by Deb Baker
“I was running late. I don’t know any more than you do.”
“Did you know Charlie Maize?”
“She was a good friend of my mother’s. Charlie sent us an invitation to a party at her shop. It was supposed to be at ten o’clock this morning.”
“Do you have the invitation with you?”
Gretchen dug in her overfilled purse. Nimrod licked her face.
“Here it is.” She handed him the invitation. While he read it, she noted the name on his uniform. Officer Brandon Kline.
He looked up from the invitation. “It doesn’t say what the celebration’s about.”
“I don’t have any idea either,” Gretchen said.
“Where’s your mother? Inside?”
Gretchen shook her head. “She’s out of town.”
“Why was your mother on the invitation list?”
“We are doll restoration artists. We repair and restore dolls for collectors. My mother knew Charlie through her work.”
“Do you believe in the chaos theory?”
What a question. “I’m not sure.” Gretchen hesitated. “Why?”
“If I can create order from this chaos, it’ll be more like a miracle.”
He flipped out a notebook and started writing. “Name,” he said.
“Gretchen Birch.”
“Driver’s license.” She handed it over.
“Well, Gretchen Birch, you’re in the thick of it now.” Officer Kline returned her license before handing her a clipboard with a form attached to it and a pen. “Fill this out and stay right here. Since you’re the expert, I may need you.”
She stared at him. “I don’t think I can be of any help.”
“Well, I don’t know a damn thing about dolls. And you do,” he said, catching her look of dismay. “Stay put,” he warned her before heading back inside.
Gretchen sighed. She was smack-dab in the middle of a police investigation. She glanced at her watch. High noon.
Chapter 2
Bernard Waites can’t pull his eyes from the fallen woman. How many years has he known her? Twenty? Fifteen, at least. They are…were a team. He built dollhouses to perfect scale, and Charlie designed the miniature furniture and room details.
They are…were a good team.
His eyes swing to the dollhouses displayed on shelves along the far wall. He’d built every one of them with his own hands and his own tools. He lifts a veined and knarled hand and studies the back of it. It shakes slightly.
Bernard is proud of his craftsmanship. His favorites are the American farmhouse, a Victorian cottage, the English Tudor, and especially, the Queen Anne mansion. He looks at the dollhouse pieces lying on the floor, furniture catapulted everywhere. His eyes shift back to Charlie’s body. Two EMTs are loading her onto a stretcher.
“Careful,” one of them warns the other.
The one doing the cautioning is a female, as are several of the cops in the room. In his day women didn’t do this kind of work. They knew their place just like the men knew theirs. The world is a changed place, and Bernard isn’t sure he likes it.
Will they cover Charlie’s face before carrying her past the gawkers outside the shop? Look at them out there, straining to see through the window from their positions on the other side of a line of cops, all hoping for a good view of something horrible. Anything will do.
And the ones inside don’t give a hoot about Charlie Maize. Nosy gossips, the bunch of them. If they craned their necks any farther, they’d look like geese. Bernard watches the EMTs prepare Charlie for the ambulance, strapping her in.
Once, long ago, Bernard had been an emergency medical technician himself, back before all the governmental licensing requirements and insurance restrictions. He knows what death looks like. He knows it in all its forms. Grow as old as he is, and you watch friends and family drop one by one. The curse of old age. All his friends gone and not much family left either.
The two EMTs heave Charlie up between them and carry her out. It was hard to see what was happening before, such a cluster of people swarming around her and him forced back into a corner with the rest, like a herd of cattle. Yellow tape used as fencing strung everywhere.
Camera flashes going off. Someone is making one of those newfangled movies of the shop. Not good. Several more cops arrive. They begin interrogating everyone inside the shop. Let them. His turn is coming, and he is more than ready. The key weighs heavy in his pant’s pocket.
Bernard is puzzled by one of the boxes on the floor. Why did she build a roombox herself? Why didn’t she ask him to do it?
Bernard knows Charlie must have made it herself, because it isn’t exactly perfect. Not even close. The edges are rough, the sides don’t fit together like they should. A craftsman would have done much better. This one was amateurish.
Looks like she used a jigsaw and fiberboard to construct it. He glances around and sees the ones he made. His practiced eye skillfully measured each one, calculates the dimensions: nineteen inches by twenty-six inches by fourteen. Large roomboxes, crafted to Charlie’s specifications.
He wants to pick up the one she made and study it, but the cops are attentive, watchful of the so-called “witnesses,” treating them more like suspects than concerned friends of Charlie’s.
“Are you the one who unlocked the door?” a cop asks him. Bernard stares at his badge.
“Yes, Officer Kline. I have a key.” He keeps his voice low and respectful.
“What are you doing with a key?”
“I’ve had one since the day Charlie opened the shop. She gave out keys like candy.” He hopes his hand isn’t shaking noticeably when he points at the dollhouses. “I made those.” He sees the tremor running along his index finger and quickly closes the finger against his palm.
The cop’s indifferent eyes slide up to the dollhouses. He writes something down in a notebook.
“Name.”
“Bernard Waites.”
“When was the last time you saw Charlie?”
