Mix-up in Miniature

by Margaret Grace

  Two female officers who had designs on Skip fawned over his little cousin-once-removed and I left Maddie in their care. I’d rather have left her in a drafting workshop or history of architecture class, but that wasn’t an option.

  Before she followed the officers, Maddie made one last attempt to work her plan. “Do you think I could go down to the jail with you when you go to see the lady, Grandma?” she asked.

  “The lady is not in jail”—yet, I added silently—“and no, anyway.” It was rapidly sinking in that Maddie’s recent interest in architecture was targeted to soften up her grandmother in preparation for diving into the petty theft issue.

  With permission from the desk sergeant—Jimmy Summers, a B student from the class of nineteen ninety-nine—I walked back to Skip’s cubicle.

  I wished I had a sweet offering for Jimmy and a peace offering for Skip, but there hadn’t been time to go home first and bake a couple of batches of cookies. One of these days I was going to be charged with bribing a whole department of police officers, I just knew.

  I stepped behind one of the fabric-covered partitions that made up Skip’s office space, checking that June’s photo was still on his desk. I’d be sure to tell her, in case that made a difference. Skip came up behind me and gave me a welcoming hug that felt like his own peace offering. I hugged him back.

  That didn’t mean he didn’t have a warning for me, however.

  “I’m not happy about your being this directly involved in an ongoing murder investigation, but I’m not about to refuse this request. I don’t see Paige Taggart as a hardened killer who’s going to take you hostage.”

  “That’s comforting.”

  I wondered if my being hired by the victim’s daughter counted as being “directly involved in an ongoing murder investigation.” I decided not to worry Skip about it at the moment.

  —

  Paige Taggart, Varena Young’s unthreatening research assistant, now an official person of interest in her murder, presented a sad picture in the very interview room I’d sat in last night. She was wearing the same oversize sweater she’d had on when she visited me a few hours ago at my home, except that the sweater looked dingier under the crackling overhead lights and even less as though it belonged to her.

  Paige stood and I received my second police-station hug of the day, this one tearful. “Mrs. Porter, thank you sooo much for coming.” Her voice cracked. “They think I killed Varena.”

  I gave her a motherly pat and we both took seats at the table, with me on the detective’s side this time. The room was no more pleasant with a view of the opposite wall, and in addition, I detected a foul smell.

  “Why do they think that, Paige?”

  “The cops searched my room at school and found the handle of the sword the killer used. Like I’d leave it there.”

  This was the first confirmation I had that the heavy object Skip referred to as the murder weapon was one of the life-size swords from the set on the wall in the Morley room. Being good at imagining dramatic, old-fashioned scenarios of murder and mayhem had served me well as a teacher of Shakespeare, but tormented me now. I blocked out the colorful images in my mind and returned to Paige.

  I wondered if her automatic reference to a third person spoke to her innocence. On the other hand, she’d all but accused Laura Overbee a couple of hours ago.

  Where was the FBI’s behavioral analysis unit when you needed them?

  Paige continued, her voice breaking as she gave me details. It occurred to me that that was why Skip hadn’t told me what evidence he had. He and Detective Rutherford were probably standing on the other side of the two-way glass, tuned in, wanting to hear how Paige would answer my genuine questions. I looked around the room for the technology that would allow them to eavesdrop. Nothing clearly visible, but they weren’t fooling me.

  I brought my attention back to Paige.

  “The police found the sword handle in my closet, right next to my shoe boxes.” Paige threw up her hands. “But I never even went back to my dorm room until after I left your house today, so how could I have put it there? And why would I keep a murder weapon, anyway? Someone’s trying to frame me, Mrs. Porter. Isn’t it, like, crystal clear?”

  I hoped Paige would eventually drop the likes, which I heard as unbecoming a college student with aspirations for a career in writing. But how did I know which styles would survive the twenty-first-century-makeover of the English language?

