Murder in Miniature (5 page)

“Speak, Linda.” I wanted to sound like I was delivering tough love, but I never did quite understand what that meant in a practical situation.

“Please, Gerry. I’m very grateful to you. You know that. But just let me get home. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Are you seriously thinking of sitting next to me at the fair as if none of this happened?”

She sighed heavily and I heard her exhaustion in her breathing. Linda’s body seemed to slide down her car door, and I worried that she wouldn’t be able to drive home. Not that I was all that chipper either at three thirty in the morning, now that my fear and excitement had waned.

“Please, Gerry.”

Tough love faded, and I stepped aside so Linda could enter her SUV.

I didn’t ask—I simply took it upon myself to follow
Linda to her home, about a mile from my house, to make sure she got there without incident. Without disappearing again, really.

A few houses before Linda’s, I passed a red sports car that I recognized as Chuck’s, with an unmistakable weather-beaten Raiders flag attached to its antenna. Chuck, or someone with the same lanky physique, was in the driver’s seat. I didn’t see this as a good sign, but didn’t have the energy to confront him or anyone else at this hour. I hoped he wasn’t there to ambush Linda. More likely looking for Jason, who I hoped was safely tucked into Peter’s guest bed.

I drove slowly by Linda’s house and saw her enter through her garage.

Call me nosy. And frustrated. After a great expenditure of both emotional and physical energy, I still didn’t have answers to a long list of questions. One more pass, I decided, in order to spy on Chuck. I drove around the block, and by the time I made a full circle, Chuck was pulling away from the curb.

Nothing left to do but take my granddaughter home to bed.

I’d fallen asleep just before five, having set my alarm for
eight thirty, at which time I called my nephew, Skip. He’d already promised to pick up Maddie at the fair midmorning and take her to the softball game between the men and women of the Lincoln Point Police and Fire Departments. Sadly, I’d realized this was more of a treat for her than helping me make doilies for my dollhouses.

“I’d like to let Maddie sleep a little longer this morning, so can you come here and babysit while I go to the fair?” I asked Skip (happy that Maddie didn’t hear the term
babysit
). I almost wished he’d ask me why Maddie needed to sleep late. Then I might have an excuse to tell him about Linda’s strange evening. Maybe there was something on the police blotter that related to it. Is this nosiness or concern? I asked myself. A thin line, it seemed.

“Sure,” Skip said. “When?”

“Now.”

“Uh, sure. I can be there in about twenty minutes.” I heard sleep in his voice, and a mumbling in the background. Either the TV or a bedmate. Skip, twenty-eight, was a handsome bachelor who kept his social life a mystery from me and his mother. Just as well, considering the abovementioned
thin line
between nosiness and concern.

“Perfect. I need to leave by about nine fifteen. I’ll make some sandwiches for you to take to the game.”

“Sweet. Throw in some of those awesome ginger cookies you bake, and I’m there. Anyway I’ve been wanting to check out that decrepit furnace of yours. We may have to get you a new one.”

How lucky could I be? With no family of my own, except for some cousins in Oklahoma, whom I’d never met, I appreciated being part of the wonderful Porter clan. The joke was that I was welcome in spite of my (once) dark, straight hair, with nothing like the eye-catching red that ran through all of theirs, in one stripe or another. (The highlights in my hair were old-lady gray.)

When Beverly lost her husband, Eino, in the first Gulf War, months from military retirement, eleven-year-old Skip, baptized Eino Jr., became even more of a regular at our home and more of a fan of my ginger cookies. Having Skip around now made up a bit for Richard and his family’s living four hundred miles away in Los Angeles.

Richard and Mary Lou constantly reiterated a standing invitation to me to visit them. They were also very good about sending Maddie to Lincoln Point often enough for me to be a real grandmother (
unlike this weekend
, I thought). I ran my finger over a drawing on my refrigerator. Maddie had done it when she was six years old, and desperately wanted me to remove it. I couldn’t bring myself to discard the childish representation of Maddie, Ken, and me holding hands in front of our square-box Eichler.

Happy to be a homemaker for these few minutes, I shuffled between the kitchen and pantry (another very desirable feature of an Eichler home, along with floor-to-ceiling windows), making ham-and-turkey sandwiches on my homemade four-grain bread. Whole grains were a little lost on Maddie, but I was out of plain white store-bought. For all I knew Skip had the same white-bread taste but was too polite to tell me. I placed the cookie jar—a ceramic San Francisco Victorian house with a removable chimney lid—on the counter where no one could miss it, and filled my own lunch bag with a cheese sandwich and a thermos of Peet’s coffee. I did all of this at about 70 percent wakefulness. Ahead of me was an eight-hour day at the fair. I looked back longingly at my bedroom.