“Yesterday,” he lies as pat as a slice of butter, or so he imagines. The cop eyes him with a piercing stare, but Bernard stays calm and pierces him right back.
“Let me see the key,” the cop says.
Bernard dutifully presents it.
“Same key fit the back door?”
Bernard nods.
“Did you ever think you might have destroyed evidence by letting all these people in here?”
“I had to see if she needed help. How was I supposed to know she was dead?” Tears form in his eyes when he says the word dead. He allows his sorrow to show.
The cop closes the notebook and hands Bernard a piece of paper. “Fill this out. At the moment, we’re using every clipboard, thanks to the free-for-all. We have an entire room full of potential witnesses who haven’t seen a thing.” The cop looks frustrated. “You’ll have to find something firm to write on.”
Bernard looks around the room with satisfaction. People are filling out paperwork left and right. They’re hunkered over the questions as though this is a written exam, and they want to get all the answers correct.
“And stay on this side of the room,” the cop cautions him.
“What about my key?” Bernard says.
“We’ll get it back to you.”
A woman enters and approaches the officer says, “I have to leave,” she says. “I have an appointment.”
She’s good-looking, about thirty, give or take, wild hair, buxomy. Bernard always liked his women full-figured. Most Arizona women look like toothpicks, like they’d snap if you squeezed them. Not this one.
He notices the dog. It looks like a black dust ball.
“You can go,” the cop says to her. “I have your number, if I have anymore questions.” She nods, stands in the entrance searching through her purse. Must be chock-full of whatever women carry with them, because it takes her awhile. That dog is in there, too. She draws out sunglasses and puts them on, then swishes out with her bowwow dog.
&nb
sp; But first she touches the palm of her hand to the doorframe.
Fingerprints.
The more, the merrier.
Chapter 3
Gretchen held a penny doll in her hand. A four-inch dollhouse doll with finely painted features, it wore a pale blue silk gown and a matching hair band in its blond molded hair. It had belonged to Charlie. The doll show owner had asked Gretchen’s mother to repair a damaged arm, and she had. Gretchen planned to return it at the party, but the doll had been forgotten in her purse. Until now.
“The Scottsdale cop asked me if I believed in the chaos theory,” Gretchen said to her aunt from a stool at her worktable.
Aunt Nina removed a pile of doll clothing from a chair and scooted lightly onto it. The bows in her hair matched perfectly with the pink and green swirls on her capris.
Nina’s precocious schnoodle, Tutu, also sported matching pink and green bows. The spoiled pet was bent on destroying the possibility of a long pampered life by angering Wobbles, the three-legged cat who chose to live with Gretchen. Wobbles, Gretchen found out early on, belonged to no one.
“The chaos theory,” Nina said, “is a mathematic theory about finding order in chaos. I wonder if he’s a New Ager like me.”
Gretchen bent over the doll, still studying it. “I reached mom. She’s canceling the rest of her book tour and is coming home tomorrow. I told her one of Charlie’s display cases tipped over, upending a number of room boxes, and she’s insisting she’s going to restore the room boxes to their original forms.”
Gretchen heard a hiss from Wobbles and a yelp from Tutu. Nimrod, the teacup poodle, was sound asleep in his bed, oblivious to the disagreement. Nina lunged from her seat and distracted the two warriors. She shooed Wobbles out of the workshop, closed the door, and fussed over her darling pet.
After Nina reassured herself that Tutu had survived her brush with death, she said, “Okay, Where were we? What are these room boxes you were talking about?”
“They’re little displays that contain a miniature scene. Like those dioramas kids make from shoe boxes, but much more sophisticated,” Gretchen explained. “A living room with all the furnishings, for example, or the inside of a store, like a pet shop. All with very realistic miniature scale details.”
“You mean like rooms in a dollhouse?”
“Not exactly, but close. Each room box is self-contained and can be an entirely different setting with no relationship to any others. What makes them really unique are all the tiny pieces of furniture and accents that go inside the room boxes. Some hobbyists are extremely creative and make their own furnishings.”
“Humph….” Nina leaned on the worktable, flashing her polka-dotted pink and green nails. How long would it have taken to paint on all the little polka dots? Probably hours, Gretchen thought.
“And your mother wants to fix them?” Nina asked.
Gretchen shrugged. “It all depends on the police investigation. If they aren’t sure Charlie died from natural causes, who knows when they will be through with her shop?”
“If putting the room boxes together helps Caroline through her grief, I’ll be there to help my sister.”
Oh, right.
Aunt Nina didn’t know a thing about dolls. She trained miniature dog breeds to travel in their owners’ purses, teaching them to duck down and hide if they entered an unfriendly environment like a restaurant or grocery store. It was a perfect career for her. She had no competition and no real overhead costs. Nina had created her very own exclusive service industry, and she had more clients than she could manage.
But dolls?
No way.
Her aunt kept herself busy training dogs, perfecting her psychic abilities, and matching her accessories to her outfits, not necessarily in that order.
