Malice in Miniature

by Margaret Grace

  I’d decided on a project that was apropos of the season: a top hat and cane. Maddie liked the idea and seemed eager to help. We changed into old sweats—mine had enough paint on them to redecorate a standard dollhouse—and went to the currently unused fourth bedroom, the one closest to the front door.

  It took a while to prepare a work space since I’d stuffed all the overflow crafts supplies into this room while my house was in its highly populated state.

  “Are you going to teach me how to put the hat together, Grandma?” Maddie asked.

  “Sure. Do you want me to teach you before I do it on television?”

  “Well, I was thinking . . .” Deep frown lines crossed her forehead. Heavy thinking.

  “What is it?”

  “Have you ever been on TV before?”

  “A few times, but never in the studio. The station covered a miniatures fair once and they interviewed me at the Old Glory Hotel downtown. And another time I was on during Library Week talking about the Lincoln Point literacy program. And, oh, our book club was on talking about our novel of the month.”

  Maddie seemed more attentive than she normally would be when I rattled on with a longer answer than required. “I’ve never been on TV,” she said. “Do they ever have kids on?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose they’ve had kids at one time or another. I don’t watch that channel very often.” (I hoped I wouldn’t let that little fact slip out in front of Nan Browne tomorrow.)

  “Well, I’ve never been on TV.”

  It didn’t take a brick to wake me up, but close to it, before it dawned on me. “Would you like to be on TV yourself tomorrow afternoon? We could do the demonstration together.”

  Her eyes lit up. “Really, really?”

  I’d read that public speaking was the third most dreaded thing for most people, after death and taxes. I’d never been afflicted that way since I’d loved teaching for as long as I could remember. I was glad Maddie didn’t have that fear to worry about, either.

  “I don’t see why not. I probably should call the people in charge and be sure, however. Shall I see if it’s okay with them?”

  She was off the couch and rubbing her hands together, as if getting them ready for some serious work. “Yes, yes. We can rehearse and I promise to practice over and over.”

  I needed to call Nan anyway to confirm that I’d be our club’s representative tomorrow. Club president Karen Striker had said she’d take care of that, but ordinarily I still would have called the station myself immediately. My meeting with Skip and then near miss on picking up Maddie had distracted me from doing that.

  But there had been something else. I realized I was intimidated by Nan Browne—maybe because she’d been presiding over a crime scene I was interested in. And because once I showed up as a miniaturist, it would blow my cover as a reporter. Apparently she’d forgotten all our previous interviews. Not that I’d claimed to be a reporter, I reminded myself. She’d assumed it and I hadn’t corrected her. It was what some groups called mental reservation (acceptable) and others called a sin of omission (unacceptable).

  To bolster my resolve, I tried instead to picture her in the arms of an illicit lover. Not many people could make as much of a fleeting shadow as an English teacher.

  She picked up on the third ring.

  “Channel 29, Nan Browne.” The friendly voice of a television talk show host. After seeing the operation yesterday, I wasn’t surprised that she answered her own phone.

  “This is Geraldine Porter, Ms. Browne. I met you yesterday—”

  “I remember. Karen told me you could do the demo, but, you know, you don’t really have to. We have some interviews in the can that we can run. It’s just a twelve-minute slot, by the time you add the promos.”

  “It’s no trouble at all. I have everything ready.” Or, I would have by showtime.

  “Maybe some other time. We’re really all set for tomorrow.”

  How rude that she hadn’t called to tell me. She must have known I’d prepare for the show unless directed otherwise. Had she planned to usher me out of the studio when I showed up with all my props?

  I didn’t mind so much being disrespected and bumped as unnecessary to Channel 29’s programming, but I wasn’t going to give up so easily with Maddie’s pleasure at stake. If I believed in such phenomena, I’d say I had a premonition about this possibility because I’d sent Maddie off to find narrow black ribbon in one of my five ribbon drawers while I called. That was an approximately ten-minute diversion out of earshot of the phone.

