Bonnie of Evidence

by Maddy Hunter

  “Close the door, you moron!” yelled Bernice. “You’re flooding the place!”

  “You are now free to leave the bus,” Dad announced with flight attendant proficiency. “You have a half-hour to explore the chapel and surrounding grounds.”

  “Are you crazy?” shouted Stella Gordon. “It’s pouring out there! You explore the grounds. I’m staying put.”

  “I’m with her,” said Bill.

  “Can we drive to the next stop?” asked Margi. “Maybe this is just an isolated squall and it’ll stop raining by then.”

  “These conditions are supposed to last all day,” said Dad in a strangely modulated tone that reminded me of a Stepford wife, “but they shouldn’t affect your activities. In Orkney, this is what’s referred to as a gentle rain.”

  Okay, Dad’s ability to channel John was officially getting a little creepy.

  Wally stood up, his gaze drifting upward as a barrage of raindrops pelted the roof of the bus. “Conditions might be a little prohibitive to fully explore the site at the moment.” He turned toward John. “And it might be a good idea to close the door.”

  Whoosh.

  “Would someone tell me why we came all the way over here to visit a Quonset hut?” griped Stella.

  “When’s lunch?” asked Dick Teig. “I’m starting to get hunger pains.”

  “That’s because you left your breakfast on the ferry,” said Helen.

  Wally checked his watch. “We’re not expected at our luncheon venue for another hour, so we’re going to have to—”

  “So let’s arrive early and surprise ’em,” encouraged Dick Stolee. “All those in favor say, ‘Aye.’”

  “AYE!”

  “Stoppit!” Osmond leaped out of his seat, arms flailing and fists clenched. “Dick Stolee is not qualified to conduct a vote.”

  Alice grabbed his jacket and yanked him back down beside her. “Save your breath. It’s because of this whole Internet blogging thing. Everyone thinks he’s an expert now.”

  Deciding that traveling to our next venue might be less risky than having our tires sink into the mud in the parking lot, Wally gave John the nod to head out. Unfortunately, with road conditions reducing our speed to a crawl, we arrived not an hour early, but ten minutes late, which caused major panic and a mad scramble for the exit doors.

  “You don’t have to rush!” Wally assured them as they muscled past him into the rain.

  I let out an amused snort. Good luck with that.

  The building everyone was escaping into was a one-story struc-

  ture perched on a hillock overlooking the storm-battered waters of the Scapa Flow. It was neither commercial restaurant nor fast food joint, but rather a community gathering space for locals whose villages weren’t large enough to warrant restaurants or fast food. Luncheon fare for tour busses was prepared by members of a ladies guild, in their own kitchens, so we’d be treated to some tasty examples of local, homemade cuisine, at a cost of only five pounds per person. But even more exciting than that for our female guests, the ladies washroom was a ten-seater!

  I followed behind Erik and Alex as they tramped through the entrance, sticking with them as they entered the dining room. The tables had filled up quickly, but there were three empty seats at a long table against the back wall, so we grabbed them, sharing dining space with Tilly, Lucille, Margi, George, and Cameron.

  “It’s a fixed meal, so there’s no menu,” I said as I shrugged out of my wet raincoat and hung it on the back of my chair. I nodded at a platter of finger sandwiches in the center of the table. “Appetizers, I presume. Shall we start passing them around?” I scrubbed my hands in anticipation, wondering what exotic fillings we’d be sinking our teeth into. Wild Atlantic salmon with cucumbers and boursin? Oyster pâté with pecans and cream cheese?

  Margi peeled back the plastic wrap, stacked a couple of sandwiches on her plate, and passed the dish to her left. Lifting up the corner of her bread to peek inside, she smiled. “Oh, goody! My favorite. Peanut butter.”

  What?

  “Egg salad,” said George as he inspected his selection.

  Cameron chuckled. “American cheese … with butter.”

