Malice in Miniature

by Margaret Grace

  I’d always thought it curious that artists named their paintings with such pedantic titles, like Cézanne’s Apples, Peaches, Pears, and Grapes, or Renoir’s lovely A Girl with a Watering Can, which I’d seen so many times. And even Mary Lou’s favorite of Vuillard, Annette Roussel with a Broken Chair. It was as if all their creativity went into the art itself, with nothing left over for an interesting title.

  I mentioned this to Mary Lou.

  “Uh-oh. Good point, Mom,” she said. “I’m calling my newest—besides the current Lincoln-Douglas I’m working on—California Hills in the Sunset. Is that really bad?”

  “Don’t worry about it. I’m guilty of the same thing, in spite of my background in literature.”

  I thought of recent titles I’d given to my miniature scenes: A Reading Corner and Christmas Dinner for Twelve. I’d been calling my latest scene The Lincoln-Douglas Debate in Galesburg, Illinois, 1858. Then and there, I renamed my scene, Debating the Morality of Slavery. It would do until I had time to give it more thought.

  We searched for Maddie and spotted her in front of a miniature aquarium with moving fish. That would keep her attention for a while. I only hoped she wouldn’t decide we should try to build one.

  I told Mary Lou about my call to June’s parents in Chicago. “I think she’s gone there to find Brad’s ex-wife, and the irony is that she’s here in town.”

  “Isn’t Skip looking for June?”

  “Yes, but I don’t want to tell Skip right away. I feel like I’d be betraying her.”

  “Aren’t you sort of betraying Skip if you don’t?”

  I groaned. “Thanks for that reminder. But I suppose you’re right. I’m hoping she’ll call me back and I can get her home soon.”

  “And then what?”

  I hadn’t thought that far ahead.

  Chapter 15

  When we arrived home, Richard was in the same position on the couch in front of the television set.

  “I’ve been here, just like this, all day,” he said, but smells from the oven—pot roast and potatoes—said otherwise. He’d offered to get dinner since we’d be gone until dark. I wondered if he’d jumped back onto the couch as he heard the car pull up, just so he could say his one-liner.

  There was no postcard from Beverly and Nick today. Instead there was a case of pineapples, with a note: “To be used with or without rum.” Richard had dragged the case through the foyer and parked it in front of the glass door between the atrium and the living room.

  We explained to Maddie that there was a popular cocktail with rum and pineapple juice.

  “Rum? Yuck, yuck. That would ruin the pineapple.”

  I agreed and hoped she’d hold that thought for many years.

  We took our places at the table, eager to dig into tender beef and tasty vegetables drenched in juice.

  Bzzz, bzzz.

  If I didn’t know better, I’d have assumed that lifting my fork for the first bite of roasted carrot was a mystical cue for the doorbell to ring.

  All the grown-ups sighed heavily. Maddie jumped up.

  “I’ll get it. I’ll get it. Maybe it’s Uncle Skip or June.”

  The three of us dug in and had at least one forkful of food down before we heard Maddie’s screams.

  We tripped over each other getting to the door and intercepted Maddie on her way back from the doorway. I held her close and drew her back toward the living room while Richard and Mary Lou checked the cause of her alarm.

  “What the . . . ?” Richard asked.

  “Is that a pineapple?” Mary Lou asked.

  It didn’t sound like much of an emergency, but I sat with Maddie anyway.

  “It was like the raccoon, Grandma,” Maddie said, already calmer. “Except it was a pineapple.” Then, to my relief, she giggled—a nervous giggle, but better than tears. “I didn’t mean to scream but I thought it was alive. I mean, an alive thing, but dead now.”

  “Don’t touch it anymore,” Richard said.

  It was all I could do not to march to the door to find out for myself what was going on. Maddie had a firm hold on my arm and waist, however, so I tried to be patient.

  “It’s just a pineapple,” Mary Lou said.

  “We should call Skip.”

  Skip? Uh-oh. Another police matter? After what seemed like an hour, Richard and Mary Lou came back empty-handed, except that Richard had his cell phone out.

