Margaret Grace - Murder In Miniature

Tonight we worked for a while on our separate Alasita projects, Maddie on her soda fountain, I on my Christmas scene. Neither was very inspired, I felt, but maybe our real life was so exciting that we needed a stable, boring miniature life.

Maddie added two new flavors to her ice cream parlor tonight, Tasty Taylor and Dusty Doug.

“The dust stands for malt powder, the way Sadie uses it on her sundaes,” she informed me-needlessly, because Sadie’s dusty road sundae was my favorite after her chocolate malt shakes.

I had some embroidery to finish up on the Christmas stockings I’d bought in Benicia last week, but the whole scene still left me cold. I couldn’t remember being so dissatisfied with a project. Certainly not the replica I’d made of Lincoln’s Springfield, Illinois, home. Not the street of shops I’d put together, that included a flower stand, a bookstore, and a haberdashery. I hoped something would occur to me before the end of the week when our projects needed to be finished.

“I’d like to make a robe for the Bronx bathroom,” Maddie said.

“We can look through our scraps,” I said.

It made my heart swell that we could talk like this, each knowing what the other meant. I knew that Maddie didn’t mean a life-size robe or the New York borough that was three thousand miles away, and she knew that I was referring to pieces of fabric to put together for a tiny article of clothing.

Terry cloth was hard to work with; the nap was so large and spread out on most selections that the robe or towel wouldn’t be able to drape well over a tiny tub or rod. We had several choices, such as dipping the fabric in a glue and water mixture to shape it, or using a thinner fabric with a tighter weave that looked like terry.

We chose the former. I made the glue bath while Maddie rummaged through the box of fabric scraps and found the shade of blue she had in mind.

I heard her groan as she cut the material. “It’s picking up everything,” she said, showing me what would end up as a sleeve, with tiny beads clinging to it. She had a hard time shaking them off as they clung to the almost magnetic fabric. “It’s just like my winter terry robe at home. It’s as sticky as tape sometimes.”

The revelation flashed in my mind like the only neon sign in Lincoln Point, the one in the window of Jeff’s Video Arcade on Springfield Boulevard. Terry cloth picks up things-pieces of thread, hair, lint, and now beads. Why not a tiny oval mirror?

I pictured the hallway on the eleventh floor of the Duns Scotus Hotel. The scene was vivid, playing out before me: Cheryl in her robe, leaving David’s room to get ice. Cheryl and Rosie arguing, then wrestling with the locker room box. One of the tiny mirrors, not glued on properly (that was the hardest to imagine) coming off in the struggle and sticking to Cheryl’s robe. The mirror finally falling from the robe in the entryway to David’s suite.

For completeness, I had to add: Gerry entering David’s suite with a key stolen from a Lincoln Point homicide detective and finding the mirror on the floor.

It made sense, and if some variation of my play was true, I could hold onto my belief that Rosie told the truth when she said she never went into David’s room.

I was glad I hadn’t presented the mirror to Skip.

Had I just cleared Rosie?

I wished it were that easy.

“Can you have two BFFs?” Maddie asked me while we were saying good night.

“Of course. Do you have a new best friend in town besides Taylor?”

“Doug, in my class.”

“That’s nice. You’ve told me about him. He’s Dusty Doug in your mini soda fountain, right?”

She nodded. “He’s the one who lets me tell jokes and laughs at them.”

“Maybe I can meet him sometime.”

“Nuh-uh.”

Uh-oh. It was too soon in Maddie’s life for her to be keeping her family away from her friends. I took comfort in the fact that she’d told me his name. It occurred to me that Doug might be the reason Maddie wasn’t kicking her legs anymore when I left her behind.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said, with a smile that was supposed to tell her I wasn’t bothered.

“Grandma, do you have a good picture of me and you?”

“I’m sure I do. What do you want it for?”

She patted a spot next to her clock. “Just to put on my table here. Mine are all on my old computer at home.”

“I’ll dig one out for you. That reminds me. Why did the witch need a computer? I’ve been dying to know.”

Maddie shook a sleepy head. “Nuh-uh, can’t tell you till we’re with Taylor and Mr. Baker. That was the deal.”

“Oh. Well, that might not happen, sweetheart.”

“Why not?”

“You can still have playdates with Taylor, but it might not include her grandfather and me.”

“Did you fight with Mr. Baker?”

“No. It’s just-”

“Complicated, right? That’s what my parents always say when their friends get divorced or something.”

“Right. It’s complicated.”

Usually, no matter how hot the day, nights in the Bay Area were cool. Without even trying to do anything productive, I took a glass of herbal ice tea to the coolest spot in the house-my atrium, one of the features of my Eichler home that I couldn’t live without. My house had needed a whole new roof last year, and Richard had suggested an upgrade while I was at it-a retractable atrium skylight. It seemed a luxury I didn’t need, but now I didn’t know why I’d waited so long to have it installed. When it was closed, the acrylic material cast beautiful patterns of light on the floor; when it was open the atrium was completely exposed to the cool outside air.

I pushed the button and watched the skylight slide back on its track.

I refused to let my recent atrium experience in the Duns Scotus color my pleasure. These were my trees, my plants. I could name every one of them-azalea, mums, cyclamen-and they harbored no danger.

It was the kind of night when Ken and I, unable to sleep, might come out here and chat about the upcoming week or share with each other our own reviews of books and movies. The ferns planted around the edge were a labor of love our first few months and still reminded me of a wonderful time in my life. The multitude of empty pots that I’d neglected to fill were only a mild reproach.

In recent years, Beverly came by often to relate her adventures as a civilian volunteer for the LPPD. She had funny stories about SUVs driving on the sidewalks to get around traffic or about the excuses people came up with for not wearing seat belts. “I’m on my way to get it fixed” was all too common, and “I’m allergic to vinyl” was one of my favorites.

I pictured Beverly on her porch on this warm, windless night, sharing stories with Nick. A smile came to my face. Beverly had contracted rheumatic fever as a child and lived day to day with a damaged heart. We’d had several scares when we thought we’d lost her and never predicted that she’d live longer than her brother, Ken. There was no one who deserved a loving companion more than she did.

Maddie was sleeping in the corner bedroom; that was enough company for me.

Or so I thought.

I heard the faintest knocking on my front door. I put down my glass and turned my better ear to the sound. Unmistakable shuffling noises reached my ear along with another soft tap, tap, tap. Someone was at my door at ten thirty. Not the latest I’d ever had company, but generally late night visitors were expected.

I got up and checked the peephole. Barry Cannon peered back at me from the other side.

My breath caught. Barry looked the most unkempt I’d ever seen him. If peephole lenses could be trusted, he had a miserable expression and a dark shadow on his face. He wore a stretched-out T-shirt with a sports logo on the front.