“Nope, and neither Mary Lou nor Laura want to discuss it. All they’re saying is that they got turned around in the crowd and couldn’t find me anywhere. Guess they never bothered to look on the damn bridge where I stood for three frickin’ hours, looking for them. Would you believe they made it back to the hotel before I did last night? So I blew up in a fit of temper, and now Mary Lou’s not speaking to me. What a great vacation, huh? I’m so glad I came.”
“Excuse me, Emily.” Grace approached us on tiptoe, questionnaire in hand. “If I could bother you for just a moment.”
“Problems with the form?” I inquired.
“And how. I’m having an ethical crisis with question number two.”
I angled my head to read the line she indicated. “‘What is subject’s hair color?’”
“That’s the one. What am I supposed to say?”
“Uh—steel gray? Salt and pepper? Plain old gray?”
She gnawed her bottom lip like a squirrel gnawing a nut. “Here’s the thing. If I’m going to be absolutely honest, I’d have to list his actual hair color as ‘bald,’ and his fake hair color as gray, but Dick would be mortified if I told the police he’s wearing a toupee. You know how sensitive he is about his hair loss. So should I keep his secret and tell the police he has a thick head of natural hair, or should I spill my guts and admit he’s bald, which will crush his ego if he finds out?”
“Well …” How did I not see this coming? I could hardly wait until she got to the hard questions. “Having a visual description of Dick will help the police find him. So you need to ask yourself, what’s more likely—that Dick is still wearing his toupee, or that he discarded it?”
“He better not have discarded it!” Her eyes spat fire. “I could have remodeled my kitchen for what it cost him to buy that thing. It’s real hair! Harvested from virgins living on a mountaintop in some remote part of India and FedExed to Iowa overnight.”
Well, duh? I didn’t want to point out the obvious, but it wasn’t the hair that was so flipping expensive. It was the shipping.
“How is his hair attached?” I asked her.
“To his head.”
I smiled indulgently. “Do you happen to know how he prevents it from falling
“Glue. Industrial strength. It does for toupees what mortar does for bricks. It’s formulated with some kind of super-duper bonding agent that makes it impervious to blizzards, tornadoes, and hurricane force winds, so once he plasters it on his skull, he knows his hair ain’t going anywhere.”
“Well, there you go. You’ve answered your own question. If the glue is that strong, his hair is probably still in place, so the answer to question number two would be steel gray.”
“Right.” Her mouth inched into a relieved smile. “I wonder why I couldn’t figure that out? Thanks, Emily.”
“You bet.”
Mike grinned when she’d left. “That was very considerate of you. As a man who boasts an undue vanity about his own hair, I thank you for urging her to keep her husband’s secret. People don’t respect the right of other people to have secrets anymore. They think everyone’s life should be broadcast on YouTube for public viewing.”
“Dick’s rug really isn’t a secret,” I confessed. “We all know he wears one. We just pretend like we don’t.”
“So what kind of questionnaire is your friend filling out?”
After I explained what it was and how it would be used, he grew pensive. “Paula’s missing, too, isn’t she? Did you elect someone to fill one out for her?”
I blurted the first thing that popped into my head. “Wally’s taking care of that.” But I saw an opening that I couldn’t ignore. “Why? Did you want to volunteer?”
“Who me? No way. I wouldn’t be able to describe her without having the entire text censored for use of obscenities, not so much for the way she treated me, but for the way she treated everyone else. Most notably my wife.”
“Seems unimaginable that Paula doesn’t possess even one redeeming quality.”
He laughed derisively. “Maybe she does. She’s just doing a damned fine job of keeping it a secret.”
“Secrets seem to be the topic of the day,” I reflected. “When I broached the subject of Charlotte’s accident with Pete Finnegan back at the museum, he suggested I should direct my questions at the people who are the real professionals at covering up the truth.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I suspect he’s referring to all the reunion people, but I was hoping you might be able to provide a little more insight.”
“Sounds like he’s calling everyone a liar.”
“That was my take. But the real question is, what’s he accusing everyone of lying about?”
He quirked his mouth and shook his head. “Hell if I know.”
“He hinted that his classmates have been hiding skeletons in their closets for a lot of years. Do you know anything about that?”
“Sounds like Pete has finally hit the paranoid-schizophrenia button.”
“I don’t know.” I paused in thought. “I got the impression that whatever he was talking about related back to the incident with Bobby Guerrette. Chip Soucy filled me in on Senior Skip Day and its aftermath, but Pete’s harangue made me think there still might be unresolved issues about Bobby’s disappearance. Are there?”
His expression morphed from puzzled to wary. “He disappeared without a trace. That was pretty much the end of it.”
“Chip told me Bobby invited you to hang out with the innies that day, so you were right there in the middle of everything.”
His eyes grew pained. “My one big event with the in crowd. What a disaster. Look, Emily, I’d really prefer not dredging all that up again. It was bad enough going through it the first time.”
“But you saw something, didn’t you?”
Alarm registered on his sun-bronzed face. “What?”
“Chip said you saw the car that picked Bobby up.”
“Oh, right. The one that wasn’t white and wasn’t a station wagon. Hennessy got the best look at it. I just kind of caught a glimpse.”
“And the police never found the car or the driver.”
He swallowed with such difficulty, his Adam’s apple bobbed in slow motion. “Yeah. No happy ending.”
“Did the police ever question Pete about the incident?”
“Not that I recall. He wasn’t there that day, so they had no reason to question him.”
“But Chip said Pete was the first person in your class to get his driver’s license, so theoretically, he could have driven by the park without your ever seeing him, right?”
His gaze hardened. “Can I ask what you’re getting at?”
“I’m trying to figure out how Pete might know things that no one realizes he knows, because he claims he’s chock full of secrets that could ruin everyone.”
“Really?” He sounded more amused than skeptical.
“Really.”
“He’s full of it.”
“I have no idea if he is or not, but he sure sounded convinced.”
He looked over his shoulder to find the video on the monitor still playing and the Mainers nowhere in sight. “Where’d everyone go?”
“Next room.” I nodded toward the front of the warehouse, taking note that my guys were still huddled in the corner.
“Gotta abandon you, Emily. Sorry. But I want to catch up with the group before they get too far ahead. I’m not about to let Mary Lou get separated from me again, whether we’re speaking to each other or not.”
“No problem.” As he headed off in the opposite direction, I added a parting shot. “If you run across any skeletons in your closet, let me know, okay?”
