Mix-up in Miniature (10 page)

Ms. Overbee raised her eyebrows, pushed her chin out, and shrugged her shoulders suggestively. She pointed at me, as if declaring me the winner in a guessing game. Where was the rigid assistant-not-servant of yesterday? Apparently Varena’s death had set her free.

“All Paige got was an acknowledgment, her name buried in a list of other resource people at the beginning of the books. She was not a happy worker, let me tell you.”

“Did Paige and Varena argue in front of you?” I asked.

“Constantly.”

“That must have made for an unpleasant work environment,” Henry said, giving Ms. Overbee a sympathetic look.

“Beyond unpleasant.” Ms. Overbee rolled her eyes. “Varena insisted that it was her fan base that sold books, her name, not Paige’s, and Paige’s name on a book would mean nothing.”

I wondered whether those were Varena’s sentiments or Ms. Overbee’s. If they were Varena’s feelings, I doubted she’d have expressed them with a screwed-up face, as Laura did.

“I don’t know much about the publishing industry, but I’m sure you do. Do you think Paige had a point?” I asked. “If she actually wrote the books, shouldn’t she receive credit?”

“I suppose if I were in her shoes, I’d feel more than a little frustrated, leaving the lap of luxury on the Heights every night for a dorm room.” Ms. Overbee rolled her eyes. “A flowery comforter doesn’t hide the fact that all you have is a bunk bed and a plywood-and-cinderblock bookcase.”

I wished I knew how Laura’s lifestyle compared—did she have an expensive duvet-and-dust-ruffle set and a Chippendale case for her books?

Laura hadn’t finished her rant against Paige. “If you ask me, Varena hired her more because of her interest in miniatures than any particular literary talent. I’m the one who’s been around awhile, managing Varena’s fans, and believe me, their devotion was to
the
Varena Young. They certainly would not accept some college-student wannabe.”

“So Paige wanted credit as co-author?” I asked, still trying to fathom what the disagreement was about between Paige and Varena.

“Well, preferably her own contract, of course, but Paige would have settled for a
with
.” Our turn for raised eyebrows. “Like ‘by Varena Young with Paige Taggart.’ Then she could eventually get her own deals when Varena retired.”

“Or died,” I said, surprising myself.

“Or died,” Ms. Overbee said, and took another long pink sip.

Act One had ended. Ms. Overbee had established Paige Taggart as a suspect in Varena Young’s murder. Her performance was almost good enough for me to eliminate Paige then and there, but I tried to keep an open mind.

The three of us took deep breaths and sat back.

To start Act Two, I brought up an item from my own agenda. “I wonder if you could help with another matter, Ms. Overbee?”

She waved her hands, as if trying to clap but missing the mark. “Call me Laura, please.”

I loved being on a first-name basis with a host of people who lived and worked on Robert Todd Heights. “I have some questions about Corazón Cruz,” I said.

“The former housekeeper.” Laura seemed unruffled, which surprised me. I’d hoped there was some controversy to exploit in their relationship.

“Yes. First, how long was she with the family?”

Laura pursed her lips and rocked her head from side to side. Making an estimate. “Not very long. About three months, I’d say. The household manager who’d been with Varena forever died last summer. If it’s really important, I can check the records and get back to you.”

Cooperation above and beyond. Stunning for a woman who tried hard to close the door in my face less than twenty-four hours ago. I was impressed by Alicia Rockwell’s reach. I wondered if Laura Overbee was jockeying for a way to be kept on at the estate. As Alicia’s assistant? I guessed the whole question of who would live or work there, if anyone, was up for grabs.

“And Corazón was let go because…?”

“Beats me. All I know is that Charles sent her packing without a word to the rest of us.”

“He could do that?”

“He does it all the time. No one asks if he has the right. We all just assumed Varena put him in charge. Most of the time, the decisions haven’t had much effect on the rest of us anyway.”

“He fired Corazón after Varena’s body was found?”

Henry had disappeared again. I wished we’d had time to strategize about the two French log cabin interviews. I hoped he didn’t think I wanted him gone from the table.

“Yes.” Laura answered my question emphatically. “I know for a fact that Charles immediately offered her a handsome severance package and a one-way ticket to Mexico.”

“Did that seem strange to anyone?”

“Not more than usual. Charles has some strange ways.”

“Had he been at the estate all afternoon?”

“He’d arrived early, around three-thirty, for a dinner meeting. Varena often did that. She’d combine things, arranging a lunch or dinner with one or all of us.”

“Were you invited to last evening’s dinner?”

“No. Just Charles. I was all packed to leave for the day when…”

I was struck by Laura’s tearing up. It seemed to stem from genuine sorrow this time and I chided myself for thinking ill of her.

