Murder in Miniature (3 page)

“Ninety-three percent wore seat belts this month,” she told me. “Too bad I can’t arrest the other seven percent. All I can do is report.”

“You and your son. There must be a genetic need to arrest.”

Beverly laughed and pointed to the dwindling supply of Linda’s miniature baked goods. “Use your own genetic talent and find more pastries and pies,” she said. “They’ve been selling like hotcakes. Pun intended.”

Obliging her with a smile for her pun, I reached into Linda’s small canvas
LITTLE THINGS MEAN A LOT
tote and came up with a two-inch-high wedding cake, several one-and-a-half-inch loaves of crusty bread, a plate of éclairs, and a cookie sheet with gingerbread men attached. I needed one or two more items to fill in the empty spot created when a young woman bought a whole bakery counter assembly. I reached in again and pulled out a piece of fabric. Linda and I had both purchased inexpensive rolls of cheesecloth for workshop use, and this piece was a match to one in my own tote.

Except that Linda’s had a red stain the size of a half-scale throw rug. My breath caught. I looked more closely. Not paint, not varnish. After all these crafting years, I knew the difference. This was blood.

I held up the cloth for Beverly to see.

“So she cut her finger,” Beverly said, shrugging her shoulders. She smiled, keeping her (to me, charming) overbite in check. “No surprise, considering the tools you people use.”

I felt my shoulders relax. Maybe giving up sleep in favor of committee meetings, with the added effort (delightful as it was) of grandparenting, was getting to me. I gave the patient Beverly a well-deserved grin. I opened my metal fishing tackle box, full of the referenced tools—knives, pins, hooks, needles, scissors, blades, and even a small hammer. “You mean these?”

“Exactly,” Beverly said. “Or should I say Exacto?”

Maddie would have rolled her eyes at the crafts humor, but Beverly and I laughed.

While my sister-in-law was distracted by her own successful joke, I folded the cloth, blood spot turned in, and tucked it in my tackle box.

I had no idea why.

At eight forty-five, fifteen minutes before closing for the
evening, I left Beverly with two tables to monitor and stepped up to the PA system at the front of the hall. Spotlighted in the center of the ticket table was the first of three prizes to be raffled this weekend: a large, cellophane- wrapped basket with treasures donated by Karen Striker. The lucky winner would take home a one-twelfth-scale milled plywood Cape Cod bedroom kit. Karen had included swatches of fabric for linens, draperies, and carpets, and a pocket-size tool kit with a pouch of finishing nails.

“Attention, everyone,” I called, against a background of whiny feedback. Abraham Lincoln High School was not known for its state-of-the-art A/V equipment. Close to the front door as I was, I twisted slightly and looked hopefully toward the foyer for signs of Linda. Surely she’d return to pack up and cover her table for the night. I saw only fidgety children in strollers, up past their bedtime.

Several times during the last couple of hours, I’d left our tables on the pretext of visiting the ladies’ room, buying popcorn for Maddie (who’d been happily recruited to assist Puppeteer Cooney in entertaining the younger children), or tending to a chairperson duty. I’d called all of Linda’s phone numbers and left messages. I’d all but crept under each grimy restroom stall, as if a simple indisposition could have kept Linda from Table 30 all evening. I’d even called the number I had for Jason’s cell, not on speed dial, but on a list of near and dear I kept in my purse.

Two or three times, I’d stepped out the side door near our tables and scanned the parking lot. Linda’s dark green SUV was still in its spot, next to my berry red Saturn Ion (my son, Richard, had tricked me into buying the bright color, but that’s what a mother’s trust gets you). Linda and I had been among the first to arrive, so we had prime spaces up against the building. Just Eddie’s formerly white, now rust- colored pickup had been two over from mine, but was now more like four spaces over. He’d taken another superlong cigarette break, I guessed, this time downtown. More often than not his breaks coincided with the happy hours at the local bars. As long as his truck wasn’t right next to my car, I didn’t care. I could easily picture Just Eddie carelessly opening his rusty door and slamming it into mine.

Now I wondered if I should have given a more careful look inside Linda’s SUV, but no one was upright on the seats (I didn’t know whether to be happy or disappointed about that), and the small red light on the dash blinked steadily, telling me that security had not been breached.

She went with Chuck, I reasoned, to take care of a Jason emergency. A quick calculation told me that, though the crafts fair circumstances made it seem like a long time, Linda hadn’t been missing as many hours as some of her other AWOLs had lasted.