  “Not exactly an emergency,” he said into his phone. “But we could use your advice at this point.” A pause. “Dinner? Pot roast.” He clicked the phone shut and addressed us. “Skip will be right over.”

  For some reason no one returned to the dinner table. The roast and luscious vegetables went the way of my shrimp marinara earlier in the week. Linda Reed, who believed in such things, would have said we had bad cooking karma lately.

  I left Maddie with her parents and hurried to the front door.

  “Don’t touch it,” Richard said.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Mary Lou said, amused. Maddie leaned against her on the couch, all smiles now.

  Had the incident with the raccoon hardened my granddaughter against nasty (why else call Skip?) sights? If so, was I happy about that or not?

  I opened the door and gasped in spite of myself and in spite of Mary Lou’s and Maddie’s chuckling. A squashed pineapple sat on the welcome mat, its translucent juice running along the cracks in the concrete.

  A knife pierced its thick, scaly skin.

  I almost screamed myself.

  “Did you notice that one pineapple was missing from the crate?” Skip asked Richard, barely containing a smile.

  Richard shrugged, the least amused of all of us Porters. “No, I didn’t count them. I could see through the openings on the top what it was. And I was getting dinner ready.” (This came out with a defensive ring.) “The crate was crushed all over, just like you see it. I assumed the box got mashed during shipping.”

  “Do you know what time it was delivered?”

  “Not a clue. I was—”

  “He was getting dinner ready,” Mary Lou said.

  All any of us knew was that at some point, while the crate was sitting on our doorstep, a pineapple had been stolen, and returned later with a knife through its heart.

  “What could this mean?” Richard asked.

  “Maybe someone is going door-to-door on our street and leaving mementos,” Mary Lou said.

  “Some sick someone,” Richard said.

  “And maybe next week Charlie and Isabel Curry on the other side”—she pointed in the direction of our neighbors—“will have an unsolicited present,” Mary Lou continued.

  I hadn’t noticed Maddie’s absence from the living room until she returned from a visit to the stabbed pineapple, now on a paper bag in our foyer, waiting for Skip to cart it away.

  “It’s from Willie’s,” Maddie said.

  “Huh?” could be heard all around.

  “The knife. Come and look at it.”

  We huddled around the slain pineapple in the close quarters of my foyer, as if we were peering into an open grave—bodies bent, frown lines on our foreheads, pursed lips, hands behind our backs.

  Maddie pointed to the knife, still sticking out of the pineapple. “It’s the same as the other knife. The one in the . . . you know. I saw this little design”—she came within an inch of touching the handle of the knife—“they’re circles. It’s from Willie’s. I guess the circles are supposed to be bagels or something.”

  Skip leaned in closer. “Sweet,” he said. “I think you’re right. The one in the . . . you know . . . is scratched up more than this one is, but I’ll bet it’s from the same set.”

  If Maddie’s grin were any bigger, it would have fallen off the edges of her face.

  My grin, too, was wide. Even in her anguish over the dead raccoon, Maddie had noticed a detail that might help solve the mystery of the slashing of nonhuman subjects. At the very least, she’d saved the police a lot of research.

&nb
sp; “You are so smart, Maddie,” I said, hugging her from behind.

  “My amazing child,” Mary Lou said, planting a kiss on her forehead.

  “Weird,” Richard said.

  Even with all of the cross talk going on, near the front of my mind was the fact that I hadn’t told Skip where June was. It had been easier not to tell him when he wasn’t in my living room. Now he picked Maddie up as high as he could these days. “If I had an extra badge, I’d pin it on you,” he said.

  “Weird,” Richard said again. “Someone from Bagels by Willie is leaving knives stuck in . . . things . . . all over town?”

  At times like this, I missed Ken, wondering how he would have reacted. Richard didn’t have his sense of humor, but he did have his sense of logic and practicality, both of which I had to only a small degree. I decided that Ken would have run to the kitchen and brought back a huge bowl of ice cream for his super-intelligent granddaughter.

