Bubble in the Bathtub Read Online Free PDF Page A

shakes itself off.”
    Nilly blinked a couple times. Then he finally understood that she was agreeing to go.
    â€œYippee!” he cheered and started jumping up and down. “We’re going to Paris. Cancan dancers! Croissants! Crêpes! Crème brûlée! The Champs-Élysées!”
    Nilly continued to rattle off Parisian things that started with
C
until Lisa finally told him enough already, it was time for bed.
    AFTER LISA SAID good night to her parents, and her father shut her bedroom door, she sat in her bed like she usually did and looked over at the yellow house on the other side of Cannon Avenue, at the gray curtains on the second floor. She knew that soon a reading light would turn on in there, be pointed at thecurtains, and then Nilly would start his evening shadow play, with Lisa as his only audience. This night his tiny fingers made shadows that turned into a line of kicking cancan dancers on the curtain fabric. And while Lisa watched the shadows she thought about the story Doctor Proctor had told them about Juliette’s mysterious disappearance so many years ago. The strange story had gone more or less like this:

    JULIETTE AND DOCTOR Proctor met each other in Paris and fell in love. One night, after they had been dating for a few weeks, Juliette came and knocked on his door. When she just came right out and asked him if he wanted to get married, he was thrilled. But he was also surprised, since she wanted them to get on his motorcycle right then, that very night, drive all the way to Rome, and get married there as soon as possible. Juliette wouldn’t give any explanation for why she was in such a hurry, so Proctor packed his only suit and started up the motorcycle without another word.
    He actually had an inkling of what was going on. Juliette’s father was a baron. And even though it had been a long time since the family of Baron Margarine had been rich, the baron did not think that a relatively unsuccessful Norwegian inventor was good enough for his Baronette Juliette. But now Juliette and Proctor were driving through the night, through France, on their way to get married. They had just filled up withgas in a village by the Italian border when they came to a bridge. That was where it happened. Exactly
what
had happened, Proctor never actually found out. Everything went black and when Proctor woke up again, he was lying on the asphalt and his throat hurt. A tearful Juliette was bending over him, and behind her he saw a black limousine approaching. Juliette said it was her father the baron’s car and that she had to go talk to her father alone. She told Proctor to drive across the bridge to the other side of the border and wait for her there. Proctor, shaken and discombobulated as he was, did as she asked without protesting. But when he turned his motorcycle around at the other end of the bridge, he saw Juliette climbing into the limousine, which then backed up over the bridge the way it had come, and once it was off the bridge, it turned around and drove off. And that was the last Doctor Proctor saw of Juliette.
    Lisa sighed. The rest of the professor’s story about his early romance had been just as sad.
    After he had waited for Juliette on the other side of the border for three days, Proctor tried calling her at home from a payphone at a café. The baron himself had answered the phone and explained that Juliette had come to her senses and realized that it would be quite unsuitable for her to marry Proctor. That she was sorry, but that the whole situation was so awkward that she’d rather not talk to Proctor—and certainly didn’t want to see him again. That that would be best.
    Brokenhearted and exhausted, Doctor Proctor had driven his motorcycle back to Paris, but when he finally walked into the lobby of his hotel there was a policeman there waiting for him. He handed Proctor a letter and curtly asked him to read it. The letter said that Doctor Proctor had