I brought my focus back to the hall, where it had gone quiet. I thought this might be a first in the multipurpose room: shoppers and vendors, popcorn makers and high-school-students-cum-soda-jerks had their mouths closed and their ears trained on me. I tapped the mike, read out a long string of numbers, and joined the applause when a woman and four children, from stroller age to about twelve, all waved their arms, declaring themselves the winners. I was sure everyone agreed they needed the boost. I hoped the twelve-year-old would take over and manage the kit project, giving Mom some free time.

I cast one last glance at the parking lot next to the side doors as I walked back through the hall to Tables 30 and 31, where Beverly had started to pack up the most fragile pieces, Linda’s three-tiered wedding cake included. We’d take the delicate items and our cash home, and leave most of the larger, more sturdy items in the hall overnight. It was Just Eddie’s job to lock up and guarantee everything would be there in the morning.

Just Eddie, his overalls streaked with grease from who knew where, gave me one more shrug as I queried him.

“What about Jason?” I asked him. “Have you seen Jason Reed around today?”

“Nope, but don’t worry about him. Kid like Jason that grew up in Brooklyn has got enough street smarts for two Lincoln Points.”

Brooklyn? Where did that come from? I remembered when Linda and Chuck picked up Jason, in Winona, Minnesota, on the Mississippi, not anywhere near New York. We were all surprised to realize that the great river went that far north. Fifth-grade geography was a long time ago.

This was Just Eddie, taking a jab at my New York City roots again, and once more confusing Brooklyn with the Bronx, where Ken and I grew up. Furthermore, his grammatical error rankled me.

“Who,” I said.

Just Eddie gave me a funny look, as if the hard work of the fair had addled my brain. “
Jason
,” he said.

“I meant, the correct form is
who
grew up in Brooklyn, not
that
grew up, when you’re speaking about a person.”

He shook his head and walked away, mumbling under his breath.

I couldn’t help thinking Linda was to blame for all this aggravation.

If she’s eating room service somewhere
, I thought,
I’m going to kill her.

Beverly might have convinced me that I shouldn’t send
the police to Linda’s home, but nothing said I shouldn’t make a stop there myself. Linda’s SUV was still in the school lot, leading me to unpleasant theories. I had to at least make an attempt to check on her residence.

“I’m going to swing by Mrs. Reed’s house,” I told Maddie. “I want to be sure she’s feeling all right.”

“Is she sick?”

“A little.”

Everything seemed harder with kids around. My urge to protect Maddie was overwhelming, even when I wasn’t sure there was anything to protect her from. I wondered if I’d felt this way when Richard was Maddie’s age. Maybe my life wasn’t so “exciting” then. Or maybe granddaughters, even those who played a mean game of soccer and wore backward baseball caps, seemed more fragile than sons.

The street Linda lived on was in an old part of town where new condos had been squeezed into what used to be spacious farm properties. The one-car garages guaranteed that the street would always be lined with vehicles (I’d read a statistic that California families had one and one-third cars per person), and this evening was no exception. I circled twice before getting lucky—someone pulled out and left a prime spot a few yards from Linda’s small front porch.

Linda’s house, an old stucco two-bedroom badly in need of a refresher coat of yellow paint, was between two new condo developments. Among Linda’s complaints about the growth in the area were boisterous neighbors and trash that spilled onto her property.

“If I could afford it, I’d put in a surveillance system and find out who was trashing my lawn,” she’d remarked.

All was clean and quiet now, however.

I unbuckled my seat belt, then hesitated. I didn’t want to take Maddie with me, just in case.
In case what
, I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t happy leaving her in the car, either. Not that it was a bad neighborhood, just dark and quiet. Almost creepy quiet.

Only a couple of minutes, I told myself.

“Wait here, sweetheart,” I told Maddie. “I won’t be long.”

I got out and locked the doors with my remote, knowing Maddie was aware how that worked: if she (or, heaven forbid, anyone else) opened the door, the car alarm would go off. No one else would pay attention, but I’d hear it and come running.

The street was lined with large, old trees that cut out the moonlight and obscured the light from the occasional street lamp. With so many residential units in such a small space, I’d expected some noise at nine thirty in the evening. Apparently all the rowdy barbecue parties Linda grumbled about were over by now, and all the backyard chatting finished. There were no signs of life except for a lit window here or there in the large, all-beige condo structures.

I approached the house, not knowing what I wished for. If Linda was relaxing in front of her TV, I’d give her a piece of my mind; if she was in trouble…I didn’t have a plan for that. A dim light that I recognized as Linda’s hallway night-light shown through the porch window. I knocked on the solid wood door (the doorbell had been broken for some time, waiting for Chuck or Peter to fix it). A newspaper was still rolled up and resting on the brackets under the mailbox. I waited, somehow knowing there’d be no response.

