Not that I actually volunteered anything but a hug. I assumed she was sneaking in a reference to her unhelpful boyfriend and the arresting officer, Skip Gowen. I patted her back, as bony as mine, but much shorter. “We’ll get through this,” I said. The line sounded familiar, as if everything I knew, I’d learned from television scripts.
Never has anyone promised so much on the basis of so little information.
As I pondered what I’d gotten myself into, still patting June’s back, Maddie caught my eye. She and her new friends beckoned to me to join them at the far end of the hall. June mumbled about not wanting to talk to anyone and excused herself. But not before she extracted a promise from me to let her brief me on Zoe’s case later this afternoon.
“I’m not sure I can offer anything but emotional support,” I told her.
“Not true, Gerry. Just hear me out. Once you hear everything, you’ll put it all together and help Skip see it. Zoe couldn’t possibly have killed Brad. She was with me that night till well after midnight. We watched a bunch of Sex and the City reruns.”
I had some experience with teenagers making up stories. “I left my homework in my other backpack” was very popular, as were “I dropped the floppy in a puddle on the way to school” and “My mom put my English folder in her briefcase by mistake and took it to work.”
June was well past her teen years, but I thought I detected the same shifty-eyed expression.
I agreed to talk to June, but not in my home since I didn’t want Maddie in on the discussion. Willie’s seemed the best choice. I guessed June hadn’t eaten in a while, and there was nothing wrong with two bagels in one day for me. My family and friends thought I still had some pounds to go to reach a healthy weight. I’d become almost as thin as Ken while he was in and out of hospitals. A therapist (I never took the advice to see one) might have said I wanted to drop as many pounds as he did.
I had to deposit Maddie somewhere. The usual lineup of sitters I used during Maddie’s visits was otherwise occupied. My first call would have been to my sister-in-law, Ken’s sister, Beverly, now in Hawaii. She was always happy to entertain or be entertained by Maddie, whom she considered her own granddaughter also. “Until my only son gives me one of my own,” she’d say, but only when Skip was in earshot.
Number two, my friend Linda, was on duty today at the Mary Todd retirement home. June was number three, and more unavailable than ever.
I’d have to move on to another typical scenario: drop Maddie off at Rosie’s Books downtown. Rosie Norman, a former student, was bound to have a story hour in progress, plus a full candy bowl on the counter. Knowing Maddie’s sweet tooth, I’d brought candy into the store several times when I picked her up, to replenish the supply.
June agreed readily to this arrangement; I doubted Maddie would. My only hope for a peaceful discussion was if Rosie had a group of preschoolers and Maddie could feel very mature helping out.
I wished myself luck in closing the deal with an eleven-year-old shark.
The watercooler group had broken up and people were returning to workstations throughout the hall. As I wove my way among them, carrying the large portfolio with Mary Lou’s painting, I was greeted by “Hi, Mrs. Porter” a number of times from former students. A few offered to help but the package was lighter than it looked and I refused with a thank-you, sometimes even remembering the person’s name.
Richard, and now Maddie, often teased me about how they had to behave themselves in public because I “knew everyone.” Not quite true, especially since more and more people came to northern California for college and stayed, thus skipping over Mrs. Porter’s English classes.
Maddie was waiting to introduce me first to Stephanie Cameron, a tall young woman wearing a long-sleeved black turtleneck and a pink quilted down vest. The rest of her appearance was of a kind with most of her generation, all of whom seem to have the same hairdo (layered in the extreme, with streaks of different colors), the same clothes (also layered, with all tiers showing, often including undergarments), the same perfect smiles (thanks to the availability of braces and teeth whiteners), and a preponderance of pink in their wardrobes.
The older (his elaborate mustache and beard had streaks of gray) gentleman was Ed Villard, whose paint-splattered denim shirt and pants placed him as another local artist. He reached out to shake my hand.
Stephanie was of the age to have been my student, but a transplant apparently, with a diploma from an institution other than Abraham Lincoln High School. Ed looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him except to say I might have seen him around town.
Both were carrying water bottles, but if we were investigating who could carry the largest bottled water container, Stephanie would stand out. Hers was at least quart-sized, with a tiny red squirt top. The proportions of the container were off, as when a doll maker lost the sense of scale and put a too-small head on a torso.
“Nice to meet you, Mrs. Porter,” said Stephanie and Ed in turn.
“Maddie says you want to drop off a painting?” Stephanie asked me. The question was accompanied by a strange look.
“Gerry,” I said and explained my errand. I lifted the portfolio in support of my story.
“Okay, if you’re sure.”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Mmm, I don’t recommend it.”
Ed gave a loud grunt, the kind that would have been a curse if it weren’t for the presence of a child. “Stephanie is overreacting,” Ed said. “A few people are taking their projects away today. I guess you didn’t hear about . . .” He looked at Maddie and stopped midsentence.
Maddie raised her eyebrows and put her hands on her hips. Although she didn’t utter a word, I heard her loud, clear declaration: “You can’t possibly leave me out of this.”
“We know about the . . . uh . . . crime-scene tape,” I said.
