“I’ll make sure Uncle Skip knows who the detective was this evening,” I said.
Maddie shrugged. “We’re a good team, right?”
I gave her my biggest smile. “The best.”
A callback from Skip came about halfway through the second helping for each of us.
“I hope your news is better than mine,” he said.
My first thought was that Rosie skipped town; my second, that there was more evidence against her. My second thought was correct.
“Let me talk to him, let me talk to him,” Maddie said, nearly choking. She’d come to my side and was leaning in, trying to speak into the phone. I still had a height advantage, so I stood up and held the phone out of reach, almost knocking over my coffee mug. What was this? A spiraling back to an impatient toddler? Eleven was a tricky age.
“It’s about something else,” I told her.
“We got another call,” Skip said.
“About that other call-” I wanted to rush in and tell him what I’d learned about the last anonymous tip he’d gotten-about the convenient location of Rosie’s locker room box, right at the crime scene. There I was spiraling back from middle age to impatient youth.
Skip talked over me. “Someone who was staying across the hall on the eleventh floor of the Duns Scotus saw the whole scene that night.”
“Friday night?”
“Yeah, he says he needed ice, but he checked the peephole first because he was trying to avoid someone. He’d heard the voices, and then when he looked he saw and heard the exchange on the threshold of Bridges’s room. He said Rosie looked furious.”
“He could tell what her expression was through a peephole?”
“That’s what he says.”
“And he called Rosie by name?”
“Not exactly. He said ‘one of the two women outside Bridges’s door’ and I figured it wasn’t you.”
“What’s this man’s name?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Was he from the reunion class?” Silence, which I took for “yes.” “Was he on the football team?” More silence, therefore, another “yes.” “Well, can you at least check to see whether he’s one of the gang who hung out with David and Barry?”
“I can do that.”
“Does this new alleged tip mean that you’re bringing Rosie back in?”
“None of this is anything but circumstantial. Unless we can put her in the woods at the time of the murder, we can’t arrest her. Too bad those trees don’t have cameras. I mean, to catch whoever did it.”
“I know a lot of parents who would like that idea.”
“I just remembered, you left me a message everywhere. What’s up?”
“I have a couple of ”-a poke from Maddie made me wince-“Maddie and I have some information for you. Can you stop by?”
“Not till a lot later. We have some visiting politicians coming in this week and they’re making us rehearse a show-and-tell for them. You know, I’d rather ride my bike to your house.”
“You hate to ride your bike.”
“That’s my point. If you come by here, I’ll squeeze you in.”
It was already after nine o’clock, and a school night of sorts. I’d had a late night with Barry, and a long day, with stressful driving to and from San Francisco. I had to decide whether presenting the evidence we’d dug up was urgent. I thought not. The police already had Barry. Our little revelation was just icing on the cake, more a thrill for Maddie than something that would be a breakthrough in proving fraud, but nothing to clinch the murder case.
I felt another trick coming on, on Maddie, who, I knew, could be in the car and buckled up in a matter of seconds.
“That’s too bad, Skip. We’ll see you tomorrow,” I said. Maddie was hanging on my every word, so I made a sad face for show.
“You don’t want to give the little redhead a vote, do you?” Skip asked.
“Uh-huh, thanks. You have a good night, too.”
Maddie had returned to the last of her tuna casserole. She drained her glass of milk and heaved a big sigh for a little girl. “We have to wait, huh?” It pained me to have deliberately kept her away from her big moment. “It’s a good thing I have a lot of homework to keep me busy tonight,” she said.
In an unusual turn of events, Maddie told me she wanted to do some computer work early this evening. It seemed too much to hope that an interesting school project had balanced out the disappointment of a delayed meeting with the police.
“Are you late turning in an assignment?” I asked, though she’d never been one to cram at the last minute.
“No, I’m just excited about the programming and I’m almost finished.”
“Can you tell me about it?”
We cleared off the last of dinner dishes and loaded them into the dishwasher.
“It’s nothing. You’d be bored.”
“I might be able to learn.”
“Okay, I need to fix some things on my avatar.”
“Never mind.”
“I’ll show you later.”
“Let me know when you’re ready to say good night.”
Maddie was at the door to her room. “Grandma?”
“Yes?”
“Knock, knock.”
“Who’s there?”
“Digital.”
“You mean digital your mother you flunked math? Or digital your father you lost the game? Or-”
“Okay, okay.” She entered her room and closed the door.
Tomorrow I’d confess that we were telling that one before she was born. Except we were referring to our fingers.
I’d already started Maddie’s Christmas present and was glad to have a chance to work on it without prying eyes. My idea was to replicate her father’s old bedroom, which was now essentially Maddie’s room.
Maddie’s things had been slowly crowding out Richard’s, but she seemed reluctant to do this and often said she missed his baseball mitt, now stored in Richard’s attic, or some other object that had been prominent in the room. I had enough photographs (and a good memory) of Richard’s room the way he left it, and I thought it would be a nice surprise to give Maddie a miniature version. Then she’d be free to decorate the life-size room any way she wanted.
