About twenty minutes later, Ken’s ladder was back in its place along the garage wall, and about two dozen boxes were at my feet or on my small worktable.
“Thanks a lot, Henry,” I said. “I’m sorry about all the dust.”
“I’ve had worse Saturdays,” he said, brushing off his khakis. He waved his arm toward the stacks of boxes. “I’ll leave you to it. Let me know if you need anything. I’m a phone call away.”
I watched him drive off, feeling lucky that I’d met him. The timing could not have been better.
I turned back to the piles of boxes. Cartons that had once held printer paper or books now presumably held financial records, log books, building plans, and whatever else Artie, Ken’s partner, and Esther, their secretary, had found when they cleaned out Ken’s office. They’d both driven to my house with the boxes once it was clear that Ken would never recover and return to work. If I closed my eyes, I thought, I’d be able to feel Esther’s tears on my cheeks when she hugged me that day.
Though I couldn’t throw the material away even after Ken died, I’d never taken the covers off the boxes. Skip had helped me put them at the highest points of the garage, and there they had been until now.
I took a deep breath and cut through the first strip of sealing tape. My shoulders ached as I lifted the top of the box nearest me. I felt as exhausted as if the simple piece of cardboard weighed more than all my dollhouses combined.
My body relaxed as I saw that the first box was filled with nothing I should worry about. I pawed through dozens of books of the same size—long, narrow telephone message books, like the kind used in the ALHS office and probably a large majority of offices around the world. All that were left in the books were stubs with dates, times, and callers’ names.
I thought of Ken, the busy, russet-haired architect, showing up at work in the morning, picking up the right-hand sections of the message slips, making all these calls throughout the day, and still finding time to say hello to me on my breaks from class.
The tears came and stayed for a while. It wasn’t a very good start. If I couldn’t handle a box of old telephone message stubs without breaking down, how was I going to get through the rest of the material that surrounded me?
I needed a cup of tea. At this rate, it would be well past Halloween before I got through everything, but I needed to indulge myself nevertheless.
I stepped into my kitchen through the door between the house and the garage. From its spot on the counter, the answering machine showed a blinking light. I immediately remembered Beverly’s call as Maddie and I were leaving this morning. Henry and I had entered the garage directly from the driveway and had had no reason to go into the house. I decided to let the message wait until I’d at least had my tea.
Besides the blinking light, something else attracted my attention as I made my way to the pantry. A white envelope was leaning against a wastebasket I kept near a small desk in the family room. It looked as though someone had aimed to throw the envelope away but missed by a bit. I couldn’t remember doing any such thing. I picked up the envelope. It was empty, unmarked, from a box of stationery I recognized as one of my own.
I stepped back from the desk and looked it over. The top drawer wasn’t fully closed. I pulled it open all the way and found the box of stationery the envelope belonged to, in the place where it always was. I wasn’t the neatest person in Lincoln Point, but I never left my desk drawers partly open. I checked the slots on the desktop where I placed correspondence that needed attention and extracted a stack of letters and flyers. Nothing was missing as far as I could tell, but still the arrangement was curious. I usually left tidier edges on the stack.
I thought briefly of Maddie, but she never used the desk.
“Nuh-uh,” she’d said when I’d told her she was welcome to do her homework there. “My dad told me not to touch that desk or I’d get yelled at if something got messed up.”
Had I really made my son’s life that miserable? I did remember warning Richard that the desk was mainly for his parents’ use, since he had a perfectly good setup in his own room, and that if he did use the desk, he had to leave everything in it and on it the way he’d found it. No wonder he’d never touched it and passed a warning on to his daughter.
On the other hand, I’d invited Maddie to use the desk, with no restrictions. In fact, I hoped she would since she would then be nearby for chatting while I cooked or ironed. The desk issue was not the only one where I knew I was much more lenient with my granddaughter than I had been with my son.
