Mourning In Miniature

by Margaret Grace

  Skip picked up his cubicle phone and punched a button. “Hey, Drew, did my aunt Gerry leave a piece of paper or something down there?” Skip held the receiver to his chest. “He’s going to look.”

  I motioned to take the phone from Skip and waited until Drew came on the line again. I had another idea about the record.

  “Nothing here, Skip,” Drew said.

  “It’s Mrs. Porter, Drew. Did you by any chance see the folder I was showing to Mr. Esterman?”

  “Yeah, I saw you guys looking at it. You know, I think I saw him put something in his pocket, something white, like a sheet of paper. I figured you gave it to him. Shall I put out an APB?” Drew laughed, but I didn’t think it was such a bad idea.

  “Thanks, anyway,” I said.

  Larry Esterman didn’t have a briefcase or any other kind of container with him, nothing into which a sheet of paper could have fallen accidentally. There was no way he mistakenly walked off with it.

  Larry Esterman rushed his daughter out of the building for a reason—he’d confiscated my record. Easy come, easy go, I thought, remembering how the record had fallen into my lap, or one seat over.

  A sneaky move on the part of Rosie’s father.

  Larry Esterman was a man after my own heart.

  With nothing much to talk about and no desire to explain my day to Skip, I left the police station and headed for Rosie’s house. On the way I called Maddie, who’d been at Linda’s for the better part of an hour.

  “I just wanted you to know I’ll be there soon, sweetheart.”

  “Okay, Grandma. Don’t worry about me. Mrs. Reed let me help her make some leaves and now I’m doing my programming homework for tomorrow.”

  Huh? No nagging or whining about being left out of my errands?

  Not one to question my good fortune, I clicked off and pulled into Rosie’s driveway. I was reminded how close her home was to the Joshua Speed Woods. I felt a shiver through my body. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw Ben Dobson strolling down the quiet street, but it was merely a gardener wearing the same color jumpsuit I’d first seen Ben wearing.

  I rang Rosie’s doorbell, listening for movement inside the small ranch-style home. I was fully aware that I might be waking Rosie up or interrupting a much-deserved bath. We had serious business, however, and any misunderstandings between us had to be cleared up immediately.

  I waited and rang again, waited and rang again. Still no action. I sat on the front steps, happily in the shade. One of the benefits of older Lincoln Point neighborhoods was their tree-lined streets, typically large silver maples interspersed with smaller Modesto ash. I didn’t think I could live where the trees looked more like miniatures, still tied to what looked like birthing posts.

  I didn’t have a plan for how long I’d wait in front of Rosie’s house, but for now, this was as good a place as any to mope about the case and about how different the weekend had turned out from what I’d expected.

  My stay in a luxury hotel had turned sour quickly, starting with David’s brush-off of Rosie at the cocktail party. Now one former student was dead and another was accused of his murder. I’d been accosted, robbed, and accosted again. I’d done my share of accosting, also. Of innocent people it seemed. I’d somehow lost Rosie’s confidence, abandoned my granddaughter, and made myself scarce to a potential new friend.

  I thought about Henry Baker. Now that I’d been reconnected with Rosie’s father (resulting in a second robbery, I noted), I didn’t need Henry’s input on Callahan and Savage. It would have been nice to have his friendship, however, and I guessed he’d decided that I wasn’t worth the trouble.

  I looked at the enormous fruitless mulberry tree in Rosie’s side yard and suspected he was right.

  Chapter 17

  It wasn’t my style to mope for too long. Now at four o’clock on a hot afternoon, I felt my waiting time was up. The one positive, useful thing I could do was retrieve my granddaughter from Linda’s house. We could work on our room boxes at home, and I’d cook her a proper dinner, preferably including a glass of milk and something that wasn’t pizza. I got up, brushed tree droppings from my slacks, and started down the stairs.

  That seemed to be the cue for Rosie’s front door to open.

  “Gerry?”

