Monster in Miniature Read online

  “Nuh-uh. I’m just trying to see what the range of the detector is,” she said. “In case I want to build one at technology camp next summer.”

  “I see.”

  A group of teenagers, three boys and three girls, happened by. They seemed to be enjoying the start of their weekend as much as released convicts might relish their first day of freedom. I remembered the feeling from having been on both sides of a teacher’s desk. The teenagers unwittingly did Maddie the huge favor of crashing through the gate, laughing and prodding one another—who would dare get closest to the figure this year?

  Maddie stayed on her perch, watching the action. Soon enough she’d be on her own, traveling with just such a group, I mused. I wondered if she were wishing she could join them now. Or was she relieved to be on the sidelines? For me, I was happy to have a couple more years with her as a preteen.

  Eeeeeek!

  A human-sounding scream pierced the air. One of the girls had apparently walked within range of the motion detector.

  Eeeeeek!

  Maddie and I blocked our ears. Sam and Lillian had outdone themselves in verisimilitude.

  But something was different—the creature didn’t budge. No bobbing head or flailing arms and no wildly kicking legs had been stirred into action.

  Maddie came down from the fence and wrapped her arms around my waist. I stroked her red curls as we both sensed something was dead wrong.

  Indeed it was. The scream had come from one of the teenage girls. “It’s really a dead man,” she yelled, in a hysterical voice, running out to the sidewalk. Most of her companions followed.

  A prank, I thought. Had Sam and Lillian Ferguson enlisted a Hollywood makeup artist to better their chances at winning a prize? From what I’d read, the prize was nothing elaborate—a modest gift certificate to a store in town, a token gesture to encourage competition.

  My teaching wits kicked in and I wondered if the young girl had faked her alarm, to scam her friends or Maddie and me? Or maybe all of the teens had been in on the joke, just because they were teens.

  “What makes you think it’s not makeup you’re seeing?” I asked the girl, who was either hyperventilating or a very good actress. “The porch is not very well lit.”

  “It is if you’re up there.” Of course it was. The Fergusons had rigged floodlights with just the right amount of illumination to cover the porch and the steps in an eerie yellow glow. “And, besides, I can tell. I’ve seen real dead bodies close-up on television,” the girl said. If she weren’t shaking so much, I’d have laughed.

  “He’s really dead,” said a boy who’d gone as far as the bottom step to confirm the report. “It’s a dead live man. I mean, a dead dead man.” His face was white as he turned and touched his forehead. “His eyes are, like, staring, and there’s a bullet hole . . . I think it is . . . right here. And there’s a gun in his hand, and there’s, like, a mess.”

  I knew that if I went up the walkway to examine the scene myself, the teenagers would flee, and on the off chance that there really had been a real gun and a real death, I needed them to stay. The more I looked at the man’s body, the more convinced I became that it was human. The legs of his jeans and the arms of his red plaid shirt were filled out, not drooping over broomstick handles or seeming to be made of straw.

  The only downside to believing without seeing for myself close-up was that I’d be embarrassed if I called the police out to investigate a spoof. With all the supplies available at every party and discount store at this time of year, how hard would it be to paint a bullet hole on a fake head?

  The looks on the faces of the teens were enough to convince me, however, that this was no joke, not by the Fergusons, and not by the teenagers.

  And there was one cop with whom I could take a chance. We had a history of sharing embarrassing moments.

  I took out my cell phone and punched in my nephew’s number.

  I saw my quiet Halloween turn into a dead pumpkin.

  Chapter 2

  I was enormously and selfishly relieved that it hadn’t been Maddie who’d discovered that the Fergusons had been sporting a live—well, once-live—Halloween decoration.

  “Do you want to go to the car?” I whispered to Maddie. She shook her head vigorously: no. Then she linked her arm through mine in a casual movement, as if she weren’t frightened to death.

  A quick survey of the house showed no sign of life inside. I was surprised the Fergusons would go out and leave all the decorative lights on but guessed that participation in the contest required it—the more exposure the scene had, the better.