I dropped the envelope into the wastebasket, though it wasn’t damaged in any way, and felt a sudden chill. What if a stranger had been in my home? I stood stock-still and listened for a noise, but heard nothing other than the ticking of my living room clock and the humming noise from my refrigerator.
Thunk. Thunk.
I jumped. What a time for ice cubes to drop into the container on the freezer door.
I took out my cell phone and held it like a gun. I walked from room to room.
Nothing seemed disturbed in the crafts room, but how would I be able to tell? My crafts supplies and projects were organized in their own way, but I would never remember if I’d left a particular strand of polka-dot ribbon hanging from its slot in the multitiered ribbon holder. At any given time, I might lift the lids of several supply boxes, browsing among picture frames, mirrors, and baskets of different sizes, looking for an extra touch to a room box. More often than not, I’d leave the lids open so I’d know which of the identical blue plastic containers I’d already gone through.
It was hopeless to track whether anyone had been in my crafts room other than the wonderful women who treated it as their own. My crafters group had been here last night. Could one of them have needed a piece of paper and helped herself to my desk drawer? I doubted it.
I moved on to my bedroom, which seemed to be as I’d left it, as was the room Maddie used when she visited.
Was I imagining things? Had the envelope floated from the top of the desk when a breeze lifted it? I often left windows open. Had I written a quick note at my desk this morning and forgotten? I did leave in a hurry, and things had been slightly less than normal around here for the last couple of days.
Should I call Skip? And tell him what? That I’d found an envelope on the floor by the wastebasket and a drawer that wasn’t closed tightly?
Put that way, it sounded silly.
I made myself the cup of tea I’d come in for in the first place and sat in my living room, facing away from the desk.
Half asleep on my soft living room chair, I decided I’d been thinking too much of Macbeth and his witches, and perhaps now the ghost of Banquo had also invaded my mind and my home. A worse suggestion came and went in a flash—that Ken was sending me a message: don’t mess with my stuff.
Chapter 6
I woke up to loud footsteps entering my house from the garage. Before I was fully conscious, I grabbed the cell phone from the table next to me and tried to remember the emergency number. I was sure the steps belonged to the same intruder who’d gone through my desk. Then I remembered—I had no evidence that there had been an intruder.
I couldn’t recall a time when I’d entertained so many strange fantasies and half dreams. Late-night visitors were taking their toll, especially those connected to homicide. I needed to get more sleep.
The very real footsteps got louder.
“Grandma, we got worried,” Maddie said, tramping in with her heavy athletic shoes, which were nothing like the flimsy white sneakers I’d worn to gym class in the Bronx. Not content with simple white laces, both Taylor and Maddie owned shoes with colorful Velcro tabs, blinking red lights, and shiny wheels that surprised me every time Maddie rocked back on them and wheeled herself around me.
Henry was close behind Maddie. “Your garage door is still open,” he said, sounding worried that someone might have walked in and stolen me away.
“What time is it?” I asked, craning my stiff
neck to see the clock. Which must have been off by a couple of hours. “It can’t be five o’clock.”
It seemed it was. I’d slept more than three hours.
Maddie had made her way to my lap. Or at least some of Maddie was on my lap. Tall for her age, she no longer fit comfortably. Her legs dangled next to my still, stiff ones; her neck was bent to snuggle in mine.
“You didn’t call,” she said. “And you weren’t answering your phone.” She picked up my cell phone and frowned. “It’s not even on. But we called your landline, too. You must have been really out.” She held me as if she’d been worried that she’d never see or hear from me again.
“I’m sorry to make you worry, sweetheart, but I’m fine.” I opened my eyes as wide as I could and smiled as broadly as I could, emphasizing my point.
I looked at Henry, standing by. “Sorry,” I said.
“We’re just glad you’re okay,” he said.
I remembered that my car was still in front of his house, from ten this morning. “I should go back with you and get my car,” I said.