  I turned to see Rosie, freshly showered it appeared, in a deep blue chenille bathrobe that added beads of perspiration to my forehead just looking at it. She held it close around her body and I suspected it was her spirit that was chilled in spite of the high-nineties temperature. We hugged, shoulder to shoulder since I stood one step below her. She smelled of something fresh and fruity, which told me she’d bothered to treat herself to a special soak or shower gel, a good sign.

  “I’m glad to see you, Rosie,” I said, as we pulled away and entered the air-conditioned house.

  Rosie wasn’t the neatest person—she claimed that you couldn’t really enjoy books if they were all lined up properly and dusted. I’d never seen her living room this disheveled, however. Her suitcases were spread on the floor, half empty, laundry in mesh bags sharing space with shoes and cosmetics. I wondered if there were an emerald and diamond bracelet buried in the wreckage.

  I moved a map of downtown San Francisco, with a photograph of the Transamerica building on the front, from an easy chair to a cluttered end table and sat down.

  Rosie settled on her couch, upholstered in a light beige leafy design. She was still wrapped in her robe. “I know you had good intentions, Gerry, but I was so mad that I had to miss the special service for David.”

  “I never intended for that to happen. I thought I was helping you, easing the way for you to go to the police and get started on clearing yourself in this awful case.”

  “I see that now. I was crazy to hide out as long as I did. I didn’t kill David so why am I acting as though I’m guilty?”

  “I don’t know, Rosie, but the important thing is that you talked to the police and they trust you to stay around in case they need you. You can go back to your normal life.”

  I wished I believed it. I had an unnerving suspicion that whoever killed David Bridges was not through trying to pin it on Rosie. From the look on Rosie’s face, I could tell she didn’t see normalcy any time soon, either.

  “Who do you think did it, Gerry?”

  It was the first time Rosie, or anyone, had asked me that and her question reminded me that I hadn’t really settled on one person. Maybe this was like that old Agatha Christie novel where everyone did it. I thought of the mystery play Rosie’s class had put on one year. I couldn’t remember the name but I’d enjoyed the tricky plot where everyone voted by a show of hands for who they thought committed the murder. The cast took a count and then acted out the rest of the play according to the majority vote. Case closed. They had an ending for every possible voting result. It was a nice fantasy.

  “I don’t know, Rosie. Maybe we can work it out if we talk for a while.”

  I took her nod as permission to probe more into Rosie’s weekend. I started with something that had been nagging at me since Friday night. “Rosie, what did you and Barry talk about at the reunion cocktail party? You had your heads together for quite a while.”

  “I suppose it’s hard to believe that we were chatting because he enjoyed my company.”

  “I didn’t mean that,” I said, though it had crossed my mind at the time. “It’s just that I don’t remember you two being especially friendly in high school and, as far as I know, you don’t see him regularly these days even though he lives in town.”

  “As a matter of fact, Barry dropped in at the shop a couple of weeks ago, just to say hi.”

  “He didn’t want anything in particular?” Another poorly worded question. I let out a frustrated breath. “I didn’t mean it that way this time, either, Rosie. I’m just trying to follow some leads here.”

  “It’s okay. Barry didn’t buy any books, if that’s what you’re getting at. He did ask me if I’d heard from David, and it was righ
t after that that the presents started coming. Let’s face it. I was always a wallflower, going back thirty years, and you know I haven’t changed much.”

  “You make friends among your customers very easily, Rosie. They all love you.”

  Rosie talked right past my compliment. “My parents were divorced at a time when it wasn’t so common. I was only nine years old. They had joint custody of me, so I had to shuttle back and forth between their houses and I always felt like an outsider. My teeth were crooked and there wasn’t any money to fix them. Remember the lisp I had for most of high school?”

  “But look what you’ve done with your life. Your store, for one thing.”

  “When my mom died my freshman year, I hid in books, I guess.”

  “Lucky for Lincoln Point.”

