Mourning In Miniature

by Margaret Grace

  On the way to my bedroom, at the back of the house, I hit the button to close the atrium skylight. In one of those comic moments, my finger hitting the button coincided with a knock on the door. The tapping was barely audible over the sound of the motor that sent the skylight sliding over the fixed roof toward the front of the house.

  Probably Skip, thoughtfully keeping his tap light at this hour. I remembered he said he’d be able to stop by later, though we hadn’t confirmed it.

  I left the skylight about one-quarter closed and walked to the door. I used the peephole just to be safe.

  Staring back at me was Cheryl Mellace. I felt like my house was a waiting room for the police department. Was there an unmarked LPPD car out in front again? I shouldn’t complain—my own private suspects were saving me a lot of legwork.

  “What a nice surprise,” I said, letting Cheryl in.

  Like Barry, Cheryl had chosen to visit in casual clothes, befitting the weather. Her outfit, a matching shorts and tank top set in a yellow and black geometric pattern was much classier than his, however. Her eye patch was gone and any residual bruising was covered by her makeup.

  Cheryl glanced up at my partly closed skylight cover. “We have one just like that in our sunroom,” she said. “It’s a godsend, especially in this god-awful weather, isn’t it?”

  I was too tired to play this game of chitchat, but I was, after all, raised to be polite to guests. “Can I offer you a glass of ice tea?”

  Cheryl put her designer-logo straw purse (I’d always thought the designers should pay the customers for advertising) on one of the atrium chairs and fanned herself with her short, slender fingers. “I’d love some.”

  “I’ll be right back,” I said, the same phrase I’d used with Barry last night.

  A slight headache came on at that moment, as I tried to shake the feeling that I was caught in a loop, where every night I’d have a murder suspect in my atrium and would have to make them ice tea.

  The more company I had in a given week, the more prepared I was and the more well stocked, except for my ginger cookies. I was back in a flash with tea and a plate that included the last four cookies. I hoped this meeting with Cheryl would result in some progress toward solving David Bridges’s murder and getting me back to baking treats for my family and guests.

  Cheryl had wandered to the edge of my crafts room, where a small table held newly purchased miniatures, not yet integrated into my crafts room supplies. I’d started to glue a stack of books together for placement in a cozy reading scene I was doing for a childhood friend in the Bronx.

  “This is amazing,” Cheryl said. “I don’t know how you work with these little things, and it all looks so neat and finished. I was in charge of decorations at the hotel last weekend and I had an awful time.”

  “It showed” was on the tip of my tongue, but I didn’t want to aggravate her.

  I let Cheryl praise the minty tea and explain how she didn’t eat sweets this late. Still very trim and muscular, she looked like she didn’t eat them early in the day, either.

  “I’m assuming you have something on your mind, Cheryl?” I folded my arms across my chest. I used this body language rarely in my classroom, but when I did, words came tumbling out of the student in front of me. And it was words that I needed now from Cheryl. Fortunately for me, tonight she looked more like Cheryl Carroll, my C-average ALHS student than Mrs. Walter Mellace, important society wife and charity fund-raiser.

  We took seats across from each other in the atrium, ready for business.

  “I know you’re working with the police on David’s case, and I think you have an idea that I was involved in his murder.” Cheryl waved a finger at me and spoke in measured tones, as she might to her children.

  I seemed to be locked in a power struggle, trying to be Cheryl’s old teacher while she was trying to be my mother.

  “What makes you think that?”

  “I didn’t do it,” she declared.

  “You flatter me by thinking you have to answer to me, or that I have any official status with the police.”

  She took a sip from her glass, leaving a large red lipstick mark on its rim, then looked at me sideways. “Come on, Gerry, everyone in town knows your, quote, status, unquote, with the Lincoln Point police.”

  One point for Cheryl, for reaching the “Gerry” stage. In his time with me, Barry hadn’t gotten past “Mrs. Porter.”

  “While you’re here, Cheryl, I do have a couple of questions for you.”