I put my hand on her arm, hoping I’d wiped all the sugar granules from my morning bun off my fingers. “I’m sorry to upset you all over again, Laura.” I spotted Henry at the newspaper rack in a corner and waved him over. “We’re leaving now anyway. You take a minute to feel better.”

“Thanks, Geraldine. It really is a shock.”

“I know.”

She pulled a card out of her purse and handed it to me. “Give me a call, okay? If you have any more questions or anything.” I took it and filed it in my purse next to Alicia Rockwell’s card.

I was feeling more and more like an investigator.

—

I wondered
if it would look silly if I were to take out my notebook and pen and write while I walked to my car. I wanted desperately to jot down important phrases from this morning’s meetings before I forgot them. I recited a few to myself. Uncle Caleb died many years ago. Paige found Varena’s body. Alicia knows of no dollhouse delivery. Laura blames Paige, is really upset. Charles is in charge, fired Corazón. Adam distracted by divorce.

“Should we stay around awhile and see who happens to drop in next?” Henry asked.

“Thanks, but if I eat one more French pastry or sip another fancy espresso drink, I won’t be able to get the seat belt around me.” I buckled myself into my car on the passenger side, glad I didn’t have to shift my concentration to driving.

My mind then took its usual wild trip, free associating. I thought of my chubby friend Linda’s woeful complaint that I could eat a dozen French pastries a day and not gain an ounce, while all she had to do was look into the tubs of ice cream at Sadie’s and she’d feel her stomach expand.

We’d never tested her theory, but it was true that I had the skinny gene and had passed it not to my son, Richard, but to Maddie.

Maddie, who still owed me an explanation about her parents’ phone call, I remembered.

This day’s work had hardly begun. It was a good thing I’d had a hearty breakfast.

As Henry drove
north on Springfield Boulevard toward my Eichler neighborhood, I strained to get a glimpse of Joshua Speed Woods to our left. I was hoping for a fall palette, but it was well past prime time for autumn colors, which even at their peak were dim here in the lowlands south of San Francisco. Things were better at higher altitudes, where there were spots that could pass for fall, but it had been a while since I’d visited any of those locations. Not for want of Henry’s attempts to drag me away from Lincoln Point, but there was always a crafts show, a tutoring schedule, a volunteer shift at the library, a commitment to take care of Maddie—something to keep me home.

And now a murder to investigate.

Henry maneuvered expertly around the construction site at the Gettysburg-Springfield intersection.

“Do you think Laura Overbee followed Alicia? Or me?” I asked.

“She certainly came with an agenda.”

I nodded. “To throw suspicion on Paige.”

“Remember, Alicia admitted she’d already told the staff she was going to hire you.”

“Don’t say hire. I don’t think I’ve ever been”—I stumbled—“well, hired, sight-unseen before. Certainly not to do anything like police work.”

“Your reputation precedes you. It’s conceivable that Laura Overbee followed you and then saw Alicia and decided she’d like to get in on the action at an early stage of your investigation.”

“Don’t say my investigation,” I said, poking the driver. “It makes me even more nervous that one of the suspects is following me, though I know nothing that should worry anyone.”

“You have enviable skills,” Henry said.

“How’s this for a skilled investigation? I just realized I didn’t even ask Laura about Varena’s brother, dead or alive, or if she had a forwarding address for Corazón. She, or Charles, must know where to send a final check, don’t you think?” I covered my eyes, as unhappy as if I’d just gotten word of my students’ poor SAT results. “I’m not good at ad hoc anything.”

“You have Laura’s card, and Alicia’s. I know you. You’ll sit down and get all organized with a list of questions for each of them and before you know it, you’ll have an
aha
moment and figure out who killed your friend.”

I liked it that Henry was so confident of my skills.

One of us had to be.

To prove Henry’s point I took out my cell phone. “You’re right,” I said. “It’s time to get organized.”

“I didn’t necessarily mean right now.”

“Since you’re such a willing chauffeur, I might as well do something useful from this seat. I’m going to call my neighbors and see if anyone was around when the dollhouse was delivered.”

“Wouldn’t they have called you if they saw something like that?

“A dollhouse arriving at my front door? No one would blink an eye.”

“What was I thinking?”

I needed to work out the timeline before I made the calls. I reviewed Monday’s events out loud, so I could have Henry’s input.

“I left my house about two-thirty yesterday to go to a three o’clock meeting at the estate.”

“It’s hard to believe it all started such a short time ago,” Henry said, echoing my own thought.

I paused, allowing myself a moment to remember what seemed like a whirlwind hour behind the gates of Robert Todd Heights on what turned out to be the last afternoon of Varena’s life.

