Tilly shook her head. “When I got up this morning, I must have grabbed your glasses off the bedside table by mistake. Forgive me, Marion.” She gestured toward the discarded lenses. “Shall I take those off your hands?”
But once she’d adjusted them on her face, she shook her head. “These aren’t mine either. All right.” Giving her walking stick an imperious thump on the floor, she steeled her eyes and hardened her jaw. “I have only two things to say. First, we owe Emily a titanic debt of thanks for resolving this imbroglio, and second, one of you is wearing my glasses. I don’t know who it is, but I’m giving you notice. I want them back.”
Relieved that all nine of them weren’t about to suffer kidney failure, I sucked in a calming breath and allowed myself an indulgent sigh.
“Can anyone read the handwritin’ on that whiteboard?” Nana asked off-handedly. “I can’t figure out where it says we’re goin’, but the bus better hurry up and get here, ’cause it says we’re leavin’ at nine-thirty.”
I checked my watch.
“Get the eyeglasses thing sorted out,” I urged as I raced toward the elevator. “I’ll see you on the bus.”
“What about Dick?” Grace and Helen shouted at me in unison.
“Don’t worry about them!” I bypassed the closed elevator door and headed for the stairs. “I’m on top of it!”
_____
The Rijksmuseum is a lumbering, red-brick leviathan that sprawls the length of two football fields. Blending the elegance of a French chateau with the ruggedness of a fortified castle, it’s an imposing jumble of gothic turrets, decorative gables, grand archways, towering windows, and cold gray stone. Skylights the size of solar panels stud its long expanse of roof, spilling light onto paintings that illustrate the domestic lives of Dutchmen in an age when their galleons ruled the waves, and their burgomeisters ruled the world in periwigs and pumps. The men responsible for creating these portraits are referred to as the Dutch Masters—a group of artistic geniuses whose masterpieces hung in the homes of seventeenth-century patricians before ending up on the lids of twentieth-century cigar boxes.
We were scheduled to meet an art historian on the first floor at eleven o’clock, so we had plenty of time to explore the ground floor exhibits before then. I power-walked through the Dutch history rooms, taking quick notice of the clocks, ships, weapons and armor, then wended my way around to the sculpture and decorative arts rooms, where I found Chip Soucy parked in front of a glass case that housed an exhibit more suited to my taste—a dollhouse.
“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
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,
“—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.”
“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.”