  “I’m sure you do, and I’ll just tell you straight out that, yes, David and I had started seeing each other again. It wasn’t the biggest secret in the world, though we hadn’t exactly gone public with it yet.”

  I decided to ask the most important question. “Cheryl, why did you put the room box in the woods near the crime scene and then call the police?”

  Cheryl blinked several times and took another drink. I could tell I’d surprised her and I got the feeling she wished the drink were stronger than ice tea. She hung her head. I tried to remember if she’d been a member of the drama club.

  “I’m ashamed of myself. I put it there because I didn’t want the police looking at me. I knew I’d made a bit of a spectacle of myself Friday night. I’d had a little too much in the hospitality suite, you know?”

  I recalled that another Mellace, her husband, excused his behavior in accosting me, by invoking the same reason.

  “How did you know where to put it?”

  “I have a friend in the dispatcher’s office. He told me where David’s . . . David was found. That clearing was a special place for us, you know.” Cheryl’s eyes seemed to drift up and off to the right. An onlooker might have thought she was stargazing through my open roof.

  “The clearing is not as private as you think.”

  She dropped her gaze and seemed to freeze in time and space. “What? What do you mean?”

  “Everyone knows, Cheryl.” I couldn’t believe I was the first to alert Cheryl that everyone past freshman year knew that the clearing in Joshua Speed Woods had been the teenagers’ haven for decades. I remembered the time a group of parents decided to drive to the parking lot where I’d been earlier today and camp out, hoping to head their children off at the edge of the woods.

  “I have to go,” Cheryl said. Looking at her expression—eyes glazed over, lips tightened into a thin line—I wondered if I should let her drive.

  I opened the door, hoping to see the LPPD escort that Barry had received.

  The street was clear except for Cheryl’s own low-riding sports car, its top down. I watched wide-eyed as she climbed over the driver’s side door to enter. It was as if she’d gone back thirty years and was trying out for the cheerleading squad. I couldn’t imagine what had put her over the edge, literally and figuratively.

  I mentally took out my grade book from the days of yore. As of this interview, my verdict for Barry Cannon was “not guilty,” for Walter Mellace, “guilty,” and Cheryl Mellace, “deadlocked.” It crossed my mind that Walter was suffering from not having knocked on my door for a late-night drink.

  In spite of the hour, I was wired from Cheryl’s visit and wished Skip would come by. I felt it would be disloyal to Maddie if I called him myself, but I’d be blameless if he showed up and asked me to share.

  Until I could unload all the little findings of the past day, I’d have trouble sleeping, I knew. Sometimes writing things down helped me let go, so I made a list of what I needed to tell Skip.

  I wrote my cryptic notes: room box journey from hotel to woods; e-mail chronology off; Larry? Cheryl?

  I surprised myself by putting Larry Esterman on my list. Rosie’s father, a murderer? I doubted it, but as more and more people told me how angry he was at the students who perpetrated the terrible humiliation on his daughter, I found it hard not to entertain the possibility. Carrying a grudge for thirty years could make anyone snap.

  The last, Cheryl? referred to a nagging bit, a possible clue I’d though
t of while Cheryl was here. It might not even have had to do with her, but something that came to me by my looping, associative mind.

  I took the notes with me and put them on my night table.

  There. Now I could sleep and let some other force do its part.

  Chapter 23

  Maddie was torn between two good options on Wednesday morning.

  She swung her cereal spoon to her left. “I really want to go to class today because I have big things going on with my project.” She swung the spoon to her right. “But I don’t want to miss anything.” She aimed the spoon at me. “Do you promise not to go to Uncle Skip’s office before I’m out of school?”

  “I do.”

  She paused a minute. “Do you promise not to invite him here?”

  “I do.”

  More thinking. “Do you promise—”

  “Sweetheart, I promise to wait before I talk to Uncle Skip about what you and I, mostly you, figured out, until you are by my side.” That ought to cover it. It took fewer words for many legal procedures.

