Monster in Miniature

by Margaret Grace

  Besides, Susan used computers every day in her job as a market analyst. And she was about ten years younger than me. (I had a slightly jaundiced view of the computer literacy curve, matching the age curve exactly.) Susan would know how to retrieve information from the drive and offer it as proof of murder, or destroy it if it made her brother appear less than pure as he’d carried out his inspection responsibilities.

  Unless she also had trouble getting through the password protection.

  Susan placed the scene on the table and lowered her head until it touched the top frame of the room box. At the first sound of sobs, Henry put his hand out and rubbed her shoulder.

  “You built the extra workbench? Using the flash drive?” I asked.

  Susan nodded without lifting her head. She whispered a weak “Yes.”

  I had a hopeful thought. Maybe Susan thought the drive was old, with nothing on it, or that it was an extra one, like the dozens of discs and other pieces of plastic that were scattered around computer areas these days, ready to be scooped up by a miniaturist needing a structural element in a dollhouse or room box. The title of the drive had come up Potentials Data, but perhaps Susan didn’t know that and saw what she considered a useful found object for a last-minute addition to her present for her brother.

  Her continued distress—she’d sat up straighter now and tried to control her breathing—said she’d known exactly what she was doing. Hiding information. Hiding evidence.

  “Do you know what’s on the drive?” I asked.

  “No, I couldn’t find the password in Oliver’s files and I couldn’t hack it in the short time I had. I just wanted the drive to be out of harm’s way until I had access to better software. It was stupid, but I was trying to protect my brother, in case . . . just in case.”

  I thought back to Susan’s withholding the small facts of her brother’s DUI and the bribery charges lodged, if not filed, against him during his tenure in Tennessee. She might even know of the bribe it took to get him his Lincoln Point job. Susan had handicapped me from the beginning, and as much as I felt sorry for her loss, a wave of annoyance came over me. She’d used me, sending me to Oliver’s apartment, hoping I’d find the room box before the police or Lynch and company did. She counted on my not noticing the flash drive.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “The flash drive probably has the proof you need that Oliver was about to bring down a lot of people. Isn’t that why you wanted the police to comb through his list of potentials? Isn’t that why you pressed me into service—to spur them on.”

  “I knew what was on the hard copy list the police picked up right after he . . . died. I hoped that would be enough to find his killer. I didn’t know for sure what was on the flash drive. I found it in my desk drawer after Oliver had just left my house a couple of weeks ago. There was no way to tell if he’d done it intentionally or not. Maybe he was trying to hide it, or maybe he wanted me to have it in case something happened to him.” The tears began again, streaming down her face. “I just couldn’t take a chance until I saw what was on it.”

  “You thought the drive might have something on it that incriminated your brother.” I saw only the slightest of nods. “And if there was, you’d have destroyed it?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, and I believed her.

  As short a time as a week ago, I might have judged Susan harshly for considering doing something illegal, like hiding evidence of a crime. Tonight I understood.

  Henry, who’d left the atrium, now returned with a cup of tea and handed it to my guest. “Take this, Susan, and try to relax. You know if you don’t tell Gerry everything, there’s no way for her to help you, and she’s already wasted a lot of time.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “Why didn’t you go to Oliver’s apartment and retrieve the room box yourself, Susan?” I asked as more confusion washed over me. “In fact, why did you give the drive back to him after you found it in your desk?”

  “I know it sounds crazy, Gerry. I made the workbench with the flash drive and the cork and took the assembly over there shortly after I found it. Things were starting to really heat up with Lynch and Crowley. I slipped it onto the floor of the workroom scene, thinking that disguising it was the best thing. And then if Oliver asked for it, I’d be able to tell him where it was. But then he . . .” She choked up and stopped. “I never even got to ask him about it.”

  Though I felt I had a handle on who did what to the flash drive when, I knew it would take a notepad and pen and a lot of doodling for me to track its journey. I saw an image of a small piece of plastic, first red, then brown, traveling from Oliver to Susan, back to Oliver, and now back to Susan.

  “And you sent me to get it because . . . ?”

  “I was afraid to be caught there with it. What if the police came back while I was there and confiscated what I had—it would look awful if I had evidence on me.”

  “But it would be okay if they found me there with evidence?”

  “Uh-huh.” I gave her a strange, frowning look. “You know, with your nephew and all, I didn’t see it as a problem. Or what if Patrick Lynch or Max Crowley came?”

  I started to tell her who exactly did show up, with at least one gun, but decided she wouldn’t be able to handle that right now. “What if?” I said.

  “I figured you could act perfectly innocent because you wouldn’t know what a flash drive was, Gerry.” She paused. “No offense.”

  “None taken. You didn’t count on Maddie.” I felt a certain pride, as if my granddaughter were making up for my shortcomings. Wasn’t that the principal mission of the next generations?

  Susan gulped down the tea, prompting Henry to remove the empty cup and take it to the kitchen for a refill. We were silent until he returned, both using the time to draw deep breaths.

  “Susan, is there anything else you’re holding back?” I asked.