But, as Ken always said, sleep is overrated.

I was never so glad to see Linda, and at the same time,
never so put out with her. She refused to tell me why she’d had to drag me—and Maddie—out of bed in the dead of night to a phone booth in the middle of nowhere. I realized I’d turned out a set of phrases that sounded whiny even to me when I recited them to Linda, but I had to get the sentiment out.

“I’d do the same for you,” was all she’d say as we sat, side by side, at Tables 30 and 31 on day two of the fair.

“That’s not the point,” was my weak comeback, since I knew she was right. “The least you can do is tell me if you were A, having fun or B, in trouble. And where is your Governor Winthrop, by the way?”

She raised her eyebrows. “That’s not your concern, now, is it?” Then she bent her head to her work—tatting along the edges of a tiny linen towel. Her face, with more makeup than usual (to cover bruises?), showed nothing. There were no bandages on her fingers or arms from Beverly’s postulated Exacto knife incident. I had half a mind to dangle her bloody cloth in her face (
explain this
, I’d say); it was still tucked at the bottom of my tackle box, which I hadn’t reorganized from last night. I had no plans for the cloth, but somehow hadn’t discarded it.

I tried different approaches during the day to get Linda to slip up and talk. Once, when I remembered the condition of Jason’s room, I asked, “Was everything okay at your house last night?”

“Of course. What do you mean?”

I wished I could learn the knack of the poker face as Linda knew it. “Nothing,” I said.

The Saturday crowd was lively, probably having slept more than I had. The piped-in music was loud and upbeat—happily, the committee had voted down one member’s suggestion that we play Christmas music (today was actually Bastille Day) to encourage shopping.

By noon, I was barely keeping up with room boxes. I’d brought several to finish during lulls in customer activity. No sooner had I added gold leaf trim to the top of an Early American dresser, than it was bought by a woman I recognized as Mabel Quinlan’s beading partner. I’d also had a special request for a Passover table and finished just in time for my customer to pick it up. I had to warn her that the lacquer I’d sprayed on the one-inch matzah-patterned place mats was still sticky.

Linda, too, was busy and polishing up extras between customers. Not that it mattered inside the windowless, air-conditioned hall, but every time someone entered or exited through the side door, we could see that it was a bright, sunny day. Linda’s mood seemed to match. Practically a first. She wore her hair in an upsweep today—one of her two standard dos—with piles of dry gray-blond strands at the very top of her head. I had a flashback to the younger, thinner Linda in a yearbook photo on her bookshelf. I wondered what her personality was back then, before adult struggles challenged her.

To give her a little credit—Linda was making an extra effort to be nice to me this morning. She offered to bring me back a snack or a drink from the concession stand at the front of the hall (every time she left her table, I felt a nervous twinge); she cleaned off my table when a bored little boy left potato chip crumbs on my tiny cherry-wood dresser; she gave me a cube from her new polymer-clay box, a lovely shade of red that would be perfect for miniature roses, and (definitely a first) complimented me on a set of “books” I’d made out of basswood strips.

Maybe she was feeling guilty about inconveniencing me last night. Or about not explaining why she’d needed to.

Or maybe last night was better for her than it appeared.

Beverly and Skip brought Maddie by after the softball
game. Maddie’s jeans looked like she’d been the one sliding into second base or skidding across the outfield to catch a fly ball. I wondered what had happened to all the frilly holiday dresses I used to send her before I knew her well.

I wanted to ask Maddie how she slept last night, whether she’d had any nightmares as a result of our spooky adventure. I supposed it was too much to hope for, that she’d think our trip was just a bad dream. I decided to wait and see if Maddie brought it up on her own.

“The cops won!” Maddie squealed, grinning broadly, apparently forgetting her zigzag teeth. She swung an imaginary bat against an invisible ball. Not thinking about anything creepy, I was relieved to see. “Skip roped it.” She swung again. “Bam! A double down the left field line.”

“Aw, shucks.” Skip removed his LPPD cap, loosening reddish Porter curls, and held the hat against his heart. He bowed to Maddie, like a shy suitor, fully aware of how much Maddie adored him. “It was just a base hit. Nothing like last night, when yours truly, Officer Gowen, was on the job, rounding up bad guys, protecting and serving the citizens of—”

Beverly put her hand over Skip’s mouth, and he pretended that it was enough to stop his flow of speech. “Sometimes I wonder what’s the real reason why my son entered public service,” Beverly said.

