Mark made a looping motion with his fingers, indicating that his wife might be a little off balance. “I told her the baby isn’t going to notice anything. She’s going to be focused on breathing and eating. When she’s even awake, that is.”
“Can you imagine having the baby arrive home to a room without a finished dollhouse?” Karen asked. Her expression said that the idea was incomprehensible.
“Can we see the house?” Maddie asked, sparing me the need to respond. She’d just unwrapped her third piece of candy. I knew I should have been more solicitous of her eating habits, but what’s a grandmother to do?
With the great patience he’d need to be a good father, Mark released the tailgate of the SUV and removed tape from a large trash bag. The green plastic fell away, unveiling a lovely prebuilt and painted Cape Cod with two floors and an attic.
With siding on the outside walls, sturdy shingles on the peaked roof, and shuttered, double-paned windows, the house might have been able to withstand the difficult weather of the New England coast as well as the real thing.
“I wouldn’t usually get a ready-made, you know, Gerry, but timing is critical at the moment.”
“I won’t tell Linda,” I offered, though I knew even our purist crafter Linda Reed would have excused a mother-to-be for not playing carpenter during her last month of pregnancy.
With Karen’s permission, Maddie and I rummaged through the purchases that were accessible in her totes. Karen had some wonderful finds, like a miniature fireplace set and scatter rugs, as well as many accessories for each room. We came close to accepting her invitation to go inside for a full report on the dollhouse show she’d traveled more than fifty miles to attend, but the sight of miniatures reminded me of my promise to another crafter in our group, Susan Giles. If I couldn’t find her brother’s killer lickety-split, I could at least repair her room box in a timely fashion.
“I wish I’d been to the dollhouse show with Karen. I love Bozo and Koko,” Maddie said, as we settled ourselves on stools in front of Oliver’s room box.
I had fond memories of the two famous clowns, who, under their bulbous red noses and oversized polka-dot outfits, were Phyllis Hedman (Koko) and Barbara Jones (Bozo), the tireless organizers of miniature shows.
We reminisced about shows we’d been to over the past couple of years since Maddie had become involved with miniatures. I remembered an older couple who dressed in identical white suits and offered their beautiful inlaid wood furniture for sale. Maddie tended to remember the accidents—the kids on wheelies who knocked over a miniature book store; the kitchenware vendor who complained about the neighboring miniaturist with “a big butt” (a direct quote from the vendor) who bumped into her table every time he got up and sent mini silverware and tiny spatulas and strainers flying.
It was easy to laugh when we hadn’t been the victims.
The mini construction scene room box of victim Oliver Halbert beckoned and we set to work.
I reattached the Rosie the Riveter poster while Maddie applied paint on a bashed-in corner of the box.
“While you have the brown paint on your brush, maybe you can touch up that workbench top,” I suggested.
Maddie picked up the loosened piece. “This must be new. I don’t remember the flash drive being here,” she said.
Flash drive? Was that anything like flash fiction? Probably not, though I’d read that flash fiction, the designation for stories as brief as fifty words, was undergoing a renaissance thanks to a rash of Internet sites that accepted and even paid writers for it.
I had heard the term “flash drive” as related to computers and had bought one for Richard’s birthday a few years ago, from a catalog, at his request. I wasn’t sure I’d recognize one in the flesh, however. “Where is it?” I asked Maddie.
She pointed to the makeshift finger-length bench top that I’d thought needed a better paint job, the one I assumed Susan had put together in a hurry.
“See, she used a flash drive as the top of the workbench. Wicked.”
I took the item from her hand and looked at the piece of plastic, about three inches long, three quarters of an inch wide, one quarter of an inch thick. Its original red color showed through the sloppy brown brush strokes. I fingered a small metal hook on one end that I hadn’t noticed when the piece was in place in the scene. I thought it might be for threading a key chain through it.
“What exactly is this used for?” I asked the resident specialist.
“It’s just, like, another drive for your computer. You can transfer files with it. You put stuff on it and then you can take it away and plug it into another computer and work on the files, or you can give it to someone for their computer as long as they have a USB port. Are you getting this, Grandma?”
“Barely.”
Maddie took the flash drive back from me and pulled on one end, removing a cover and revealing a rectangular metal protrusion. “Okay, see? You plug this end into any computer, just like you’d do with a keyboard or a mouse, and you can download whatever is on here, onto your computer.”
“So, if there’s information on that drive, I’d be able to get to it from my computer?” I knew I sounded dense, but this was no time for pretense.
She handed the drive back as if it were nothing important, just another mini bench top that had been badly painted. “Uh-huh. Me and Taylor do it all the time.”
Never mind my granddaughter’s cavalier misuse of the objective pronoun, I had more important things to consider. I noticed that the shade of brown used to paint the flash drive was the same as that on the baseboard of Oliver’s apartment as I remembered it, and I did have a good eye for color, if not for computer portals.
Had it been Oliver Halbert and not Susan who’d done the awful paint job? It seemed so. Oliver must have known he was in danger, or might be. It looked as though he’d tried to hide the flash drive containing incriminating information so it wouldn’t fall into the wrong hands. He’d painted it quickly with what he had handy, then set it on top of a wine cork to make a crude table.