One of the hardest items to reproduce in miniature was Richard’s baseball bedding. The ball and bat patterns on novelty fabric were usually large, with each graphic several inches in width or length-not suitable for a bed that was itself only six inches long.
Thanks to the younger members in my crafters group, who kept up with modern technology, I now had a solution to the problem. I was able to purchase a package of eight-and-a-half-by-eleven sheets that were a combination of plastic on one side and fabric on the other and would go through my printer. I’d simply have to scan a photo of Richard’s comforter, size it as I wished, print it on the sheet, and remove the plastic backing. Voila, I’d have the exact fabric I wanted.
If I couldn’t do it by myself (these things were never as easy as they sounded), I knew I could call on Karen or Susan in the group, so I wouldn’t have to invoke Maddie’s help.
Tonight’s project, phase one, was to sift through photo albums to find the right view of the comforter. While I was at it, I’d select a photograph of Maddie and me, as she’d requested.
I sat in the cool atrium and turned page after page of history, starting with the books dedicated to Richard’s preteen years. I found a few good candidates for photos to use, but I didn’t stop. I kept going through later albums, caught up in the reverie until I’d gone through Madison Porter’s birth announcement, infant years, and early birthday parties.
When she came out in her soccer pajamas and her eleven-year-old body, I was startled into the present.
She may have wondered why I hugged her tighter and longer than usual.
“I’m ready to sleep,” she said.
“I’ll be right in.”
After I take a minute to ponder the passing of the years.<
br />
Maddie was in bed, ready for a brief recap of our favorite moments of the day and a good-night kiss. I brought her a snapshot I’d found from Richard’s birthday party in the spring. Maddie and I were sharing a happy moment eating multilayer cake.
She looked closely at the photo. “This is perfect. Thanks, Grandma.”
“I’ll take it back for now, then, and put it in a frame.”
“It’s okay. It’s better like this,” she said, standing it against the base of her lamp.
I noticed she’d already turned her computer off.
“I thought you were going to show me your atavar.” She laughed. “It’s avatar, Grandma. I forgot and shut down. And I’m ready to sleep, okay?”
“Of course.”
“There were too many favorite things, today, anyway, Grandma,” she said. “I could never pick. There was class and Ghirardelli and talking to Marina and tuna casserole and finding the date mix-up and…”
She trailed off, exhausted from the long list of wonderful things that had happened to her today.
I hoped life would always be that way for her.
Chapter 22
I started my work on the model of Richard’s bedroom by cheating. I’d bought a tiny baseball glove from an online hobbies and miniatures supply store. Linda would be so ashamed of me. She, and many of the other crafters I knew, would have been manipulating pairs of tweezers, stitching tiny pieces of leather together, to make the glove. If I took that approach to my hobby, I’d get one thing done a month, if that. I was much too impatient.
At a miniature show in San Jose last fall, I’d met a woman who was displaying a four-inch-by-six-inch quilt made from 576 pieces. Each piece seemed no bigger than what fell from my nail clippers.
For me the joy of miniatures was in the originality and personalization of the scenes I made, not in the craft of making pieces more easily bought, like mahogany four-poster beds, or stuffed easy chairs with hand-stitched upholstery. Or like the rocking chairs Henry Baker turned out, I mused.
In my own defense, I did add two or three handmade pieces to each room box, and I had a few from-scratch specialties that I prided myself on.
One item I loved to make was the tiny pair of eyeglasses I put into my scenes. I made these with needle-nose pliers and fine-gauge wire of different colors. Any clear plastic, cut to size, served as a lens. When I was really ambitious, I added tiny beads to the rims and earpieces, for a Hollywood look. For sunglasses I dipped into my boxes of envelopes with photographs and negatives from the days before digital cameras. Small pieces cut from the edges of negatives made a convincing sunglass lens. I doubted the memory stick Maddie talked about, that was in her camera, would prove as useful in twenty years.
By ten thirty, I was ready to turn in. While working on a tiny trophy-cut out from foam board and painted bronze-for Richard’s bedroom, I’d thought over the facts of the David Bridges murder case. I’d been doing well, putting it in the back of my mind, until I took out a new container of tacky glue, and an image of David’s lips came to me. Once Maddie and I talked to Skip tomorrow about our interview with Marina, and our new evidence of fraud, I was finished. The only curious loose end was why Larry had stolen the bank record from my tote. And, of course who had killed David.
I packed up the work in progress and slipped the box on the floor under a crafts table where Maddie wouldn’t find it. I looked forward to reading in bed, finishing my book club’s selection, The House of Mirth. I’d have to brace myself for what I knew was a devastating ending. When it was my turn to choose a book in a couple of months I planned to offer several more upbeat titles. I had to admit, though, I was tempted to try decorating a room box with the costumes of the times portrayed in the book, perhaps a turn-of-the-century ladies’ shop. It had been a while since I’d made a feathery hat or a parasol. I pictured a hat and accessories shop, with a row of pancake-shaped chapeaux in different pastels and piles of necklaces (thin, broken chains from my jewelry box) on the counter.
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.
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