7 Madness in Miniature

by Margaret Grace

  “What do I have to wear?”

  “Well, if you have official duties like taking pictures, who knows what you’ll have to do. You might need to kneel on the grass or climb on something to get a good shot. You can wear whatever you want, but make sure it’s comfortable. Probably a frilly dress wouldn’t be advisable.”

  Maddie sat back, her tongue licking her lips. She was having a good day. A trip to the police station, a free pass at Video Jeff’s while all the boys envied her, and now permission to dress casually as an official photographer at her great-aunt’s wedding. To top it off, Sadie pushed through the door.

  “We’re open. C’mon in.”

  From the way the three of us stampeded to the table, you’d think it had been years since we’d had ice cream.

  * * *

  As I’d hoped, Maddie and I had time later for a relaxing crafting session. My main crafts area was the second room from the front of the house, next to Maddie’s bedroom. When it came right down to it, however, every room in my four-bedroom home was a crafts room to some extent. We’d already started on the interior components of the twelve-inch-by-nine-inch ice cream shop that Henry was building for us. Not that we were addicted or anything. Maddie had carefully chosen the flavors—strawberry, chocolate, raspberry ripple, and “just nothing with mint,” she’d said. After a half hour of shaping tiny balls of crafts clay and gluing them into miniature sundae glasses, Maddie made an announcement.

  “This is getting boring. I’d rather do an earthquake,” she said.

  Maddie still seemed a bit moody, even after her treat-filled morning. Bev and I hadn’t had a private moment to discuss the letter Maddie had mailed, and I wondered if her lingering grouchiness had anything to do with the missive.

  “An earthquake? You mean an outdoor scene showing the geological layers?” I hoped not. Too much like a science project.

  “No,” she said. “Just a place where there’s been an earthquake with things that fell over.” She’d already told me that she’d considered finishing the ice cream shop, then shaking it as if a seven-point-nine hit it, but decided against wrecking anything that looked like Sadie’s.

  We sat on opposite sides of a long table, billed in store catalogs as a picnic table, but the staple of every crafter I knew. The surfaces of the ones I owned were constantly strewn with tiny objects and pieces of indefinable origin destined to be part of a dollhouse or a room box or a free-standing miniature scene. Sometimes an entire row of dollhouses occupied the table, as if I’d created a suburban street in my own home. My greatest pleasure was delivering the houses to a school or hospital for a raffle—or most recently, to SuperKrafts for the charities auction—and then starting all over with new houses. I could see that the ice cream shop was now relegated to the “unfinished” side of the room.

  “Let’s brainstorm,” I said, having introduced the concept to Maddie when she was barely able to repeat a two-syllable word.

  She closed her eyes, part of our early brainstorming ritual. “Okay.”

  “A schoolroom?” I suggested. “A hair salon? A post office?”

  She shook her head, no, no, and no. “A swimming pool,” she said. Apparently we hadn’t been brainstorming at all; I’d simply been trying to guess what Maddie had in mind from the start.

  I remembered her earlier complaint that she wished she had a pool. I could certainly give her a miniature pool. “A swimming pool hit by an earthquake. We can do it. We can have poolside lounge chairs tipped over,” I said.

  “And sodas spilled out.”

  “A beach ball that flew into a bush.”

  “Some rafts and tubes.”

  “A lifeguard chair?” I offered on my next turn.

  Maddie shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

  “Is this an indoor pool or an outdoor pool?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “You have a particular pool in mind?”

  “Nyah. Let’s forget about the pool. How about a police station?”

  What? I looked at her, wishing I could get inside her head the way I’d done when she was a toddler. My family marveled at how I always knew what my little granddaughter wanted. Milk or juice? Sneakers or sandals? A bedtime story from the big blue book or one from the skinny red book? Now at only eleven, she was impossible to read. What would I do next year and those to follow?

  “Okay, let’s do a police station,” I said.

  “I mean a police station in an earthquake,” she said.

  Of course. “You got it.”

  “Do you think it will be too boring?” she asked.

  “Not if it’s been hit by an earthquake.”

