7 Madness in Miniature (14 page)

Bebe had been watching my reaction. “Oh, no, Gerry,” she said. “You have that look, like all self-righteous. Are you going to tell Skip?”

Lately, Bebe seemed to have a never-ending number of ways to aggravate me. I tried to recall what her personality was like before the takeover (her term) by SuperKrafts. My assessment was: not that different; she’d always seemed to have a chip on her shoulder. I remembered her nasty divorce from Jake Mellon, a tax attorney who took his business to another state to get away from her, as well as other shop-related troubles with vendors and employees. Since I had no such worries, I cut her some slack and kept my composure. “What I’m going to do is tell Jeff to tell Skip,” I answered.

“Kinda the opposite of what you told me,” Bebe said. “You said not to tell the police.”

“Because I didn’t believe your story,” I said, miffed again that I had to explain myself when all I’d tried to do was protect her. “Jeff, on the other hand, has valuable information.”

“How can it help Catherine if I tell them I found Craig’s body?” Jeff asked.

“You can help the police pin down the timeline. You know what time you were able to get in. You say the door was propped open?”

“You sound like you don’t believe him,” Bebe said.

“What time was it, by the way?” I asked, choosing not to acknowledge Mama Bear. I was also distracted by the idea that security at SuperKrafts did not befit a major New York–based corporation. Not only had they purchased inferior cameras that were recalled, but no one noticed the back door was open?

“It wasn’t too late,” Jeff said. “Before sunset, not long after I closed up, maybe seven-thirty?”

One hour after the earthquake, which was consistent with the theory that the killer had taken advantage of the quake to cover the murder. Also, if he was telling the truth, Jeff’s alibi was still intact, that he’d been in his store at six thirty-two.

“That’s a big piece of information,” I said. “If you really want to help Catherine, that’s how you can do it—talk to the police.”

“I see what you mean,” Jeff said. “And knowing the door was propped open, that matters, too, so absolutely anyone in town or three towns over could have gotten in and killed him.”

“Including Catherine,” Bebe said.

One could never say that Bebe didn’t make herself clear.

I felt great relief when I heard the key turn in the lock on my front door, a few yards from where we sat in my atrium. Not only would I have my granddaughter back, but I would have gotten away without making a commitment to work on the Palmer case as if I were a cop, no matter whose friend or relative had been arrested for the crime.

* * *

In
the next few minutes, there was a significant regrouping in my atrium as Maddie bounded in, Skip following. Bebe and Jeff beat a hasty retreat after a cursory greeting to Skip. I could believe they’d had a big enough dose of the LPPD to last a while. Skip stayed only long enough to explain that he simply wanted to drop Maddie off and had to rush next door to June’s “because she texted and said we had something important to talk about.”

I wondered what that could be?

I was happy to have Maddie to myself again but also eager to know how Skip had fared with her. Had the swimming session relaxed them both enough to have the open conversation I’d envisioned? Had Skip found it easier to deal with Maddie than with June, or was he stymied by women of all ages?

As I was debating whether to broach the tender subjects of Taylor and boys myself, Maddie came up with her own plan. “Can we do the chart now?” she asked. “The one with the earthquake alibis,” she added, responding to my confused look. Charts were not something I chose to think about on a regular basis.

I rummaged in my purse among the detritus of the day—receipts, wrappers, tissues, Fred Bates’s business card—to pull out the odds and ends of notes I’d made on the reported whereabouts of my little group of suspects. I felt a pang of guilt as I came across the piece of paper Jeanine had given me with the titles of her boyfriend’s books of poetry. I doubted I’d ever follow through and look them up, let alone read them. I’d have to come up with an excuse, but not right now. I picked out the alibi notes and gave them to Maddie to compile.

“You can probably put these together faster than I can,” I said.

“I can’t believe you did this by hand,” she said, shaking her head, causing a red curl to fall in front of her eyes. “You know, if you had a smartphone, you’d be able to type right into a notes app and then I could have just ported them and then…”—she looked at me and caught me rolling my eyes—“Never mind,” she said.

Maddie disappeared into her computer and came back to the atrium table about twenty minutes later. She placed one printed copy of a nicely laid-out chart in front of me and another in front of her seat. “I made an extra copy for Uncle Skip,” she said, while lowering her skinny body to the chair. She brushed back her curls and we were ready for a high-level meeting.

