer, layered strands that hugged her skull like a bathing cap. She’d even tweaked the color, replacing her peach Margarita tint with a soft shade of powdery pink. If her late husband—cigar-smoking, practical joking Dick Rassmuson—had still been alive, he might have passed her on the street and not even recognized her.

“My coordinates were right,” Bernice huffed. “We were practically standing on top of the thing! It was Tweedledee and Tweedledum who dropped the ball.” She fired accusing looks at the two other women on her team.

“I beg your pardon?” Tweedledee’s mouth fell open, drawing attention to her beautifully capped teeth and neatly applied lipstick in the season’s most vibrant color. She’d listed her occupation as “retired retail buyer” on her guest information form, and judging from the way she’d added a stylish belt to glam up a simple sweater and designer jeans, I’d guess she’d been a whiz at it. Her name tag identified her as Dolly Pinker from Chicago. “There was no hidden cache in that alleyway. You entered the wrong numbers in your GPS.”

“Did not.”

“Did so. And you were too pigheaded to admit you were wrong, so thank you very much for helping us to end up with
nothing
. This is all your fault.”

“Is not.”

“Is so. I want to change teams.”

“Me, too,” said Tweedledum, whose real name was Isobel Kronk from Gary, Indiana. “I could use a free vacation, but it ain’t gonna happen with Wrong Way Corrigan calling the shots.” Isobel was hard-edged and rough-angled, with long gray hair, sun-damaged skin, and eyes that snapped with impatience. Her lone fashion accessory was a backpack handbag in an exotic animal print that made it look as if she had a zebra strapped to her back. She owned a scrap metal business in Gary, where she probably spent most of her time crushing car engines between her teeth. “Are we the only team who didn’t find the cache?” she asked me. “Our timekeeper refused to tell us.”

Unwilling to hammer the first nail into their coffin, I resorted to evasive tactics. “I’m sure the timekeeper simply wanted to tabulate all the results before she released—”

“Everyone scored a find except you,” ratted Dick Teig.

Dolly held up her iPhone. “Is this the alley where you found it?” The image on the screen showed a seemingly endless flight of stairs shoehorned between two buildings.

“We didn’t have to climb no stairs,” said Nana.

Dick Stolee scrunched his eyes in thought. “Are you sure? I remember stairs someplace.”

“Show of hands,” said Osmond. “How many people remember climbing stairs?”

“Geez-Louise,” griped Bernice in her former-smoker’s rasp, “would all you whiners just put a sock in it? We didn’t find the stupid thing, all right? Get over it. We’ll find it next time.” The humidity had caused her hair to frizz around her head like exploded electrical wire, giving her the look of a person who’d just had a run-in with chain lightning.

“Will someone
please
switch teams with me?” Dolly begged, making her appeal to the entire Iowa gang. “I’m willing to offer bribes.”

“Me, too,” pleaded Isobel.

“Hey, team.” The lone male member of Team Five waved his hand in the air. “Remember me?” He was of average height, with thinning brown hair, a weak chin, bulbous nose, neck wattle, and a little paunch belly, but his ever-present smile made up for all his shortcomings, making him appear taller, handsomer, more physically fit. His name was Cameron Dasher, and he was proving to be quite the people magnet with his self-deprecating sense of humor and upbeat mood. The unattached ladies on the tour found him particularly attractive—not so much because he was of the same generation and made them laugh, but because he possessed the one quality they were all looking for in a man.

He was still alive.

“What are we? A team of quitters?” Dasher scolded. “Tell me this—how flavorful would our food be if Marco Polo had given up trying to discover a trade route to the East? How exciting would our world surfing competitions be if Balboa had given up searching for the Pacific Ocean? Where would all of us be living today if Columbus had quit trying to find his way to the New World?”

Osmond shot his hand into the air. “Croatia?”

“Come on, ladies,” Dasher goaded. “This was only our first try. There’s eleven more sites to explore. Where’s your fighting spirit? So we messed up the first one. If we stick together, I guarantee we’ll find all the rest. We can do this! If you want to quit after just one round, I can’t stop you. But if we hang tight, one of us can look forward to a free vacation in our future! Are you with me?”

Eye rolling. Sighs.

Not surprisingly, Cameron had listed his occupation as “motivational speaker.”

“What’s our team slogan?” he prodded, cupping his hand around his ear.

“Yes, we can,” came the grumbled reply from his teammates.

“I can’t
heeeear
you.”

“Yes, we can,” they recited with slightly more gusto.

“Once more with feeling!”

“Yes, we can,” they chanted as they tapped into his enthusiasm. “Yes, we can!” Lucille, Dolly, and Isobel high-fived each other. “YES, WE CAN!”

“Yes, we can,” chimed Osmond, pumping his spindly arms as he boogied to the beat. Dick Teig whacked him on the shoulder.

“Cool it. You’re not on their team.”

Cameron Dasher banded his arm around Bernice and gave her a squeeze. “And from now on, Bernice promises to respect all our opinions and not hijack the whole show. Right, Bernice?”