  I felt my fingers tighten around the telephone receiver. “Ms. Browne, I have an eleven-year-old granddaughter who is extremely excited about being my assistant on this program. As we speak, she’s gathering supplies and thinking about her presentation. Now, unless you want to give the next generation a very bad impression of the media, you’ll let us keep our scheduled appearance in the Channel 29 lineup.”

  A long pause. Apparently, I had amazed Ms. Browne, not to mention myself, with that allocution. My rereading of the Lincoln-Douglas debates and its stern, pompous language, was taking its toll.

  I heard a pronounced cluck, then, “Okay. But you’ll have to be here by eleven for a one o’clock show.”

  I hadn’t counted on “afternoon” meaning anything before two or three. Maddie had school until noon tomorrow. I wasn’t sure it was a great idea to keep Maddie out of classes for something as frivolous as making a mini hat and cane in a television studio. I had a good sense of how her parents would vote. (Richard: no, school is more important than entertainment. Mary Lou: yes, this is all part of her education. She’ll probably learn more at Channel 29 than she will sitting in class all morning.)

  I didn’t mind being the tiebreaker. It had been a pretty general pattern since Maddie was born. I supposed I should side with my son during one of these votes (real or imagined) but not today.

  “See you at eleven,” I told Ms. Browne.

  “Don’t wear a busy print,” she said, as if she was used to seeing me in flowered housedresses.

  “Thanks for the tip,” I said, hoping some of the irritation I felt had seeped into my voice.

  Before settling down to work, we had a few phone calls to make. Maddie had a list of people that included her best friend, Devyn, and her second best friend (her term), Melana, in Los Angeles, plus Linda’s son, Jason. I hoped against hope that there were some Palo Alto youth on her list.

  While she took care of her potential fans, I called Mary Lou on my cell phone to prepare her for the conversation we were sure to have at dinner (was this what lobbyists did?).

  “Great,” Mary Lou said. “I don’t see the big deal for her to miss one morning of school before a holiday weekend. It’s all part of her education. She’ll probably learn more in the field anyway.”

  I smiled. “Richard was so smart to find and keep you.”

  “Huh? Oh, I get it. Don’t worry about Richard, Mom. We’re carpooling home today. I’ll have him prepped.”

  “Did I ever tell you what a great mother you are?”

  “All the time. But don’t stop, okay? I have a feeling it’s going to get a lot harder before it gets easier.”

  I made a few calls myself to recruit viewers for the show and got positive responses. I hoped there was a way that Nan Browne could check the statistics and see a spike in tomorrow afternoon’s viewers.

  From my older crafter friends, I heard, “I’ll be watching,” and from the younger ones, still in the workforce, “I’ll TiVo it,” or “I’ll post to all my lists.” The comments didn’t all fall along expected lines, however. I was taken off guard when our oldest member, eighty-something master bead worker, Mabel Quinlan, asked, “Will it be on YouTube?”

  I should have expected what I got from Skip: “There’s no blood left at the scene, you know.”

  “I have a badge from the Maui PD,” I said and hung up.

  By five thirty we’d finished our calls and, thanks to multitasking, had gathered s
upplies for the hat. Maddie had finished clearing a small table in the crafts room for us to work on. The idea was to have at least one practice run before we sat down to eat.

  It was Mary Lou’s turn to get dinner, which meant that at least eight different boxes of food from San Francisco’s Chinatown would be arriving in about an hour. Maddie would hold her nose and forego it all to eat leftover pizza.

  Maddie had dug out enough black paper and fabric so that we could afford to cut out one set of pieces to make the hat at home for practice, and still have enough to be able to cut out the pattern in real time on camera tomorrow.

  We made measurements to determine how big the hat should be. Maddie was certainly better at math than I’d been at her age, so she did the calculations easily, except for a haberdashery question.