  “Thanks, Gerry.”

  “Barry?” I asked.

  “You’re right that it wasn’t what you would call a personal conversation at the cocktail party. There was no ‘let’s catch a movie sometime.’ Barry’s a bachelor, you know. He seemed more interested in my father’s business, what Dad was doing these days. As if he ever knew my father or cared about my family. It was weird.”

  I’d been processing the weirdness as she talked. To me, interest in Larry Esterman, the petty thief, was interest in the company he consulted for, Callahan and Savage. Walter Mellace thought I represented Callahan and Savage and had found something Walter wanted. Why was the loser in so many recent major bids so popular? And why, other than a genetic disposition for stealing, had a Callahan and Savage consultant walked off with my precious bank record? I’d have to find a way to talk to Larry about that little trick.

  For now, I had his daughter in front of me.

  “Rosie, remember the box of chocolates you received at the hotel?”

  “I was going to throw them away, but I thought you and Maddie might like them.”

  I told her, as gently as possible, about the origin of the gift. I was ready to support my story with an affidavit from Samantha, the clerk in the hotel shop, if I needed to, but Rosie didn’t seem to need confirmation.

  “Could it have been Barry who was sending you those gifts all along?”

  “I suppose so. I know you and the girls on crafts night tried to tell me that something was not right. I just couldn’t listen at the time. But why would Barry send them using David’s initials?”

  “You talked about, quote, a date gone bad. Are you willing to tell me more about it?”

  Rosie bristled. She’d seemed to have matured in her outlook since Friday afternoon. Nothing like a murder to give one perspective. I hoped I hadn’t lost her with this question. She’d referred to the date several times, but it seemed the details of its failure were still hard to talk about.

  “That was a long time ago,” she said.

  “That’s what reunions are about. A long time ago.”

  “Do you want some ice tea?” she asked me.

  “I’d love some,” I said and followed her to her kitchen.

  It took longer than it should have to brew two glasses of ice tea, during which time we chatted about decaf versus regular, whether the upcoming week would be as hot as last week, and a special shipment of book club choices Rosie expected on Wednesday. She’d closed Rosie’s Books early on Friday and, as far as I knew, hadn’t opened it since.

  “In some ways, I’m dreading going to the shop tomorrow,” she said, once we were finally settled in the living room again.

  “It will probably take you all of twenty minutes to get back in the swing of things. Once you see the boxes of books waiting to be opened and start to work on the details of the fall children’s program, you’ll be fine.”

  “Fortunately, not too many of my classmates are customers. I guess we weren’t your best readers.”

  “Except for you.”

  Rosie’s smile was thin, but more than I’d seen for a few days. I felt a breakthrough coming.

  “It was a Thursday, before the big Valentine’s Day dance. David came up to me in the hallway, where the lockers were.”

  I knew that. My whole crafts group, including Maddie, knew that. I let Rosie take her time.

  “Uh-huh. And then?”

  “He kissed me and whispered in my ear that he wanted to go to the dance with me the next night.”

  “It was pretty short notice, wasn’t it?”

  Rosie uttered a bitter-sounding laugh. “So? It wasn’t as if I had other plans. I nearly fainted, I was so shocked and, of course, deliriously happy. On Friday I skipped classes and went shopping for a dress. I had to beg my father to help me pay for it, and money was very tight at the time. Business was slow and there were so many other expenses senior year.”

  Rosie was talking so slowly I had time to speculate in between phrases. This time I jumped ahead and figured David stood Rosie up.

  “I’m guessing something kept David from showing up.”

  “It’s worse than that,” Rosie said. “He asked me to meet him in Joshua Speed Woods, where, you know, kids went to make out.”

  More interesting. “Uh-huh.”

  Rosie took several sips of tea, with deep breaths in between. I knew I could end her misery by calling off the question, but I kept my eye on the goal—to have as much information as possible.

  “He said he’d meet me in the clearing. I knew where he meant.”