  So, that’s what I did.

  There was one more voice to be heard on the case of the battered pineapple. Linda Reed stopped by to give me some news.

  “Two pieces of news,” as she put it.

  Richard had disappeared and came back now to announce that he’d reheated the pot roast dinner and there was enough for all.

  “I was counting on it,” Skip said.

  “You’re so lucky, Gerry. You have someone to cook for you,” Linda said.

  I passed on the chance to remind her that I took my turn every third night, and that soon I’d be back cooking for myself full time.

  I knew that Linda had felt out of it the last few days. She was always eager to help me or to be the first one to give me the latest gossip. I often thought it might have been due to her feeling that she was competing with Beverly for a top position on my nonexistent “best friend” list. Today she was delighted to have the added attention of my whole family.

  Once we were settled around the table, napkins on our laps, Richard and I looked at each other. We’d left our forks midair, as if waiting for the doorbell to shatter our plans once again. Then we burst into laughter.

  “What’s so funny?” Linda asked.

  “Never mind,” I said. “What’s your news, Linda?”

  Linda straightened the fleece vest she wore over a sweater, which was in turn over her large bosom. “First, there’s this thing going on between Nan Browne over at the TV studio and—”

  “And the security guard at the Rutledge Center,” Mary Lou said.

  In deference to Maddie who was wiping up the juice on her plate with a hunk of bread, no one specified what the “thing going on” was.

  “Okay, well, I should have known.”

  “The question is how did you find out, Linda?” I asked.

  “Nan’s mother is at the Mary Todd and she’s kind of gone over the edge, so she spills family secrets all the time. She said she saw them . . . you know . . . before she got moved to the home a couple of months ago.” Linda gave a hearty laugh. “In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Nan moved her into the home just because she saw them . . . you know.”

  The presence of a minor certainly brought out a lot of hand waving and “you knows.”

  “Are you saying that’s how long their . . . thing . . . has been going on?” I asked.

  “I guess. I actually wasn’t sure the old lady was right until you just confirmed it. I figured there was a good chance that old Mrs. Browne was making things up.”

  I’d had enough experience at the Mary Todd Home, where Linda worked and I taught crafts classes, to know that the (very) senior citizens who lived there were sharper than most of us thought.

  “I guess we all know how to keep a secret, huh?” Mary Lou said. “What else can we confirm for you, Linda?”

  Linda cut into a potato on her plate. I wondered if this meal were approved by her latest weight-loss program. “This pot roast is terrific, Richard,” Linda said. I had a feeling that Piece of News Number Two was juicier than Number One and Linda was taking her time, getting more mileage out of it.

  “There’s a lot more out there,” Richard said. “You can take some home for Jason if you want.”

  “We’re waiting for your news, Mrs. Reed,” Maddie said.

  That’s my girl, I thought.

  “Okay, this other is really crazy though. You know the new condos next to my house? The ones Zoe Howard lives in?”

  We all nodded, mouths full, chewing.

  “Well, we had a homeowners neighborhood meeting last night and something weird came up. I almost called you, Gerry, but it was a little late, and then there was Jason’s game today.”

  “And . . . ?” Mary Lou said, expressing the impatience we all felt.

  “On the walkway up to one of the condos, there were three grapefruits.” Linda paused for effect, but she needn’t have bothered.

  “And they had knives stuck in them,” Maddie said, as if she’d been the first to hit the right button on a game show, while the rest of us were still tongue-tied.

  Skip had put our maimed pineapple in his car so there was no way Linda could have known about it.

  “I don’t believe you people,” she said, wide-eyed. “How could you possibly have known that?” She looked at Skip, her expression accusing him of a leak in the police department. “I should have called you last night,” she said to me.

  “Was the department called in?” Skip asked.

  “Oh, you don’t know?” Linda responded.

  With Linda, it was always questionable whether she was teasing or seriously put out.

  “We need you, Linda,” I said, trying to appease her. “Tell us the whole story.”

