Dutch Me Deadly

spun around and landed on the ground. And that’s the last thing I remember until I woke up and found him gone.”

“Why did you think you’d killed him if his body was gone when you regained consciousness?” I asked.

Ricky looked suddenly hangdog. “After I hit him, I thought I heard something fall into the water. Something big. So I figured I’d probably knocked him unconscious into the river … and he drowned.”

“You freaking coward,” bellowed Mike. “Threatening me. Threatening Peewee!”

“Don’t drag me into this,” squawked Peewee. “I don’t know anything about it.”

Mike shot him a look. “What do you mean you don’t know anything about it?”

“I’m not Peewee.”

“What did I tell you!” hooted Jackie.

Mike’s voice exploded like a sonic boom. “You’re not Peewee? Then who the hell are you?”

Peewee shrugged. “Melvin Crowley. Peewee’s cousin. He didn’t want to participate in the reunion, but the discounted tour price was so good, I couldn’t pass it up, so he told me I could come in his place. Sorry I got you so hot under the collar yesterday, man, but when you were reliving all those high school memories, I didn’t know who the hell you were talking about.” He elevated his hand, waving to the room like an English monarch. “Thanks for being so nice to me, everyone. You’re all right, despite what Peewee had to say about you.”

“I told you morons that that Bobby kid ran away,” crowed Bernice. “But no one ever listens to me.”

I stared at Laura. “How did he do it? How did he just disappear?”

“Ricky’s punch never landed, but he was so drunk, he didn’t realize it. He pretty much knocked himself silly when he tried to slug Bobby, and while he was groaning on the riverbank, Bobby chucked an old railroad tie into the river, kind of imitating the same sound a body might make if it fell into the Penobscot.”

“He did it on purpose?” Ricky sputtered. “He wanted me to think I’d caused him to drown on purpose? Miserable bastard!”

Yup. I guess Bobby Guerrette had sure taught Ricky Hennessy the lesson of his life.

“So did Bobby get into a car with someone or not?” Chip threw out. “All my life I believed what Hennessy —”

“Oh, shut up about me,” yelled Ricky.

“Bobby hiked along the railroad tracks until he reached another town,” said Laura, “and then he hitched a ride with a truck driver headed for Boston.”

“He walked the railroad tracks?” said Gary. “Why didn’t he just hitch a ride from the park? We were so wasted, none of us would have noticed.”

“Because he spied Pete Finnegan’s car parked at the side of the road by the Water Works, so if he’d shown his face again, Pete would have seen him.”

“Isn’t that just like Finnegan to spy on us,” sneered Ricky.

“Maybe if you’d treated him differently, he wouldn’t have had to spy,” snapped Laura. “But he got an eyeful that night. He saw Bobby and Ricky disappear across the railroad tracks. And he most probably saw Ricky return to the park alone, and knew that everyone was lying about Bobby catching a ride in a mysterious car.”

“So why didn’t Pete ever say anything to the cops?” asked Mike.

Laura shrugged. “Only Pete knows the answer to that, and it’s too late to ask him now.”

“What happened after Bobby got to Boston?” asked Chip.

“He found a room at the YMCA, got a job busing tables, enlisted in the military, spent time recuperating from his injuries at Walter Reed, headed to California to attend college, married yours truly, and became one of the most respected psychiatrists in the Bay area. He led a good life, right up until the day he died.”

“He was at Walter Reed?” asked Mike, leveling a look at Mary Lou. “Did you know about that?”

Mary Lou nodded self-consciously. “I was in the operating room for one of his facial reconstructive surgeries.”

“You knew?” blasted Mike. “You knew he was alive and you never told me?”

“He swore me to secrecy! What was I supposed to do, Mike? Be disloyal? Betray his trust? Reveal the secret he’d struggled so hard to keep?”

Mike thumped his chest with an angry fist. “I’m your husband! Your first loyalty was to me! Jeesuz-Mighty, Mary Lou, didn’t you think I’d want to know he was still alive?”

“You think it was easy for me?” she yelled, tears starring her eyes. “You think I didn’t stay awake at night wondering if I should throw professional ethics and confidentiality out the window and tell you? Well, it wasn’t easy. It was the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make!”

“Don’t be so hard on her, Mike,” chided Laura as she banded her arm around Mary Lou’s shoulders. “If not for Mary Lou, I never would have become Mrs. Battles. She’s the one who told him where I was. She’s the one who got the ball rolling. And if you ask me, she did good.” She clasped Mary Lou’s hand and smiled. “She did real good.”

Officer Vanden Boogard retrieved his clipboard from the podium and tapped his pen on the metal clip, his gaze focused on Mary Lou and Laura. “You have no alibi, ladies. Dat was an intriguing human interest story, but if you weren’t pushing Ms. Peavey into der canal, what were you doing?”

Looking both chagrined and embarrassed, Laura slid her hand into her purse and extracted a matchbox that she tossed to Vanden Boogard.

“Der Dungeon Bar?”

Mary Lou cleared her throat. “It’s an all-male revue. Kind of like the Chippendales, only the dancers are dressed up as macho historical figures like Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan before they, uhh—strip down to the good parts.”

“Do them folks knock money off the cover charge for seniors?” asked Nana.

“You were whooping it up at a strip club while I waited half the night for you on that damn bridge?” railed Mike.

“Give it a rest, hon,” soothed Mary Lou. “After spending all those years at Walter Reed, I was dying to see a few body parts that weren’t screaming out to be stapled, drained, or sutured back together again. And it wasn’t as exciting as I thought it would be. Think busman’s holiday.”

Officer Vanden Boogard rolled his eyes. Glaring at the bunch of us, he let fly a stream of exasperated Dutch that I had no trouble translating into English: So if Mike didn’t kill Pete, and Mary Lou and Laura didn’t kill Paula, who did?

Twenty-one

We dined fashionably late in the hotel restaurant again that night.

After subjecting us to two more hours of questioning with no relevant information to show for it, Officer Vanden Boogard had thrown in the towel and released us, with the caveat that he wasn’t satisfied with our timeline, so we weren’t off the hook yet. The reunion crowd had dispersed in every direction afterward, some forming into little cliques in the lobby, some exiting through the revolving door, others crowding into the elevator for the upper floors. My gang swore to be suffering such stomach-gnawing hunger that they didn’t have the energy to dodge bicyclists while searching for a nice restaurant, so I’d ushered them into the hotel dining room, where the staff had been kind enough to set us up at a table that could accommodate all of us.

“Wasn’t it somethin’ how that Bobby Guerrette fella invented a whole new life for hisself,” commented Nana as she dug into her cinnamon ice cream.

“Probably wasn’t too hard to do back then,” said George.

Tilly nodded agreement. “There were so few forms of identification in those days. No national credit cards. No local charge cards. No photos on drivers’ licenses. And the communication highway had yet to be constructed. Most households didn’t even have a telephone.”

They bobbed their heads in silence, looking as if they were wondering how they’d ever endured the horror of such privation.

“Speaking of phones,” said Jackie, who’d elbowed out Bernice for the plum seat at the head of the table.