“Good luck with that,” wisecracked Dick Stolee.

Bernice glanced from Cameron’s hand to his face, melting against him with a breathless sigh. “Whatever you say,” she gushed, fluttering her lashes like a silver-screen movie goddess.

Whoa
! This guy was good. I wonder if he’d ever consider freelancing as an assistant escort on tours saddled with especially nasty guests?

Bernice’s teammates fell suddenly silent, their mantra dying on their lips as they narrowed their eyes and hardened their jaws.
Unh-oh
. It had been awkward enough that every woman on the tour had wanted to be on Cameron’s team, but if they started throwing daggers at each other every time he paid attention to one of them, there was going to be trouble.

“It’s decided then?” Cameron asked good-naturedly. “We’re still a team?”

“Of course we’re still a team,” Dolly assured as she looped her arm through his, smiling possessively. “And just to set the record straight, it wasn’t my idea to change teams in the first place.” Honey oozed from her voice. “It was Isobel’s.”

“Me?” Age might have ruined Isobel’s complexion and turned her hair gray, but her hearing still rocked. “What the hell have
you
been smoking? You’re the one who—”

Cameron raised his hands in Biblical fashion as if to calm the waters. “L
aaa
dies, l
aaa
dies, it doesn’t matter who said what first. All that’ll matter in the end is how many checkmarks we have in the ‘Find’ column, so let’s put this episode behind us and start with a clean slate tomorrow. Fair enough?”

Bernice and Dolly took wary measure of each other as they lingered at Cameron’s sides, looking like two spurs of an about-to-be-snapped wishbone. “Fine,” they crooned in unison.

Lucille heaved a sigh and nodded grudgingly. “Okay.”

Isobel’s mouth strained at the corners as if she were trying to force her lips into a smile, but all she managed was a sneer. “Whatever,” she spat, her eyes narrowing to hostile slits.

Yup. There was going to be trouble.

As a troupe of Shakespearean players paraded past us, reciting extraneous lines of prose to any tourist willing to listen, Nana grabbed my arm and dragged me aside, concern etched across her face.

“I know what you’re going to say,” I offered preemptively. “You’re afraid that glaring jealousy issues on Team Five might lead to trouble, and I have to admit, that makes me a little nervous, too, but here’s the thing.” I raised a determined finger. “It’s going to be different this time because Etienne is with us. Guests will
not
be creeping around, trying to knock each other off, with a former Swiss police inspector watching their every move. So, even if the ladies of Team Five get into it with each other, I don’t expect it’ll escalate beyond snotty name calling or an occasional cat fight.” I flashed a confident smile. “I think we’re good!”

“Whatever you say, dear.”

My smile morphed into a wince. I hung my head. “I’m in denial, aren’t I? Those women hate each other already and the tour has just begun.”

“I don’t wanna be no alarmist, Emily, but we got bigger problems than them four women.”

“We do?”

“You bet. Team Five come up with a snappy slogan for themselves. The rest of us don’t got one.”

I stared at her, non-plussed. “That’s a problem?”

“You bet it is. They’re makin’ the rest of us look bad, so we’re gonna have to think of one, too.”

“Is that going to be difficult?”

“Emily, dear, we got one Catholic, two Lutherans, one birther, and a vegetarian on our team. How are we s’posed to compromise? That don’t give us no common ground to work with.”

Ew
. She had a point. I just hoped their diversity didn’t set them up to get sucked into knockdown-dragouts over issues of a more ideological nature—like, if Catholic priests should be allowed to marry, or, which
Gilligan’s Island
character was hotter, Ginger or Mary Ann? That could get really ugly.

I gave her a hug. “Chin up. You’ll think of something.”

“I just did. I’m gonna let Tilly figure it out.”

Nana had three chins, blue hair, and stood four-foot-ten in her bare feet. She’d won millions in the Minnesota lottery a few years back, but the experience had changed neither her outlook nor her practical spending habits. She was the treasurer of the Legion of Mary at church, a card-carrying computer geek, and an enthusiastic subscriber to every TV channel offered by her cable provider. She had only an eighth-grade education, but given her addiction to the Discovery and Smithsonian networks, she was the smartest person I knew.

“
Uh-oh,
” Nana fretted in a sudden panic. “I don’t mean to ditch you, dear, but I’m outta here.” Like a video playing at warp speed, she raced behind me in her size five sneakers and ducked into a shop displaying a selection of tartans and kilts on headless mannequins.

I stared after her.
What in the world?
And then it hit me.

I turned slowly.

She was barreling toward me with her laptop slung over her shoulder in its trusty carrying case and her fannypack riding her opposite hip like an oversized jellyroll. Her little moon face was flushed from exertion, and her salt and pepper hair was disastrously windblown, but her girlish excitement made it quite apparent that she wouldn’t have missed this for the world. The tour guests knew her as “the timekeeper.”

Nana knew her as Margaret.

I knew her as Mom.