“Don’t worry. I drove your car here, Grandma,” Maddie said.
Even before she gave me her teasing grin, I tickled her all around her middle. Nice to know I wasn’t that far gone.
Back from Henry’s with my car, I thought it was time I retrieved my messages. Between my home answering machine and my cell phone voice mail, I had eight messages, not counting the many short ones from Maddie. The eight were from two people—four from Beverly and four from Susan. The gist of Beverly’s sequence was “Can we have lunch today?” (the one I’d ignored as I left the house in the morning), followed by two versions of “It might be too late for lunch now,” and finally, “Maybe I’ll stop by for dinner.”
Maddie curtailed her table-setting activities when she heard the last one and rushed to call her Aunt Beverly. (We had researched the question and found that one’s grandfather’s sister should be called a great-aunt, but Beverly refused any designation preceded by “great.”)
“Aunt Beverly said she was coming over anyway,” Maddie said, hanging up the phone. “She was worried when you didn’t answer your phones. How could you sleep through all that ringing? I called the line in the kitchen a lot, even more than the times I left a message.”
I doubted she was exaggerating. “I must have been really tired,” I told her.
I supposed I should have been grateful and flattered that I was missed after only a long nap.
Susan’s messages were also sequential. They began with, “Have you been to Oliver’s place yet?” and ended with, “I’m anxious to hear what you found at Oliver’s place.” Susan spoke in a gravelly voice that was different from her usual lilting southern tones. I suspected she was also short on sleep these days.
I felt like a dud. With the whole day at my disposal, I’d opened only one of Ken’s boxes, done nothing to help Susan, pawned my granddaughter off on other people, and was now barely scraping a dinner together. It was a good thing Beverly was family, or I would have had to rethink the platter of leftovers I was planning to serve.
My greatest wish was that I’d gone to Oliver’s apartment and picked up the miniature scene for Susan and found a suicide note the police may have overlooked. Cruel as that sounded, it would have brought a speedy close to Susan’s questioning and started her on the road to proper grieving.
I had another wish. I wished I’d stayed awake, gone through every scrap of paper in every one of Ken’s boxes and found only praiseworthy correspondence, perhaps one reading, Dear Mr. Porter, we accept your high moral position and your exemplary decision not to join us in our shady dealings. Best wishes, signed, All the Other Potentials on Oliver Halbert’s List.
Yes, I had been a good creative writing teacher, I mused.
“You look a little out of it this evening. Is something wrong?” Beverly asked. She’d held her question until Maddie had left for the kitchen to fill three bowls with ice cream.
“Other than hosting a dinner of leftovers?” I asked, tensing.
She pointed to the nearly empty serving bowls on the table. “Chicken cutlets, potato salad, green beans with almonds, and homemade dilly bread. I’ll take your leftovers any day.”
“Me, too,” Maddie said. “Except for mixing nuts with the vegetable.” She made a disgusted face, which quickly brightened as she plunked a small tray on the table and handed out bowls of chocolate ice cream. By long-standing agreement, she deposited the bowl with the largest amount of ice cream at her place. I was glad to have her back, not for the dessert, but because it meant I didn’t have to tell Beverly what was wrong with me: I was in essence investigating her brother.
This was a long holiday weekend for Maddie and she was mine until I delivered her to her Palo Alto school on Tuesday morning. Her parents were in San Francisco for a few much-needed days of relaxation, staying in a friend’s oceanside condo. Though Richard cared deeply for his profession as a surgeon, the job was stressful. I was delighted that Mary Lou gently forced him into quarterly getaways and time-outs when he was required to leave his pager in a desk drawer.
I always loved extra time with Maddie; this weekend there was a bonus in that I could use her as an excuse to leave the boxes in my garage unopened and the foreign key in my purse unused. I had to babysit, after all.
On the other hand, our bedtime chat tonight was more like a conference Skip might have with his LPPD colleagues.