  “Okay,” she said. “I won’t crab anymore.”

  She kept her promise through breakfast and even on the short ride to the Rutledge Center.

  I was grateful for a cooler day in the forecast as I headed for the library. I much preferred to have all the windows open in my car to using the noisy, windy air conditioner. Maddie, on the other hand, wanted the air conditioner all year long, it seemed. You might have thought she grew up in the Bronx as I did, and hadn’t been cold since leaving the Grand Concourse.

  My morning would be taken up with a tutoring session at the library with Lourdes Pino. Otherwise, I’d have bitten my nails to the core waiting for permission from my granddaughter to contact my nephew.

  It never took me long to refocus when I met Lourdes Pino. Her enthusiasm and energy for studying was contagious. If she’d been in any of my high school English classes at ALHS, she might have inspired some of the duller students whom I was unable to reach.

  Although Lourdes had earned her GED last spring and was ready to start her first year of community college, she asked if we could continue our weekly sessions in the Lincoln Point Library.

  “I want a leg up,” she said, grinning. “Is that the right saying?”

  “You could have said, ‘I’m eager to pursue a course of study that will give me a competitive advantage over less zealous students.’”

  It was always good to start a session with a laugh.

  Lourdes showed me the catalog description of one of her classes, an English class that “integrates reading, critical thinking, and writing assignments.” It sounded good to me and we drafted a plan for me to work with her through the semester, helping her with homework as needed.

  Today Lourdes and I met in the new wing of the library, where small meeting rooms were perfect for tutoring sessions. We were glad for the sorely needed upgrade to the facility. Week after week, Lourdes and I had met in a tiny room that had also served as the mailroom and the office supply closet. It was now possible to have comfortable space available outside of regular library hours, for community meetings and educational programs such as Literacy for All, which had brought Lourdes and me together several years ago.

  The new room was nicely appointed, with poster-size photographs or drawings of literary giants on the walls. Shakespeare, T. S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf, among others, looked down at us.

  The wall directly beside us was devoted to a children’s project. A set of posters titled California Authors caught my eye. The young students had compiled a collage of photographs of famous west coast writers: William Saroyan, Robinson Jeffers, Jessica Mitford, Gertrude Stein, Eugene O’Neill, and many others, whom, I was sure, the children would appreciate only later in life.

  The photograph of Wallace Stegner seemed to have loosened from its backing. I looked closely and saw that many of the photos and clippings were coming undone. Another case of poor craftsmanship, like the posters at the thirty-year reunion, managed by Cheryl Mellace.

  A bell went off in my head, loud as the sound of the beginning of class. I raised my eyebrows in a silent aha moment. I knew what had been nagging at me.

  Lourdes picked up on my change of mood. “What’s wrong, Mrs. Porter? A spelling mistake on the poster?”

  I smiled. “Something like that. I hope you don’t mind, but I have to leave a little early, Lourdes.” I stood and packed my notes and books. “I’ll type up our schedule and drop it by Willie’s later today. Is that all right with you?”

  “Yes, yes, Mrs. Porter. You have something very important to do, I can tell.” Lourdes shot me an exaggerated wink. “For the police, yes?”

  I wished I weren’t so transparent.

  The Lincoln Point Library is only one building away from the police department. If it weren’t for my need to follow up on my flash of awareness, it would have taken all my willpower not to take a detour to the LPPD building and see if Skip was around. I’d been disappointed that he hadn’t called. I had to balance that with how pleased Maddie would be when we traveled together to talk to her uncle.

  With the promise of a breakthrough at the front of my mind, I headed home.

  For once my lack of organizational skills paid off—I hadn’t cleaned out my tote bag since the reunion weekend. I rummaged around in it now and hoped I still had the program.

  I breathed a long sigh when I found it between a package of glue gun sticks and a bag of M&M’s. More good luck: the program listed the decorations committee: Cheryl Mellace, chairperson, and, under her, Allison Parker.

