Mix-up in Miniature (22 page)

It didn’t take
long for my crafter friends to descend on the new-to-them dollhouse in my atrium. On Fridays we worked on our individual miniatures, but on Wednesday evenings we typically worked on one project together, a house or room box that ended up at a children’s center or on the table of a charity auction.

I hadn’t intended to offer Varena’s dollhouse for the evening, since it wasn’t mine to offer, but I saw right away that it was going to be difficult if not impossible to rein in my group. The ladies hardly said hello before they’d flicked all the switches and exclaimed over the thoroughly modern lighting in the house. Then they plunged in with ideas and suggestions, rummaging in their tool boxes and totes.

“It’s been so long since we’ve had a modern style to work on,” said Mabel Quinlan, our oldest member and an inveterate beader. “I think the foyer needs a chandelier and maybe a sculpture with primary colors. I’m thinking of red seed beads and yellow cat’s-eyes to begin with. And some bright blue tube beads, I think.”

Mabel settled at the picnic table Henry had set up along one wall of the atrium, the working area. She opened her bead case, mumbling to herself about sizes and colors. She was on her way. Who was I to take away an octogenarian’s fun with small details like the ownership of the house?

Karen Striker, who was a new mother, had her eye on the nursery as everyone predicted.

“I saw this cool toy organizer that’s very modern looking,” she said. “It’s just rows of bins in a sleek frame. I could probably make it with found objects. I’ve been collecting small pillboxes. I can paint them to go with the primary colors on the walls.” And Karen was on her way.

Gail Musgrave, our city councilwoman and a new grandmother, had her eye on one of the other bedrooms, a kids’ room judging by the bunk beds and shelves of toys. “I’m torn between that and the nursery. I saw this neat circular crib in a catalog. You can remove pieces of the circumference as the baby grows, and eventually it becomes a toddler’s bed or two chairs,” Gail told us. “Imagine! I think I can make it in miniature using one of those mesh clip containers from an office supply store.”

“Or you could use the basket strawberries come in,” Karen said.

“Or the netting from a sack of those small potatoes,” Mabel said, sorting through her trays for the right red, blue, and yellow beads.

“Or instead of looking in your trash for materials, you could crochet the mesh and starch it,” Linda said.

The meeting had officially started.

I knew Susan Giles would be the hardest to win over. Our relocated southern belle, who never met a ruffle she didn’t like, was into soft curves, not the sharp angles of Varena’s modern dollhouse. She’d worked for weeks sewing tiny velvet cushions and embroidering pillowslips for the lavish rooms in a flowery Victorian she’d earmarked for the children’s ward at Lincoln Point’s hospital.

Susan ran her finger along the edges that formed the roof and the interior doorways. She wrinkled her nose. “I don’t know. A working television set in a dollhouse? This one’s just not my style. But I’ll think of something to contribute. Maybe I’ll work on an old-fashioned games carpet for the playroom.” We all approved.

Once she determined the dollhouse was not from a kit, Linda was on board with working on it and announced a plan to use balsawood with a light stain for the base of a coffee table.

“It should have a glass top,” Linda said.

We all knew she meant glass, and not a piece of plastic that looked like glass. Linda would take herself to her workbench where glass and glass-cutting tools were available and the dollhouse would have a made-from-scratch coffee table.

Henry stood next to Linda, nodding, as she pointed out all the flaws he’d already noted when the house first arrived. Unlike Henry, however, who praised it as a most-likely first attempt, Linda wondered why the original recipient didn’t send it to the dump. It helped that she grinned while she gave her judgment.

Once the first rush of ideas was over, but before people settled into chatting and finding materials to work with, I announced an extra attraction for the evening.

“Maddie has a little demonstration for us,” I said.

Henry mimicked a drum roll with his fingers on the table.

A very smiley Maddie stepped to the open back of the dollhouse and asked everyone to gather there. What she said was, “C’mon over here, please,” accompanied by dizzying waves of her arm.

She ran her hand across the back wall of the larger of the upstairs bedrooms. “This looks like an ordinary wall, doesn’t it?” she asked.