His information might have stayed hidden forever if I hadn’t dropped the scene on the floor. And if I didn’t have a very smart granddaughter.
The flash drive, or something like it, must have been what Lynch and Crowley were looking for.
Did they know I had it now? Probably not, or the threat I felt this morning would have been much more dire. Besides, they’d searched my tote while I was passed out in the apartment. If they’d known what they were looking for, they would have seen it.
Was Ken’s name on the drive? Did I want to know?
I felt out of breath with the possibilities.
I thought back to the question Skip asked me after I’d visited Oliver’s apartment: “Did you find the crucial piece of evidence we missed?” he’d asked, facetiously.
It seemed I might have.
I stood at my stove, waiting for water to boil. Maddie had left me to my reflections, having become caught up in fixing the strap on a miniature hard hat in Susan’s room box. I’d slipped the flash drive in my pocket and left the crafts room to heat water for tea.
Should I try to find out what was on the drive, or should I call Skip immediately? Not an easy question. Why bother him with what might be nothing? I thought of Ken, of his “arrangement” with Patrick Lynch, of the photograph of him with a baby. There might be nothing on the drive; or there might be everything.
I took my cup of tea back to the crafts table. I handed Maddie the flash drive. “Can you use your computer or mine to tell me what’s on here?” I asked, almost surprising myself.
My mind must have been made up somewhere between the whistling of the kettle and the pouring of the hot water.
“Sure. Probably mine is better; your computer is a little lame. I’m not even sure it has a USB one port, let alone USB two.” She laughed as if everyone listening would get her joke.
I followed my granddaughter to her room and watched her plug the drive into her computer
. In less than a minute a squarish white icon appeared on her desktop (the one that was a screen, not a shiny cherrywood). Beneath the icon was the phrase, Potentials Data.
Oliver had called his list of suspect businesspeople “Potentials.” Ken’s name had been on that list. What did “Potentials Data” mean? That, in a more detailed version of the list, Ken’s name had been crossed out? Think positive, I told myself.
Its most obvious meaning was that Oliver had been more specific in this medium than he’d been on the handwritten list the police had found. I envisioned names, dates, and dollar amounts. I mentally ran a thick red marker through Ken’s name, striking it from the list.
“Nuts,” Maddie said, screwing up her face and banging on the edge of her keyboard.
“What’s wrong? Do you need my computer?” I teased.
“It’s password protected.”
I felt a wave of relief. “Never mind, then. It’s not important anyway.” Putting off the inevitable had become a way of life for me.
“I can work on it. Sometimes I can figure them out, but only if they’re short. Or, like, sometimes people just use defaults, like ‘password’ ”—she typed it, and an access denied message appeared on the screen—“or, like, ‘flashdrive’”—she typed it, with the same result.
“Try using ‘like,’ ” I said, gently badgering her about her rampant use of the word, though I considered her better than most kids about good usage.
“Nuts.” Maddie ignored my attempt at humor and blew a breath of defeat out the side of her mouth.
She tapped the drive, which was sticking out of her computer like some unnatural growth. “I’d have a better chance if I knew something about the person who owned this.” She gave me a wide-eyed look that said a light had gone on in her head.
That could only mean trouble. “Don’t worry about it, sweetheart. I told you, it’s not important.”
“It’s about The Case, isn’t it? I knew Mrs. Giles didn’t have it in the room box when we all worked on it, so it must be her brother’s drive, the man who died. That’s where you found the mini scene. At his house, right? I’ll bet the drive is his and he put it in the room box to hide it. Wicked.”
She leapt from her chair and nearly danced around it. “I should have known.” She sat back down. “I have to crack this password. It will help Uncle Skip crack the case.” She grinned. “That will be two cracks.”
I put my hand on her shoulder. “I’m not sure whose it is or what it is or who put it in the box,” I said, honestly. “But I think we should take it to Uncle Skip, just in case it’s important to his investigation.” I tried to emphasize his in vestigation.
While I was being so calm and logical, Maddie’s fingers were flying across the keyboard, stopping every now and then to use the mouse.
“What in the world are you doing?”
“I’m trying things from Mr. Halbert’s life. I just found his Facebook page. I should have thought of doing that before, instead of quitting after I Googled him.”
Were my son and his wife raising the computer geek everyone in school made fun of? I had the feeling that schools were now full of Maddie’s kind of geek.
“Shouldn’t you be making mini ghosts for Halloween? Or working on your costume?”
“Our computer teacher says never to use anything obvious for a password, but most people do, so they can remember it. I’m trying his birthday and his daughters’ names. Do you know if he had a pet?”
“How do you know his daughters’ names?”
“Jeanine and Casey. It’s in his Facebook profile. Probably if he had a pet, it would be in his profile. A lot of people use pictures of themselves with their pets or just their pets as their avatar.”
Of course they did. What I knew of all the emerging networking sites didn’t inspire trust. “Don’t people lie on those profiles?”
“Yeah, they do, but you wouldn’t lie about your children’s names. It wouldn’t make sense. You’d just say you didn’t have kids.”