  “Is that where . . . ?”

  “Yes, it’s where he was killed,” she said, without much emotion.

  I expected that David’s murder had put an end to romantic assignations in the clearing for the near future. “Did you go to the clearing that night?” Not the night of the murder, I said to myself. That can’t be where this is heading.

  Another nasty-sounding laugh. “I went all right, in my new red dress with these little sequin hearts all over it. I got my red heels, which were right out of the box, all dirty, walking down the path, but I didn’t care. I was going to meet David.”

  A long pause. I became impatient. “And he didn’t show?”

  “Worse than that,” Rosie said again. “Do you remember Mathis Berg? He was the school’s biggest nerd.”

  I nodded. “Math Bird.”

  “Well, when I got to the clearing, guess who was there?”

  It started to fall into place. A prank perpetrated by the cool kids on the unwitting wallflowers of the class. “They’d set Mathis up, too? So instead of David, you met Mathis there?”

  “Worse than that.”

  One more time. Rosie knew how to spin a yarn. Too bad she was the victim in this one.

  “They were all there to see it. It was dark, just the moonlight illuminating the clearing. Then, suddenly all these lights went on. They’d rigged them somehow to hang from the trees. I picked out the football team and the cheerleading squad, mostly, but it seemed like the whole senior class was there in the woods. Mathis and I were standing there, all lit up. He had on a tux and I remember the collar was so big for his skinny neck. We were both so mortified.”

  To think I’d taught those students who made up the jeering crowd, probably the same day and the days before and after. I might even have given a couple of them As. Would I have graded them differently if I’d known what shallow lives they led? That was a moral discussion for another time.

  I took a cue from Abraham Lincoln: “A friend is one who has the same enemies as you have.” Rosie and Mathis should have waltzed out of the woods and gone to the Valentine’s Day dance together and had the best time of anyone there.

  But that was hindsight, and an adult response, not a high schooler’s.

  “How cruel, Rosie. You must have felt awful,” I said. I moved to a seat next to her on the couch and put my arm around her.

  “I wanted to die right there.”

  “Did you talk to Mathis about it?”

  “Never, never. Looking back, I guess he was in his own private agony. I learned that Sheila Philips, who was voted the prettiest girl in the class—do they even do that anymore
? I hope not—was the one who invited Mathis to the clearing. It’s so dumb, Gerry, what seems important when you’re seventeen.”

  “And you never talked to David about it?”

  She shook her head. “Never. But he was nice to me after that. He didn’t ask me out or anything, but he would smile and once he picked up something I dropped in class. That made me think the whole setup in the clearing wasn’t his idea, that his boorish friends put him up to it. And then this summer, when I started getting presents from him—I thought it was him—I figured he was finally going to make it up to me.”

  “I’d have been so angry with him.”

  “My father was the one who was ready to kill him.” Rosie stopped and put her hand to her mouth. “I can’t believe I said that.”

  “It’s just an expression, Rosie. We don’t realize what a terrible thing it is to say, until something like this really happens.”

  “My father wanted to have it out with him in the school-yard. Imagine that. He’d have been arrested immediately.” Rosie laughed. “Me, I had this fantasy of pouring tacky glue all over David’s lying lips.”

  I withdrew my arm from the back of the couch and sat up. “What did you say?”

  “I was into miniatures then, too, remember? So, naturally, that’s what I thought of.”

  “Naturally.”

  I left Rosie’s to go to Linda’s where Maddie was hanging out. I was ready for grief as only an eleven-year-old can give it. On the way to her house, I called Linda, using my headset. I wondered if Bluetooth was now a verb—I Blue-toothed Linda. I’d read that the technology was invented in Denmark and named after one of their peacemaking tenth-century kings, Harald Bluetooth. At first hearing, the story seemed like something made up in an eighth-grade creative writing class, but I’d read it enough times from trusted sources to believe it.

  I needed to ask Linda a question out of range of Maddie’s ears.