Everyone knew to say, “Yes.”

Only then did I realize that in my excitement over retrieving the envelope with its valuable contents, I’d never even had Maddie show me specifically where the secret room was and what it looked like. No wonder she’d felt underappreciated.

Maddie, with her usual flair for drama, ran her hand across the wall again, but this time stopped at one of the red circles and pushed it down. I could almost hear her silent “one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi.”

Half of the thin wooden wall slid along a nearly invisible track, revealing another wall, painted in the same geometric design, about two inches behind it. A small passageway between the two was carpeted in red felt.

Confident that she’d never again forget how to open the panel, Maddie had stashed a chocolate cookie in the tiny hallway. She plucked it out and took a bite, then a bow. The oohs, aahs, and applause caused Maddie’s smile to broaden, though I wouldn’t have thought it was possible.

I felt a swell of pride that Maddie was mine, and in a way, so was the dollhouse, simply because it had finally responded to our probing.

“That’s why you were asking me all those questions about secret rooms, Gerry. I’ll be darned,” Linda said, scratching a spot under her retro beehive hairdo.

Only someone who knew Linda well would have understood that “I’ll be darned” was high praise and meant that Linda was impressed.

“Now I like it,” the recently divorced Susan said. “I’d put a romantic note in that little hallway, send the house out to sea, and see who it brought me.”

“Was there anything in the room when you first opened it?” Gail asked.

I started to speak, but Maddie preempted me. “Nothing important. Just an old envelope,” she said.

—

As
the evening wore on, the featured dollhouse sported many new items. From Susan, a colorful games carpet in the loft, with blocks for checkers, backgammon, and marbles. From Maddie, working with Henry, a new picnic cooler right inside the kitchen door, thanks to my stash of molded Styrofoam packing material. From Mabel, a chandelier of clear plastic with crystal beads.

Gail made headway on the circular crib and Karen simply played with the secret room, trying different items and making up a story for each one.

I wondered what Varena had done with the secret room when the dollhouse was new. Stash away pages of her diary? Hide notes from a boy she liked? I’d have to ask Paige if Varena had ever written a novel with a hidden-treasure theme.

“Who did you say built this house?” Karen asked.

I was speechless for a moment and Henry filled in with “The brother of a friend of Gerry’s.”

Buzzz. Buzzz.

The doorbell was just what I needed while I thought of other details I could share about the house’s architect.

Henry went to the front door and stayed there a few minutes talking to my guest. I strained to listen. Not Skip. An older male voice, but not Charles, fortunately. A voice I may have heard before. I was ready to take a nonchalant stroll to check out the visitor when Henry led him into the atrium.

The newcomer was a man unmistakably related to Varena Young, that is, Mildred Swingle.

Caleb Swingle, tall, but a bit stooped, smiled almost imperceptibly when he saw that his dollhouse was the object of everyone’s attention. “I’m sorry to interrupt your meeting,” he said. “But Mr. Baker here said you’ve all been working on my sister’s dollhouse. I can’t tell you how much that means to me.”

I liked him already.

—

For
the next hour, Caleb became part of the group, quietly explaining the kind of tools he’d worked with as a twelve-year-old, how he’d fashioned the secret room, crudely at first, then in a more sophisticated way as batteries and circuitry improved. He expressed delight with the new window treatment I’d come up with for the smaller bedroom and praised everyone’s efforts to spruce up the old house.

It felt as though Caleb Swingle had been part of the group for years. There were a lot of things I wanted to know about the man and his family, but for now I enjoyed watching him bask in the praise and appreciation my crafter friends heaped on him.

The ladies of the club were so taken with the builder of the newest dollhouse, I knew I’d never tell them that he was an ex-con who’d been stalking me for a few days.

—

Once
the ladies had dispersed, I went to the front bedroom to say good night to Maddie, leaving the men to continue talking. I’d already learned how old they were when they got their first serious woodworking kits (ten for Caleb, eight for Henry), what their first projects had been (a model boat for Caleb, a log cabin for Henry), which kind of glue sets fastest (yellow for both), and the best use of rubber bands (as clamps while the glue dries).