  Henry said, “If you’d like me to leave, so you can be more open—”

  “Henry knows everything,” I said, wondering what I meant, other than the fact that I didn’t want Henry to leave.

  “It doesn’t matter now, anyway.” Susan looked at me. “You already gave the drive to the police, didn’t you?” I could see that she hoped she was wrong.

  “It’s really the best thing,” Henry said. “We’ll just have to wait and see what’s on the drive. I’m sure the police have more resources for getting into these things.”

  If they don’t, they should, I thought.

  I had a silly question. “Susan, was it really you who painted that drive and glued it to the wine cork?”

  “Awful, wasn’t it?” she said. I saw the first sign of a smile. “I was in a big hurry.”

  “I won’t tell Linda,” I promised.

  I was happy to see my friend’s smile widen.

  Susan began to relax. I hated to take advantage of her vulnerable state, but I hoped she’d be able to offer pieces to a puzzle in my mind: what was the relationship among all the players in the city inspector’s office?

  “Once Oliver was accused of bribery years ago, it made him very sensitive to the crime and he went looking for trouble, sometimes in dangerous places,” she said.

  “Crowley being one of those places,” Henry said.

  Susan had nodded. “Except Crowley didn’t even wait for trouble to come his way. He preempted it. Crowley paid off the powers that be to look the other way about Oliver’s DUI, without Oliver knowing about it. Oliver just figured his past troubles were overlooked because they were so long ago and so minor.”

  “And Crowley then had something to hold over Oliver’s head,” Henry said.

  “So if he turned out to be the kind of inspector who didn’t want to cooperate with Lynch and the others, they could always blackmail him,” I said, proud that I’d kept up with all the cross-references.

  “Uh-huh. They could threaten to go public that Oliver got his job under false pretenses,” Susan said. “Unless Oliver could gather enough evid
ence against them.”

  “Kind of like nuclear deterrence,” Henry said.

  I trusted that the analogy was apt, though I knew little of the strategy for either blackmail or war.

  One mystery solved, however. Oliver wasn’t as much of a cad as Skip and I had thought. The revelation brought me relief, as if somehow a course of good “brother” karma had begun and my own husband, Beverly’s brother, would be exonerated as well.

  The labyrinthine reasoning didn’t bother me as much as it should have.

  “So you think the flash drive has evidence against Lynch and Crowley?” Henry asked Susan.

  “I surely do,” she said.

  We all fell silent. I figured we shared the same thought in one form or another—the flash drive was a dangerous item to be caught with.

  I was relieved that it was now out of my hands and my house.

  I wondered what was keeping Maddie busy all the while we were talking, especially since it was getting toward dinnertime. Susan had said, “No, thank you,” to my offer of food. She’d excused herself to fix her face, as she’d put it, and gone home with her room box, swearing there would be no more holding back information. I promised to tell her as soon as I heard anything from Skip.

  I’d decided to honor Maddie’s plea (more like a whine) for pizza—“I haven’t had it all weekend, and it’s a holiday”—and placed a phone order for home delivery. It was the least reward I could give her for her excellent detective work. If it weren’t for my granddaughter, the police would not be decoding the flash drive—and clearing my husband’s name, I dared think—as we spoke.

  “You must have been pretty busy back there,” I said, as Maddie, Henry, and I set the table and listened for the pizza delivery. “How many vampire bats did you make?”

  “I wasn’t making decorations,” Maddie said.

  I’d thought, optimistically, that she’d been in the crafts room, happily making miniatures. I wanted her to learn that spending time alone with a hobby could be entertaining and rewarding. Until now, Maddie would work on dollhouses or miniature scenes only with me or with others. I wanted her to experience the pleasure of going into a different world, by herself, and feeling exhilarated by the creative process, and calm at the same time.

  Some other day, I hoped.

  “Last-minute homework?” Henry asked.

  “Nuh-uh.”

  “TMing Taylor?” I suggested.

  “Nuh-uh.”

  “Devyn?” I asked, continuing the game. I knew she still kept in touch with her best Los Angeles friend. The stock for postcard-rate stamps had surely gone up since they’d been separated. As I saw Maddie write out the greetings, I’d been glad to see that e-mailing and TMing hadn’t completely ruled out the joy of receiving a colorful, physical card.

  “Nuh-uh.”

  “Taking a nap?” Henry offered, followed by laughter from all of us.

  Finally, she threw up her hands at the useless guesses from the old folks. “I’m still trying to crack the password for the flash drive.”

  “It’s gone,” I said. “What do you mean?” Had she slipped her uncle a different drive? Had Skip, in collusion with Maddie, left it with her on purpose?

  “I cloned it.”

  “You what?” I asked, in utter confusion. Did Maddie have a biology lab under her bed? A sheep?

  “I cloned the flash drive. You know, copied it and put it on my hard drive before I gave it to Uncle Skip.”

  I wondered if I should be grateful that there was one hobby Maddie worked on by herself and seemed to derive pleasure from.

  What was foremost in my mind, however, was that I hadn’t gotten rid of the crucial flash drive after all.