  “I don’t want it to be just desks and chairs.”

  “Let’s think of what cute things we can add,” I said. I thought a minute. “Handcuffs. We can make them from jewelry clasps.”

  “The silver lobster clasps,” Maddie said, delighted that she remembered the technical name. “They already look just like handcuffs. And we can have, like, a lunch bag, like Uncle Skip has sometimes. He puts his sandwich on top of it when he eats it. We could make a sandwich, easy.” Maddie, who never sat long in one place unless there was a computer in front of her, had left the table and skipped around the room as she brainstormed, ticking off items for consideration. “And a coffee mug. And photos, like the one of June on his desk.”

  We were on our way.

  We started with a lunch bag. Maddie dashed to the kitchen to get a life-size brown bag, which we then unraveled, as she called it, taking it apart so we could spread it out to see the pattern. She was good at scaling down the shape and making a template for a bag that was one-twelfth scale.

  Dum dum, da da dum, da da dum.

  I resisted the urge to get off my chair and march around the room with the music. I checked my cell phone screen. Catherine calling. Probably to ask about my brief visit with Bebe.

  “Are you in the middle of something, Gerry?” she asked.

  I looked at the table, Maddie’s sketch, the scraps of brown paper, and sitting in its cradle, my smoking glue gun. What could Catherine want that would be more important than this? Maddie stared at me, waiting to see what I was going to do and whether she’d be included.

  “I am busy, Catherine. Is something wrong?”

  “It’s just … I was reading these notes again.” She let out a loud sigh.

  I carried the phone out of the crafts room, into my atrium. “Did you get another one?”

  “No, but I’m trying to figure out the handwriting. Like, is it a man or a woman? If it’s Bebe, then I’m safe, I guess, now that she’s in custody. But then about a half hour ago someone knocked on my door really hard. I didn’t answer and he went away, but the knocking was, like, angry, and scared me. I was afraid to look through the peephole. I saw this movie where a guy shot someone in the eye, through the hole.” Catherine let out a noise, like a shiver, as if a wind had whipped through her room. “Finally I went to the window and after a couple of minutes I saw Leo’s car drive away. At least, I’m pretty sure it was Leo’s. What if Leo killed Craig? And is sending me notes. Maybe he had another one but he heard me in the room and left?”

  “But it wouldn’t make sense for Leo to send you notes telling you to get out of town, would it?”

  “I don’t know. I guess not. I’m afraid to leave the room, Gerry.”

  I pictured the KenTucky Inn, mentally blocking out the large sign in front. Three floors high, formerly a sprawling private home with expansive lawns that had been replaced by parking lots in the front and back, according to city ordinances.

  “How good a look at the car did you get?”

  Maddie entered the atrium and flopped onto my lap, as far as her long legs would allow. It was more of a reclining position these days, as if I were her personal poolside lounge chair. Her head rested on my shoulder, a handy spot for a little girl who wanted to eavesdrop on her grandmother’s conversation.

  “I got a pretty good look,” Cather
ine said. “Leo’s rental car is a funny shade of blue. I’m on the third floor in the back with a window onto the parking lot. He drove right under me.” Another shivery noise.

  “Have you talked to the police yet?” I asked, leaving off “as I advised.”

  She paused. “That’s not the real reason I called, Gerry. I was going to call you anyway. We scheduled a meeting, Leo, Megan, and I, to make some decisions about the Grand Opening. It would be great if you could come.” I noted the swift transition between being afraid to step out of her hotel room to cajoling me into a meeting. “Maisie’s not feeling well and Bebe’s still at the police station and we don’t want to recruit someone new. But we should have at least one community rep.”

  “For appearances?” I asked, smoothing Maddie’s red curls.

  “Well, sort of, but you know we value your input, Gerry.”

  How flattering. “When and where?”

  “At the store at three.”

  I looked at the nearest wall clock, hanging over my kitchen sink and visible from the atrium. “An hour from now?”

  “We’d be really grateful.”

  “Isn’t the store still a crime scene?”