“Afterwards, I went directly to your house. Then Kay and the girls went for ice cream—what time would you say?”

“After Skip’s call.”

“Which was at six-fifteen. Now I remember looking at the clock to check how long it had been since I’d left Varena’s home. I wish I’d known how handy it would have been if I’d taken a log book with me.”

Henry smiled. “We’re figuring it out. Kay and the girls would have landed at your house around seven-fifteen, seven-thirty, and found the dollhouse.”

“Five hours. It’s a long window of opportunity for a delivery.”

“It includes the dinner hour; someone must have been home,” Henry said.

“We’ll see,” I said, with as much optimism as I could muster.

I started with June Chinn, my neighbor to the right, facing my house from the street. June was a tech editor and Skip’s current and longest-running girlfriend. Her Eichler was pale green with dark green trim, a nice complement to my two-tone blue version. There was a good chance June would be around now and also last evening since she often worked from her well-equipped home office.

I was delighted to hear her voice. Success on my first call. Then she launched into what was on her mind. “Hey, Gerry. What’s up with that woman who was murdered in the rich part of town? You usually have the skinny on such things.”

“It turns out, she was a friend of mine.”

The long pause told me I should have led up to the announcement more slowly. I hadn’t meant to sound abrupt.

“Oh, Gerry, I’m so sorry. Me and my big mouth. I haven’t talked to Skip or I would have known. We’re kind of on the outs.”

Uh-oh. I didn’t want to hear more bad news. “What’s wrong?”

“Oh, never mind. It’s the usual. Taking our relationship to the next level and so on.”

“Do you want to talk about it?” I hoped not right now.

“No, no. I’m sorry about your friend. On the news this morning, they said she was a famous writer and I’d never heard you talk about her.”

“It’s my fault, June. I shouldn’t have dropped that so unceremoniously. You couldn’t have known, and actually I’d just met her. But we clicked right away and I feel more of a loss than I expected.”

“I totally get it. Wow.”

I pictured the totally cute June, sitting in her sweats, with her straight black hair pulled into a ponytail. Skip’s mother and I were big fans of June, and apparently more eager than the two of them to seal the relationship with a marriage license. I wondered if that was the “next level” disagreement now in effect between them. I wondered which one wanted to go up a step.

“Do they know anything about who killed her?” June asked.

“Not yet.”

“That’s really tough, not even knowing.” A pause and a breath. “Oh, wait, are you working on it, helping Skip?”

“Not really.”

“You are. Great. All is well.”

Another vote of confidence for my detecting skills.

“I have a question for you that’s not connected to the investigation.” Not so far, anyway.

“Shoot.”

I heard the sounds of June taking a long drink from her ever-present water bottle.

“Were you around your house yesterday afternoon?”

“Yeah, I was here all afternoon with my head in my keyboard. We’re working on a new version of a
GUI
—a graphical user interface—that’s supposed to be delivered by the end of the week. That’s why I wasn’t even thinking that the victim could have been someone you knew.”

“Don’t worry about it, June.”

“Now I got you off track. Shoot with your question. Oh, bad choice. I hope your friend wasn’t shot?”

June seemed more hyper than usual; I wondered about the amount of caffeine she’d imbibed this morning.

“No, she wasn’t shot.”

“Whew.”

“There was a delivery to my house yesterday, some time between two-thirty and”—I looked over at Henry, who held up five fingers, then two, then a bent index finger; I smiled—“about seven-thirty in the evening. Did you happen to notice?”

“Gee, you mean like a UPS truck or something?”

“I’m not sure. It’s a very large dollhouse.”

“Hmmm.”

I took that as a “no,” but I persisted. “It wasn’t in a box. So, I’m assuming it probably wasn’t an official delivery service like UPS or FedEx. Maybe just a small truck or an SUV. But it would have taken two people a few minutes to carry it to the front door.”

“Hmmm. Sorry. I didn’t hear any noise or anything. I’m on the other side of the house, though. Did they send the wrong one?”

“Yes.” Close enough.

“Let’s see. Who might have seen something? Mari and Jeremy just got back from vacation this weekend and I know they were planning to take one more day at home. They might have seen something. They’re probably more observant than I am. Do you have their number?”

“Yes, but I’m not at home. Can you give it to me?”

I wrote down that number and those of several other neighbors and thanked June.

“No problem,” she said. “If I think of anything else, I’ll buzz you. And, again, Gerry, I’m—”

I couldn’t take another apology. “You’ve been a big help, June. I hope you can get back to work on your GIU.”