“Don’t forget I’ve been hanging around with doll collectors,” Nina said, as though she knew exactly what Gretchen was thinking. “I love to decorate, and you and Caroline know everything there is to know about doll repair. I’ll be able to tell you where all the pieces go. We’ll be a great team. I’m getting a psychic message right this minute.” Nina’s long fingers connected with her forehead in a telepathic pose. After listening hard, she said, “We were meant to do it.”
In Gretchen’s opinion, Nina’s psychic abilities were entirely trumped up. None of her aunt’s otherworldly announcements had ever amounted to anything.
“I don’t know if we should,” Gretchen replied. “What about all the work piling up right here?”
“Between the three of us, it won’t take long,” Nina argued.
“I’m sure April would like to help, too. That would speed it up.”
April was the Phoenix Dollers’ favorite doll appraiser. She wore tent-sized muumuus, drove a banged-up white Buick, and lived in a dilapidated house in Tempe. She didn’t care for any material possessions except for her prized collection of miniatures. Gretchen chuckled to herself every time she envisioned the large woman engulfing a mini doll in her chubby hands.
“April,” Nina repeated the name, acidly. “She’s always hanging around. This should be just family.”
“But April collects miniatures. She’d bring a lot of experience to the project.”
“She should stick to appraising dolls.”
“I thought you liked April.”
“I do. We’ve just been seeing too much of her.”
Gretchen glanced sharply at her aunt, who had been uncharacteristically catty lately. If she didn’t know better, she’d think Nina was jealous of the time Gretchen spent with April.
Gretchen lifted the dress on Charlie’s penny doll and noted the stamp on the doll’s back. “Charlie’s doll is fascinating,” she said. “See the stamp on its body? It was made in Germany some time in the very early 1900s, one of the more expensive penny dolls. April could tell us more.”
Nina scowled at another mention of April’s name. Wait…” she paused dramatically. “I feel something coming in. Yes, you need a reading.”
“A reading?” Oh, no. I have to keep my aunt away from new age shops. Over time, Nina had progressed from analyzing colored auras to communication with spirits. Now what? Readings?
“I bought my first set of tarot cards,” Nina said, “and I’m practicing. You might discover your true self.”
“I’ve found my true self. See, here I am.”
“You’re such a pragmatic.”
In spite of all her aunt’s hype about her special ability as a psychic, she hadn’t managed yet to impart anything unusual, helpful, or remotely close to remarkable.
“I still don’t understand why mom wants to put the room boxes together,” Gretchen said.
“Maybe Caroline needs the closure.” Nina studied the little colored dots on her fingernails. “Besides, it might give you an opportunity to see more of a certain man.” She glanced slyly at Gretchen. “Detective Matt Albright’s divorce is almost final. But, of course, you know that.”
Gretchen pretended disinterest by shrugging her shoulders.
Buff, hunky, masculine Matt. Separated, living single, but technically still-married Matt. The M word bothered her tremendously.
Matt’s mother Bonnie was president of the Phoenix Dollers Club and the biggest blabbermouth on planet Earth. If she found out Gretchen had gone out on a date with Matt, his soon-to-be ex would find out, and that could create all kinds of serious problems for the detective. And for her.
They had to slow way down and keep their relationship casual while he waited for his divorce to be finalized. Nina knew about Gretchen’s attraction to the detective, but she didn’t want the rest of the doll community to know.
What if he went back to his wife? If they reconciled, wouldn’t she feel foolish if everyone knew? You bet. But her decision to avoid Matt made him that much more intriguing and sexy. She hadn’t been able to get him out of her mind.
“Don’t pretend indifference with me,” Nina said.
“I like to travel light,” Gretchen said, repeating he
r old mantra. “And he comes with a lot of baggage.”
“Look who’s talking? You spent seven years with a cheating man.”
Steve. The years she’d wasted with the self-indulgent attorney! How naïve she’d been. All those “business trips.” She’d still be buying his line if one of his little “distractions” hadn’t called and spelled the entire thing out for her.
The discovery that Steve had been unfaithful had felt like Camelback Mountain boulders crushing the air from her body. She’d thought she’d never breathe again. But she had.
“You make it sound like I knew he was playing around all along,” Gretchen said. “The minute I found out, I ended it. No baggage here.”
Nina peered at Gretchen’s face as though hoping to read her mind. “One lunch date with Matt, and you’ve been dodging him ever since. What happened? Did he forget to use utensils? Did he make lewd and inappropriate sexual advances to the waitresses? What?”
Gretchen shrugged. “He was interesting, comfortable to be with, considerate—”
“Those certainly are serious flaws in his character. I can see why you’re avoiding him.”
“You’re too pushy. Give me some time.” Gretchen felt a twinge of guilt for speaking so harshly.
“Is his wife still stalking you?” Nina asked, not even noticing Gretchen’s tone had become brisk and impatient. “Or rather, his soon-to-be ex?”
“Once in a while I spot her. That’s another good reason to stay away from him.”
“She’s a nut case all right,” Nina agreed. “You know, Bonnie really wants you to get together with her “Matty”. I bet she’s the one who spilled it to Kayla. His own mother is making his life impossible.” Nina clasped her hands together. “But why think depressing thoughts. What do you think about restoring the room boxes? Let’s do it. Say yes, and I’ll teach Nimrod more tricks.”