  I knew Sam and Lillian Ferguson as well as I knew the parents of any of my former students. I’d known their twin boys, Eliot and Emory, now in their forties, from ALHS, and saw them around town occasionally. My late husband, Ken, had been the architect on an industrial remodeling project that included the twins’ manufacturing business, E&E Parts. That era seemed a lifetime ago, but then, any day without Ken was still too long.

  At this distance from the porch I couldn’t make out details of the facial structure of the body, but I was fairly sure the victim wasn’t old Sam. The Fergusons had had their boys a little older than most parents of that time, and were probably now close to eighty years old. The dead man seemed much younger, around the twins’ age.

  I felt Maddie shudder and rubbed her arm. I wished I could protect her from anything that brought her shivers, but I felt my duty was to stay at the scene.

  What if Sam and Lillian were at home, a few yards away, injured or dead? As much as I wanted to go through the gate, at least to check on them, I felt glued to my spot, with no choice but to wait until Skip arrived. What few passersby I saw were on the other side of the street, and none of them seemed old enough for me to enlist for crime scene inspection.

  The teens had gone into a huddle. Not a good sign, in my vast experience with adolescents. I needed to maintain some control over them.

  “I’m Mrs. Porter, from the high school,” I said, approaching the group. I didn’t bother to amend the statement to include the fact of my retirement several years ago. “Is everyone okay here?”

  Two of the girls remained silent, moving their thumbs with great speed over a tiny keyboard on their cell phones. The others answered me with murmurings of “I guess” and “Kinda.”

  “I have some water in my car if anyone needs it,” I said. The suggestion spurred no verbal response, but several bottles of water appeared from their backpacks. “I called the police and they’ll be here any minute,” I continued. “I’m sure they’ll want to talk to each of you.”

  “No way,” one boy said, and he and the girl who’d been clinging to him rushed off toward Hanks Road before I could convince them otherwise or even get their names.

  Bad start. To contain the remaining four teens, I’d need my strongest teacher voice. “Now, listen to me, please. By all accounts, this was not a death by natural causes, and you can all be considered witnesses after the fact. You can’t run away from that.” (Sad to say, it wasn’t the first time I’d made up an official-sounding phrase to fool a group of freshmen.)

  “I have to get home. My mom will be totally worried,” said the girl who’d screamed. I sympathized with her sudden need for her mother’s comfort, but I had a job to do as an unofficial representative of the Lincoln Point Police Department.

  “You can call her and explain that you’ll be home very soon. I’m sure you’ll be able to get a ride home in a police car, in fact.”

  “Cool,” said one boy. An ally, as I’d hoped for, and one who used an old-fashioned word, I noted.

  “Colin!” said more than one of his companions, with accusatory looks.

  “What if the dude just killed himself? That’s not a crime, is it?” Colin asked, turning to me.

  It was not the time to voice my opinion, but I’d always thought it strange that attempted suicide was a felony in some states. As for successful suicide, well, it was a moot point from the point of view o
f the victim. “Only the police will be able to tell us for sure,” I said. I sounded lame even to myself, but so far no one else was moving away.

  I was aware of Maddie’s arm, linked into mine, but otherwise, she remained in the background. I’d deliberately taken a position facing the corpse so the youngsters would be looking at me, in the opposite direction. Even so, all their faces had pinched and serious expressions.

  The twinkling lights that decorated the lawns and porches of the other houses on the darkening Sangamon River Road took on a more eerie look than even their owners had intended, I was sure. A light breeze swept through the neighborhood and I had the sensation that all the filmy ghosts and stiff bats had come alive for a moment and blew out a breath or fluttered their wings.

  I took a breath myself, then got back to matters at hand. I pulled a notebook and pen from my large purse, working my way around glue sticks, tweezers, a sewing kit, and a miniature set of knives I’d forgotten to unload after a shopping trip.