Stephanie took a drink from her oversize water bottle. She had a long, thin neck with a hint of an Adam’s apple. “Right, that’s one of the things that happened. The other one was that a roomful of paintings were slashed. If I’m overreacting, I have good reason.” She addressed this last sentence to Ed.
I winced. Were the paintings slashed with the murder weapon? I imagined a knife piercing not canvas, but a young man’s skin. I worked against my dry throat. I wished I could ask Stephanie and Ed more details, but I needed to be careful in front of Maddie.
“Do the police have any clues about who did that?” I was embarrassed to have to ask, what with my own nephew on the force.
“Well, yes, and she’s in jail,” Ed said. He flicked his wrist as if he were banging a gavel. “Case closed.”
“But still, everyone’s nervous. I mean, you never know, you know?” Stephanie’s comment came out with the tone of the “duh” I heard constantly these days.
I didn’t know how to answer that question, so I simply nodded. “You think Zoe Howard slashed the paintings?”
Maddie had slipped behind me. I knew her tricks. If she was out of sight, I might not remember she was present. So far, there was nothing too offensive that I would regret her having heard. Not that slashing anything was an image I wanted to implant into her highly fertile mind.
Ed waved his free arm around, pointing in the general direction of the television studio. “We don’t think she did it, we saw her do it.”
“You saw Zoe cut up the paintings?”
“Uh-huh. On our security camera,” Stephanie said.
Before or after Sex and the City reruns? I wondered.
The four of us deliberated for a few minutes.
“It’s all safe here, now, Grandma,” Maddie said, voting to leave the painting as planned.
Stephanie reiterated her “you never know” position. “But if you want, I’ll take it to where her assigned space is,” she said. “Your choice.”
I heard, Don’t blame me if something happens to it.
Ed shrugged his shoulders, as if wondering what the fuss was about.
I felt
the weight of the portfolio against my leg.
I called Mary Lou, but had to leave a message on her cell phone asking her preference. I had a good idea what my activist daughter-in-law would want. I could almost hear her. “Why would I let anyone intimidate me into giving up my work space?”
Richard and Mary Lou had met at the University of California in Berkeley—“Cal”—where tie-dyed shirts without designer labels still held sway at vendor booths on the streets around the campus. They loved to tell the story of their first meeting. Mary Lou was in a picket line, having joined the custodians and service workers on campus in their fight for better working conditions. Richard tried to cross the line to get to class and ended up carrying Mary Lou’s sign and walking beside her.
I tapped my cell phone in my hand. Stephanie and Ed were waiting for my decision.
I handed the portfolio to Stephanie.
“Take the painting,” I said.
Chapter 5
Maddie and I sat on a bench outside the Rutledge Center. Maddie leaned forward, kicking her feet as she always did when excited, either positively or negatively. Today I could tell that the energy was not good as she listened to my Rosie’s Books plan.
I knew it wouldn’t be easy, but I wasn’t prepared for tears. Was this the way the next few years were going to be with my formerly sweet, mature-for-her-age granddaughter?
“I’m so bored,” Maddie cried. Not the wailing kind of cry that I was used to at times like this, and that she’d bring out as a temporary measure to make her case. This was a sad cry, and I couldn’t stand it. I nearly called June’s cell phone and cancelled our meeting. I wished I knew whether this was a new tactic or a whole different phase Maddie was entering.
“You have homework to do, don’t you? You can do it at the store.” Going for simple problem, simple solution. “Or Mrs. Norman would let you sit in the back where all the new books are delivered and you can open the cartons. Or she might want you to help out with the little kids’ reading program.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“What is it, sweetheart? I know you can’t be this sad about missing a dumb meeting.” (My own little device: throw her language back at her.)
She jerked her body toward me and landed half on my lap. She had to stop kicking to accomplish this, and I felt her relax a bit. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”
I rubbed her head. “Are you sorry you moved up here?”
No answer. I looked across the road at the green hills to the east. Surely she didn’t miss the ever-dry hills of Los Angeles? I had an idea what her problem was but I didn’t want to press her if she wasn’t ready. I moved closer and invited her to lean on me.
“You can tell me anything, you know that.”
“I can’t. You’ll be mad.”
I shook my head. “I can’t imagine how you could make me mad, except to be sad about something and not tell me.”
“I love you, Grandma. I’m glad I’m near you and Aunt Beverly and Uncle Skip.”
“I know that, sweetheart. We can tell you’re glad to be living here.” (Or will be eventually, I added in silence.)
“Then how come I want to be back with my friends and my old school?”
“I would be shocked if you didn’t miss them. It would mean you never cared about them all this time that you’ve known them.”
“So I’m supposed to miss them?”
I nodded. “It’s very normal.”
She uttered a sound that was half whistle, half wail. “Do you still miss your friends in the Bronx?”
“Some of them, yes, even after all these years.”
It never took much for me to time travel back to my life in the Bronx and my days at Hunter. I thought I’d never find anything as fulfilling as my daily interaction with classmates and professors. I could bring back everything from my best friend’s filling her bra with tissue paper before the prom, to the more serious gatherings in the assembly hall, about whether we should boycott classes after the shootings at Kent State in Ohio.