  She speared a roasted carrot and bit off half. “Okay, the woman who lives there, who’s a good friend of Zoe’s by the way . . . tripped over them.” Linda prepared another forkful of food with some of everything on it—a piece of beef, a chunk of potato, and a slice of carrot, the whole assembly dipped in juice. Done with amazing skill. “The grapefruits. She tripped over the grapefruits and flipped out. She actually called the police, but they didn’t make much of it. They almost laughed at her.” She gave Skip another accusing look.

  “The fruit was left there last night?” Richard asked. I could almost hear his mind working: We weren’t the first. That’s probably good.

  Linda nodded. “Her point was, she’s Zoe Howard’s neighbor to the north, and she thinks it was supposed to be for Zoe, to mimic the stabbing?” She ended in a question. “So now she’s worried that if they think that’s where Zoe lives, what will they do next?”

  “Maybe it was because she’s a friend of Zoe’s,” Mary Lou said.

  “That’s even worse. But I didn’t really know Zoe,” Linda said, her case for exemption from threatening gestures going largely unheard.

  “Did you hear about any”—Richard lowered his voice—“raccoons that were harmed?”

  “Raccoons?” Linda mimicked Richard’s low tones. “Nuh-uh.”

  “Stabbing fruit now? Isn’t this a step down from killing a raccoon?” Mary Lou asked. “I thought bad guys escalated their crimes, I mean first assault, then . . . you know, something more serious. This guy is going the other way.”

  “Where did you learn that?” Skip asked.

  “She watches Law and Order reruns all day,” Richard said.

  “You’d better be kidding,” Mary Lou said.

  “If there’s all this slashing going on, and Zoe’s in jail, isn’t that a point in favor of her not being the painting slasher?” I asked, too weary to generate a more intelligible question.

  “I think it’s the crazy lady we’re always seeing hanging around Willie’s,” Maddie said, giving voice to what I’d been thinking. She’d cleaned her plate of everything except the carrots. At a more ordinary dinner, her father would have cajoled her to eat them. But this was no ordinary dinner.

  Skip’s cell phone ring gave us a breather from a conversation that was getting out of hand. I, for one, had a headache, and I imagined I w
asn’t the only one.

  Skip left the table, carrying a piece of bread with him, and leaned on the kitchen counter to take his call.

  We ate in silence, our ears on Skip’s side of the conversation, but all we got at first were “uh-huhs” and “nuh-uhs.”

  Then my imagination took over and I thought I heard him say, “June?” It turned out to be “raccoon.”

  He clicked his phone shut and came back to the table. “Guess what was not killed by a knife wound, besides that pineapple and Linda’s grapefruits,” Skip said.

  “Not my grapefruits,” Linda said.

  “The knife hardly penetrated the raccoon’s body, because it was already stiff, having died of natural causes.”

  “How can you tell if a raccoon has a heart attack?” Mary Lou asked.

  “What raccoon?” Linda asked.

  “The same way you tell if a human has had a heart attack,” Dr. Richard said.

  “There was a raccoon in the trash in June’s driveway,” Maddie said.

  “They’re all over. They love garbage,” Linda said.

  “I had a buddy in animal control take a look at the raccoon,” Skip said. “His opinion was that the raccoon was probably kept as a pet for a while until the people realized that was not a good idea. Then they released it and the animal didn’t know how to survive. Something like that.”

  “See, this wasn’t just a raccoon eating garbage. Someone stuck a knife in it and threw it in June’s trash can,” Maddie explained to Linda.

  “Wow,” Linda said. She shook her head and made the kind of sound you make when you’ve lost the upper hand.

  “What do you think, Skip?” Richard asked. “Are we in danger here? I’m not so sure we should be laughing at all this. I mean, two pranks in less than a week?”

  “Three,” Linda said. “Darn, I wish I’d gotten a look at the knife at the condo.”

  “My professional opinion?” Skip offered. “This is not the work of a killer or of anyone who is going to attack you personally. I’m not saying the cliché is absolutely true, that no criminal backtracks like this from animal to vegetable—”