  No, no. This couldn’t be right. Where was the salmon? The oysters? “Just a few mundane trifles to whet your appetite,” I assured them. “The main course should be along presently.” But it was definitely a little odd that the wait staff hadn’t arrived yet to take our drink orders.

  “Would someone hand me the water pitcher?” asked Erik.

  Cameron passed it across the table. “So when did you retire from the kickboxing circuit? I was telling Emily I saw you fight years ago in Vegas—the year you took home all the marbles. I knew you looked familiar, but it took me awhile to place you. What year was it that you won the championship?”

  Erik froze mid-motion, his hand hovering above his water glass as if it were being held in prolonged suspension by a master puppeteer.

  “Kickboxing champion?” Alex guffawed. He arched a questioning eyebrow at his partner. “Have you been holding out on me? Shame on you. Frolicking in Vegas and not bothering to invite me along?”

  “Oh, right.” Erik threw Cameron a dismissive look as he remem-bered to pour his water. “Wasn’t me, bro. Musta been someone wearing my face. What’s that really long German word for it?”

  “I thought all German words were really long,” puzzled Margi.

  “You’re referring to the term doppelganger,” said Tilly. “A word in our modern lexicon that has come to mean ‘a look-alike.’”

  “It was no look-alike,” Cameron insisted. “It was you. Fast Freddie Torres? Sound familiar?”

  Erik took a long swig of water. “Nope.”

  Cameron laughed. “Why are you running away from it, dude? If I’d rung up as many wins as you, I’d put it out there for everyone to ooh and ahh over. Say, what’d you do with that last championship belt you won? You can’t wear something like that to hold up your jeans. I mean, with all the gold and glitter, that thing must weigh fifty pounds.”

  “I told you.” Erik’s voice grew sharp, his eyes narrow. “I’m not your guy. So, can we drop it?”

  “My Dick loved to watch those awful boxing matches,” Lucille reminisced. “And pro wrestling matches. And mud wrestling matches.” She bit into an egg salad sandwich, chewing thoughtfully before swallowing. “Now that I think about it, Dick was quite fond of watching people in skimpy outfits beat the crap out of each other.”

  “Are you skipping the appetizer course, Emily?” Tilly took the sandwich platter from me as I handed it to her untouched.

  “Yah. I’ll let you guys finish the rest. I’m going to save my appetite for the main course.”

  “If it’s as good as the peanut butter sandwiches, we’ll be in for a treat,” Margi enthused.

  “Comfort food,” said Alex. He glanced at the blinding rain streaming down the windows. “We need comfort food in weather like this. Did you know NASA provides comfort food to the astronauts when they’re in space? The only problem is, it comes out of a tube and looks like toothpaste, so what’s the point? How much comfort can you eke out of eating toothpaste?”

  Which reminded me. “Are you a nuclear engineer or a rocket scientist?” I asked Alex.

  “Believe it or not, Emily, I’m a little of each.”

  “So, have you ever been exposed to radiation?”

  “Certainly not,” he said blithely.

  “Oh. Then Erik was only teasing last night?”

  “Teasing about what?” asked Alex.

  Erik blew out a long breath. “It was a joke already! You know—ha ha ha? I was being facetious. His brain has not been affected by radiation. If his breath could light up a Geiger counter, do you think I’d be sitting here beside him?”

  Margi looked aghast. “Oh, my goodness. You’d abandon the poor thin
g to fend for himself in his hour of need?” She tucked in her lips. “That’s very disappointing.”

  “Has anyone read the new biography of Leonardo da Vinci?” Tilly jumped in. “He drew up plans for a flying machine as early as the mid 1400s. From the perspective of a rocket scientist, Mr. Hart, would you consider da Vinci’s blueprints the first embryonic stage of aeronautical or astronautical engineering? And for those among us who are unfamiliar with the terms, perhaps you’d be so good as to explain the difference between the two.”

  Smiling inwardly, I settled back in my chair, waiting. Alex threw his head back and groaned.

  “Realllly, Miss Hovick. I so appreciate the question, but I’m not about to bore these good people with a treatise on rocket science. It’d be more exciting for them to watch paint dry.”