She allowed me a couple of minutes of silence to study the chart (sometimes the word itself caused my jaw to tighten). I observed first the headings for each column: NAME, LOCATION, WHAT HAPPENED, DIRECTION, and then read the entries:

Megan
KenTucky Inn
coffeemaker/ice bucket shook, glass broke
?

Catherine
KenTucky Inn
hotel clock shook and slid
?

Jeff
inside his store
games toppled
W

Maisie
home
no movement

Bebe
?
?
?

Leo
hotel (?)
?
?

Jeanine
Seward’s Folly
filters fell, coffee spilled
W

Grandma
home w/Maddie
vase and bowl fell and broke
W, W

I smiled when I saw the addition of “Grandma,” and my alibi. I understood why Bebe’s and Leo’s rows were incomplete—Bebe had now retracted her initial claim to have been at ground zero, and Leo had escaped any attempt on my part to obtain his alibi. But I was confused by the extra heading, DIRECTION, and by the question marks and the “Ws” in that column.

“You did an amazing job,” I said, following my longtime rule as a teacher—always lead with the positive.

“What’s wrong, Grandma?” Maddie asked. Her skills at knowing how I operated went way back to her toddler days. “What don’t you understand?”

“Nothing’s wrong, but I haven’t seen this last column before.”

“It means ‘west.’ That’s the point of the chart,” she said, with remarkable patience. “Remember, I told you that when the earthquake wave comes in, it has a direction, and things fall on one side of the room or another.” She’d just begun and I was already struggling to understand her explanation, but that wasn’t her fault (so to speak). I still had a hard time thinking of earthquakes as waves and not as underground explosions, which made more sense to me. Maddie continued as if she were teaching her slowest student. “So, like, the vase fell from the west side of our atrium and the bowl fell from the west side of the kitchen. Nothing fell from the east side of any of the rooms.”

“So, if one of these people said something fell from the east side of a room, they’d be lying?”

Maddie’s smile said I aced the quiz, but I had my doubts. “Is it really that simple?”

Maddie shrugged her shoulders. “My teacher says it’s more complicated, but I saw it on TV once where the police solved a murder by figuring out which side got damaged. A husband pushed a bookcase on his wife, but it was the wrong wall.”

It wasn’t my place to question Maddie’s TV watching, but it was possible that I’d bring it up with her mother at an appropriate time. For now, I sat back, wondering what we’d accomplished by developing the chart, other than involving Maddie and bringing her a bit of satisfaction during a rough time. Otherwise, it seemed to be a dead end, maybe even good content for a school report on the soon-to-be-famous three-point-one. But as an aid in a police investigation? I didn’t see it. Still, I wasn’t going to dash a little girl’s hopes.

“I think we should fill in these question marks, don’t you?” I said.

Maddie’s reaction, a wide grin and a modest round of applause, told me I’d made the right choice.

“I know what the inside of Seward’s Folly looks like and where they keep the boxes of filters. Remember I got a box of them for my mom once? They’re on the side that looks out on Video Jeff’s across the street, and that’s west, right?” Right, but she didn’t wait for my answer. “That’s how come I could put the W where I did in Jeanine’s row. But we need to find out which wall the stuff is on at the KenTucky Inn. I already looked online at their website. There’s not much on it, just a picture and an address and how to make reservations and stuff. The big hotels, like the ones in Los Angeles or New York, they all have photos and you see the exact way the rooms look.”

“Not you, too,” I said, before I knew it.

“Huh?”

“Never mind. I’m sorry for interrupting. What were you saying about the big hotels?”

“They show you the layout of the rooms sometimes. But the KenTucky Inn just has stuff like whether there’s a hair dryer or a coffeemaker. So, I was thinking, maybe we should go there and ask them. Or look at the rooms. Do you think they’d let us?”

Ah, a field trip. Maddie’s favorite thing. Maybe that was what this whole chart idea had been leading up to. “Great idea,” I said. “You know the people who run it are good friends of mine. We can go tomorrow. If they’re too busy, we’ll make another plan.”

“Yeah, like, we could rent a helicopter and fly next to the windows and look in.”