  Chapter 17

  I couldn’t bring myself to scold Maddie for holding on to the flash drive, by whatever means she could. I should have known it would take more than confiscation of property by the police for her to give up a challenge. That spirit was what got her father through medical school and beyond and her mother a place in a major San Francisco art gallery, not the easiest field to turn into a career.

  Our talk while eating a delicious pizza—one side with cheese only, for Maddie, the other side with mushrooms and olives for Henry and me—was free of conflict, ours or anyone else’s. We talked more about three-dimensional animation, which Maddie was expecting to learn at her next session of technology camp; we discussed which store had the best Halloween candy for the best price; I promised to get a supply of Maddie’s ghosts and witches to the Ferguson factory party; and we made plans for another dinner with Taylor and her parents.

  I enjoyed our version of a normal family dinner, with only a few ghosts and goblins flitting around my mind.

  It was seven o’clock before we finished bowls of ice cream. I could tell that Henry wasn’t eager to leave, but Maddie and I had a project to complete. And not on the cloned flash drive.

  We needed to get to work on the haunted dollhouse.

  I walked Henry to the door.

  “Do you want me to pursue contacting Sunaqua Estates?” he asked me.

  I thought about it. Maybe all the interruptions were telling me something. Let the past be, it might be saying. “I’m not sure,” I said. “But thanks for the offer. And thanks for coming. You can see where I’d be if I’d had to wait for Skip to rescue me from the Ferguson brothers.”

  “My pleasure. Skip hasn’t called all evening. Are you concerned about him?”

  “No more than usual. It’s always hard to picture him out there with scary people.”

  “I hear you. But he looks like a man who can take care of himself.”

  “That he is.”

  Henry started down the path toward his car. I had the door half closed when he turned back. “What are you doing tomorrow?” he asked, catching me off guard.

  “I’ll be driving to Palo Alto, taking Maddie back to school in the morning.”

  “Want some company?”

  I found I did. “Can you be here by seven?”

  Henry gave me a salute, which I took as a yes.

  What had I been thinking, agreeing to have Henry accompany me on the drive to Palo Alto? I didn’t know how I was going to break the news to Maddie.

  Ever since her family moved to northern California from Los Angeles, and we set up a schedule for regular visits, our commute time had always been special. I learned as many things about my granddaughter while we were buckled into my car, looking straight ahead, as when we sat face-to-face. My red Saturn Ion served as a therapy office as we talked out everything from how to deal with losing a soccer game to the homesickness Maddie felt when her family moved here from Los Angeles to whether there really was a heaven.

  I couldn’t define it, but there was something about the extra generation that separated grandparents and grandchildren that fostered a unique bond.

  Would Maddie see Henry as an intruder on our time together? I knew she liked him a lot, but would this be too much togetherness? More important—had I always been such a worrywart, stressing even over who would sit in the front seat?

  I decided to put off telling Maddie the arrangement until her bedtime, when there was a chance she’d be more mellow.

  For now, I had to try to extricate her from her computer and plunk her down in front of the dollhouse.

  “I have to crack this password,” she said.

  “I know you do, sweetheart, but sometimes it’s better to leave this kind of challenge for a while, let it stew in your brain. Then when you go back to it, something will snap into place. It happens to me all the time.”

  “Like when?”

  “Well, I might be trying to think of a new way to make a mini table or decoration, or maybe I need just one more word to finish a crossword puzzle. If I concentrate too hard for too long, my brain gets overloaded and I have to step back. Then, when I’m cooking or watering my plants, not thinking about it at all”—I snapped my fingers—“it comes to me.”

  “Okay.”

  R
eally? That had been easier than I thought. I’d been ready with more examples, like trying to remember the name of a song or a movie and having it come to me hours or days later when I’d forgotten about it and didn’t care anymore. Maybe it was only my brain that worked that way, but the pep talk got Maddie away from the computer, and that’s what I wanted.

  We headed for the crafts room discussing how to attach a miniature ghost to the haunted dollhouse so it would look as though it were flying out of an upstairs window. I hoped immersion in miniatures would take both our minds off the elusive contents of the flash drive.

  “It didn’t work, Grandma.” Maddie held up a set of completed ghosts. “I worked on something different, but I didn’t get any answers yet.”

  “Sometimes it takes longer than a couple of hours.”

  “How long?”

  I checked for evidence that she was teasing. I was happy to see a barely contained grin.

  Maddie was in bed and we were having our last chat of the day. There was no more stalling. I had to tell her the plans for Tuesday.

  “It’s back to school tomorrow,” I said.

  She frowned. “I’d rather stay and work on you-know-what.”

  The cryptic naming of the flash drive was Maddie’s way of following my advice not to think about it. I had to work on being more clear about the process.

  “You know that once you’re in the classroom with Mr. Ramsey and all your friends, you’ll be very happy to be back.”

  “I know.”

  “We’ll leave about seven as usual, but there’s one change.”

  “Mr. Baker’s coming.” Maddie’s tone was casual, I was glad to hear, as if he accompanied us every week and I’d simply forgotten.

  “How did you know that?”

  “I just figured.”