“Wow.” I joined him at the display case. “My Grampa Sippel built a dollhouse for me when I was little, but it didn’t look anything like this.”
Chip donned his glasses to read the accompanying plaque. “‘Dollhouse of Petronella Oortman, 1686–1705.’ Cripes, it took nineteen years to complete the thing. I’d like to build one for my granddaughter, but I’d like to finish it before she graduates from college.”
The dollhouse was a miniaturized wonder, depicting nine rooms of what were probably high-class digs in Petronella’s day. Built inside an open-fronted cabinet of tortoise shell and tin, it boasted Lilliputian-size furnishings, complete with porcelain spittoons, gilt-framed portraits, tapestried walls, China plates, and itty-bitty irons in an array of microscopic sizes.
“All the comforts of home,” I quipped. “They even played kids’ games.” I indicated a wooden game board sitting atop a table in a second-floor salon. “What’s your best guess? I’m thinking Parcheesi.”
“Backgammon,” he said without hesitation.
“How can you tell?”
“I cheated.” He nodded at the wall to my left. “You can see it better in the painting.”
Petronella had apparently been so proud of her creation, she’d commissioned an artist to reproduce it on canvas. The result was an eight-foot-high painting that replicated the details of the dollhouse so perfectly, it looked like something spewed out by the Big Bertha copy machine at Kinko’s. But while the painting depicted maids and mistresses in attendance in every room, the dollhouse was strangely unoccupied, or at least, it was now.
“Do you suppose the people in the painting represent dolls that used to be in the dollhouse?” I wondered aloud.
“That’d be my guess,” said Chip. “Looks like they all bit the dust.”
“They must have been really fragile for not even one of them to survive.”
Chip shrugged. “It’s been three hundred years. Stuff breaks, gets set aside, goes missing. Speaking of which, I hear a couple of your guys are MIA.”
“They’re presently unaccounted for, but I’m expecting them back at any moment,” I said in an upbeat voice.
“Yeah? Well, good luck with that.”
“Please, don’t sound so grim. They’ll show up. The police assured me they would.”
He forced an apologetic smile. “Sorry. Guess I’m a little jaded about the prospect of actually finding a missing person. Personal experience and all that.”
Was this another reference to Bobby Guerrette? His classmates were talking about him so much, I was beginning to think he was on the trip with us. “Would you do me a favor?” I finally asked. “Would you please get me up to speed with the Bobby Guerrette story? I know he was really smart; he championed Laura LaPierre when she was being ridiculed, and he refused to attend his senior prom with Paula Peavey. I keep hearing everyone bat his name around, but no one has breathed a word about how he disappeared. It’s almost as if they’re afraid to.”
“Sounds like you’ve been hanging out with the wrong people. No one’s afraid to talk about it. It’s just that some of these yahoos don’t want to waste time talking about Bobby when they could be talking about themselves. So, what do you want to know?”
“How did he disappear?”
“It was on Senior Skip Day, a month before graduation. We decided to spend the day at a park near the Bangor Water Works. It was a great place to hide out from the parents. More like a grotto than a park. A steep hill. Trees. A waterfall. A little manmade sluiceway that funneled water down the hill. A fountain that could have rivaled Vegas at the time. We used to monkey around in the water, acting like dopes. It only reached our ankles, but it was like wading in a brook, without the aggravation of mosquitoes or black flies.”
“The whole class went?”
“The whole class never did anything together, except attend assemblies in the auditorium. A bunch of us arrived early, and then kids came and went all day. I don’t recall everyone who showed up, but I know Hennessy was there, and Bouchard, Mindy and Sheila, naturally, Peewee—”
“—who was much shorter back then than he is now.”
“Right. He was a shrimp in high school. He must have overdosed on growth hormone after he graduated. Uh, Bobby was there, of course. Kids got along with him surprisingly well despite the fact that he was so much smarter than the rest of us. Mike McManus showed up—”
“Mike? He told me he was invisible in high school. What was he doing rubbing shoulders with the in-crowd?”
“Bobby really liked Mike, so he asked him to join us. It was probably the first and last time Mike ever found himself in such exalted company.”
Pseudo-exalted was more like it.
“Paula was there, even though no one wanted her, but her parents bought her a car for graduation, so she showed up wherever she damn well pleased. I have a mental image of some jocks and cheerleaders whose names escape me, and a few of the more popular smart kids.”
“Pete Finnegan?”
“Hell, no. Pete was smart, but that’s all he was. He didn’t talk to anyone, he didn’t participate in anything, he never cracked a smile. He studied. Pete was a dud, even though he was the first kid in our class to get his driver’s license, which should have earned him bragging rights, but it didn’t. His first big rite of passage, and no one bothered to congratulate him. If I’d been Pete, I would have been so bummed, but he probably never even noticed. He did everything he could to be an outsider, so the rest of us accommodated him. If he’d shown his face at the park, I guarantee he would have been laughed out of the place.”
I flinched involuntarily. “And yet he signed up for the reunion.”
“A complete one-eighty. Go figure.”
“Were Mary Lou and Laura there?”
He scrunched his eyes shut as if trying to picture them in the scene. “I can’t visualize them, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t there.” He hesitated. “Well, Mary Lou might have shown up, but not Laura. The popular kids were always merciless with poor Laura. I’m surprised she hasn’t suffered permanent emotional damage.”
“She apparently rose above it.”
Chip pondered this as he massaged the bristly white hairs of his mustache. “Either that, or she’s spent a fortune on therapy.”
“Whatever the explanation, she’s certainly come out the winner. So,” I eyed him intently, “at what point did Bobby disappear?”
“Okay, I’m getting to that. We spent the day horsing around—eating junk food, sneaking into the woods to drink the beer we’d smuggled out of our houses, hanging out, making out, getting a buzz on—all the stuff that seems so cool when you’re a teenager. When it got later, Bobby said he had to get home before he got locked out, so he decided to hitchhike, and … that’s the last time we ever saw him.”
I stared at him, slightly jarred. “That’s it?”
“Pretty much.”
“He had the kind of parents who would actually lock him out?”
“He didn’t have parents. He lived at the orphanage on the other side of the city. St. Michael’s Home. The nuns locked the door at nine o’clock, so if you showed up at 9:01, you were on your own. I guess Bobby had missed curfew a couple of times growing up, and he didn’t want to do it again. He wasn’t fond of sleeping on the ground.”
Bobby Guerrette was an orphan? Huh. Someone had made a reference to an orphan, a misfit, and a girl who was afraid of her own shadow on the dinner cruise last night, but I’d obviously been too distracted by rising tempers to make the connection.