  “To speed things up, let me take your names and addresses,” I said, as if it were attendance time on a normal day in homeroom.

  They responded well, straightening up and preparing to identify themselves, leading me to believe that my guess was correct—they were freshmen, and therefore malleable.

  “Ashley Gordon, Two-two-one Lee Street,” said the screamer, shivering in a long-sleeved red T-shirt with stamps of the great landmarks of Europe. I took off my unfashionable Irish knit cardigan and put it on Ashley’s slight shoulders. She gave me a weak smile of gratitude as she pulled it up past her chin. Thin as I was, my hip-length sweater reached beyond the petite girl’s knees.

  “Chelsea Sheridan,” said a heavy girl with equally heavy makeup in a semi-Goth style. “I live on Merrimac, and I didn’t see anything.”

  “Sometimes we’re not aware of what our brains pick up at a time like this, Chelsea,” I said, in the best Detective Skip Gowen tradition.

  “It’s true,” Maddie said, surprising me. She’d had to let go of my arm as I transferred my sweater to Ashley, and now she was ready to stand on her own. “Wait till my uncle gets here and starts asking questions. You’ll be smarter than you think.”

  I wished Skip, who was in fact not Maddie’s uncle, but her first cousin once-removed, had been present to hear her. The two had had an unbreakable mutual admiration society going since Maddie was born.

  I reinforced Maddie’s words. “You might have picked up on a detail you didn’t think was important but could be a major clue in the case.”

  Chelsea’s face brightened, her cheeks puffing up. The ego of a freshman was no smaller than the ego of a senior.

  “I’m Rob Wellington,” said the fourth and last teen to speak, through a mouthful of braces. “I saw a boy on a bike at the other end of the street just before we got here.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything,” Chelsea said. I had the feeling it wasn’t the first time she’d put Rob in his place.

  Rob countered. “He was riding really fast and he didn’t have any lights on.”

  Chelsea screwed up her nose and made a gesture of dismissal with her hand. “So?” she asked.

  “I still think it could be suicide. The gun is right there in his hand. Just look,” said Colin, who did not turn to look. I made a note: Colin was the boy who’d gotten closest to the corpse and had testified to the bullet hole and the gun in the victim’s hand. “Oh, I’m Colin McKeon,” he said. “I didn’t touch anything.”

  I didn’t doubt him for a minute.

  “And your friends who ran off?” I asked. “Who are they?” I made it sound as though they’d be considered fugitives, finally captured and sitting outside the principal’s office on Monday, while the four exemplary students who’d stayed behind would be honored and applauded at the next school-wide assembly.

  They looked at each other. To tell or not to tell?

  “Garrett Cox and Amber Frederich,” blurted Ashley.

  I made a show of writing down the information, flicking my wrist after an imaginary exclamation point. “Were any of you here on Sangamon recently, before this evening?” I asked.

  “We came by the other night, but not all the decorations were ready yet,” Chelsea said.

  “Old Sam was still wiring things up,” Rob said. He pointed over his shoulder, not venturing another look at the scene. I was glad of that.

  “Did you talk to Mr. Ferguson?” I asked, looking from one to the other, pen still poised over my notepad.

  “We just waved,” Colin said. His hands were in the pockets of his sweatshirt, and I thought I caught him stifling a shiver.

  “Me and my boyfriend, Noah, came by again today,” Ashley said, testing my patience with her grammar.

  “What time?”

  “Lunchtime. We have open campus on Fridays and then we have study hall so we rode our bikes over here.”

  “Did you look at this house?”

  “Uh-huh. It was normal. I mean the straw man was there and jumped around the way he was supposed to. That’s not Mr. Ferguson with the . . .”—Ashley touched her forehead—“on the porch. That man is younger,” she offered, long after the fact.

  “I know it’s hard to think about, but just from your brief glimpse, does the man on the steps look like anyone you know, Ashley? You were the first to see him.” She shook her head. Once again, I scanned each of the teenagers. “Does anyone here recognize him?”