  “Can you help me figure it out, Paige?” I asked, thinking the best tactic was to let her believe I was convinced of her innocence. As I assumed the role of interviewer in a police station, I felt like an applicant to the police academy. I knew my methods were being observed and evaluated by the team on the other side of the glass.

  “Well, yeah, but how am I supposed to figure it out? Aren’t the police supposed to do that? Are they holding anyone else from the Heights? What about Laura Overbee?”

  “Who else has access to your dorm room?” I asked. Not for nothing had I observed Skip’s practice of answering a question with a more difficult question of his own choosing.

  “My roommate, Tanya, but she went home to Oregon this week because her mom is really sick. And I guess, school security could get in, but that’s all. I didn’t give anyone a key and I’m sure Tanya didn’t. But it’s just a flimsy doorknob lock, you know. Anyone could get in if they really wanted to.”

  “Do you stay at the dorm every night?”

  “No, that’s just it. Laura and I both have rooms at the estate, for when we work late.” Paige smiled, her eyes looking far away. “Mine is the Lady Bunting Suite. Varena named all the bedrooms after her protagonists.”

  How sweet, I thought. Paige continued, her expression still focused on a memory.

  “Sometimes Varena starts late in the evening and dictates for hours and she wants one or all of us there. ‘The muse is visiting me,’ she’ll say, and we all know we’re in for a long night.” Paige’s eyes widened, her expression changing to a look of realization, as if she’d been editing a manuscript and suddenly become aware that she needed to switch to past tense.

  “Take a breath,” I said. Softly, lest my evaluators take my consideration of the suspect as a sign of weakness.

  “I’m okay,” Paige said. Unconvincing. “Last night Laura went home, but I stayed. I was all wound up and I didn’t feel like driving back to an empty dorm room. When I finally got back there this afternoon, it looked like the whole Lincoln Point Police Department was in my little room, searching anything and everything, turning things inside out. And the next thing I know, here I am.”

  It was hard not to feel sorry for Paige, until I remembered that there was a better than even chance that she’d lied to me about being familiar with the mysterious dollhouse now in my atrium. I shook my head, playing tough. “I’m not sure what I can do for you, Paige. You haven’t been completely forthcoming.”

  Paige hung her head and dug the heels of her hands into her eyes with what seemed an alarming pressure. “I know what you’re talking about, Mrs. Porter. I just didn’t know what to do when I saw the dollhouse in your house. I wasn’t sure it was the right one.”

  “What would be the right one?” The midsize Tudor?

  “It’s very complicated.”

  I started to laugh and stopped when I realized that Paige wouldn’t get the significance of the Phrase of the Week. “Try me.”

  Paige dropped her arms on the table with a thud that made me wince. I hoped she hadn’t hurt herself. I made a note to remind the people watching behind the pseudo-mirror that if they were going to keep her overnight, they needed to be sure she was kept safe from harming herself.

  “Okay, I got this strange series of text messages and emails, all within about an hour the night before Varena was killed. This guy said Varena might be in danger but he wasn’t in a position to go to the police. He said he had evidence, some documents that he put in an envelope, and hid in one of Varena’s dollhouses. Then he said I sh
ould find the envelope and take it to the police.”

  “Did he tell you which dollhouse? Did you look for it?” It was hard to control the mounting excitement as I felt I was getting closer to the story behind the special-delivery dollhouse. If Varena’s murder was directly connected to the dollhouse, everything could be cleared up at home and on the Heights.

  “The messages were all really short,” Paige said. “Like, I think he must have been at a café or something and the connection kept timing out. This was late at night. I was tossing around, couldn’t sleep. My phone was on in the charger and when it beeped that I had a text, I opened it and that’s what it said, what I just told you. I texted back and asked him all kinds of questions, like yours. We went a few rounds, sometimes by email, but when I asked him why he couldn’t just tell me why Varena was in danger, and who was she in danger from, and where exactly was this envelope, he didn’t write any more.”