“Did you call Mrs. Giles back and give her a report on The Case?” Maddie asked. She was sitting up in bed, arms folded across her chest. The chief of police couldn’t be more intimidating to his subordinates, the aroma of her strawberry bubble bath notwithstanding.
“Not yet.”
“Didn’t you find anything out today?” she asked.
Nothing I could share. (Where did she learn that stare?) I’d discovered that it was going to be harder than I thought to tear open cartons of material that had Ken’s name all over it. I was no chemist, but I’d have bet I wasn’t imagining things when I’d smelled my husband’s slightly musky scent when I unsealed the box of telephone logs.
“No, I didn’t find out anything.”
“Then, what were you doing all day, Grandma?”
“It wasn’t exactly all day. Just a couple of hours.”
“It was from eleven twenty when you left for lunch with Mr. Baker to almost five o’clock. I wanted to come home sooner, but Mr. Baker said you needed some private time. I figured it was about The Case, right?”
“I took a nap, remember?”
“Well, I did,” Maddie said.
That was a surprise. “You took a nap, too?”
“No, I found out something.”
I’d lost the continuity and now saw that the “I did” referred to making good use of the day.
“You found out something about what?” This was one of those times when it would have been helpful to have a whiteboard and dry-erase markers in Maddie’s room.
Maddie turned her head and gave me a sideways glance. “About The Case. I used Taylor’s laptop to Google Oliver Halbert.”
I wanted to ask if Taylor’s parents were aware of the forensics investigation going on in their daughter’s bedroom. There was no use discussing the bigger issue of sleuthing as a hobby for an eleven-year-old; Maddie won those debates hands down. I might as well reap the rewards.
“What did you learn?”
“He used to be in jail.”
I grimaced. “I doubt it.”
I should have learned by now not to question my granddaughter’s research skills. She threw back the covers and went to her own laptop on her desk. This was not sleep inducing. What had happened to the days when I sat on her bed and read a soothing, happy-ending story with no more serious a crime than a trampled cabbage patch or a stolen coin? At an hour when she should have been nodding off with a sweet smile on her face, she was upright at her computer, clicking intently. I consoled myself with the fact that at least tomorrow, Sunday, w
as not a school day.
“Here it is,” she said, beckoning me with a finger that seemed to have grown as long and crooked as that of Macbeth ’s second witch, as I envisioned her. By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes. Some things, once memorized, never left our consciousness.
On Maddie’s monitor was a newspaper photo of a young Oliver Halbert. The caption read, “Local man arrested on DUI.”
I studied the photo. The man, looking back over his shoulder at the camera (he couldn’t have intended that), had the same high forehead, thick neck, and narrow eyes I’d seen briefly on Oliver where he was slumped on the Fergusons’ porch and more recently in his sister’s photographs of him. I doubted the arrestee was another Oliver Halbert from the small town of Bethelville, Tennessee. The newspaper was dated fifteen years ago, which would have put Oliver in his early thirties, well beyond the frat party phase.
Besides the pressing issue of Oliver Halbert’s arrest record, there was the curious question of how Google got a photograph from a time when the Internet was barely developed and certainly not widely used. I pictured a room full of teenagers entering mountains of data and scanning photos from the past.
I wondered also how Oliver could have landed a government job in Lincoln Point when he had a record. Maybe this was a low-priority arrest. I’d have to ask Skip.
“See?” Maddie said.
I patted her head. “Good girl.” A question formed in my mind: what were the chances that a person would be arrested once, as an isolated incident, in his thirties? I supposed he could have learned his lesson, but there was also a chance that this was a pattern. “Can you see if there are any more”—how to phrase it to my underage researcher—“things he might have been in jail for?”
“I already looked at all the hits and I couldn’t find anything except one more that was part of a police thing. Something about bribing someone, but he didn’t do it. They thought he did, but it turned out he didn’t.”
Monster in Miniature Page 7