  “Lincoln was over six feet tall and Douglas was under five feet, so whose hat shall we make?”

  “Let’s just make an average-size top hat, say about eight or nine inches in real life.”

  Maddie moved her lips around as if she were using her mouth as a calculator. “Nine inches would be easier. Then it’s just three-quarters of an inch for the main part of the hat.”

  “Maybe a little longer if we want to do a stovepipe hat. That’s what Lincoln usually wore, and it’s a little taller and floppier than a formal top hat.”

  “Cool.”

  We cut a rectangle about an inch on one side and two inches on the long side. Maddie made a cylinder by gluing the long ends of the rectangle so the diameter of the circle formed was about a half inch. We were on our way, with just the top piece, the brim, and the ribbon binding to add. Maddie completed the project while I looked on.

  I wondered if she needed me at all, except to drive her to the studio.

  “Where’s Lincoln’s real hat?” she asked.

  “I’m sure he had a number of them. But the one he was wearing when he was assassinated is in the Smithsonian, a museum in Washington, D.C.”

  “We should go see it sometime. The cane is going to be easy. Can we do something harder?”

  “Let’s time this project first. We have only ten minutes for the whole show.”

  “You said twelve.”

  “Well, twelve, but they might put extra promos on or cut us off for some breaking news.” We both chuckled at that. “In any case, I think you’ll be surprised at how quickly ten or even twelve minutes will go by.”

  And even more surprised at how the years go by. I wondered if Maddie knew why I interrupted these proceedings to give her a long hug.

  Chapter 13

  I’d called June at work earlier, planning to invite her to dinner. I knew she had more pressing things on her mind than Maddie’s television debut, but I needed to keep her grounded. She wasn’t in her office at the time. I left a message but wasn’t surprised when I didn’t get a call back. I enlisted Maddie to go and knock on June’s door to see if she was interested in American Chinese food, but no answer there, either.

  “Where has June been?” Maddie asked. “Is she mad at us?”

  “What makes you think that?”

  She hesitated. “She didn’t thank us for cleaning up her trash.”

  “She may not even know we did that.”

  “Right, right.”

  “Is there something else?”

  “Nuh-uh.”

  But I suspected there was. With Maddie there was always the chance that she picked up much more than we would like.

  Her parents’ arrival with bags of food cut off further discussion for now.

  Homecoming time in the evening was almost as mad a scramble as breakfast in my newly busy home. Now at six thirty, everyone was talking at once, eager to share the best and the worst of the day, carrying snacks to the bedroom so they could nosh while changing their clothes, too hungry to wait for dinner. Maddie nearly bit her lip waiting to take her turn and talk about her upcoming television appearance.

  Arms and elbows bumped during our table-setting tasks. As we opened each box, another delicious aroma filled the room: jumbo shrimp, kung pao chicken, hot and sour soup, fried wonton, fried rice, pork egg foo young (for Richard only), and two vegetable dishes.

  Much talk and eating later, I needed one more shrimp and jabbed my fork (Mary Lou was the only one who used chopsticks) into one of the last pink chunks. After a few bites, “As Time Goes By” sounded from the kitchen counter, where my cell phone was charging. I was glad for the excuse not to participate in the usual debate about dessert whenever Mary Lou brought home Chinese take-out.

  “Why don’t the Chinese eat dessert?” Maddie would always ask.

  “They do eat dessert,” Richard said tonight. “They have green tea ice cream; they have sponge cake with coconut icing . . .”

  I smiled in her direction while I unplugged my cell and answered.

  “Hey, Aunt Gerry,” Skip said. “If you’re home, don’t say my name, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s not that I don’t love my cousins, but things were simpler when you lived alone.”

  I put one finger in my ear to drown out the noise from the dining room. An advantage for me was that no one cared who was on the phone right now. Maddie had commandeered the floor, talking with excited gestures, describing her hat tricks for the umpteenth time. I knew her parents were happy for anything that got her spirits up, and I heard no negative comments from Richard about missing school for entertainment.

