Murder in Miniature (15 page)

“Mary Cassatt, like the Impressionists who inspired her, preferred bright paintings, picturing a lively world bathed in light. Her technique was to use rapid brushstrokes and thick coats of paint.”

A little closer to Angela’s life
, I thought, and resolved to bring a set of Cassatt “mother and child” cards for her next week.

I visited Maddie during our restroom break and treated her to the junk food of her choice from the vending machines. She chose a packaged pair of chocolate cookies (candy? crackers?) that I’d never seen before, nor heard of. A point in favor of the days when no food, drink, or conversation was allowed (including “study groups”) in libraries.

The current lack of rules did allow Maddie to make a new friend during the story hour, however, and I was glad she wouldn’t be bored when Angela and I went back to work. I predicted there’d be a new Lincoln Point–to–Los Angeles pen-pal duo in the season ahead.

As Angela and I headed back for one more hour in the roasting storeroom, I saw an excuse to dally. Gail Musgrave was in a reading corner by the reference desk, gazing intently on a large book of some sort. Like a teenager, she sat on one leg. It had been a while since I had such agility. When she saw us approach, she closed the book quickly and shoved it under some magazines. Odd, but none of my business. If she enjoyed some exotic form of adult entertainment, she was welcome to it.

“Will we see you at the crafts meeting tonight?” I asked.

“Yes, yes,” Gail said, unfolding her leg and bringing her upper body, short as it was, to attention. She fingered the edges of the book she’d (apparently) hidden from us, nudging it farther under the magazines. “We’re making books at your house, right?”

I nodded. “Books, magazines, leaflets. Anything you find in a library.”

“Movies on DVD,” Maddie said.

Gail laughed and relaxed her hold on her pile of magazines.

“If you’d like to join the crafts group, you can make the DVDs,” I told Maddie.

She gave me the look of one who has lost a round.

“That was funny,” Angela said, settling her tiny body
onto the uncomfortable metal chair.

“What was funny?”

“How Mrs. Musgrave didn’t want us to see the book.”

So it wasn’t my imagination. “I wonder why,” I said. A rhetorical question.

“I don’t know. She uses those books all the time. I get them for her. The ones on jewelry and gems.”

I was glad I hadn’t yet explained the nature of rhetorical questions to Angela.

A few times a year, the members of my crafts group
work together on a project, to be donated to a charity. The timing now was perfect. The fair was over; no one was under a deadline. A new one would come around all too soon, for the fall fair at the end of October. We’d decided to build a miniature one-room public library as a raffle prize for a library fund-raiser.

Karen Striker and I had already provided the main structure, using a storage box from the local discount store (the kind where you can buy everything from a prescription drug to a patio table, with umbrella). The box, set on its side, would be turned into a “room” twenty-two feet (inches) long, with a ten-foot (inch) ceiling. We laid the carpet (a piece of mottled felt), wallpapered three walls with a subtle beige-on-beige leaf-design wrapping paper, and installed bookcases (a series of compartmentalized Lucite trays meant for organizing a jewelry drawer).

We needed books. Many books, to fill the shelves (the sides of the organizer box) along half of the long, back wall and one side wall. The other wall space would have a newspaper rack, an information desk, and other library furnishings. We’d had a heated discussion over whether to include a row of computer terminals. The compromise was that we’d have a computer at the reference desk, but no others.

“No one knows how to make one of those things anyway,” Mabel had said.

During dinner—stir-fry tofu and vegetables, finally—before the group arrived, Maddie and I talked about her contribution: the DVD cases.

Maddie knew how to access pictures of movie posters online. After a few standard complaints about the slow modem she had to work with in my house, she explained how she would set up the printer to get the correct size. She made a list of her favorite movies, most of them animated, with colorful covers.

We did the math. A boxed DVD set measured five and a half inches by seven and a quarter inches.

“Looks like we’ll need covers that are about a half-inch square. That’ll be close enough,” I told her. We picked out half-inch balsa-wood pieces from my stash.

Maddie rolled two tiny blocks between her fingers. “These aren’t very big.”

“That’s the idea.”

“How many do you think we’ll need?”

I could tell that the tediousness of the task ahead was dawning on her. Making two or three DVDs, or any item, was fun, but producing them in large supply required discipline. It was worth it in the end to see row after row of fabric bolts, for example, in a miniature fabric shop, or shelf upon shelf of glassware in a tiny restaurant, but crafting dozens, even hundreds, of identical pieces could be tiresome. Wasn’t that why our group had decided to do the bookmaking (not the illegal kind) together?

