“I never intended for that to happen. I thought I was helping you, easing the way for you to go to the police and get started on clearing yourself in this awful case.”
“I see that now. I was crazy to hide out as long as I did. I didn’t kill David so why am I acting as though I’m guilty?”
“I don’t know, Rosie, but the important thing is that you talked to the police and they trust you to stay around in case they need you. You can go back to your normal life.”
I wished I believed it. I had an unnerving suspicion that whoever killed David Bridges was not through trying to pin it on Rosie. From the look on Rosie’s face, I could tell she didn’t see normalcy any time soon, either.
“Who do you think did it, Gerry?”
It was the first time Rosie, or anyone, had asked me that and her question reminded me that I hadn’t really settled on one person. Maybe this was like that old Agatha Christie novel where everyone did it. I thought of the mystery play Rosie’s class had put on one year. I couldn’t remember the name but I’d enjoyed the tricky plot where everyone voted by a show of hands for who they thought committed the murder. The cast took a count and then acted out the rest of the play according to the majority vote. Case closed. They had an ending for every possible voting result. It was a nice fantasy.
“I don’t know, Rosie. Maybe we can work it out if we talk for a while.”
I took her nod as permission to probe more into Rosie’s weekend. I started with something that had been nagging at me since Friday night. “Rosie, what did you and Barry talk about at the reunion cocktail party? You had your heads together for quite a while.”
“I suppose it’s hard to believe that we were chatting because he enjoyed my company.”
“I didn’t mean that,” I said, though it had crossed my mind at the time. “It’s just that I don’t remember you two being especially friendly in high school and, as far as I know, you don’t see him regularly these days even though he lives in town.”
“As a matter of fact, Barry dropped in at the shop a couple of weeks ago, just to say hi.”
“He didn’t want anything in particular?” Another poorly worded question. I let out a frustrated breath. “I didn’t mean it that way this time, either, Rosie. I’m just trying to follow some leads here.”
“It’s okay. Barry didn’t buy any books, if that’s what you’re getting at. He did ask me if I’d heard from David, and it was right after that that the presents started coming. Let’s face it. I was always a wallflower, going back thirty years, and you know I haven’t changed much.”
“You make friends among your customers very easily, Rosie. They all love you.”
Rosie talked right past my compliment. “My parents were divorced at a time when it wasn’t so common. I was only nine years old. They had joint custody of me, so I had to shuttle back and forth between their houses and I always felt like an outsider. My teeth were crooked and there wasn’t any money to fix them. Remember the lisp I had for most of high school?”
“But look what you’ve done with your life. Your store, for one thing.”
“When my mom died my freshman year, I hid in books, I guess.”
“Lucky for Lincoln Point.”
“Thanks, Gerry.”
“Barry?” I asked.
“You’re right that it wasn’t what you would call a personal conversation at the cocktail party. There was no ‘let’s catch a movie sometime.’ Barry’s a bachelor, you know. He seemed more interested in my father’s business, what Dad was doing these days. As if he ever knew my father or cared about my family. It was weird.”
I’d been processing the weirdness as she talked. To me, interest in Larry Esterman, the petty thief, was interest in the company he consulted for, Callahan and Savage. Walter Mellace thought I represented Callahan and Savage and had found something Walter wanted. Why was the loser in so many recent major bids so popular? And why, other than a genetic disposition for stealing, had a Callahan and Savage consultant walked off with my precious bank record? I’d have to find a way to talk to Larry about that little trick.
For now, I had his daughter in front of me.
“Rosie, remember the box of chocolates you received at the hotel?”
“I was going to throw them away, but I thought you and Maddie might like them.”
I told her, as gently as possible, about the origin of the gift. I was ready to support my story with an affidavit from Samantha, the clerk in the hotel shop, if I needed to, but Rosie didn’t seem to need confirmation.
“Could it have been Barry who was sending you those gifts all along?”
“I suppose so. I know you and the girls on crafts night tried to tell me that something was not right. I just couldn’t listen at the time. But why would Barry send them using David’s initials?”
“You talked about, quote, a date gone bad. Are you willing to tell me more about it?”
Rosie bristled. She’d seemed to have matured in her outlook since Friday afternoon. Nothing like a murder to give one perspective. I hoped I hadn’t lost her with this question. She’d referred to the date several times, but it seemed the details of its failure were still hard to talk about.
“That was a long time ago,” she said.
“That’s what reunions are about. A long time ago.”
“Do you want some ice tea?” she asked me.
“I’d love some,” I said and followed her to her kitchen.
It took longer than it should have to brew two glasses of ice tea, during which time we chatted about decaf versus regular, whether the upcoming week would be as hot as last week, and a special shipment of book club choices Rosie expected on Wednesday. She’d closed Rosie’s Books early on Friday and, as far as I knew, hadn’t opened it since.
“In some ways, I’m dreading going to the shop tomorrow,” she said, once we were finally settled in the living room again.
“It will probably take you all of twenty minutes to get back in the swing of things. Once you see the boxes of books waiting to be opened and start to work on the details of the fall children’s program, you’ll be fine.”
“Fortunately, not too many of my classmates are customers. I guess we weren’t your best readers.”
“Except for you.”
