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were crossing the street? What if—
    I saw legions of tourists on the perimeter of the crowd, but no Nana, no Tilly, no George.
    Oh, God!
    Spying a familiar face, I ran toward him. “Do you know what happened?” I asked Pete Finnegan.
    He regarded me, stone-faced. “Dunno.”
    I stood on my tiptoes, unable to see over the bystanders’ heads, but I wasn’t about to let that stop me. Squeezing around a baby carriage, I created a tiny opening and excused my way through the crowd until I reached the curb, where I stared in numb horror at the scene before me.
    The tortured wreck of a bicycle lay on its side, surrounded by loose Brussels sprouts, a smattering of broken eggs, and a woman’s walking shoe. The cyclist was curled in a fetal position nearby, his trousers ripped, his face and hands bloody, being attended by several people who were yelling desperately into cellphones.
    A dozen feet away, in a swirl of diesel and exhaust fumes, a woman in a pea-green blazer with jumbo shoulder pads lay facedown on the pavement, seemingly unaware of both the foul air and the people who were hovering over her. Her legs were twisted into impossible angles. Her shoeless foot hung limply from her ankle. She neither coughed, nor groaned, nor moved.
    She was still. Absolutely still.
    “I know that woman!” I cried, hoping that someone who spoke English would understand me. “Her name is Charlotte.”
    The cyclist fought to sit upright. Propping his elbows on his bent knees, he braced his head in his hands and threw an anguished look at Charlotte’s lifeless body. He let out a tormented sob, then wailed something in a language I couldn’t understand.
    It was gut wrenching. The poor man was so beside himself with grief that I felt guilty bearing witness to his heartache. I blinked away tears as I turned to the woman standing beside me. “Do you know what he’s saying?”
    “ Ja . He says, ‘Damn these tourists. They’re going to be the death of me.’”

Four
    If the cellphone reception in our Amsterdam hotel lobby had been subpar, my conversation with Etienne might have been reduced to a few minutes of frustrating static, but aided by a profusion of cell towers in the area, I was able to recount the tale of our most recent tribulation with landline clarity.
    “So the bus driver dropped us off at our hotel about a half hour ago, and we’re supposed to leave again in twenty minutes for a dinner cruise on the canal. Not that anyone can think about food right now. But our driver informed us, and I quote, that ‘the show must go on.’ Why are Europeans so fond of American clichés? Don’t they have any of their own?”
    I waited a beat for him to answer. When he didn’t, I figured the call had been dropped despite the good reception. “Hello? Etienne? Are you there?”
    “Your tour director is dead?”
    I winced. This wasn’t exactly the kind of event we could highlight in our travel brochure. “She warned us about the bicycles, but she apparently forgot to heed her own warning.”
    “Your tour is one day old, and already you’ve transported a body to the morgue?”
    “C’mon, sweetie. You’ve visited Holland. You know what bicycle traffic is like around here. An accident like that could happen to anyone.” I paused. “I guess.”
    He muttered something in French, or Swiss-German, or Italian. I couldn’t tell which.
    “Here’s the thing,” I explained. “Charlotte was a terrible tour director. No one liked her. Actually, that’s an understatement. Everyone hated her. She was controlling, and petulant, and treated us like children.”
    “So you think the accident happened on purpose?”
    “You bet I do.” Etienne had hung up his Swiss police inspector’s badge only a short time ago, so his law enforcement genes were still easily stimulated.
    “Did any eyewitnesses step forward?”
    I cupped my hand around my mouth and lowered my voice. “That’s the really weird thing. The sidewalk was absolutely choked