Margaret Grace - Murder In Miniature

Maddie was in bed, ready for a brief recap of our favorite moments of the day and a good-night kiss. I brought her a snapshot I’d found from Richard’s birthday party in the spring. Maddie and I were sharing a happy moment eating multilayer cake.

She looked closely at the photo. “This is perfect. Thanks, Grandma.”

“I’ll take it back for now, then, and put it in a frame.”

“It’s okay. It’s better like this,” she said, standing it against the base of her lamp.

I noticed she’d already turned her computer off.

“I thought you were going to show me your atavar.” She laughed. “It’s avatar, Grandma. I forgot and shut down. And I’m ready to sleep, okay?”

“Of course.”

“There were too many favorite things, today, anyway, Grandma,” she said. “I could never pick. There was class and Ghirardelli and talking to Marina and tuna casserole and finding the date mix-up and…”

She trailed off, exhausted from the long list of wonderful things that had happened to her today.

I hoped life would always be that way for her.

I started my work on the model of Richard’s bedroom by cheating. I’d bought a tiny baseball glove from an online hobbies and miniatures supply store. Linda would be so ashamed of me. She, and many of the other crafters I knew, would have been manipulating pairs of tweezers, stitching tiny pieces of leather together, to make the glove. If I took that approach to my hobby, I’d get one thing done a month, if that. I was much too impatient.

At a miniature show in San Jose last fall, I’d met a woman who was displaying a four-inch-by-six-inch quilt made from 576 pieces. Each piece seemed no bigger than what fell from my nail clippers.

For me the joy of miniatures was in the originality and personalization of the scenes I made, not in the craft of making pieces more easily bought, like mahogany four-poster beds, or stuffed easy chairs with hand-stitched upholstery. Or like the rocking chairs Henry Baker turned out, I mused.

In my own defense, I did add two or three handmade pieces to each room box, and I had a few from-scratch specialties that I prided myself on.

One item I loved to make was the tiny pair of eyeglasses I put into my scenes. I made these with needle-nose pliers and fine-gauge wire of different colors. Any clear plastic, cut to size, served as a lens. When I was really ambitious, I added tiny beads to the rims and earpieces, for a Hollywood look. For sunglasses I dipped into my boxes of envelopes with photographs and negatives from the days before digital cameras. Small pieces cut from the edges of negatives made a convincing sunglass lens. I doubted the memory stick Maddie talked about, that was in her camera, would prove as useful in twenty years.

By ten thirty, I was ready to turn in. While working on a tiny trophy-cut out from foam board and painted bronze-for Richard’s bedroom, I’d thought over the facts of the David Bridges murder case. I’d been doing well, putting it in the back of my mind, until I took out a new container of tacky glue, and an image of David’s lips came to me. Once Maddie and I talked to Skip tomorrow about our interview with Marina, and our new evidence of fraud, I was finished. The only curious loose end was why Larry had stolen the bank record from my tote. And, of course who had killed David.

I packed up the work in progress and slipped the box on the floor under a crafts table where Maddie wouldn’t find it. I looked forward to reading in bed, finishing my book club’s selection, The House of Mirth. I’d have to brace myself for what I knew was a devastating ending. When it was my turn to choose a book in a couple of months I planned to offer several more upbeat titles. I had to admit, though, I was tempted to try decorating a room box with the costumes of the times portrayed in the book, perhaps a turn-of-the-century ladies’ shop. It had been a while since I’d made a feathery hat or a parasol. I pictured a hat and accessories shop, with a row of pancake-shaped chapeaux in different pastels and piles of necklaces (thin, broken chains from my jewelry box) on the counter.

On the way to my bedroom, at the back of the house, I hit the button to close the atrium skylight. In one of those comic moments, my finger hitting the button coincided with a knock on the door. The tapping was barely audible over the sound of the motor that sent the skylight sliding over the fixed roof toward the front of the house.

Probably Skip, thoughtfully keeping his tap light at this hour. I remembered he said he’d be able to stop by later, though we hadn’t confirmed it.

I left the skylight about one-quarter closed and walked to the door. I used the peephole just to be safe.

Staring back at me was Cheryl Mellace. I felt like my house was a waiting room for the police department. Was there an unmarked LPPD car out in front again? I shouldn’t complain-my own private suspects were saving me a lot of legwork.

“What a nice surprise,” I said, letting Cheryl in.

Like Barry, Cheryl had chosen to visit in casual clothes, befitting the weather. Her outfit, a matching shorts and tank top set in a yellow and black geometric pattern was much classier than his, however. Her eye patch was gone and any residual bruising was covered by her makeup.

Cheryl glanced up at my partly closed skylight cover. “We have one just like that in our sunroom,” she said. “It’s a godsend, especially in this god-awful weather, isn’t it?”

I was too tired to play this game of chitchat, but I was, after all, raised to be polite to guests. “Can I offer you a glass of ice tea?”

Cheryl put her designer-logo straw purse (I’d always thought the designers should pay the customers for advertising) on one of the atrium chairs and fanned herself with her short, slender fingers. “I’d love some.”

“I’ll be right back,” I said, the same phrase I’d used with Barry last night.

A slight headache came on at that moment, as I tried to shake the feeling that I was caught in a loop, where every night I’d have a murder suspect in my atrium and would have to make them ice tea.

The more company I had in a given week, the more prepared I was and the more well stocked, except for my ginger cookies. I was back in a flash with tea and a plate that included the last four cookies. I hoped this meeting with Cheryl would result in some progress toward solving David Bridges’s murder and getting me back to baking treats for my family and guests.

Cheryl had wandered to the edge of my crafts room, where a small table held newly purchased miniatures, not yet integrated into my crafts room supplies. I’d started to glue a stack of books together for placement in a cozy reading scene I was doing for a childhood friend in the Bronx.

“This is amazing,” Cheryl said. “I don’t know how you work with these little things, and it all looks so neat and finished. I was in charge of decorations at the hotel last weekend and I had an awful time.”

“It showed” was on the tip of my tongue, but I didn’t want to aggravate her.

I let Cheryl praise the minty tea and explain how she didn’t eat sweets this late. Still very trim and muscular, she looked like she didn’t eat them early in the day, either.

“I’m assuming you have something on your mind, Cheryl?” I folded my arms across my chest. I used this body language rarely in my classroom, but when I did, words came tumbling out of the student in front of me. And it was words that I needed now from Cheryl. Fortunately for me, tonight she looked more like Cheryl Carroll, my C-average ALHS student than Mrs. Walter Mellace, important society wife and charity fund-raiser.

We took seats across from each other in the atrium, ready for business.