“Linda, did you tell Rosie about how David Bridges’s lips were . . . how his lips were when they found him?”
“Glued together? Nuh-uh, I thought it was too gross.”
I knew that the police hadn’t released that detail. Did Rosie know because she did it, or was it one huge coincidence that the killer had used glue, just as Rosie imagined she would thirty years ago. Rosie had told her story with such guilelessness, I couldn’t believe she knew the implications.
“Thanks, Linda,” I said, though I didn’t feel grateful.
My attention switched to Rosie’s father. A man who hadn’t been in my consciousness for many years now loomed at the front of my mind. He took shape as a former refrigeration specialist who now worked for Callahan and Savage, who stole a bank record from me, and who was angry enough to want to kill David Bridges thirty years ago. Had it all finally come together for him? It was altogether possible that Larry Esterman knew of his daughter’s fantasy and carried it out for her. Except that the deed pointed to Rosie and he wouldn’t have wanted that.
Every hour today seemed to have created more problems and questions for me. I’d heard many stories, but I was no closer to the truth than I was at noon on Saturday when I heard of David’s murder.
I hung up and called Maddie’s cell. She loved getting calls on it directly, although lately she told me she much preferred text messages. I had no trouble manipulating two sets of tweezers at the same time, to place a delicate bead on a piece of fabric, but I didn’t think my fingers could work the tiny buttons on the phone pad to send a TM.
“Hi, Grandma. I’m helping Mrs. Reed make some ferns like the ones in the Duns Scotus hotel lobby. Remember that bridge and how those trees made it look like you were in a jungle?”
Yes, and how the bushes and rocks could hide a mugger and purse thief. I hoped one day I could look at a garden like that and not think of crime. “I remember, sweetheart.”
“Look at this,” Maddie said, showing me, in person, a miniature version of a large leaf, like the kind you’d see in a real jungle, or in a hotel lobby atrium. “Guess what it’s really made of, Grandma.”
Linda stood behind her, her look daring me to spoil my granddaughter’s fun.
I took the leaf from her and scanned it. “I have no idea.”
“It’s sticky paper!” Maddie was delighted to have fooled me. Or she thought she’d fooled me. (She’d left telltale scraps of paper backing on the table behind her.) “See how the sides of the leaf stick to each other, and all you have to do is shape it with scissors and snip off little pieces to look like separate leaves.”
“Nice work. I’m glad you two had a good time.”
“Uh-huh. We had two kinds of Popsicles,” Maddie announced.
“The fruit-flavored ones,” Linda added, as if to gain health points.
I knew that Linda was addicted to sugary sweet Popsicles, the kind with a long list of artificial ingredients on the box. I liked to believe Sadie’s homemade ice cream was better for Maddie, but if sugar kept her from nagging me about where I’d been, it was okay with me.
After Linda and I made a plan to “talk later,” Maddie and I headed home. I waited but never got a question from Maddie about what I’d done during my several hours away this afternoon. Had she learned reverse psychology? Did she think that if she didn’t ask me, I’d voluntarily give her an update on the David Bridges case? I wouldn’t fall into that trap.
“I’m sorry I didn’t pick you up today,” I said, turning right on Gettysburg Boulevard toward home.
“No problem.”
No problem? No leg-kicking? No bargaining to tag along wherever I was going next? Maddie knew about David’s death from the announcement at the groundbreaking ceremony at the high school and she knew of my Internet search for Callahan and Savage. She must have known I’d gone to Skip’s office a couple of times since then, and therefore that there was an investigation going on. Where was the whining? Where were the incessant pleas to help?
“You were okay with Mrs. Reed?”
“I told you, we made ferns and ate Popsicles.”
“A perfect day.”
Why wasn’t I happier that Maddie had enjoyed herself, out of harm’s way, while I continued to dig around, entertaining strange men in my car near Joshua Speed Woods?
I had to admit I missed Nancy Drew.