I wanted Maddie to experience both the disciplined work and the final satisfaction. I wasn’t sure it would happen in the little more than twenty-four hours before Friday, when I’d put her on a plane to Los Angeles, but we could get started.

More math was needed. We figured that one rack would hold about one hundred DVDs. Maddie’s eyes popped. I considered comparing this activity with one hundred swings of a bat during practice, but, in truth, I had no idea how many swings of a bat were involved in a game, nor did I want to turn her off by disparaging her beloved sports.

“But not all of them will need covers, only the ones on the ends. For the rest, you just need to cover the spines.” I avoided saying: “the very, very tiny spines,” but she was smart enough to get it.

“Maybe I’ll just make one of those racks like they have in the video store, where they’re all facing out.”

“Good idea,” I said, then gave in to the temptation to give her an even easier way out. “Or, you could look in magazines for a picture of a row of DVD spines, print it to size, and…”

Her face lit up. I could see that, as a miniaturist, she was going to be more like me than Linda.

Who was where by the way?
I wondered, but I pushed that question aside.

Maddie set herself up in my office. There was more modem
grumbling and a snide remark about the age of my printer, but otherwise a quite satisfactory arrangement for both of us. She didn’t have to sit around with a gaggle of old women (until it was time for dessert), and I didn’t have to worry about the nature of the conversation, which I felt sure would be talk of murder.

Which started immediately.

Betty Fine and Mabel Quinlan, who arrived together, gave barely a nod toward the tables I’d arranged in the atrium, loaded down with raw materials—wood, colored papers, scraps of fabric, leather, and felt. They tripped over themselves to tell me their theory of the murder of Dudley Crane.

“Just Eddie did it,” they said in unison.

“What makes you think so?” I asked. The morning paper had very little information, stating the simple fact that Crane’s body had been found in the lot behind his store.

“Just Eddie works in Crane’s part-time, you know, and I can’t believe he wasn’t behind the robbery,” Betty said, patting her bouffant hairdo (not a strand of hair budged). “Crane must have figured it out and Just Eddie shot him.”

“There is no way that Just Eddie could work in a store like that and not be tempted,” Mabel said.

So the first votes were in, sans evidence.

Susan Giles was next. A Tennessee native, Susan still had her Southern accent after three decades in California. “The Postmaster,” she said. “Where do y’ all think the expression ‘going postal’ comes from? Besides, Crane handled the estate when cranky old Mrs. Cooney died, and Brian confided to me that he would never, ever recommend Crane to anyone.”

That would be “nay-evah, evah.” A duet of “ahas” went up from Betty and Mabel. I didn’t contribute a sound.

Karen Striker and Gail Musgrave were close behind, standing on the welcome mat when I answered the doorbell.

“I’m glad for the company,” Karen said. “Imagine, a friend murdered, right in our own town. Very scary.”

Not one, but two murders in a week, but somehow the first one, of a stranger, didn’t have the impact on the citizenry.

With two votes for Just Eddie and one for Postmaster Brian Cooney, Karen checked in.

“I’m all Just Eddie,” Karen said. “Had to be.”

“If it wasn’t Just Eddie, it must have been someone from Los Gatos or Menlo Park. I can’t believe a citizen of Lincoln Point would do such a thing,” Betty said.

I was glad no one had mentioned Jason—until Mabel slipped.

“What about that Reed boy, the adopted one? I heard he has no alibi for the day of the robbery.”

“How would you ever know that, Mabel?” Betty asked. “I think it’s a shame when a child is automatically blamed because he’s adopted.”

“He has been trouble, though,” Karen said. Tonight her hair was swept around her face, looking remarkably like that of a model from a magazine she’d brought. “It’s those Brooklyn genes.”

Another jab at New York. Like Just Eddie’s. “Lots of good things come from New York,” I said, with a smile, hoping to remind my friends of my roots in the Bronx, a couple of boroughs north of Brooklyn.

“No one knows where Jason was born,” Susan said.

“I do,” Karen said.

We all looked at her. Karen put her hand over her mouth. “Oops. I probably shouldn’t have said that.”

Too late. Karen worked at city hall, which gave her enormous credibility over, say, a rumor. I could pretend to be uninterested, since I knew Betty, Mabel, and Susan would pounce on her.

As they went at her, I felt sorry for Karen, whose youth put her at a disadvantage among seasoned rumormongers.

“Okay, let’s just say that at one time Linda came to city hall—she was interested in knowing about Jason’s parents. She thought his acting out might be due to some physical reason, and she asked for disclosure.”

“And?” Susan asked.

