I didn’t need to ask Jim and Eve to take a gander. Even before I poked my finger at the black-and-white photo, they bent closer for a better look.
While they did, I bit my tongue, the better to keep my opinions to myself. After all, I’d had three and a half hours in the car with the William Allen High School yearbook, and in those three and a half hours-the yearbook open on the front seat beside me-I’d had plenty of opportunities to glance over at the picture of the young man with shaggy hair and wearing a Nehru jacket.
“So?” I’d waited long enough. I wanted to hear what they thought. After all, that was why I’d pilfered the yearbook in the first place.
My impatience didn’t stop Eve from peering at the picture a while longer. Jim did her one better. He took the book over to where an overhead light shone directly above the bar cash register. He stared at the photograph of Norman for a long time before he shook his head.
“That’s the hell of it, isn’t it?” he said. “A person changes a great deal in forty years. I’ve seen pictures of my own mum from way back then. Wouldn’t even know it was her if she didn’t tell me.”
I was hoping for something more conclusive, and I guess my expression gave me away, because Jim handed the book back to me. “There’s a resemblance, sure enough. If you add more than forty years, and more than forty pounds, and a whole lot of gray to his hair… yeah, this Norman fellow might look like Jacques. But if it’s really him…”
“Let me see it again.” Eve reached over and grabbed the book out of my hands. She wrinkled her nose. “Yeah,” she said. “It’s him. For sure. Maybe. Or maybe not.”
My spirits sank. I’d already been over the definitelys and the maybes and the maybe nots inside my head. All the way back from Allentown. I was hoping Eve and Jim would be more help.
I squinted at the picture, trying to imagine the fresh-faced boy in it wearing a crisp, white Très Bonne Cuisine apron and smiling back at me from a jar of Vavoom!
“Let’s say it is him.” I threw out the suggestion because standing there wondering was getting us nowhere. “That leaves us with even more questions. If Monsieur started life as Norman Applebaum and then he was all those other people…” I thought about the stack of phony IDs and my spirits slumped even lower. “It’s overwhelming. I mean, where do we even begin?”
Pub keeper that he is, Jim knew exactly where. He poured a glass of white wine for me, a glass of red for Eve (her current favorite was Shiraz), and a bitter, dark beer for himself. He put the glasses on the tray, carried the tray to a nearby table, and pulled out chairs for Eve and me.
“We’re getting ahead of ourselves,” he said. “And that’s going to accomplish nothing at all.”
“But-”
He stopped me with a look. “It isn’t like you to get so discouraged,” he said. “You’ve never lost faith in yourself and your detective abilities before. Not with any of your other cases. You’re feeling down because you’re worried about Jacques.”
“Sure. Of course.” I dropped into the chair and when Jim put the glass of wine in front of me, I took a sip. “He’s our friend. And so far, nothing we’ve done has brought us any closer to finding out what happened to him. What if…” I took another sip of wine. When it slid past the lump of emotion in my throat, it hurt. “What if he’s dead?”
“If he’s dead, the police would have found his body by now.” This comment came from Eve, and I turned her way. It wasn’t the time to bring up Tyler so I kept my mouth shut on that subject and simply listened. “They’ve looked in all the logical places,” she said. “I mean, they checked the parks and the Potomac. They even took a close look at all the johns in the morgue.”
“That’s John Does,” I told her, but I don’t think she saw the difference.
“So all that’s good.” Jim licked a bit of beer foam from his lips. “Until we hear differently, we’re not going to panic. We’re going to assume Jacques is alive and well.”
“And all we have to do is find him.” I plunked my elbows on the table and cradled my head in my hands. “We could always look into what the waitress in Allentown told me,” I said, thinking out loud. “She said Norman Applebaum came to a bad end in Las Vegas. What do you suppose that means? Does it mean Norman died there? If he did, and if we could get some kind of confirmation about that, then we’d know for sure that Norman’s not Jacques and Jacques isn’t Norman.”
“That’s a good start.” Jim had an order pad in his shirt pocket and he pulled it out and scribbled a note.
Back when we met at that cooking class at Très Bonne Cuisine and I got involved with my first case, Jim had opposed the very idea of me sticking my nose into a murder investigation. Don’t get the wrong idea; he’s not the Me-Tarzan-You-Jane type. Even back then, he tells me, he knew I was smart and capable (I love it when he says things like that). But like most regular people-me included before that fateful cooking class-Jim had never been so close to a murder. He knew nothing about investigating. And he was worried about my safety.
Recently, he’d learned to be more tolerant. Oh, I suspected that he still worried, but I knew that if I kept him in the loop and bounced my ideas and theories off him, it made him more comfortable. It was also a no-brainer from my point of view: If Jim knew where I was going and who I was going to see, it provided me with a safety net. I liked that, too, especially since Jim had already proved himself something of a superhero when it came to saving me.
There was the time he raced into a dark alley to whisk me away from danger and keep me from getting arrested. And the time he dove into the path of a giant vase that was headed right at me. And… well, I could go on and on. The point being that when it comes to my well-being, Jim is fearless.
It seemed even the perfect boyfriend could get better and better. Jim had never done anything as tangible in regard to one of my investigations as keeping a list for me, and watching him scribble on the order pad, my heart warmed.
“So you’ll do the computer work, right?” He pointed my way with the pen he was holding. “What do you want me and Eve to do?”
“Well, while we’re at it, we should all take a look at these other pictures. We might as well start there.” I’d flagged the pages with sticky notes, and I flipped to the one that showed the drama club arranged on the gym bleachers. “There.” I poked a finger at Norman, standing in the back row. “What do you think?”
“It looks more like Jacques there, for sure,” Jim said, and I wondered if he really meant it, or if he was just trying to boost my spirits. I appreciated it, but really, I was searching for the truth.
He glanced at the photos on the opposite page. They showed scenes from a school production of Our Town, and according to the caption on the photo of the curtain call, Norman Applebaum had played the Stage Manager. Norman stood in the center of the line of teenage actors to take his bows.
“There’s no denying that looks like Jacques,” Jim said. “I’ve seen him smile that way dozens of times, usually when he’s being interviewed by the press or when he’s onstage at a food show. He loves being the center of attention.”
“And Norman loved writing, too.” I turned to the page that showed the school newspaper staff. In that particular picture, Norman was wearing a cardigan sweater. He was seated at a desk in the newspaper office.
“On this picture…” Jim examined it closely. His expression fell. “Not so much,” he said.
He was right.
I sank back in my chair. “Well, I’ll make copies of the pictures, just in case we want to refer to them. For now, I guess it’s all we can do. I’ll work the Las Vegas angle, too. If MaryAnn’s right about Norman going out there and we can find out what really happened to him, we can take it from there. Only…” I glanced at the clock above the bar. “I can’t do it tonight. I’m whooped, and I have to stop at Très Bonne Cuisine on my way home. I know there isn’t much change in the cash register and I’ll need to get some for the morning, but I need to get some tens and twenties out of the drawer and I’ll pick up the day’s deposit while I’m at it. That way I can stop at the bank on my way in tomorrow.”