Why not?

Skip didn’t surface
for the rest of the afternoon and early evening. So, over a “boring” dinner of roast chicken, green beans, and plain brown rice (I put my foot down against pizza again), I tried to get Maddie to talk about her time with him.

“Did you and Uncle Skip have a nice time at Willie’s?” I asked.

“Yup.”

“Did they have your favorite blueberry bagel?”

“Yup.”

“Was it fun at the pool?”

“Yup.”

Nothing. “I had a good day, too,” I offered.

“You want to know what we talked about?” she asked.

“Yup,” I said, getting a grin from her.

“Police work.”

I tried to keep my fork steady in my hand. “You mean ‘The Caysh’?” I asked, putting quotes in the air. We’d laughed often about how she’d loved to use the phrase “The Case” when she was still too young to get her sibilants right.

“No, not The Caysh,” she said, smiling as if those days were eons ago. “I wanted to know what it’s like to be a detective. Uncle Skip says a lot of what cops do every day is very boring, like writing reports and filling out lots of forms at a desk.”

“That doesn’t sound like much fun,” I said, grateful to Skip for not making his job sound glamorous. Teachers do a lot of dull paperwork, too, I almost admitted to her, as well as doctors and artists, but if Maddie were weighing criminal justice against education or other alternatives, I wanted to tip the scales against the police academy.

“Yeah, but a lot of it can be fun, too,” she said. “He talks to all kinds of people and he says that’s the most important part of solving a case. If you do it right, they’ll tell you what you need to know. And he says cops have to be counselors, sometimes, and peacemakers and coaches, and even stand in for parents.”

“You think you’d like that part?”

“Uh-huh. Like, we hear about all the clues and everything, like fingerprints and DNA. But Uncle Skip says fingerprints are overrated, because you almost never get really good ones. When the crooks break in, they aren’t going to roll their thumbs perfectly on just the right kind of surface, like we did when we got fingerprinted at school. You have to listen really carefully when you interview people and that’s how you figure things out. I almost told Uncle Skip about our chart, because that came from talking to people, right?”

“It certainly did,” I said. I’d heard this description of police procedure many times from Skip, but I was impressed at how well my granddaughter understood his message. Besides, it was clear from her long-winded, excited state, that Maddie was coming out of her funk. I hoped the letter to Taylor, if there were a letter to Taylor, would give her the response she needed and remove this latest obstacle to her happiness. I realized I couldn’t protect Maddie from heartbreak forever, but surely I ought to be able to do it until she’d finished college. And graduate school. And perhaps became a grandmother herself.

“But the chart wasn’t ready yet this afternoon,” Maddie continued, “and anyway I want to surprise him.”

Just as well that we didn’t “surprise” Skip. I had mixed thoughts about how he’d handle Maddie’s creativity. Would he humor her? Actually use the chart? I knew Maddie was as eager as I was to find out.

Maddie pushed a green bean to the edge of her plate and added about a quarter of a stick of butter to her rice. “You tried to get Uncle Skip to find out what I didn’t want to tell you,” she said.

She’d caught me off guard, but I managed to pretend I was pretending to be shocked, sort of like a double-agent ploy I’d seen in the spy girl movie. “Whatever do you mean?”

“I can’t tell you yet, Grandma,” she said, serious.

I was glad she was close enough for me to ruffle her curls. “That’s fine.”

“I didn’t tell Uncle Skip either. But it was so much fun hanging around with him.”

“I’m glad.” And also dismayed that Maddie had to be in trouble before we’d arrange a nice day with her cousin-once-removed.

“I think I’ll be able to tell you pretty soon, though,” she added.

I wondered if her timeline had anything to do with mail delivery.

* * *

By
ten o’clock, when Maddie was tucked in (not that I ever let her hear me use that phrase) I was ready for quiet time with a new issue of a dollhouse magazine. Now and then I contributed ideas to this miniatures periodical and others. I decided that the project Maddie and I had worked on for a while after dinner might be worth writing up for their tips page. We’d decided that the imaginary surrogate who would occupy our tiny police department cubicle-in-progress should have a salad for lunch. We shaved crayons (three shades of green) to make realistic lettuce, and whittled cheese, chopped olives, and carrots, all from Maddie’s abandoned crayon box. We rummaged in my “recyclables” drawer, full of cast-offs like toothpaste tube tops and bottle caps, and found a suitable salad bowl among them.