  “I don’t mind watching paint dry,” confided George, “especially if it’s one of those intense new colors, like marshmallow or clouds. But I wouldn’t mind hearin’ about rockets either.”

  I smiled brightly. “Me, too.”

  He gave his head an adamant shake. “Absolutely not. I never talk shop when I’m on holiday. Isn’t that right, cookie?” He leaned toward Erik and batted his eyelashes.

  “Hey,” Erik droned. “Do you mind? We’re in public.”

  “I don’t mean to change the subject,” Margi interrupted, “but shouldn’t we be starting the main course sometime soon?”

  I ranged a look around the room, looking for Wally.

  No Wally.

  “Why don’t I just pop up and see what the holdup is.”

  As I hurried through the dining room, I noticed a lot of empty sandwich platters, which meant everyone else was waiting for the second course as well. So where was it?

  I passed through the entry vestibule, headed down a connecting corridor, and ended up in a room with a refrigerator, stove, several butcher block tables, and three white-haired ladies wearing neatly starched aprons.

  “Hi.” I offered a friendly smile. “I’m part of the tourist group in the dining room. We have a schedule to maintain, because we have to catch a ferry back to the mainland later, so we’re not in that much of a hurry, but we really do have to watch our time. So, will you be serving the main course soon?”

  “Whit fock fer dool un fae ma pooky,” explained one of the ladies with a quick bob of her head.

  How could I not have guessed she was going to say that?

  I held my finger up in a stalling gesture. “Don’t move from this spot, okay? I’ll be right back. We just happen to be traveling with our own translator.”

  I sprinted back into the hall, running into Margi in the vestibule. She held my phone out to me.

  “It was dinging inside your raincoat pocket. I thought it might be important.”

  “Thanks. While I get this, would you run back and tell Dad I need him?”

  It was a text. From Etienne.

  “Background check disturbing. Subjects don’t exist.”

  eighteen

  I couldn’t decide what freaked me out more—that our platter of finger sandwiches was the main course, or that Erik and Alex were honest-to-goodness imposters. The only comforting thing about the day so far was the unrelenting foul weather that was confining us to the bus.

  It was raining so hard, tiny estuaries were forming rivers across the road.

  Pretty bad when the only ray of sunshine in your day is rain.

  The torrential downpour was the reason we were parked in the visitors’ lot at the Ring of Brodgar, our noses pressed to the windows, squinting at an impressive circle of standing stones rather than wandering through them. This was to have been the site of today’s geocaching search, but with no one willing to brave the elements, we canceled the event by unanimous consent, which was just as well, considering that Mom had forgotten to turn her computer off last night, causing the battery to run down. No computer meant no coordinates, and disrupted cell service meant no one’s GPS was working.

  It also meant that Bernice wouldn’t be harping at me to let her back into the contest until at least tomorrow.

  If I lived that long.

  “If you rub away the condensation on your window, you can see that unlike Stonehenge, the monoliths of Brodgar still form a nearly perfect ring.” Dad swept his hand in Vanna White style toward the spectacle. “Scientists think it was erected about four thousand years ago, which goes to show that Stone Age people didn’t buy into the idea of built-in obsolescence.”

  “Could be they just didn’t know how to spell it,” suggested Osmond.

  Something had changed drastically at lunch. Whether spurred by Cameron’s insistence that Erik was Fast Freddie Torres, or Tilly’s polite inquiry about the difference between aero- and astronautical engineering, Erik and Alex had shed their friendly exteriors to become tight-lipped and wary, like two men intent on completing a deadly mission.

  And I didn’t know how to stop them.

  I stared at the blank screen on my cell phone, willing the signal to come back up. Etienne would know what to do. If only I could reach him.