I left the porch and walked around to the narrow side yard, thick with weeds (also waiting for attention from exes), waving to Maddie on the way. The windows were dark. I knew the layout well—I passed the combination living and dining room, chasing away images of Linda out cold on her seventies orange-and-brown-plaid couch, and of her body spread out on the dark brown wall-to-wall carpet.

The only window lit at all was the one in Jason’s room, at the end of the hallway, in the back of the house. Light from the bathroom night-light filtered in through his open door. Once in a while I appreciated my height. I was able to gain a clear view of Jason’s room by raising myself slightly on my tiptoes. I’d never seen such a mess. I picked out food containers, clothes, books, CDs, videos, and sports paraphernalia (a surprise since Jason seemed so lethargic and anti-exercise) strewn everywhere. On the bed, on the floor, under the desk and chair, on the metal shelving. Would Maddie grow into this lifestyle in a couple of years? I wondered.

Even the television set was…what? I zeroed in on it. The television set was on the floor, on its side. What I thought of as the disorder created by a teenager now seemed to be a room that had been ransacked. I shifted my position, partly supporting myself by the window frame, and looked more closely, as far into the corners of the room as I could. The chair was leaning back against the desk, and the bed linens had been stripped and dumped on the floor.

My heart raced. I wanted to run back and check on Maddie, but I needed to see more. I continued around the back of the house, and caught only one more glimpse inside, this time of the hallway, where nothing seemed disturbed, except a balled-up scatter rug. The phone books and a couple of pens or pencils were on the floor, but then Linda wasn’t the world’s most perfect housekeeper, so it was hard to tell normal disorder from a break-in.

I took a deep breath. I walked slowly around the house again, giving Maddie (for whom I needed a really good cover story) another wave. This time I checked for any sign of break-in. I checked the front and back doors (locked) and the windows (none open, none broken). The garage, set back from the house, had no windows at viewing level, but all was quiet (and no noxious gas poured from under the door). My imagination had turned a messy room into a burglary, I decided. If Jason’s room was extraordinarily wrecked, it was because he was an extraordinarily difficult kid.

The whole time, I hadn’t heard any sounds except sizzling electric wires, nor seen anything except a lone dog and its mistress. I knocked on the front door one more time, more for Maddie’s sake if she was watching, then returned to the car and climbed in.

“I guess Mrs. Reed’s okay. Probably sleeping already,” I told Maddie, my stomach uneasy. “She has bad allergies this time of year.”

“Wasn’t her SUV still at school?”

I nodded. A casual gesture, I hoped, for my budding detective. “I guess someone drove her home.”

Leave it to a ten-year-old to help you through a rough
patch. By the time Maddie and I pulled up to my (life-size) house, we’d decided we were both too wound up (Maddie from puppets, candy, and popcorn; me from you-know-what) to go to bed anytime soon. We made a plan that included pizza and a board game.

My home—with four bedrooms, kitchen, and ample living space built around a large atrium—was a source of great pleasure for me. Ken and I had bought our Eichler in the midseventies. I’d recently received a letter from the Department of the Interior informing me that our Lincoln Point Eichler neighborhood, about forty miles south of San Francisco, had been added to the National Register of Historic Places. Impressive as that was for all of us property owners, for me the best feature was unlocking my front door and entering a beautiful natural setting. I never tired of looking at the magnificent jade tree and a border of cyclamen that Ken and I had planted in the atrium.

Sometimes I expected to open the door and find Ken in his hospital chair, under the skylight, where he spent his last days.

Tonight it was Maddie who had my attention, however. While we waited for a large pizza with everything but anchovies, Maddie and I dug through the game cupboard to find the challenge of the night.

I pulled out a red box near the top of the pile. “Let’s play Yahtzee,” I said to my granddaughter, who always beat me at it.

“Why don’t we play on the computer this time, Grandma?” Maddie said, covering her uneven-toothed smile with her fist.

I made a big show of walking to the table and pouring out the Yahtzee dice, and slapping the score pads on the surface, creating as loud a noise as I could. “I like to hear and touch things,” I told her. I reached over and fingered her curls, moved to her underarms, and then to all her tickle spots until she was rolling with laughter.

We’d set up a card table in the atrium, under the stars, and had no sooner started the game when Giovanni’s delivery truck arrived. I guessed we were well beyond the rush hour for fast-food deliveries.