“Do you have a Facebook page?” I asked.
She grinned up at me. “Duh.”
At what point did I lose track of all the minutiae of my granddaughter’s life? I knew that I had no private life until
I went to college. My parents asked questions and I answered. Now I wouldn’t even know the questions to ask.
“Am I on your Facebook page?” I asked.
“Uh-huh. Do you want to see it? I can set you up on Facebook and then we can be friends and write on each other’s walls. That’s what they call it when you send a message.”
“Isn’t that what text messaging is all about? And e-mail?”
“Yeah, but that’s not really networking, like Facebook and MySpace and Twitter and—”
“Never mind.”
I was just getting used to deciphering e-mail shortcuts such as CU for “see you” (used all the time by Maddie) and YTB for “you’re the best” (from Mary Lou). Karen Striker had ended an e-mail to me last week, TTUL. “Talk to you later,” she’d explained the next time we had an old-fashioned ear-to-ear phone conversation.
Did I want to extend my social networking skills and put myself on Facebook? Write on someone’s wall?
“Do you want to be my Facebook friend?” Maddie asked, with a wide grin.
“Maybe some other time,” I said.
Maddie had been typing while we talked. “I tried the hobbies Mr. Halbert listed, like rafting and chess. It’s a good thing he didn’t put a program on here to limit the times you can fail before they cut you off. I’d be in trouble.”
I thought we might already be in trouble, withholding evidence. “I think we should quit now and just give the drive to Uncle Skip.”
“If I could go to Mr. Halbert’s apartment, I could probably crack the password.”
That wasn’t going to happen, but I was curious. “How would that help?”
“Well, first, I’d look through his desk. Lots of people write down their passwords, which you’re really not supposed to. Then, I’d look around his office. Like, if he has a poster of some rock group, I’d try the name of the group. Or if there’s a rose bush outside his window, I’d try ‘rosebush’ or ‘redroses.’ That kind of stuff.”
The things my granddaughter knew about human behavior astounded me.
“Ms. Anderson is teaching us better ways to crack passwords using special programs that you can install on your computer.”
“Your computer teacher is showing you how to break into someone else’s computer?”
Another charming grin. “You’d only do it in an emergency.”
“I’m going to call Uncle Skip.”
“Please, Grandma, just give me a little more time.”
“You can work on it while I make the call,” I said.
Skip arrived in record time, claiming he was in the neighborhood. I imagined he’d be anxious to take what might be pivotal evidence out of harm’s way. I was sure he’d also want to protect Maddie and me, in case the drive was the known target of a search by people with a vested interest in its destruction.
Maddie had worked on figuring out the password right up to the minute the doorbell rang before she gave up.
Skip took the flash drive from her and bounced it in his hand, as if he were juggling the data itself in his mind. “This could be it,” he said. I heard a capital I in his tone.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t crack the password code,” Maddie told Skip.
“But you found the drive, sweetheart. I’ve seen it lots of times and I thought it was just an old piece of plastic painted brown,” I said.
“And my guys walked right by the thing when they searched Mr. Halbert’s apartment and none of them recognized what it was, either,” Skip said.
Maddie accepted the praise with a wide grin. “I wish I could have cracked it, though,” she said, sounding too much like her perfectionist father.
“You know, I’ll bet you could have if you had a bigger computer. Tell your dad to get y
ou an upgrade.”
Some things never changed—Skip always enjoyed hassling his cousin Richard, even remotely.
Skip lifted Maddie off the floor and swung her around—a far cry from what seemed only a short time ago, when he could pick her up and hoist her on his shoulders.
I had a brief moment alone with Skip while Maddie called her parents. We were asked to stand by in case either of her parents doubted the magnitude of her skills or her need for a new computer. I hoped Richard wouldn’t stress out at the idea that she’d helped with police work. I trusted Mary Lou to calm him down if he did. After all, she was the one who told me that if Richard ever complained, I should invoke the universal rule: what happens at Grandma’s stays at Grandma’s. It worked for me.
“Any word on the building in that photograph I gave you?” I asked Skip.
“Actually, yeah. I was going to call you.” Skip pulled the envelope with the photographs out of his pocket. “Did you ever hear of Sunaqua Estates? It’s in upstate New York, in a town called Sunaqua Falls.”
I shook my head. Upstate New York was about as far from the Bronx as California in some ways. Ken and I never owned a car in New York City and few of our friends did, so a trip to Peekskill, about an hour away, to visit former neighbors, was considered a major journey. So different from our lives on the West Coast, where we wouldn’t think twice about driving forty-five minutes to meet friends for lunch.
“Do you even know what the term ‘Estates’ refers to? Could it be a housing development? A country club?” I asked Skip, keeping my voice low. Maddie had been busy enough with the flash drive; she didn’t need to worry about another “case.”
Skip had taken the photos from the envelope. He tapped his finger on an image of the building, most prominent in the long shot. “I think it’s kind of a cross between an orphanage and a home for special-needs children.”
“Special needs like learning disabilities? Is it a school?”
Monster in Miniature Page 18