Lying on her baseball sheets, Maddie struggled to stay awake long enough to ask me the most important question of the evening.

“Did you tell Uncle Skip, Grandma?”

I didn’t have to ask what she meant. “No, sweetheart. That’s up to you, whether you want to tell him or not.”

“Do you think I should?”

Why did a child’s questions get tougher every year?

“I don’t see why, unless you think you’ll feel better. Uncle Skip wasn’t really affected by what you did.”

“Except I couldn’t help him on the computer.”

“True, but you were a great help with the secret room in the dollhouse. You don’t need a computer to be smart.”

“Did I do a good job tonight?”

“Outstanding.” I ruffled her curls for emphasis.

“I don’t think I’ll tell anyone.”

“I think that’s a good decision for now. You know, some day something might come up and you might feel like telling Uncle Skip, or someone else, what happened.” How many weasel words had I fit into that one sentence? “But don’t worry about that now. You can explain to Uncle Skip that you’re just recovering from a nasty bug and you’ve been catching up with homework and you’re going to be your old self very soon. All of that is true.”

“Thanks, Grandma.”

“Did I tell you lately how smart and wonderful you are?” I asked.

She smiled. “Tell me again.”

I did, and that was all it took to get her to sleep.

—

The
atrium was chilly, but neither Henry nor Caleb nor I wanted to move from the site of the dollhouse. There wasn’t much left of Wednesday night, but the three of us continued to sit there, with different drinks, and talk as if it were the middle of the day. And as if we were old friends.

I accepted Caleb’s apology for his unconventional methods of communicating and following me home.

“And for frightening me in the woods?” I asked, with a smile.

“That, too. Only when I saw them take Charles into the police building tonight did I think it was safe for me to surface.”

“Understood,” Henry said.

Easy for him to say.

We went back and forth from expressions of sadness at the loss of Varena to beautiful memories of her to ugly times when, as he put it, Caleb hit bottom.

“It was my idea to break it off,” he said. “I didn’t want my niece and nephew knowing what a loser their uncle was. A gambler. A thief. No way were they going to be visiting me in prison. Especially Adam. He was old enough for us to have a real relationship.”

“Adam has only the best memories of you.”

Caleb’s rheumy eyes lit up when I told him the story of Adam and the hot dogs. “I hope they’ll let me back in their lives. It’s going to be quite a shock, I know.”

“You mean Alicia and Adam don’t know you’re alive?”

I hadn’t meant to be so blunt, but Caleb didn’t seem to mind answering.

“I didn’t get in touch with Varena until about a year ago, after I paid off the debt as the court ordered. I didn’t want her to think I was looking for money. She would have given it to me in a minute. And she took me back without so much as a harsh word.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” I said, doing my best to hold back tears.

“We talked about how to deal with the children, but then this issue with Charles came up and we decided to take care of one thing at a time.”

“Do you mind telling us how Varena came to be suspicious of Charles?” I asked.

“She got a statement in the mail by mistake. Charles usually intercepted them, but somehow Varena learned of a bank account she didn’t know she had, and it went on from there. She asked me to look into it before going to anyone official.” Caleb’s eyes watered as he talked. “Now, I think she might be alive if she’d gone to the authorities right away.”

“You don’t know that,” Henry said, leaning over, putting his hand on Caleb’s shoulder.

“If I hadn’t been so stupid, I could have been her financial manager myself and none of this would have happened.”

“Were you arguing with them that afternoon?”

“Yes, and I stormed out because Varena seemed to be falling for his story. I ended up sneaking back and putting the ledger sheets…well, you know the rest of the story. I knew how much Varena cared for Paige and felt I could trust her. Now, I realize, if I’d stayed behind…”

My heart went out to Caleb, a man with a great burden. I hoped Varena’s children would be willing to brighten what was left of his life.

Dum, ta da dum, ta da dum, ta da dum.

Skip, one of very few people who could call at this hour and not send me into a panic that someone near and dear was in the ER.

“Thought you’d want to know we searched Charles Quentin’s home and found a cloth with blood all over it. He must have used it to clean the weapon.”