  No, no, and no. The two girls picked up their backpacks. I sensed I was losing them, and I couldn’t think of another reasonable question.

  An unmarked sedan that I recognized as belonging to the LPPD pulled up behind me. I turned and saw two other LPPD vehicles arriving also.

  Leave it to my nephew and his buddies to show up in the nick of time.

  Uniformed officers and crime scene technicians, who’d followed Skip to the location, entered the Fergusons’ home. They wasted no time waiting for a doorbell to be answered. I assumed this fell under the guideline of “exigent circumstances” and the need to check for evidence or additional victims. I felt a little guilty that I hadn’t made an effort to do that myself, but Skip assured me otherwise.

  “You did good, Aunt Gerry,” he said, as the crime scene technicians took over. “It was important to keep the kids here.” He leaned down and kissed Maddie’s forehead. “And I hear you were a great partner,” he told her. When their heads touched, it was hard to tell where one thicket of red hair ended and the other began, except that Maddie’s was curlier.

  After administering that compliment, Skip sent Maddie into the care of a female officer I recognized from my trips through the halls of the police department. I expected instant bonding since Maddie made friends easily, and especially with law enforcement. I checked back and saw the two were sitting in the patrol car, engaged in conversation that seemed to involve an examination of the bells and whistles of the vehicle. I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear the siren soon and see the lights flash. My granddaughter had negotiating skills far beyond her years.

  So far, no neighbors had made themselves known. With all the special lighting, it was nearly impossible to tell which houses were occupied this evening. It was a little too early for returning commuters, and perhaps those who did hear the activity thought the Fergusons had enlisted the LPPD to be part of their contest entry this year.

  We all breathed sighs of relief when we learned that there was no one at home, neither alive nor dead, inside the Ferguson residence.

  Skip’s interviews with the teenagers, though brief, was painful to witness. He took each frightened teen, gently, one by one, as close to the body as possible until he determined that they were all sure they didn’t know the man. Then he took their phone numbers (I’d forgotten about that) and the addresses I’d missed and sent them off feeling relieved and important.

  When it was my turn to approach the dead man, I took my time and looked (gulping) not only at his body but around the porch, thinking something might jog my memory abo
ut the victim or about the Fergusons. When had I last seen any of the family? I recalled that Lillian attended a miniatures show I organized and bought a dollhouse. It had been almost a year ago, but I remembered the enormous Victorian being carried out of the school hall by her twin boys. I hadn’t seen Sam to talk to in a while.

  I looked at the position of the gun, still in the victim’s hand. I hoped the LPPD could do some magic or trigonometry (which amounted to the same thing to my math-challenged brain) and determine whether the man could have killed himself.

  Everything on the porch seemed related to Halloween, from the stubby orange battery-operated candles to the fake hay strewn around the floorboards. The two-seater metal swing held rag dolls dressed to look like farmers and farmers’ wives and children. Although they were the size of regular toddlers’ dolls, I had to resist the temptation to poke them to verify that they were indeed dolls and not more, if tiny, victims.

  I walked past the body again, holding my breath all the way. Nothing came to me. Back on the sidewalk, when I finally exhaled, a wave of exhaustion washed over me. My stomach felt nauseous, as if I’d eaten a whole bowl of the chocolate candy.

  “It’s going to be hard for you to get an investigation going with no identification of the victim,” I said to Skip.

  “Oh, we know who he is,” he said. “The techs gave me his wallet right away. His name is Oliver Halbert. He’s a building inspector with the city, lives in an apartment right around the corner on Hanks. Has a wife and two daughters, if you can go by the photographs he was carrying.”

  I grunted in surprise. “If you already had all that information, why did you put those children though that dreadful rigmarole?”

  Skip slapped his notebook against his hand. “For one thing, it tells me something about the kids, who, after all, were at the crime scene. For another—well, you never know what you can learn even when you think you already know it.”

  Words of wisdom, widely applicable, I thought.