“Did you have a lot of friends?”
“I did. But I have a lot of new friends here,” I told Maddie and myself.
“It seems complicated.”
“It is complicated. The older you get, the more changes you’ll make, and you’ll make new connections. But you’ll still miss some things, and not others.”
“I don’t miss Mr. Duroucher.”
“Aha. Tell me more.”
“He’s our soccer coach. He gives the best game dates to the boys, and the best lockers, and new jerseys and us girls get the leftovers. Like, who’s going to come and watch us on Wednesday afternoon?”
“There, you see. Maybe the Palo Alto coach will see things differently. You might even have a woman coach.”
Maddie laughed, as if I’d suggested something with as low a probability as that school would be called off for the rest of the year.
“You never know,” I said.
“Then you’re not mad that I wish I was with Devyn and the other kids?”
“I’m not mad.”
The next two passersby were older women who apparently saw nothing strange at the sight of a grandmother and granddaughter embracing, both teary-eyed.
Not that Maddie gave up on a shot to go to the meeting with June.
“I think June wouldn’t be as comfortable with you there,” I told her, heading for Rosie’s in my car. “This way I’ll find out a lot more and then I can tell you everything.”
“You always say that.”
“I do? Well, then it must be true.”
The strains of “As Time Goes By” rang through the car. My latest cell phone tone, courtesy of Linda’s son, Jason. Maddie refused to help me ever since I had Jason get rid of her favorite “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” which she’d surreptitiously programmed as my first ring tone.
Maddie dug my phone out of my purse and answered.
“Hi, Mom.” Pause. “Yeah, yeah, my day is fine.” Pause. “Okay.”
She handed me the phone. After another round of “how’s your day going?” I assured Mary Lou that I’d left her painting in capable hands at the Rutledge Center.
“Good choice, Mom,” she said. “No way am I going to let someone intimidate me out of my work space.”
I gave myself a mental pat on the back, proud of myself for how well I knew my daughter-in-law.
Maddie got her spunk from her mother and not her father, who was a much more cautious type. When it came down to it, I supposed we all wanted a surgeon who paid attention to details and followed the rules exactly, and an artist who made things up as she went along, and not vice versa.
Not that Richard hadn’t engaged in typical teenage manipulative tricks, but when his clique of friends wanted to try bungee jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, Richard volunteered to borrow a stopwatch from their physics lab and time the adventuresome jumpers. He also provided a cooler of drinks and took photos. Such was the extent of his risk-taking.
I saw Maddie work the muscles in her face now, trying to get something good out of this deal, wherein she’d be relegated to a bookstore while I was “on the case.”
“Can I walk by myself from Rosie’s to Sadie’s and meet you for ice cream after your meeting?”
I thought about it. Rosie’s was one long block away from Sadie’s. Willie’s was about halfway between. “Come to Willie’s and we’ll go to Sadie’s together.” After all, there might be a murderer loose in Lincoln Point. In fact, if I believed June, there was a murderer out there, since her friend was innocent.
“Okay, I’ll meet you at Willie’s in about ten minutes.”
“Nice try. Let’s say one hour.”
“Deal.”
Something told me she started low on purpose.
I’d called ahead to Rosie, my former student, who was waiting for us at the door. I waved to her from the car while Maddie went into the bookshop, with resignation, but no more tears. I knew she still had a long way to go to bec
oming acclimated to her new situation. I hoped I could help her through it.
I drove farther down Springfield Boulevard, festooned with American flags hanging from every light post—the February décor. Even Video Jeff’s, our local arcade contributed to the theme, with a life-size caricature of Abe. I parked under one of the new banners in front of Bagels by Willie, announcing the events around next week’s debate, and entered the shop’s yeasty air for the second time today.
“Mrs. Porter. You’re back already,” Lourdes said. “I should have brought my homework for you to check.”
“I’m sure it’s perfect,” I said.
“Yes, but you’ll find something, huh?”
Lourdes was one of my most conscientious students. Approaching middle age, she had only one more exam to go and she’d have her GED and a chance for a full-time job at the Lincoln Point Library.
“We’ll see on Sunday,” I said, remembering that I’d promised Lourdes an extra two-hour session, two days before my room box was due. What had I been thinking?
Lourdes had already seated June at a table in the corner. I joined her, facing the large window onto Springfield Boulevard, intending to watch for Maddie. I had a clear view of our busy card shop across the street and one of several fast-food establishments that had survived an overhaul of the street a few years ago.
I noticed the woman Maddie had referred to as the crazy lady. This time she seemed to be pacing in front of Willie’s, looking through the window (at me?), perhaps trying to decide whether to come in. From this distance, she seemed well dressed except for a stocking cap pulled low over her forehead so I couldn’t make out her face. If she was trying to be inconspicuous, it wasn’t working.
I ordered coffee and a brownie; June had ordered a bottled water. While I was at it, I asked for a dozen assorted cookies to go, to have around the house in case I didn’t have a chance to replenish my supply of homemade ginger cookies. I was afraid June was going to be sick at the mere sound of my order.
Malice in Miniature Page 5
