She sighed. “I know. I’m in denial.”
“Three things.” I waved a trio of digits in her face. “These folks from Maine aren’t cream puffs; they’re pretty tough hombres. So whatever you do, don’t bug them. Stay out of their personal space. And don’t ask them stupid questions.”
“How am I supposed to know if a question is stupid or not?”
“As a general rule? Anything out of your mouth that contains the words ‘Did you kill the tour director?’ is a stupid question.”
She looked confused. “Why is that stupid?”
“It’s a go,” Beth Ann announced as she joined us, “but it’s costing us twenty Euros apiece for the honor. Is twenty too much? Do you think I should have haggled the price down to ten?” She compressed her head between her hands and squeezed. “Did I do the right thing? I think I screwed up.” She gave Jackie a beseeching look. “I’ll die if I screwed up. Really. I’ll just open a vein, lie down, and die.”
Yup. Jackie had called that one. Beth Ann’s cool, calm, and confident demeanor was all window dressing, which meant that despite Jackie’s wanting to play Nancy Drew, her hands were going to be so full addressing Beth Ann’s insecurities that she’d have precious little time to derail my investigation.
I smiled impishly. Thank you, Jesus!
“Twenty Euros is a fair price,” Jackie reassured her. “You think twenty Euros is fair, don’t you, Emily?”
Twenty Euros was highway robbery, but Beth Ann didn’t need to hear that, especially if she was carrying sharp objects in her shoulder bag. “Sounds good to me.”
Beth Ann gasped with relief. “Ehh! I was really sweating it.” She fanned her face at warp speed. “We can leave as soon as two couples and a female guest change their clothes. They were sitting in the booth where the guy got seasick and blew his cookies all over his table companions. I’m surprised they’re coming with us. Word on the grapevine is that the aggrieved guests are so incensed, there could be an old-fashioned rumble.”
“How very West Side Story of them,” cooed Jackie. Then to me, “Do we need to cover that?”
“Consider all guests in the Maine contingent persons of interest,” I suggested. “You can judge for yourself what you want and don’t want to cover.”
“I don’t want to cover a rumble,” she said with an admiring glance at her hands. “I just had my nails done.”
Figuring my influence here was about spent, I spotted someone standing by herself near the front door and realized there was one more thing I needed to do. “Stay out of trouble,” I cautioned Jackie and Beth Ann before making my way across the lobby to the pretty blonde in the skinny jeans and ponytail. “I’m sorry to bother you,” I said by way of greeting, “but my name is Emily, and I have a confession to make.”
“Don’t we all,” she said, laughing. “Glad to meet you, Emily. I’m Laura, and if you have something to confess, I’m all ears.” Her smile was magnetic, her eyes warm and lively. She looked like the type of person who could coax a cat out of a tree or a child out of a tantrum. I liked her already.
“You’re going to think this is pretty weird, especially since you don’t know me, but I took the liberty of inventing a personality profile for you at dinner tonight.”
Her smile widened. “Did you make me sound good?”
“I made you rock. You are now as financially savvy as Oprah and as physically fit as Wonder Woman.”
She threw her head back with laughter. “Fantastic! Do I wear hot pants and a brass bra?”
“You’re wealthy enough to wear whatever you want. You’ve already done an interview for Fitness Magazine with tips on how to remain flab-free, optimistic, and disgustingly rich throughout retirement, and next month, you’ll be doing a feature article for Vanity Fair and a cover shoot for Vogue.” I shrugged. “Just a few minor events in your life.”
“Vogue? Boy, have I come up in the world. I may have to drag out my curling iron and rethink my makeup. So, tell me, what necessitated the grand fiction?”
I opened my mouth, then snapped it shut. Hold it. I couldn’t tell her all the hurtful things her classmates had said. The idea was to stick up for her, not rip the scab off an old wound. I stared at her stupidly, hoping the ground would open up beneath my feet so I could disappear into it.
“Ouch. That bad, hunh?” She smiled sympathetically. “Maybe I can make this a little easier for you. Who did you eat with this evening?”
“The Hennessys—two n’s, two s’s, no e before the y—the Bouchards, and Paula—”
“Peavey,” she finished for me. “Say no more. I get the picture. I guess they made it clear that I was the butt of their jokes for four years. I’m so sorry you had to sit there and be exposed to their negative energy. Did Paula recite the twisted rhyme they made up about me? Lau-ra, Lau-ra, she’s so scary. Looks like a—”
I held up my hand. “Hearing it once was more than enough. It was really mean, not to mention it didn’t even rhyme.”
“I know. And Mindy, being the master of iambic pentameter that she was, never figured out that ‘ferret’ didn’t rhyme with ‘scary.’ ‘Fairy’ would have been a better choice. Even I knew that. I’m surprised her grades were even good enough to graduate with the rest of us, but she was already planning her wedding senior year, with a bun in the oven, so Sister Hippolytus probably wanted to get rid of her as soon as possible. Not the kind of image our high school wanted to promote, especially back then.”
I shook my head. “How were you able to handle the humiliation for so many years without cracking?”
“I knew myself better than they knew me. I might have been painfully shy and geeky, but I knew that there was an attractive extrovert hiding somewhere inside me, so I just kept my mouth shut and my nose in my books and bided my time until I could head off to college.”
“Has anyone nominated you for sainthood yet?”
“Don’t get me wrong, I did my fair share of crying over having my feelings hurt, but I thought they were a bunch of loud-mouthed idiots who probably wouldn’t amount to much, so that kept me going.” Her eyes sparkled with sudden tears. “And I had a protector who always came to my defense when something derogatory was said about me. I wish I could have been so brave, but I took the coward’s way out. I simply told myself that the meanies were living the best years of their lives in high school, while I was looking ahead to bigger and better things. And see? I was right. I’m going to be on the cover of Vogue!”
“Boy, how do you resist wanting to pay them back for all the misery they put you through?”
“Believe it or not, I’ve forgiven them.”
“You’re kidding.”
“It was either forgive them or let the experience weigh me down for the rest of my life. So I chose forgiveness. It was very liberating. I highly recommend it. And it’s allowed me to direct my energy and talents toward something constructive rather than destructive. Revenge is such a downer. If you feed it enough negative emotion, it can eat you alive.”
She took my arm and navigated me away from the door as
Dietger stormed into the lobby like a prize bull stampeding through the streets of Pamplona. “Geesch. He walks the same way he drives,” she scoffed. “Like a maniac. I’m glad we’re going on foot tonight. The only thing we’ll have to dodge is bicycles. Are you coming with us? We’ll probably be treated to quite the spectacle for a measly five Euros.”
“Five Euros? Not twenty?”
“It’s probably worth five. No way is it worth twenty.”
Oh, God. I hope no one mentioned that to Beth Ann. We could be looking at a total nuclear meltdown.