June chuckled and I figured I’d mixed up the letters. I didn’t flub on purpose, but I was glad she’d have a good laugh once I hung up. If she and Skip were on the outs, she might need one. I know I did.

I repeated my story to Mari, who lived on the other side of me.

“Don’t you know where you bought it?” she asked.

“It’s a gift. I think my son is trying to surprise me, but I don’t want to thank him if it was someone else.”

Henry gave me a thumbs-up, apparently not concerned about the easy lie he’d heard from my lips.

I left a message for Shelley and Joel across the street. Next to them were Yvette and Andrea, both of whom worked from home but weren’t aware of a dollhouse delivery.

“I could come by if you need help getting it in the house,” Yvette said, a nice gesture.

After five calls, I had no more information, but I did catch up on what my neighbors had been doing lately and acquired an insight into who was paying attention and how people responded to an off-the-wall question.

I felt like a reporter interviewing for a “man on the street” column. Or a police detective investigating a crime. Neither of which I had credentials for.

My last hope was Esther Willoughby, a nonagenarian who lived by herself in a beige Eichler with brown trim at the corner of the cross street near my home.

It took a few minutes for Esther to come around to my question. First, I heard about her club’s project to knit fifty baby blankets for the firemen’s holiday drive. In a burst of altruistic feelings, I offered to contribute one though it had been years since I’d knit anything bigger than six inches square. Then we reviewed the status of her four children, all older than me, an update from just last week. They were all doing so, so well, but none of them visited as often as she’d like.

Finally, she said, “I was in the front yard tending to my heather and azaleas—some have already turned brown, sorry to say—and I happened to see two men leave your door, Geraldine. It was around five, right after all the four o’clock shows. I switch back and forth, you know.”

I didn’t know, and tried to picture Esther wielding a remote, following several talk shows at once. “Were the men carrying the dollhouse?” I asked, cautiously excited.

“No, no. And I can’t even tell you for sure that they left anything at your house, because I didn’t see them walking to your door, just away from it, empty-handed. They got in a red truck, kind of old and dusty, like the kind George and I had when Lincoln Point was all farm land. Nowadays families have those large types, those SVUs.”

I smiled and empathized with Esther’s mixing up the common letters as I was sure I’d mixed up the acronym for June’s work. The smile was also in honor of the first bit of information I’d had since starting my polling of my neighbors.

I let Esther go on. “I’ll bet these young mothers wouldn’t know what to do if they had to load their kids onto a bus, like I did with my four. We never even owned a car, you know, until my youngest was in high school.”

It was time to cut in before Esther could launch into a discussion of families these days versus those in the good old days.

“Can you describe the men?”

“Oh, dear, they were too far away for me to see any details. I’m sorry. They were husky, though, and white, and walked like they were kinda young, but everyone’s young to me.”

“I know what you mean,” I said, joining her in a laugh.

“They had those baseball caps that all the men wear.”

“Did you happen to see a logo on the cap or anything that would distinguish them?”

“No, sorry, dear. They drove right by me, but with these eyes I have now I couldn’t see inside. I tried, too. Not that I’m nosy, but I do keep watch for strangers in the neighborhood.”

Burglars, beware, with Esther on the job. “You’ve been a big help,” I said, for the second time in several minutes.

It was true. Esther had given me more than anyone else in the neighborhood. I knew from experience that when an older person gave you television shows as time markers, they were usually correct.

“There might be one other thing that could help you,” Esther said.

“What is it?” It always took awhile to leave Esther, whether in person or on the phone. I didn’t have a lot of hope for more information during the long good-bye.

“It probably doesn’t matter, but I did notice an Arizona license plate on the truck those two men were driving. I couldn’t see any numbers though. They weren’t sticking to the speed limit, if you know what I mean.”

“Arizona? You’re sure?”

“You can’t miss Arizona plates. They have a big cactus on the lefthand side. My granddaughter lives there, is how I know, and Terry’s the only one who comes to visit me, even though her parents live right across the bay in Union City. Terry goes to school in Tucson.”

I couldn’t wait to get off the phone and mull over this new information. It was more than I’d gotten all day. However, I couldn’t get away from Esther without a promise to stop in for tea very soon. “And bring that handsome new friend of yours,” Esther said. I knew there was a twinkle in her eyes at that point.

Maybe Alicia Rockwell should have hired Esther for this job.

—

“It’s
something,” Henry said after I filled him in on Esther’s end of the conversation. He’d pulled over while I finished talking.

“And since nothing else was left on my doorstep yesterday, it’s a good bet that we’re looking for an old red pickup with Arizona plates.”

I envisioned our riding around all day scanning every truck’s license plate we passed. I hoped we’d come up with a better idea.

“How old did you say this lady is?” Henry asked.