  “Did you try to reach him yesterday or today?”

  “Yeah, of course. When I found Varena the next day, I knew it hadn’t been just some nut case on the phone. But there was nothing else from him and the account he used was closed or something. I kept looking around at Varena’s houses, which are all over the estate”—here I took a minute to picture the dream acreage with dollhouses everywhere—“but I didn’t have any idea what kind of house he was talking about, so how was I supposed to know? He didn’t tell me the style or anything. Then when I saw one of her dollhouses in your home, I thought that might be the one.” She shrugged. “I don’t know why. Maybe just because it was in a different place. I thought maybe he put it there.”

  “So you recognized the house in my atrium as one of Varena’s? You’re sure of that?”

  “Yes.”

  I had a very important question. “Where did you see the dollhouse before you saw it in my atrium?”

  “Upstairs at the estate. In one of the guest rooms, the Lord Weatherly Room, where it always is. It belongs on a table that’s supposed to look like a beach, with fake sand and all.”

  “When did you receive the last message from the man?”

  “Late. Maybe midnight Sunday night. And like I said, there’s been no word from him at all yesterday or today.”

  I thought of Maddie, who’d seen an envelope in the secret room. I no longer doubted the existence of the room or its contents, but I wanted to move step by step, for the benefit of my onlookers.

  “Did you search all the houses that are still at the estate for the letter that was supposed to be there?”

  “Sure. I love the dollhouses, you know.”

  “Yes, I think Laura told me that you’re also a miniaturist. I’m surprised you didn’t take a minute to look at mine when you stopped in. I suppose they’re not as grand—”

  “No, no, that wasn’t it. First, I don’t tell too many people because, like Laura, they’ll assume that’s why Varena picked me. And then when I saw the modern-style beach house right there in your atrium, I got flustered.”

  “Back to the emails, Paige. You checked all the dollhouses at some time before Varena died?”

  “Uh-huh, I peeked in all of them and moved some furniture a little, but, I mean, how can you hide something as big as a life-size envelope in a dollhouse? You look in, and it’s either there or it isn’t, right?”

  Not if it has a secret room, which apparently wasn’t made clear to Paige by the mysterious man who deposited the envelope.

  “Did you tell all this to the police this afternoon?”

  “No, I sort of said I had some information about the real killer, but I didn’t think I should talk to them too much without a lawyer, and I can’t afford one, and I didn’t want them to think I called one because I’m guilty and…well, the reason I’m here in the first place is that the cops got an anonymous tip to search my room and I pooh-poohed it and told them it was ridiculous to believe anything anonymous, and then here I am giving them an anonymous tip of my own?” Paige went into a frenzy of gestures, sending her too-big sweater off one shoulder. “That’s why I wanted to talk to you first.”

  The shift gave me a chill, as if my own sweater had fallen off. The room seemed to be too cold one moment and too warm the next. I wondered if the powers-that-be were manipulating the temperature, another of Skip’s “tricks of the trade” that was “just routine.”

  I sat back, trying to put together the pieces of Paige’s story. “It sounds like a lot of trouble for someone to go to. I don’t understand why the person who sent the messages didn’t just take the information to the police.”

  “It’s not like I had a real conversation with him. All I know is what was in the texts and the emails. He did say once that it wasn’t safe for him to appear—that was the word he used, ‘appear’—until the killer was in prison.”

  I let out a breath. “I don’t know, Paige. There are so many questions and things that don’t make sense. Why didn’t he name the person he thought might harm Varena? Why did he pick you to talk to? Why didn’t he call in an anonymous tip to the police himself? Or why didn’t he tell you exactly in which dollhouse he hid the information? He could have done a million things that would have been so much simpler than what you’re describing.”