  Allison, who still lived in town, was a customer of Rosie’s. I’d run into her several times in the bookshop, making it easy to approach her for a favor. I rushed to the bedroom to find the updated yearbook Rosie had produced, found Allison’s phone number, and called her.

  Another stroke of luck, when Allison picked up the call. “Hi, Mrs. Porter. I was sorry I didn’t get a chance to talk to you at the reunion. It was just crazy wild, and then that awful thing with David, it was so upsetting, I almost didn’t go to the banquet on Saturday night, because my husband was sick besides, but I figured David wouldn’t want everyone just to stay at home and not get together, which he was so looking forward to.”

  Now I remembered. Allison was a lot like Linda, with record-breaking run-on sentences and nonstop rambling. When Allison took a breath, I offered my few words, commiserating about the loss of David Bridges. It bothered me that I never seemed to take very long to grieve before wanting to get back to the investigation of his murder. I hoped that could be counted as respect for the dead.

  “I don’t remember seeing you at the groundbreaking,” I said. As if I’d been keeping track.

  “No, we didn’t make it. My husband and I were at San Francisco General Hospital from Friday night to Saturday morning. By the time we got out, it was already close to noon and we knew we couldn’t make it, but we stayed around anyway and waited for the banquet. Andy was sick right after the cocktail party, losing everything, you know, and we didn’t want to take a chance, being away from home and all, so we went to the ER and they said it was probably food poisoning. We thought of the shrimp immediately. I don’t know if you had a problem with it. I didn’t, but Andy has a sensitive digestive system. Anyway, they gave him something to calm his stomach down and he was okay, but by then it was too late to go back to Lincoln Point for the groundbreaking.”

  I thought it must have been my personal best at not interrupting a story I didn’t care about. Except, I did care in the sense that it gave Allison Parker an unsolicited alibi for the time of David’s death. In case anyone asked.

  During the story, I’d held the phone in the crook of my neck while I poured myself a glass of ice tea. “Allison, I wonder if you could do me a favor? Do you still have the posters that were on display in the hotel ballroom? The ones you helped Cheryl with?”

  “Yes, and I’m not sure what to do with them, to tell you the truth. I guess I’ve become the of
ficial archivist for my class, although—”

  “Do you mind if I take a look at them again?”

  “Sure, no problem.”

  One of my pet peeves reared its head. “Sure” meant she did mind, when I knew the opposite was true. I hadn’t been in charge of Allison’s grammar lessons for many years, however, and I passed on the need to correct her.

  Though she didn’t ask, I felt I should explain, or rather, create a fictional explanation for why I wanted to see the posters.

  “I remember that some of the photographs showed students in the background whom I’ve been trying to reconnect with, and I’d like a closer look. Also, I thought you might be able to help me locate them.”

  “Oh, you’re so good, Mrs. Porter, keeping up with your students from so long ago like that. I always liked you.”

  I never forgot where my students fell on the grading curve. “That’s because you were such a good student, Allison.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Porter. Sometimes I wish I were back in high school when life was so simple.”

  Not for everyone, I thought. Not for Rosie. “Are you free now, by any chance? I wouldn’t need to see all the posters. The ones I’m interested in are the medium-size, about fifteen by twenty-four.” No sense in having the poor girl lug all that heavy cardboard for my sham research. “Can we meet downtown somewhere?”

  “Oh, gosh. I’m just leaving to pick up my grandson because his mother is tied up with a client. She’s in real estate. Is this evening okay? I could even swing by your house.

  You’re in the Eichler neighborhood on the upper west side, right?” Allison made our humble residential area sound like the real Upper West Side of Manhattan. I felt a pang of longing for my former, big city life, where I’d never been involved in a murder case.

  “This evening is fine, Allison. I have my crafts group, but I’ll certainly be able to take a break with you.”

  I gave Allison directions to my house and rejoiced in my luck. If Allison came through, my crafts group were exactly the people I’d need to consult with tonight.