Margaret Grace - Murder In Miniature

Maddie placed the two mug-shot views on the table in the atrium where everyone who came into the house would see them. I tried to remember if she’d been this excited when she’d had her photograph taken with all the animals at Disneyland.

I thought not.

We had time for a crafts fix before dinner. I’d been eager to try something recommended by a woman I met at a dollhouse show last month. She’d taken seeds from a green bell pepper and dried them, simply by leaving them on a paper towel for a few days. She’d piled the seeds into a tiny wooden bowl, available in quantity at any crafts store, and, lo and behold, she had a bowl of potato chips. I’d put some seeds out a couple of days ago and Maddie and I finished the project this evening.

“Do you think Mrs. Reed will like this, or would she want us to carve the chips out of real potatoes?”

“Good one,” I said.

My granddaughter had told a miniature joke, of sorts, giving me my thrill of the day.

“That reminds me, we need to have a lunch or something with Taylor and her grandfather, so we can finish the witch joke. Remember: why does a witch need a computer?”

“We’ll try to get together soon,” I said.

“Tomorrow?”

“We’ll see. Don’t you have some homework to get done before the crafts group gets here?”

“Yeah, I do. I have to fix my avatar. It has a wobbly head.”

“I hope it doesn’t leave a scar.”

“If you take a laptop computer for a run, you could jog your memory.”

“I give up,” I said, ceding the stand-up stage to my granddaughter.

The crafts group, with Susan bearing the promised sweet potato pie, arrived around seven. Rosie was understandably missing. I hadn’t talked to her since she and her father left the police station with his newly acquired ankle jewelry. I predicted an eventual full recovery for both of them and hoped I’d be able to help make it shorter than thirty years.

Karen had knit a yellow afghan for her nursery, big enough to fold in quarters and still be a substantial size (about two inches on a side). My afghans tended to be much smaller and not as perfectly bound as Karen’s. She’d be able to fold hers and drape it over the back of the miniature glide rocker in the nursery, meant for mother and child bonding.

Mabel was eager to show us her nearly completed ship’s cabin, a replica of one she hoped to share with Jim on their cruise. We admired the highly polished walls and the tiny bathroom she’d constructed, much like that on an airplane.

Linda, who’d missed last week, brought a new room box with a Halloween theme. (Another plus for our hobby: miniaturists celebrated all holidays all year.) I hoped the scene wouldn’t remind Maddie again of the witch joke. To my relief, her response to Linda’s scene was, “Do you want to see some potato chips to go with your candy?”

I worked halfheartedly on my Christmas scene. Unless I had a brilliant flash of inspiration, there wasn’t much more I could do with it.

I had one ear on the group chatter and one on the door, waiting for Allison to drop by with the posters. I was proud of my friends for not exchanging “I told you so’s” about Rosie’s misadventure, especially since she wasn’t present. The only references to Rosie and the ill-fated reunion weekend were in private, to me.

Susan had made a second sweet potato pie for Rosie. She gave it to me in the kitchen. “You’re bound to see Rosie before I do,” she said. “Tell her I hope this sweetens her day.”

Karen approached me soon after, with a small set of books she’d made for Rosie, who kept an ongoing project of a miniature bookshop in her own life-size one.

I was glad to see that Susan and Karen, who’d been hardest on Rosie from the beginning, had both come through for her in the end.

I hoped I could do so as well.

When the doorbell rang, I was deep into embroidering Richard’s name on a Christmas stocking for my room box. I jumped, though it was the sound I’d been waiting for all evening. I’d already told the group that I was expecting company who would take a few minutes of my time. I excused myself now and left to open the door.

“Hi, Mrs. Porter,” Allison said, juggling three posters that kept sliding against one another. “I came as soon as I could. I hope I’m not too late. My youngest needed to go to a parent-teacher conference and I forgot I said I’d babysit, but she’s back now.”

“Perfect timing,” I said and ushered Allison through the atrium, open to the sky, to the dining room table.

Allison had kept her schoolgirl figure, which was on the large, curvy side, not fit for jumping from the shoulders of classmates in uniform, as Cheryl Mellace’s could. In knee-length denim shorts and a white polo shirt, she was mercifully brief in her answers to my obligatory inquiries about her family. The logo on the shirt, it turned out, was a cardinal, the mascot of her middle grandson’s elementary school in nearby Cupertino. I hoped Allison wasn’t planning on getting even with me for my pop quizzes by springing one on me, covering all the trivia she doled out.

We spread out the posters. “If the people you want aren’t on these, don’t worry. I stuck the rest in the trunk of my car, just in case.”

How obliging. I felt worse and worse about this ruse to gather evidence for a murder case. It was the same old means-and-ends issue that I’d wrestled with daily over the past week.

We looked at the posters, one by one. I played along with the “find the student” game, while really checking out the glue job on the project.

I put my finger on a photograph that was particularly badly glued to the backing. “Isn’t this Marsha Lowe?” I asked, touching a figure in the background of a candid from the senior ski trip. “She seems to have dropped out of sight and I just learned we have a mutual friend and I wanted to get in touch with her.”

I had to admit there was something to run-on sentences. They conveyed an excitement in and of themselves.

“Yes, that’s Marsha. You’re right. She met someone on a ski trip to Switzerland and married him and stayed there, but she’s back now, in San Jose.”

For the sake of credibility, I fingered two more students in the photographs. Allison knew them both and was excited to be able to give me information that I already knew. I decided to make her a batch of ginger cookies, soon, to distribute among all her above-average children and grandchildren.

I owed food all over town, it seemed.

“This is just what I wanted, Allison. Would you mind if I kept these photos? I’ll be very careful with them and I’ll be sure to return them.” If they don’t end up as a prosecutor’s exhibits in a trial.

Allison waved her hand and clicked her tongue. “Of course, Mrs. Porter. Who’s going to miss them, huh?”

I lifted the photographs from the poster, being careful to take the dried glue along with them.

“Hmm. Some of these pictures weren’t glued down very well. What kind of adhesive did you use?” I asked.

“Oh, Cheryl picked some up at one of those everything’s-a-dollar stores at the last minute. I guess it wasn’t a very good brand.”

That was more good news for me. Cheryl may have had designer taste in clothes and cars, but not in adhesives.

“Do you have the glue?” I asked. Allison gave me a curious look. “I like to compare different brands of glue for my crafts classes,” I added.

That seemed to satisfy her. “Cheryl took all the unused supplies-the extra poster board, tape, and all. I could ask her exactly where she bought the glue, if you want.”

“No, no. Thanks, Allison, but don’t bother.” I slipped the photos into an envelope. “You’ve already been a great help.”