  “Not as of twenty minutes ago. Jeanine called to say the cops took the tape down. I guess they have all the evidence they need. Or whatever. Anyway, it’s all clear. And Mrs. Porter, I don’t know how you feel about the Grand Opening, given the circumstances, but it doesn’t seem right to me to have a hundred balloons going up right over the spot where Craig was murdered. Not so soon anyway.”

  In spite of Catherine’s unsubtle lobbying for my support, I tended to agree with her. Although Craig wasn’t a resident and had spent little more than twenty-four hours alive on Lincoln Point soil, he’d been murdered in our town and it seemed only proper that we respect his memory. Even if someone had traveled from New York to kill him, which, I admitted to myself, was my preferred scenario. And probably the town’s.

  I thought about the opportunity to see the recent crime scene, an excuse to be with all three SuperKrafts suspects, as I thought of them, and a chance to help the police close their case and remove Lincoln Point from unwanted attention. “I’ll be there,” I said, as Maddie clapped her hands at the possibility of a field trip.

  “Uncle Henry’s or Aunt Beverly’s?” I asked her, meaning, “You’re not invited.”

  She hoisted herself off my lap and faced me. “You haven’t told me anything about this case,” she said. “Just because there’s no computer work, it doesn’t mean I can’t help.”

  Maddie had a point. Also, it wasn’t fair to exploit her techie talents and cut her out of cases that didn’t require those particular skills. She couldn’t help it that she was eleven years old going on thirty. On the other hand, a person had been murdered in the very building where the meeting would be held. What if the killer returned, or, more likely in my mind, was one of the attendees of the meeting? I didn’t want her there.

  “This time I promise to tell you all about the case when I get back.”

  “Abso-totally-lutely?” Another linguistic variation from Maddie.

  “Abso-blahblahblah-lutely,” I answered.

  Earlier, by phone, Henry and I had considered forcing a showdown between his granddaughter and mine. If he happened to be needed to pick up Taylor from her swim party while he happened to be taking care of Maddie, well, whose fault would that happen to be?

  “But it’s probably better to let them set the pace,” he’d said.

  “Unless it exceeds a statute of limitations. Shall we say a week?”

  “A week is good. We have our own convenience to consider,” Henry had said.

  We’d hung up on a chuckle.

  * * *

  Bev, my accommodating sister-in-law and the bride-to-be, came by in plenty of time for me to make the meeting.

  “We might as well stay here,” she said to Maddie. “Your grandma’s fridge and cookie jar are a lot more inviting than mine.”

  Until Maddie left the atrium, we chatted about how much time wedding planning takes and what other items we could add to the police station room box. Bev had a wealth of ideas. Maddie drew up a list at this more fruitful brainstorming session as we came up with a magnifying glass, a gun and holster, and three-ring binders, plus everyday desk supplies like telephones, staplers, scissors, and file folders.

  “I have an idea,” Maddie said, and skipped away toward the crafts room.

  Bev and I moved closer and put our heads together. “Did you get anything from Maddie about the letter or about her Taylor snit?” I asked, talking in a low voice at a rapid speed.

  Bev clucked her tongue, disappointed. “Sorry, I didn’t see the full address, but I did notice a large uppercase T and the rest of the name could definitely have been Taylor.”

  “That’s what I guessed.”

  “I tried to get a better look, but our Ms. Maddie was very careful.” I believed her. She looked around now to be sure Maddie was still out of earshot. It was clear who was in charge of the household.

  “She’s always careful,” I said.

  “Bummer. We have Maddie and Taylor at kid odds and Skip and June at grown-up odds.”

  “Do you know what that’s about?” I asked, no longer whispering.

  “It’s a time thing, I’m pretty sure. They both put in a lot of overtime at their jobs. And I think Skip, lovely lad though he is, still has this idea that man’s work is more important than woman’s work, so it’s okay for him to be late or miss a date, but not for her.”

  “Well, he is a cop.”

  “She has a demanding job, too. Software deadlines are serious. She’s told me about the fierce competition in the business, and how important it is to meet the launch date when they have a new product.”