  Paige’s eyes grew wider with each of my “why” tick points. She seemed to be holding her breath. “I don’t know, Mrs. Porter,” she nearly screamed. “I wish he didn’t pick me. I wish…everything you said. I thought maybe Laura killed her but I don’t know now, and I’m really scared that the killer will come after me if he knows that I know about this envelope and the evidence.”

  It was one thing to think about suspects, evidence, and motives in the abstract, but another to picture someone lifting a heavy sword and bringing it down on a person’s head. And then to have that killer on the loose to strike again. I could understand why Paige was frightened. I hoped the image in Paige’s head didn’t match the grisly one forming in mine.

  I waited until Paige settled down. “Could you tell where the messages came from? Did the person sign any of them?”

  “The address was in the form of some nonsense syllables, like spam. You know, a string like ‘czd#k&h%y$.’ ” Paige spouted off random letters and characters, using her finger to punctuate, as if she was typing them in the air between us. “But here’s the really crazy part. He signed it just, ‘Varena’s brother.’ ”

  With great effort, I turned my gasp into a reasonable-sounding throat clearing. “Varena’s brother?”

  “Yes, but Mrs. Porter, Varena doesn’t have a brother, except one who died a long time ago.”

  “What do you know about her brother, Paige?”

  “Not a lot. Varena mentions him now and then, and once she said a character she was developing was based on him. She named him Caleb, too, except the character in the book doesn’t die in an accident. Why would someone claim to be Varena’s brother, Mrs. Porter?”

  “I have no idea, Paige,” I said, truthfully. “But I think it’s time we tried to find out.” I looked back at the two-way mirror-cum-window, to where I hoped Skip was standing.

  I sent a questioning, eyebrows-raised look to where I estimated his head would be: Now do you believe me?

  Chapter 14

  Skip’s tiny cubicle had now been made smaller by a roll-in filing cabinet that took up most of the opening between the partitions. I squeezed by the metal box and took a seat across from him on his rolling guest chair. I was too excited to wait for him to begin, and afraid he’d throw cold water on the investigative avenues my interview with Paige had opened up, so I plunged in before he had a chance.

  “Even if you don’t believe her whole story, Skip, you have to admit it’s an enormous coincidence that both the missing Corazón Cruz and the framed Paige—”

  “Allegedly missing and allegedly framed,” Skip said, but with enough of a grin that I wasn’t offended.

  “Thank you for clarifying that, Detective. Now, continuing—that they both came up with a brother who’s supposedly dea
d?”

  Skip’s smile broadened. “Yeah, I got the point of your look, Aunt Gerry. Sweet work with that interview, by the way.” He waved his floppy notepad at me. “I even took notes.”

  I listened for a sign of sarcasm and didn’t find one. It was nice to hear a compliment from my nephew on something other than my ginger cookies. I pointed to his laptop computer, imagining it contained an infinite number of databases at his disposal, whereas I’d been at a disadvantage without even Maddie’s enthusiasm and help. “Can’t you look that up?”

  “Actually, we did. We came up with nothing, no brother, but we did check it out.”

  “You did? Based on what I told you yesterday, you tried to find Varena’s brother?”

  Skip nodded and sent a sheepish grin my way, a familiar expression that had marked his preteen years. “Just because I don’t jump up and down when you tell me something, it doesn’t mean I completely discount what you say.”

  “Why did you let me think so?”

  He shrugged. “We have to separate the wheat from the chaff. We don’t have the manpower to track down absolutely every little lead, as much as we’d like to. Part of detective work is to decide what to do immediately, what to put on the back burner, what to trash.”

  “You expect to be able to do it all without help from people like me, outside the department?”

  “Not at all, we count on the cooperation of everyone involved. I’ve told you this before. Most of our cases are not solved by exotic forensic science, like on television. You know, where they trace a single blue carpet fiber to one manufacturer and then to the one store in the state that sold it between the years two thousand-six and two thousand-eleven.”

  “Then they go to that store and the records are there, with the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of every customer who bought that particular color carpet in the last five years.”