Rosie’s smile was thin, but more than I’d seen for a few days. I felt a breakthrough coming.
“It was a Thursday, before the big Valentine’s Day dance. David came up to me in the hallway, where the lockers were.”
I knew that. My whole crafts group, including Maddie, knew that. I let Rosie take her time.
“Uh-huh. And then?”
“He kissed me and whispered in my ear that he wanted to go to the dance with me the next night.”
“It was pretty short notice, wasn’t it?”
Rosie uttered a bitter-sounding laugh. “So? It wasn’t as if I had other plans. I nearly fainted, I was so shocked and, of course, deliriously happy. On Friday I skipped classes and went shopping for a dress. I had to beg my father to help me pay for it, and money was very tight at the time. Business was slow and there were so many other expenses senior year.”
Rosie was talking so slowly I had time to speculate in between phrases. This time I jumped ahead and figured David stood Rosie up.
“I’m guessing something kept David from showing up.”
“It’s worse than that,” Rosie said. “He asked me to meet him in Joshua Speed Woods, where, you know, kids went to make out.”
More interesting. “Uh-huh.”
Rosie took several sips of tea, with deep breaths in between. I knew I could end her misery by calling off the question, but I kept my eye on the goal-to have as much information as possible.
“He said he’d meet me in the clearing. I knew where he meant.”
“Is that where…?”
“Yes, it’s where he was killed,” she said, without much emotion.
I expected that David’s murder had put an end to romantic assignations
in the clearing for the near future. “Did you go to the clearing that night?” Not the night of the murder, I said to myself. That can’t be where this is heading.
Another nasty-sounding laugh. “I went all right, in my new red dress with these little sequin hearts all over it. I got my red heels, which were right out of the box, all dirty, walking down the path, but I didn’t care. I was going to meet David.”
A long pause. I became impatient. “And he didn’t show?”
“Worse than that,” Rosie said again. “Do you remember Mathis Berg? He was the school’s biggest nerd.”
I nodded. “Math Bird.”
“Well, when I got to the clearing, guess who was there?”
It started to fall into place. A prank perpetrated by the cool kids on the unwitting wallflowers of the class. “They’d set Mathis up, too? So instead of David, you met Mathis there?”
“Worse than that.”
One more time. Rosie knew how to spin a yarn. Too bad she was the victim in this one.
“They were all there to see it. It was dark, just the moonlight illuminating the clearing. Then, suddenly all these lights went on. They’d rigged them somehow to hang from the trees. I picked out the football team and the cheerleading squad, mostly, but it seemed like the whole senior class was there in the woods. Mathis and I were standing there, all lit up. He had on a tux and I remember the collar was so big for his skinny neck. We were both so mortified.”
To think I’d taught those students who made up the jeering crowd, probably the same day and the days before and after. I might even have given a couple of them As. Would I have graded them differently if I’d known what shallow lives they led? That was a moral discussion for another time.
I took a cue from Abraham Lincoln: “A friend is one who has the same enemies as you have.” Rosie and Mathis should have waltzed out of the woods and gone to the Valentine’s Day dance together and had the best time of anyone there.
But that was hindsight, and an adult response, not a high schooler’s.
“How cruel, Rosie. You must have felt awful,” I said. I moved to a seat next to her on the couch and put my arm around her.
“I wanted to die right there.”
“Did you talk to Mathis about it?”
“Never, never. Looking back, I guess he was in his own private agony. I learned that Sheila Philips, who was voted the prettiest girl in the class-do they even do that anymore? I hope not-was the one who invited Mathis to the clearing. It’s so dumb, Gerry, what seems important when you’re seventeen.”
“And you never talked to David about it?”
She shook her head. “Never. But he was nice to me after that. He didn’t ask me out or anything, but he would smile and once he picked up something I dropped in class. That made me think the whole setup in the clearing wasn’t his idea, that his boorish friends put him up to it. And then this summer, when I started getting presents from him-I thought it was him-I figured he was finally going to make it up to me.”
“I’d have been so angry with him.”
“My father was the one who was ready to kill him.” Rosie stopped and put her hand to her mouth. “I can’t believe I said that.”
“It’s just an expression, Rosie. We don’t realize what a terrible thing it is to say, until something like this really happens.”
“My father wanted to have it out with him in the school-yard. Imagine that. He’d have been arrested immediately.” Rosie laughed. “Me, I had this fantasy of pouring tacky glue all over David’s lying lips.”
I withdrew my arm from the back of the couch and sat up. “What did you say?”
“I was into miniatures then, too, remember? So, naturally, that’s what I thought of.”
“Naturally.”
I left Rosie’s to go to Linda’s where Maddie was hanging out. I was ready for grief as only an eleven-year-old can give it. On the way to her house, I called Linda, using my headset. I wondered if Bluetooth was now a verb-I Blue-toothed Linda. I’d read that the technology was invented in Denmark and named after one of their peacemaking tenth-century kings, Harald Bluetooth. At first hearing, the story seemed like something made up in an eighth-grade creative writing class, but I’d read it enough times from trusted sources to believe it.
I needed to ask Linda a question out of range of Maddie’s ears.
“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.
Murder In Miniature Page 19
