Pine Vista. At eighteen, with a fresh shirt and an untarnished grin, Bobby Chaplin was a different guy, brash and freshly minted. Chaplin is not a bad-looking guy but he looks – well, defeated. Thinner, with telltale shadows in the hollows at his temples and eyes making their inevitable descent into the skull.
Where other seniors cited songs and slogans, dropping hints about epic bashes they’d survived or naming their loves, Bob Chaplin included one personal item. Favorite saying: ‘Harvard Fair Harvard.’ His staff added an editorial comment in italics: ‘We always knew he was gonna be a star.’
Yeah, right, Dan thought. Like that worked out. All those expectations, and now look.
He said to the photo, ‘I’m sorry.’
He found Mrs McCall accidentally, because she looked exactly like Steffy on a fat day. The plump teenager’s glossy hair had that freshly ironed look and her eyes gave back the bank of studio lights. She was smiling – happy and excited, open to whatever came next. Her thumbnail bio was touchingly girlish. GENEVIEVE HENDERSON, he read. Nickname: ‘Nenna.’ Pen Club, 4; Drama Club, 3, 4; FJHS Tarponettes, mascot, 4. Slogan: Puh-leeze. Favorite color: blue. Favorite player: Number 67, Now it Can be Told! Favorite song: ‘The Way We Were.’
‘Oh, lady,’ he said to the photo, to all of them. ‘What happened to you?’
Looking for his mother in endless group photos, he studied all the group shots: May Court, N.H.S., kids lined up over cutlines identifying them, left to right. Lucy wasn’t among them. Pretty as she was, she didn’t show up among the laughing kids caught partying or mugging for the camera in the candids either. He had to wonder, did the woman have no friends? Skimming for anything that would link her to the guys in her cherished Polaroid, he overlooked the ragged spot where somebody razored out a page. He won’t find the photo of Lucy Carteret standing with Bobby Chaplin on the steps of City Hall over the cutline, Most Likely to Succeed.
He turned to the inscriptions in Chaplin’s yearbook, loving screeds in flashy colors, but Lucy wasn’t anywhere. Desperate to be different, girls wrote gushy notes with curlicues and flourishes, dotting their I’s with hearts or smiley faces, scrawling cliches like, ‘You’re the best.’ Sallie, Bethany, Betsy, Jane, began, ‘Remember that time’ or ‘houseparties!!!’ followed by paragraphs of bla, bla, bla, ending with multiple Xes and Os. He found Nenna Henderson’s timid, ‘Love ya Bobby,’ almost by accident, she wrote so small. The guys’ were briefer, scrawled in drunken haste. A gifted speed-reader, he skimmed them all.
At Six. Oh. Oh. he was still in lotus position, reading long after his feet had gone to sleep.
The last note he found was neatly printed. ‘Thanks for that.’ No explanation, no effusions in contrived script, just the signature in a spot so obscure that he had to look twice before he noticed it. ‘Sincerely, Jessie Vukovich.’ Flipping back, he found her photo. Less angular. Brunette back then, the woman who signed him in yesterday with the same brash smile, the same sultry toss of the hair. There it was. A plan.
He snorted orange juice and ate his way through the mini-bar before he showered and prepared for the day. Dumping the promotional bumph out of the Flordana’s complimentary goody bag, he slipped The Swordfish inside. Flash it at the people you know. See what they do when you point to Lucy’s photo. He took the stairs, peering into dim corridors as though he expected Jessie Vukovich to pop out and tell him everything.
What did she mean when she wrote, ‘Thanks for that’? Do she and Chaplin have a secret history? Yesterday she handed back his snapshots with an indifferent shrug. The woman graduated the same year as his mother, could they actually not know each other in a school that small? Perched on a tapestried love seat outside the coffee shop, he mainlined swash from the coffee machine, lying in wait for her. As if he really believed that aging, overtly sexy Ms. Vukovich could solve his life.
A skinny old guy with a comb-over came out of her office at seven sharp, straightening his black string tie on his nerdy white short-sleeved shirt. Dan retreated behind the Fort Jude Star and settled down to wait.
At nine – late enough to make house calls, he gave up on Jessie Vukovich, FJHS grad who owed something to Chaplin, and what else did he have? The inscription. ‘Love ya. Nenna.’ He stuffed the yearbook in