Margaret Grace - Murder In Miniature

As I walked to my car, passing vintage Victorian houses, antique shops, and clothing boutiques, tempting smells and interesting music wafted from doorways. But cafes were ubiquitous and would be around for a long time-who knew how much longer Maddie, approaching the years of teen angst, would want to eat with her grandmother?

Maddie was staying with me for three weeks while she attended a high-tech summer camp program at Lincoln Point’s Rutledge Center, the town’s educational and all-purpose facility. I considered it surprising, and amazing good luck, that our tiny town offered a computer program not available in Maddie’s new, more sophisticated residence city of Palo Alto, home to Stanford University, among other grand institutions. Her parents were using the time for a little camping of their own, at a cabin at Lake Tahoe.

I was thrilled to have Maddie to myself.

I drove home with a smile, wondering what her latest computer joke would be.

“Why are computers skinny?” Maddie asked.

This was easy, a rerun from the first day of her class. “Because they eat only bits,” I said.

Maddie frowned and kicked her legs under my kitchen table. “I already told you that one, didn’t I?”

I admitted as much as I scooped ice cream into cone-shaped, cone-colored dessert dishes.

“Is that all you’re learning at computer camp? Jokes and puns?” Once in a while I assumed the role of strict grandmother, but it never lasted long.

“It’s not computer camp, it’s technology camp,” Maddie said, pulling a bowl of ice cream toward her. “We’re learning how to do two- and three-D video, flash animation, and modding for games. Some kids are on the robotics track, which I’d like to do next year. They’re attaching a Bluetooth interface to a robot so they can control it from any location connected to the Internet. Cool, huh?”

Like most children her age, Maddie grew up with computers and had surpassed me in the language a long time ago. My only contribution now was, “Yes, very cool.”

“Does that sound like we’re just telling jokes all morning?” Maddie asked. Then, much to my relief, she broke into laughter and came over for a hug that she knew would turn into a tickle and a messing up of her red Porter curls.

Bzzz, bzzz, bzzz.

Maddie ran to the door. We both knew it was probably my nephew, homicide detective Eino Gowen, whom she called Uncle Skip. First cousin once-removed had been too much for her as a toddler and no one in the family thought there was a reason to revisit the uncle title.

“Looks like I’m just in time for dessert,” Skip said, helping himself to a handful of my just-made ginger snaps. “I could smell these half a block away.”

I scooped a generous portion of caramel cashew ice cream, Skip’s favorite, into a bowl for the second redhead at the table. A Porter by marriage only, I didn’t share in the redhead gene and had to make do with ordinary dark brown hair, now tinged with gray.

“What timing,” I said. “I think you have a GPS on my oven and freezer door.”

“That’s not how-” Skip started until he caught my look.

I liked to keep my family guessing about just how much of a Luddite I was.

“Uncle Skip, what did the computer’s fortune cookie say?” Maddie asked. She’d finished smashing her chocolate ice cream with her spoon, to a mushy consistency, just as she did when she was three years old. Aspiring robot maker or not, she was still a little girl.

Skip put on his best thinking expression. “Hmm. Not a clue. What did the computer’s fortune cookie say?”

“Take one data at a time,” Maddie said, triumphant.

Skip slammed his palm against his forehead. “Good one.” Unlike inconsiderate Grandma/Aunt Gerry, Skip not only let Maddie have the punch line, he also laughed harder than I did. No wonder she adored him.

“Are you busy down at the station, Uncle Skip?” Maddie asked.

“There’s not too much going on right now.”

“No big cases or piles of folders on your desk like you have sometimes?”

“Nope. I guess all the criminals are too hot to work.”

“And August is the only month when we don’t celebrate an Abraham Lincoln event, so there are no big crowds to worry about,” Maddie added.

“Exactly. Next month we’re back on track with the big Emancipation Proclamation Convention.”

“But August is pretty clear, right?”

Uh-oh. I knew where she was going with this.

“You’re doomed, Skip,” I said.

Maddie swooped in. “Remember you said when you weren’t busy you’d teach me some police things, like how to do fingerprints and how to investigate? And tour the building”-here she shook her spoon in his direction-“including the jail.”

Skip hung his head. He’d been had. I saw it on his face. Twenty-eight years old and a preteen had bested him.

The good news was that our little town of Lincoln Point was homicide-free for the summer, a comforting statistic.

Skip cleared his throat. “Let me look at my calendar when I get back from my meeting, okay?”

“Promise?”

“Hey, any cute boys in your computer class?”

Nice try, I thought. But Maddie had something to say about that.

“Are you kidding? The boys are all dorks. We had a class photo taken for the newspaper and the boys all made funny faces.” Maddie splayed her fingers, held a hand to each ear, and wiggled her fingers. “Like this.”

Skip mimicked her hand gesture and stuck out his tongue. “It’s no good without the tongue,” he said, once he could talk.

Maddie and I rolled our eyes. “Boys never grow up,” I warned her.

It was a dream come true for me when Maddie had decided she’d like to be part of my Wednesday-night crafts group. During the school year she stayed overnight with me and I drove her back to her home in Palo Alto early on Thursday mornings in time for classes. We’d all agreed that we’d keep this schedule as long as her schoolwork didn’t suffer.

“Not likely,” I’d told my son, Richard, Maddie’s father. “She’s a genius.”

“So you say,” said the orthopedic surgeon, a man of few words who knew better than to argue with his mother.

For our group project this summer, we crafters borrowed from a Bolivian tradition, Alasita. We’d learned about it from Beatriz, a woman who joined us briefly while visiting her mother in Lincoln Point. We were fascinated by the concept: during the Alasita festival, people made or bought miniature versions of what they hoped for in the coming year.

“In the markets you find everything,” Beatriz told us. “Tiny cars, houses, and food, and even little bitty marriage certificates, passports, and money. Men buy hens and women buy roosters in the hope of finding a partner before the year’s end. If you buy these things or make them, it’s supposed to bring them into your life in the next year, as long as it is blessed by a shaman.”

“Do you think there’s a shaman in Lincoln Point?” Karen Striker asked now, as we sat around a large table in my primary crafts room. (According to my late husband, and everyone who was familiar with my house, the whole rest of our four-bedroom home was a secondary crafts area.)

Karen, five months pregnant, was building a lovely nursery, augmented by the one-inch-scale baby carriage I’d picked up for her this morning in Benicia. “I want to send good vibes into the air on every possible wavelength,” she told us.

“I know a priest,” Mabel, our oldest member, offered.

Her husband, Jim, the only male in our group, grunted, conveying doubt that a Catholic blessing would work as well. Mabel and Jim were working on a ship’s cabin, a model of the luxury version they hoped to occupy on their fall cruise to the Mediterranean.