Chapter 18
Maddie hadn’t always loved dollhouses and miniatures. It had taken the Bronx apartment dollhouse to win her over. I’d abandoned the project after Ken died and Maddie started working with me to help me get back to it. It was completely furnished now but there was always something to add, like the cracker crumbs we’d whipped up last night.
As a hobby, miniatures had a lot going for it. Unlike say, golf or skiing, you didn’t need to leave home to do it. And you could make progress on a project in as little as ten minutes. Often while heating dinner in the microwave, I’d pop over to one of my crafts areas and apply a quick coat of varnish to a tiny table or bookcase, or I’d test a gluing job I’d done in the morning.
Tonight we worked for a while on our separate Alasita projects, Maddie on her soda fountain, I on my Christmas scene. Neither was very inspired, I felt, but maybe our real life was so exciting that we needed a stable, boring miniature life.
Maddie added two new flavors to her ice cream parlor tonight, Tasty Taylor and Dusty Doug.
“The dust stands for malt powder, the way Sadie uses it on her sundaes,” she informed me—needlessly, because Sadie’s dusty road sundae was my favorite after her chocolate malt shakes.
I had some embroidery to finish up on the Christmas stockings I’d bought in Benicia last week, but the whole scene still left me cold. I couldn’t remember being so dissatisfied with a project. Certainly not the replica I’d made of Lincoln’s Springfield, Illinois, home. Not the street of shops I’d put together, that included a flower stand, a bookstore, and a haberdashery. I hoped something would occur to me before the end of the week when our projects needed to be finished.
“I’d like to make a robe for the Bronx bathroom,” Maddie said.
“We can look through our scraps,” I said.
It made my heart swell that we could talk like this, each knowing what the other meant. I knew that Maddie didn’t mean a life-size robe or the New York borough that was three thousand miles away, and she knew that I was referring to pieces of fabric to put together for a tiny article of clothing.
Terry cloth was hard to work with; the nap was so large and spread out on most selections that the robe or towel wouldn’t be able to drape well over a tiny tub or rod. We had several choices, such as dipping the fabric in a glue and water mixture to shape it, or using a thinner fabric with a tighter weave that looked like terry.
We chose the former. I made the glue bath while Maddie rummaged through the box of fabric scraps and found the shade of blue she had in mind.
I heard her groan as she cut the material. “It’s picking up everything,” she said, showing me what would end up as a sleeve, with tiny beads clinging to it. She had a hard time shaking them off as they clung to the almost magnetic fabric. “It’s just like my winter terry robe at home. It’s as sticky as tape sometimes.”
The revelation flashed in my mind like the only neon sign in Lincoln Point, the one in the window of Jeff’s Video Arcade on Springfield Boulevard. Terry cloth picks up things—pieces of thread, hair, lint, and now beads. Why not a tiny oval mirror?
I pictured the hallway on the eleventh floor of the Duns Scotus Hotel. The scene was vivid, playing out before me: Cheryl in her robe, leaving David’s room to get ice. Cheryl and Rosie arguing, then wrestling with the locker room box. One of the tiny mirrors, not glued on properly (that was the hardest to imagine) coming off in the struggle and sticking to Cheryl’s robe. The mirror finally falling from the robe in the entryway to David’s suite.
For completeness, I had to add: Gerry entering David’s suite with a key stolen from a Lincoln Point homicide detect
ive and finding the mirror on the floor.
It made sense, and if some variation of my play was true, I could hold onto my belief that Rosie told the truth when she said she never went into David’s room.
I was glad I hadn’t presented the mirror to Skip.
Had I just cleared Rosie?
I wished it were that easy.
“Can you have two BFFs?” Maddie asked me while we were saying good night.
“Of course. Do you have a new best friend in town besides Taylor?”
“Doug, in my class.”
“That’s nice. You’ve told me about him. He’s Dusty Doug in your mini soda fountain, right?”
She nodded. “He’s the one who lets me tell jokes and laughs at them.”
“Maybe I can meet him sometime.”
“Nuh-uh.”
