Free How Nancy Drew Saved My Life by Lauren Baratz-Logsted Page A

worse.’” It said that in the month in which I was living, just one single fine day was considered to be the norm.
    What in God’s name was I doing here?
    I’m a Jewish girl. We hate being cold! It is a mistake to let us get wet!
    I hadn’t even brought any kind of rain slicker.
    â€œOh, yeah,” George crooned from behind me. “You’re doing just great so far, aren’t you?”
    What Would Nancy Drew Do?
    She’d have read the damn guidebook, she’d have read all available information, she’d have done research before coming here.
    Screw it.
    Of course, she’d also still be nice to George, no matter what he said to her.
    Screw that, too.
    Â 
    The first thing that struck me about the terminal at Keflavik Airport was all the duty-free shops. Everywhere I looked, there were these shops and the chief product they were all selling was chocolate, chocolate in massive industrial-size bags that were bigger than anything I’d ever seen in my own supersize-it country. You would think that with all of that chocolate, Icelanders would be the fattest people on the planet, but everywhere I looked, with the rare tourist exception, there were tall and beautiful and blond people making their graceful way through the airport, as though they were peopling the Scandinavian equivalent of Stepford, toting their duty-free booty.
    One of the nice things about being employed by an ambassador is that there is a car and driver to meet you at the airport: I realized this as soon as I saw the man standing there holding a placard that said Nanny Bell. As George, who was waiting in line for the bus, shot daggers at me—I was sorely tempted to stick my tongue out at him, our brief flirtation with being friendly already a thing of the past—I let Lars Aquavit take my bag and lead me out to the embassy car at the curb.
    Actually, his name wasn’t really Lars Aquavit, but I doubt I could spell and certainly cannot pronounce the name he gave me, so let’s just leave it at Lars Aquavit.
    Lars was tall, blond and beautiful, and I was quickly realizing that those three adjectives were going to soon grow redundant for me. Oh, well. Maybe to these people I would seem exotic and they would crown me Miss Iceland and send me off as their emissary on an all-expenses-paid trip to the next Miss Universe Pageant.
    Yeah, right.
    Lars also had a slim silver cell phone glued to his ear. I would have thought this rude, but everywhere I looked, all the other beautiful Icelanders were doing the same. It seemed to be a cultural thing, even more than back home.
    Somehow, Lars managed to use his cell-phone hand to also juggle an umbrella over our heads, so what had I really to complain about? At least I wasn’t getting wet.
    The other cultural thing about Icelanders that I noticed right away was that a lot of people seemed to be smoking. Back home, where smoking had replaced being a witch as the number-one reason to burn someone at the stake, I’d been forced to slowly quit over time and, of course, I’d certainly never smoked around the Keating kids. After all, what kind of an adulterous nanny would I be if I both slept with their father and smoked within sniff of their button noses?
    But once Lars had me seated comfortably in the back seat and climbed behind the wheel, he lit up, drawing long and hard on his slim cigarette, and that curling smoke sure looked tempting.
    Weren’t Icelanders supposed to have the highest life expectancy on the face of the planet? I seemed to recall reading that somewhere several years back. Maybe those statistics—Best This, Best That—were revised every year and maybe some other country had outlived them, but still, I distinctly recalled the article saying the average Icelander lived eighty-four years. Eighty-four healthy years. So how come they could smoke like chimneys and we couldn’t?
    â€œUm, excuse me?” I called up to