“Cops are chick magnets,” Maddie said. I could tell by the flush that took over her freckled cheeks and the surprise in her eyes that the words were out before she knew it. The laughter that rose up from those who happened to catch her remark proved too much for her. Maddie giggled self-consciously and ran off to the Children’s Corner. I reminded myself of my grandmotherly duties and resolved to talk to her later about where she’d picked up the phrase.

I caught Linda’s eye a couple of times during Skip’s visit, especially when Beverly followed Maddie to the stage, where Just Eddie and Postmaster Cooney were having it out over who-knew-what. Now it was just the three of us—Linda, me, and my nephew, the cop—during a lull, and in a rather separated little corner between the storage area and a single row of crafters’ tables. Linda worked her jaw to one side and deepened her frown. “Don’t say a word to him,” her expression shouted.

For now, I wouldn’t.

Besides, there wasn’t time. We were called to attention by a tinny rendition of the tune “Hail to the Chief.” Linda looked around with a questioning look, but Beverly and I recognized Skip’s cell-phone ring (exceptions to the no-cell rule could be made for law enforcement, I decided on the spot).

“A what?” Skip asked, in a voice louder than normal to counteract the din in the hall. His eyes grew wide with disbelief. He plugged one ear against the drone of the fair. “A 187? For real?”

I’d learned a few police codes during Skip’s career: 65 was a robbery; 65p a purse snatching. A 459 meant that a silent alarm had gone off somewhere, and I remembered Skip’s calling a petty thievery charge a 966. What was 187?

“A homicide,” Skip said, clicking his phone shut, as if I’d asked the question out loud. Then, apparently realizing he was not in his squad room, he lowered his voice and addressed us. “For now, you didn’t hear that, okay?”

We all nodded as Skip turned and all but ran out the side door.

The day passed quickly, with few breaks for dipping
into my lunch bag and thermos. From time to time I thought of Skip, on his first homicide call. Not that he’d be happy about the violent act, but it was common knowledge around the LPPD that helping on a murder case was the first step toward earning a detective’s badge. I knew he’d do well and felt conflicted that his success had to come at someone’s (
whose?
I wondered) expense.

By midafternoon, Linda had recovered her old moodiness, and her frown lines were back. In all fairness, the instigating incidents might have been the appearance of her two ex-husbands, within minutes of each other.

Peter, ex-husband number one, showed up first, with Jason trailing him down what must have seemed interminably long aisles of crafts. Both males had their hands in their jeans pockets, elbows in, and shoulders hunched as they made their way along Tables 25 through 29, as though worried either that they might break something precious, or that a piece of satin ribbon would reach out and attach itself to their clothing. They rounded the corner, past me, to Linda’s table.

Peter’s tall, broad frame seemed to take up half of Linda’s table front. Jason, on the other hand, was short for his age, and chubby, like his adopted mom. He seemed to shrink into his T-shirt. “Just dropping off your son,” Peter said. “The one you abandoned last night?”

“I don’t need dropping off,” said a sullen, stringy-haired Jason, whose jeans had horizontal slashes from his knees to his ankles. He threw down his backpack, its camouflage design reminding us all of war. “I’m almost fifteen.”

Peter removed his wire-frame glasses and gave him a glare that I felt sure wasn’t the first of its kind in the last twenty-four hours.

Linda dragged an extra folding chair close to hers and pointed a stiff finger at its seat. “Jason,” she said. Not a warm invitation.

Jason rolled his eyes. “I don’t have to stay
here
, do I?” He pulled up the neck of his army green T-shirt until it covered most of his mouth. I figured he didn’t want to be identifiable next to tables full of lace, beads, and tiny, cute objects.

“Hey, buddy.” Chuck’s voice. He’d come in through the side door a few feet from my table. Another tall man, but thin, with a preference for Western wear. Today’s shirt featured two identical cowboys riding bulls (or very animated horses), facing each other across Chuck’s skimpy chest. His sculpted ivory belt buckle was too big for his narrow waist and reminded me of a badly fashioned bathtub. “You can hang with me,” he told Jason.

“Great,” Peter said, and made as hasty an exit as I’ve ever seen, out the side door to the parking lot.

Jason let the neck of his T-shirt snap back, as much as jersey fabric can snap. “Oh, yeah, great,” he said. “One freakin’ picnic after another.” But his behavior belied his outburst as he jumped off the chair and gave Chuck what might be called an affectionate look. Almost a smile, which was a lot for Jason.