  Wally stepped into the center aisle, his expression apologetic. “We’re supposed to be here for a full hour, but since you’ve decided to scrap this site, I’m going to suggest we head directly to our next stop, Skara Brae. It’s a National Heritage Site with a museum, cafe, restroom facilities, and a top-notch reconstruction of a prehistoric dwelling. Once it stops raining, if it stops raining, you can venture out to visit the excavation site of an authentic Neolithic settlement. It was discovered in 1850 after a powerful storm swept over the bay and washed all the sand and topsoil off the beach. Ironically, until then, no one ever suspected it existed. Not even the family who occupied the mansion that sits practically on top of it. And the mansion had been occupied since the 1600s. It’s just down the road a piece, so we’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  Nuts. We were safe on the bus. It was when we split up into smaller groups that we ran into trouble.

  I stared out the window, worrying the gloss off my bottom lip. If Etienne were here, he’d tell me not to do anything that would jeopardize either my safety or the safety of our guests. He’d tell me to be smart, remain calm, and stay frosty. But most importantly, he’d tell me not to be a hero.

  My updated Escort’s Manual was a bit more to the point: When situations arise that are beyond your control, don’t feel obliged to suffer silently. Share your misery. That’s what your tour director is for.

  “We’ve got a problem with Erik and Alex,” I blurted out to Wally the minute we hit the visitor center. I’d chased him down and dragged him to a quiet corner before he could run off to the men’s room.

  He regarded me sternly. “Unbelievable. I thought I might get complaints from folks like the Gordons, but never from you. Look, Emily, whether you like it or not, we’re living in the twenty-first century, and relationships like the one Erik and Alex have are part of the emerging fabric of the times. So unless you’re planning to limit your roster to couples who—”

  “I’m not talking about their being gay! I don’t care if they’re gay. They’re planning to kill someone!”

  He stared at me, deadpan. “Of course they are.”

  “They are! I overhead them talking in the men’s room on the ferry. They’ve already killed Isobel and Dolly—apparently accidentally, because the girls weren’t their intended target. But they’re going to make up for their mistakes today by hitting their real target, and then they’re getting out of Dodge.”

  He lifted his brows. “You were in the men’s room on the ferry?”

  “I was in the ladies’ room. There’s an air vent between the two. But that’s not the issue! They’re planning to whack one of the guests on our tour. And I think they have guns.”

  That got his attention. “Did you see an actual weapon?”

  “No, but Erik said some
thing about pulling a trigger. And here’s the other thing. I got a text from Etienne back at the community center. He ran a quick background check on Erik and Alex and he discovered they don’t exist.”

  He pushed a long breath out through his teeth, his expression morphing from disbelieving to grim. “Geez. You actually heard them admit they killed Isobel and Dolly?”

  “Alex called it collateral damage and suggested that someone named Stu was going to be really ticked off about it.”

  “Geez.” He gave his head a quick shake as if to clear his brain. “Okay, so how does Etienne say we should handle this?”

  “He doesn’t.” I pulled my phone out of my pocket. “No signal. Do you think we should contact the police in the nearest town?”

  He chewed that over, eventually shaking his head. “And tell them what? That you overheard two guys in the men’s room say they were going to kill someone? It’d be their word against yours, and there’s two of them to deny it.”

  I paused thoughtfully. “They didn’t actually use the word ‘kill.’”

  “What word did they use?”

  “They said they were going to ‘strike.’ But in the context they were using it, I’m sure they meant kill.”

  He planted his legs apart and crossed his arms. “They didn’t say ‘kill’?”

  “They used a very acceptable synonym.”

  He shook his head. “You got nuthin’, Em.”

  “But what about the fact that Erik Ishmael and Alex Hart don’t exist?”

  “It’s not a crime to be an imposter.”

  “Are you sure? What about their passports? Isn’t it a federal crime to put a fake name on a government document?”

  “I don’t know! But I do know that the local police aren’t going to be able to do anything about your allegations. And I say that with some authority because I’ve been in the tour business a heck of a lot longer than you have, and I know how police in foreign countries deal with American tourists.”

  I looked him straight in the eye. “But … what if I’m right?”