Uh-oh. It was too soon in Maddie’s life for her to be keeping her family away from her friends. I took comfort in the fact that she’d told me his name. It occurred to me that Doug might be the reason Maddie wasn’t kicking her legs anymore when I left her behind.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said, with a smile that was supposed to tell her I wasn’t bothered.
“Grandma, do you have a good picture of me and you?”
“I’m sure I do. What do you want it for?”
She patted a spot next to her clock. “Just to put on my table here. Mine are all on my old computer at home.”
“I’ll dig one out for you. That reminds me. Why did the witch need a computer? I’ve been dying to know.”
Maddie shook a sleepy head. “Nuh-uh, can’t tell you till we’re with Taylor and Mr. Baker. That was the deal.”
“Oh. Well, that might not happen, sweetheart.”
“Why not?”
“You can still have playdates with Taylor, but it might not include her grandfather and me.”
“Did you fight with Mr. Baker?”
“No. It’s just—”
“Complicated, right? That’s what my parents always say when their friends get divorced or something.”
“Right. It’s complicated.”
Usually, no matter how hot the day, nights in the Bay Area were cool. Without even trying to do anything productive, I took a glass of herbal ice tea to the coolest spot in the house—my atrium, one of the features of my Eichler home that I couldn’t live without. My house had needed a whole new roof last year, and Richard had suggested an upgrade while I was at it—a retractable atrium skylight. It seemed a luxury I didn’t need, but now I didn’t know why I’d waited so long to have it installed. When it was closed, the acrylic material cast beautiful patterns of light on the floor; when it was open the atrium was completely exposed to the cool outside air.
I pushed the button and watched the skylight slide back on its track.
I refused to let my recent atrium experience in the Duns Scotus color my pleasure. These were my trees, my plants. I could name every one of them—azalea, mums, cyclamen—and they harbored no danger.
It was the kind of night when Ken and I, unable to sleep, might come out here and chat about the upcoming week or share with each other our own reviews of books and movies. The ferns planted around the edge were a labor of love our first few months and still reminded me of a wonderful time in my life. The multitude of empty pots that I’d neglected to fill were only a mild reproach.
In recent years, Beverly came by often to relate her adventures as a civilian volunteer for the LPPD. She had funny stories about SUVs driving on the sidewalks to get around traffic or about the excuses people came up with for not wearing seat belts. “I’m on my way to get it fixed” was all too common, and “I’m allergic to vinyl” was one of my favorites.
I pictured Beverly on her porch on this warm, windless night, sharing stories with Nick. A smile came to my face. Beverly had contracted rheumatic fever as a child and lived day to day with a damaged heart. We’d had several scares when we thought we’d lost her and never predicted that she’d live longer than her brother, Ken. There was no one who deserved a loving companion more than she did.
Maddie was sleeping in the corner bedroom; that was enough company for me.
Or so I thought.
I heard the faintest knocking on my front door. I put down my glass and turned my better ear to the sound. Unmistakable shuffling noises reached my ear along with another soft tap, tap, tap. Someone was at my door at ten thirty. Not the latest I’d ever had company, but generally late night visitors were expected.
I got up and checked the peephole. Barry Cannon peered back at me from the other side.
My breath caught. Barry looked the most unkempt I’d ever seen him. If peephole lenses could be trusted, he had a miserable expression and a dark shadow on his face. He wore a stretched-out T-shirt with a sports logo on the front.
How did he know where I lived? I wasn’t listed in the phone book. I thought back and realized I’d probably put my address in the faculty section of Rosie’s updated yearbook.
I debated whether to open the door. I worried about Maddie, in dreamland one room away. Barry shuffled his feet and tapped again.
My ear was still close to the door and I jumped, though the knock was light.
I took a breath. No one who comes to kill you knocks so gently, I reasoned, or looks so downtrodden. Also, Barry was shorter than I was, and even though he was more muscular, I’d always thought that height gave one the edge.
I opened the door.