A good-night call from Henry came at the usual time, about ten-thirty, unless we were together.

“No mail yet,” he said. “I’m thinking you should have slipped the letter to me somehow and I could have put it under Taylor’s door to speed things up.”

“It will all work out,” I said, and recounted my conversation with June. I planned to consult June in the future whenever a Maddie issue surfaced, no matter what her future with Skip turned out to be. He’d proven useless along those lines so far.

I clicked off with Henry when a call came from Bev, which, like Henry’s, didn’t count against quiet time. I made yet another promise to go shopping with her tomorrow.

“Shoes and lunch,” I said.

“I know you don’t want me to go barefoot down the aisle,” she said. “Although in this heat, who could blame me?”

We chatted for a while, covering Maddie’s troubles (info to come, I told her) and Skip’s whereabouts (his car was still parked outside my house).

When Bev and I hung up, I took up my miniatures magazine again, but found I was waiting for late-night company. Who would it be tonight? Probably not Leo or Megan pleading for my help with getting Catherine released. Neither of them seemed to care. All that was left to motivate me was my own curiosity (I liked to call it obsession with justice) and the fact that a woman I’d taught and later worked with for a year might be falsely accused of murder.

There was still a possibility that Skip would drop in. He was always welcome, but especially when I needed information from him. There had to have been something more than an anonymous call to have precipitated an arrest. What a disappointment, then, when I heard his car drive off around midnight.

Dum dum, da da dum, da da dum.

At least he was calling to say good night. “Hi, Skip,” I said.

“Hey, Aunt Gerry, I’m just driving off for home. In case you had some cookies waiting, wrap them up, okay? I’m beat.” Rather than remind him that I know the sound his car makes when it takes off from right outside my front door, I thanked him for letting me know. “And I wanted to say thanks for talking to June today. She told me what a huge help you were. I think we’re back on track,” he continued.

“How nice,” I said. “Maybe we can barter for some information on Catherine Duncan’s arrest.”

He laughed, as if I hadn’t meant it. “No, really, thanks,” he said, and clicked off, leaving me frustrated, with a sigh no one could hear.

I wished I knew what I’d said to patch things up between Skip and June; I might be able to use those words again for another purpose.

In spite of Skip’s lack of cooperation, for the first time in a while, I felt progress was being made, due solely to Maddie’s chart. I was warming up to the trip to the KenTucky Inn and the potential of clearing up the life-and-death matters of Craig Palmer’s murder and Catherine Duncan’s arrest. I was a little disappointed to realize that since Skip had been with Maddie, then June, all day and evening, he wouldn’t have been involved in the inevitable search of Catherine’s room and belongings. Not that he’d been much use to me anyway lately.

I headed back toward my bedroom and noticed a piece of paper on the floor of the hallway. The note, with titles of books of poetry, must have fallen out of my purse when I retrieved the scraps of paper for Maddie’s chart. I had to give Jeanine credit for trying to support her boyfriend’s career goals. I supposed it wouldn’t hurt me to give an hour to the young man’s work and think up something positive to say about his poems. I looked at the titles of the three collections—“You Never Dream Alone,” “Pretty Days,” and “Yesterday’s World Again.” I wondered how long the books were. Maybe I could read just one, the shortest. It would be a good chance to visit with my friend, Rosie, who owned the book shop.

I smoothed out the paper. The handwriting looked familiar but I couldn’t imagine when I would have seen it before. From her early days baby-sitting Maddie, Jeanine and I communicated by phone or e-mail. Something about the flourishes on the uppercase
Y
and
P
niggled at my brain. Each of those letters had more loops than necessary and more elaboration than was present in the rest of the words. It was almost as if Jeanine were trying to mimic an illuminated manuscript where the first letter of the passage was oversized and full of curlicues.

Just like the letters in the notes sent to Catherine, recommending in no uncertain terms that she get out of town.

When I finally grasped what the similarity meant, I was sure there’d been a crazy mistake. I wished I’d agreed to take custody of the notes as Catherine had asked. Surely, if I could compare the handwriting side by side, I’d see my misjudgment. Too late now, since the police had most likely found them.