  “It’s still not life and death,” I noted.

  “Whose side are you on?”

  “Oops,” I said.

  Before I turned over my crafts table and significant collection of glues to Maddie and Bev, it occurred to me that Bev might be able to answer a question that Skip had glossed over last night. He never did tell me what exactly was the murder weapon. Bev cleared it up for me.

  “We told the press it was a vase; actually it might have been twelve vases,” Bev said.

  “Meaning?”

  “Skip told me that they found a wooden crate containing a dozen pottery vases, each one about ten inches high. One vase was out of the crate and seems to have been used to bash in…well, fallen hard on the victim’s head. The other vases were half in, half out, lots of broken pieces. The way the crime scene guys have reconstructed things, so far, anyway—Palmer and the killer walked out of the lounge where they might have been meeting and entered the general area of the store together. They were right on the border between the warehouse side and the retail side when the earthquake hit. The killer seized the opportunity, took a vase out of the crate and smashed it…you know. Then he or she pushed or lifted the crate onto Palmer’s body, and smashed a few vases afterward, to make it look like the crate had fallen on Palmer from above.”

  “But that didn’t happen? The earthquake didn’t do it?”

  “No, the trajectories were all off. There was a set of shelves near the crate but it wasn’t high enough off the floor to send the crate where it landed; and the widths didn’t compute; and it’s unlikely that anyone would have stashed the vases on the shelf like that in the first place, et cetera, et cetera. Plus, why would only one vase fall out of its mooring in the packing material and land on Palmer’s head in just the right spot? They have all kinds of photos to back up this theory.”

  “It sounds as though the killer was sloppy.”

  “Probably spur of the moment. Crime of passion, as they say. The killer and victim might have been fighting and then the earthquake was handy to cover up a last burst of anger.”

  Slap, slap, slap. The sound of running flip-flops. Maddie bounded into the atrium waving a narrow streamer of some kind.

 
“Ta da!” Her announcement was accompanied by a wide grin, the kind I hadn’t seen enough of lately.

  On a closer look at the streamer, Bev and I expressed our delight with words like “wow” and “amazing,” and high-fives all around. Maddie had produced miniature crime scene tape.

  “I typed out the words, then I copied and pasted them over and over in the smallest font I have, then I highlighted them in yellow. If I had yellow paper, I would have just printed them on it. Then I cut the pieces…I mean, with scissors…and strung them together with glue”—she held up the newly created long strip with the never-ending phrase POLICE CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS—“and ta da!”

  I couldn’t have been more thrilled, by the result of Maddie’s creativity, of course, but even more so by her increasing interest and enthusiasm for miniatures. It had taken some time to win the young soccer-loving Maddie over to the craft, and today’s leap into a project all her own brightened my life considerably.

  I left the house, knowing my crafts table was in good hands.

  Chapter 8

  I drove downtown, my car’s A/C much too underpowered for the usual increase in midafternoon temperatures. My hands were sticky on my steering wheel, my face flushed from overheating. I hoped the not-yet-open SuperKrafts had a cooler climate, though I had a feeling that the managers’ tempers would be flaring no matter what the weather.

  At two forty-five on a Sunday afternoon, most shops were still open. I marveled again at the brand new sidewalk on both sides of Springfield Boulevard, all the way to the corner where Rosie’s Bookshop sat. SuperKrafts was the generous funding agency for the sidewalk project, which included new parking lots behind its own store as well as a small park in front of Civic Center.

  Incentives worked both ways, as I’d learned. The town council had given a tax break to the giant retailer, in the form of a sliding scale that was based on their profits. Theoretically, the town would still be ahead because of the enormous income from the sales tax SuperKrafts would generate. The vision was that when crafters from all over the area came to Lincoln Point to buy their supplies, they’d also send their kids to Video Jeff’s while they shopped, stop for lunch at Willie’s Bagels across the street, and pick up gifts and odds and ends at Rosie’s and at Abe’s Hardware before having dessert at Sadie’s. Everyone would prosper. Time would tell.