“I’m sorry to bother you so late, Mrs. Porter,” Barry said. “But remember you said you wanted to meet with me.”
So I had.
“Come in, Barry,” I said, ushering him into the atrium. As he passed by me in my foyer, I’d detected no smell of alcohol, which brought me great relief.
“I know this isn’t what you had in mind, but I need to talk to you,” he said.
I tried to hide my excitement at having a chance to interview Barry in a better environment than Miller’s Mortuary. I recalled his nasty mood at that time and took his presence in my home so late at night as a sign that he was ready to cooperate.
I wasn’t completely devoid of fear, however. What if he was a killer? Killing twice wouldn’t be a great leap. I wondered if I should slip my cell phone into my pocket and surreptitiously keep my index finger on the speed dial button for Skip. I also thought of saying something like, “I’m not alone, you know. My very tall, husky son is in the next room.” Or, to protect Maddie, I might say, “I’m utterly alone in the house.”
This was no way to start an interview.
“Can I get you a glass of tea? Or something else to drink?” I asked him.
Barry shook his head, running his hand across his forehead at the same time. When the light from the small lamp in the atrium hit just right, I could see beads of perspiration. “I’m good, thanks. I shouldn’t have been so rude to you today.”
Barry’s manner put me at ease. He seemed as dejected as Rosie when David let her down. “It wasn’t the right time to approach you, Barry. I’m really sorry for the loss of your good friend. But I have so many questions about his death and I need to have them answered.”
“I’m aware of that. And that Rosie is being accused of killing David. I know you became friends after graduation and I’m sure you want to clear her.”
“I want to discover the truth.” Wasn’t that always what prosecutors said in their opening trial remarks?
“Everyone in the gang is talking about how you’re going around investigating and I decided to come here myself and set everything straight. You know, you still have a lot of power over your students, Mrs. Porter. I guess we still need your approval.” Not everyone, I thought, calling Cheryl’s “you’re not my teacher anymore” outburst to mind. “I swear to you, I could never have killed David. He and I have been friends since we were kids.”
Barry broke down and I had a moment of feeling sorry for him, but I couldn’t let him get away without answering a few questions. He sat hunched on a chai
r across from me. We might have been in English 1A at the Abraham Lincoln High School thirty years ago. But then all Barry would have had to explain was why his Steinbeck paper would be late.
“Maybe you didn’t kill your friend, Barry, but you do have some explaining to do.”
Barry nodded. “I don’t know where to start, Mrs. Porter.”
“Maybe you can begin by telling me why you sent Rosie presents using David’s name.”
Barry folded his hands, as if in prayer. I could tell he wanted to ask me how I knew about the misrepresented gifts, but thought better of it. He lumbered up from the chair.
“I shouldn’t have come. I’ve said all I wanted to say, and that’s it.”
“Barry Cannon,” I said, in a classroom voice, mindless of Maddie sleeping not far away.
It worked. My roughly forty-eight-year-old former student, whose brown hair was now sprinkled with gray, responded like the well-behaved young man he used to be and sat down again, letting out a long breath. “I’m not proud of this.”
I put the best spin I could on the situation. “Barry, someone else’s life is at stake here. If you were too shy to ask Rosie out for yourself—”
Barry’s loud, rueful laugh interrupted me. I was afraid Maddie would wake. But remembering the drama she’d snoozed through at the Duns Scotus, I relaxed.
“No, no, no,” Barry said. I was glad Rosie wasn’t around to hear his vehement denial of his wanting to spend time with her. In her fragile state, she would have taken it as yet one more rejection by her classmates. “I’m not courting Rosie. If anyone, I was courting her father.”
“Oh?” I hoped for a quick explanation and Barry came through.
“What I mean is, I was trying to get inside information from Callahan and Savage. Her father, Larry Esterman, consults for them now. We wanted David to do it himself—to buddy up to Rosie so we could get to her father. We knew Rosie was still vulnerable as far as David was concerned. She never held him accountable for an incident that happened when we were seniors.”
Mourning In Miniature Page 20