I drew in my breath. Should I show Skip Jeanine’s note to me? A series of
no
’s ran through my head. It was ridiculous to suspect Jeanine of writing the notes to Catherine. Jeanine was one of the most level-headed, mild-mannered young women I knew. Besides, she had nothing to gain by Catherine’s leaving town. She’d hardly be affected at all by a shift in management of the store or its employees. It wasn’t as if Jeanine were after a career with SuperKrafts. But wasn’t it Jeanine who’d brought up the psychology of a killer during our last conversation? Had that been merely the curiosity of a future psych major? Or something else? I thought back to Maddie’s chart and Jeanine’s alibi. She’d said she’d been in Seward’s Folly having coffee with some friends. That should be easy enough to check out. And if it didn’t? I tucked the paper back into my purse. There’s another explanation, I thought. Wasn’t there?

I knew I’d have to talk to Jeanine about my suspicion. I had no idea how to approach her. I could email her, ask to meet. But my computer was in Maddie’s room; I hadn’t moved it from its position during the days when Maddie didn’t bring her own laptop. I’d have to wait till morning.

I got in bed, knowing my peaceful night’s sleep wouldn’t come easily. I composed at least four versions of an email to Jeanine in my head, before drifting off.

* * *

On
Tuesday morning, I was as eager as Maddie was to start the day. We had the KenTucky Inn to visit, shoes to shop for with Aunt Bev, and the mail to check for a letter from Taylor. I also needed to contact Jeanine.

Maddie was up and ready to hit the road by nine. I stalled her a bit, wanting to arrive at the inn after their guests left for a day of business or sightseeing. Our police station replica held her interest for a while as we cut out images of police magazines, glued them to foam board, and strewed them around the miniature cubicle.

“Uncle Skip has aspirin on his desk,” Maddie noted.

“Easy,” we said, in unison.

Maddie cut a label from a newspaper ad for aspirin, and wrapped it around an appropriate-size plastic cylinder, gluing it in place. Another small piece of plastic tubing served as a tumbler, and Uncle Skip was on his way to pain relief. Who could deny the pleasure of instant gratification achieved by doing miniatures? No wonder it was often hard to reenter the life-size world.

* * *

My
stalling strategy worked. By the time we arrived at the KenTucky Inn, only a mile or so past downtown Lincoln Point, the nicely paved parking lot behind the three-story Colonial was nearly empty. I’d heard that the Olsons’ son, now in his thirties, had begged his parents over the years to forget his childish mandate and change the name of the inn, to no avail. I’d gotten used to zoning out as I passed the grammatically skewed sign and hardly caught a glimpse of it this time. I smiled as I recalled a science fiction device in a short story I’d read, and mentally sent an electric pulse through the state of California, eliminating all uppercase letters in the middles of words.

Innkeepers Loretta and Mike Olson had moved to town from New Hampshire about the same time that Ken and I arrived from the Bronx. Considering the relative distances, we felt we’d been neighbors back “home” and became good friends. After a couple of years, the Olsons bought a large abandoned home and remade it into a near-replica of a New England–style inn. The white clapboard building held up to twenty-five guests (which made me question why SuperKrafts managers Leo Murray and Craig Palmer thought they would have felt crowded here). The inn was beautifully maintained, the house surrounded by two lovely verandas lined with salvia plants, nearly two feet tall and densely populated with red, pink, and lavender blossoms that filled the air with a fruity scent. I remembered the advantages of salvia—low maintenance and a great attraction for hummingbirds—and resolved to add a row of the plants to my front garden. It would be a much more appropriate item on my to-do list than “find Craig’s killer,” I reminded myself.

I’d been to more than a few weddings here and knew that the interior was equally reminiscent of New England, with a cozy, dark-paneled library, handmade quilts on the beds in every room, and a lounge with a handsome but unnecessary-for-California fireplace. It was as if the Olsons had transported their homestead from three thousand miles away. Bev had wanted to have her wedding here, but occupancy laws limited the inn’s gatherings to one hundred or fewer, and in the end, Bev and Nick couldn’t whittle down their list. We were resigned to celebrating their marriage in San Jose, at a hotel the size my New York visitors would feel comfortable with.