  “What would you like?” I asked Skip.

  “Meet me outside.”

  “Now?” I whispered.

  “Yeah, I’m just turning onto your street. Say you have to take out the garbage or something.”

  It had been a long time since I’d gotten an SOS call from Skip. The last one I could remember was when he was almost twelve, right after his father died. He’d broken his nose falling from a fence in his own backyard. He’d called me because he thought his mother would be mad at him for ruining her flowerbed and getting blood on her roses. That’s when Beverly realized the depression that had set in while she was mourning her husband was taking too much of a toll on her son. She made an impressive turnaround after that.

  My guess was that Skip wanted to talk about his relationship with June, and with his mother three thousand miles away in Hawaii, I was the best he had.

  Maddie had been allowed to break a dinner rule and have “stuff” at the table. At the moment she was demonstrating how to roll a rectangle into a cylinder. I walked as casually as I could from the kitchen through the atrium, making it look like I was headed for one of the bathrooms. I was out the door without having to make up a story about the garbage.

  Skip looked as despondent as I’d ever seen him. He was in his work clothes, except for the tie that he’d thrown onto the backseat.

  “Sorry to do this to you, Aunt Gerry. Is everyone wondering why you left?”

  I reminded him that Maddie was going to be on television tomorrow and explained how details of that event commanded more attention than anything I might be doing.

  “Who knows when they’ll miss me,” I said. “I’m all yours.”

  “Thanks.” He reached to the back floor of the car and pulled up a briefcase. “This is kind of informal, but I want you to look at some photos.” He slipped a folder out of the briefcase, opened it, and handed it to me.

  I squinted, then reached up and turned on the dome light, which helped a little. I looked at a set of six photographs, all of women in their late twenties or early thirties, all blondes. “A photo array? Like a lineup?”

  “This is not official. We already have Drew’s ID, but it never hurts to have a backup. My car’s not the best environment, I know, but see what you can manage. I want you to look at these photos and tell me if you recognize any of these women.”

  We sat in his very plush sports car, turned to each other as much as possible with an enormous gearshift in the way. Skip drank from a large plastic soft-drink cup that had been sitting in a holder. It was a mild night; in
many other parts of the country, where February still meant ice and snow, it could be called a spring evening.

  I tapped the middle photograph in the top row. All the women had fairly thin faces, but this one’s pointy chin was unmistakable. And she had an attitude that was apparent even in the grainy photograph. “Her,” I said. “I recognize her.”

  “From where?”

  “She was coming out of the door to the jail, walking into the foyer this morning.” Was that just this morning?

  “Okay, that’s it. Thanks.”

  “What’s this all about? I know this must be Rhonda Edgerton, or Goodman, as she still believes, because Zoe told me she had just left the visiting area.”

  “We don’t always take the word of a defendant, but it’s nothing you have to worry about.”

  “Skip, I’m missing my dinner here.” Not quite true, but there was that one shrimp impaled on the end of my fork.

  “You have a point.” He shifted in his seat, replacing the folder in his briefcase. “The Chicago PD is looking for her, just to question her as they always would an ex, and they have no record of her taking a trip in recent history. No flights, no trains, no buses.”

  “Maybe she drove?”

  He took a long breath. “Maybe. But also no hotels or motels, no credit card activity, and no relatives in the area.”

  “She must be using that alias for everything, then. Did you look up Rita Gold?” He gave me his what-do-you-think expression. I answered his nonverbal accusation. “How do I know if you had time to do that? I just told you this afternoon.”

  “If Rita E. Gold is indeed Rhonda—”

  “Three people said she was,” I reminded him.

  “If Rita is Rhonda, clearly that’s not the only alias she’s using. But it’s nothing you need to bother about, Aunt Gerry. It’s under control.”

  “It doesn’t seem so. Do I get a question, by the way?”