“She couldn’t get most of what she wanted, but she did go away with some bits, here and there.”

“So, was Jason really born in Brooklyn?” Betty asked.

“I can’t say,” Karen responded. But she already had.

We moved off Linda’s son, though Jason’s delinquency was legendary and his lineage would be fascinating to us. Possibly her fellow crafters were being respectful to Linda, even in her absence. She hadn’t shown up yet; I doubted she would.

Jason was from Brooklyn
. I had a hard time letting go of it, for some reason that was unclear. It rolled around my brain for a while.

“How about you, Gail?” Susan asked. “You haven’t told us. Who do you think murdered Dudley Crane?”

“I’ll leave it to the police,” she said.

“Not even a guess?” I asked.

No response. She turned from Susan and me a bit and made a show of emptying her large briefcase of materials onto the table. (Everyone else carried supplies in totes; Gail, who, besides studying for her new career in real estate, still worked part-time as a cosmetics sales rep, always looked ready for a day at the office.)

It bothered me that I was considering Gail’s brother capable of the crime of murder. Unlike the police, who couldn’t limit their world of possible suspects, I had limited mine to those I knew had motive to want Dudley Crane out of their lives. This meant suspecting my friends.

I looked around the table at some of my favorite people in the world, outside of my relatives.

Gail’s summer wardrobe of trim sundresses seemed to have no end; Karen’s inventory of youthspeak phrases was a delight to the rest of us; Susan, the most girly member of the group, sported a ruffle on some part of her outfit, no matter the season; Betty had a new set of photos of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren to start every meeting; and Mabel—we all hoped Mabel and her white, white curls would live forever, as we knew her beads would.

I couldn’t know all their private and personal lives. I thought of a very old radio program that began with the words
Who knows what evil lurks
…Was it possible that one of my own circle was a killer, or related to one?

I hoped not.

Sometimes it was a blessing not to be a cop.

As always, great ideas flowed when crafters got together.

Karen, the only native Californian in the group, had already started on a series of posters for the mini-library, on California authors. She’d measured each frame to fit in the space between the bookshelves and the ceiling. She showed us miniature images of John Steinbeck, M. F. K. Fisher, Jack London, Gertrude Stein, Robert Frost, Anna Deavere Smith, and a half dozen others, including Dr. Seuss (who knew?) for the children’s section.

We considered a Lincoln wall, to identify the library as belonging to Lincoln Point, but settled on having just one Lincoln poster, over the bookcases in the history section. Mabel was assigned the task of choosing it.

“And don’t go beadin’ his beard,” Susan teased.

We made books and talked, as we did nearly every Wednesday of the year in the home of one or the other of us. We agreed to drop the subject of murder, but it came back over and over, like a bubble between two glued surfaces.

We’d start on an unrelated topic, but all roads led to Dudley Crane. Betty’s granddaughter’s beautiful engagement ring took us straight to Crane’s Jewelers. Susan’s evening in Tad Lincoln Park rolled into a discussion of the trees, which led to Dudley Crane’s proposals to level them. Mabel’s recent reread of a Louis L’ Amour book turned into talk of Crane’s classy Western wear, which he wore for campaign appearances. (The cynics among us thought he chose cowboy hats to remind everyone of the old West, not the new West he was trying to raise up in stucco houses and strip malls.)

Still, we made progress on our bookmaking, with no lack of supplies. Karen brought more women’s magazines than I’d ever seen, including the stack on my hairdresser’s table. Susan shared museum quarterlies and catalogs—she wanted to create an art and antiques book section. (I glanced at Gail, who had been singularly quiet all evening, tempted to ask if she knew any good books on gems.) Susan’s designs were always ornate, like last year’s Atlanta plantation home. She claimed she entered a Frank Lloyd Wright dollhouse entry this year just to prove she could do minimalist.

Betty set herself to printing Jane Austen titles in gold. She had created a similar set for her recent Tudor (later declared
Tudorbethan
, a melding of Tudor and Elizabethan, by one of the judges, who pointed out its steepled roof and prominent cross gables).

Maddie joined us for refreshments, which we were not allowed to indulge in until we were close to our goals for the evening. Tonight was Susan’s turn to feed us, and we were treated to a four-layer apple-and-peach stack cake.

“The official cake of the state of Tennessee,” she announced.

Before I finished wondering if California had a state cake, Maddie was off to the computer and back with the answer.

“All I can find is Mexican hot chocolate for California,” she said.

She won a round of laughter and great praise for her miniature rows of DVDs.

Her presence for the rest of the work session kept murder talk at bay. A very good thing.