Malice in Miniature Page 3

  The Lincoln Point television studio, where local Channel 29 originated, was located in the complex also. It was deemed convenient to have the works-in-progress under their roof for easy access as they prepared their documentary.

  “It’s been neat having the television crew around, taping us working, or getting set up in my case, asking questions about my brushes,” Mary Lou said.

  “I’ll bet,” her husband said, his eyes on the television screen.

  “Their anchorwoman, Nan Browne . . . she’s also the one who’s the narrator of the documentary . . . is something else, though. She has a daughter who’s a painter, Diana Browne. She lost out on a commission, so I don’t think either the mother or the daughter likes me very much.”

  “I don’t know Diana, but I’ve heard that Nan doesn’t like too many people anyway,” I said.

  Mary Lou’s in-progress rendition of a Lincoln-Douglas debate, which Richard had almost tripped over in my dining room, would be on its way to the Rutledge Center tomorrow, at the hands of yours truly. I’d offered to drop it off in the afternoon.

  “You always see Lincoln towering over Douglas in paintings and drawings,” Mary Lou said. “That’s why I put Douglas in front in my version. I’ll bet half the population thinks Lincoln won that election, just because he’s so tall and imposing in all the debate images.”

  “He didn’t win?” Richard looked genuinely surprised.

  “Did you learn nothing in the public schools of Lincoln Point?” I asked my son.

  “That was a long time ago, and I don’t remember hearing about a President Douglas. Do we get his birthday off?” Richard sounded defensive, as if one of his teachers had just suggested he wasn’t applying himself hard enough to his history lessons.

  Mary Lou cut him a little slack. “I wouldn’t have known, either, if I hadn’t studied up to get in the spirit of the painting. The debates were for one of Illinois’s two U.S. Senate seats. Lincoln lost that election, but it did put him in the public eye nationally and he won the presidential election two years later.”

  “Interesting,” Richard said, but his tone said otherwise.

  “Anyway, I want to try to give Mr. Douglas a little stature in my painting, even though he was under five feet tall.”

  “Interesting,” I said, and meant it.

  “Another minute and we should have some local news,” Mary Lou said. “Anyone for more tea? Mom?”

  I raised my hand. “I’d love some.”

  “I’ll have some wine,” Richard said.

  “Can I have some hot chocolate?” a small voice said. It came from behind us, from the direction of the corner bedroom with the baseball afghan. “I can’t sleep.”

  Richard deftly pushed buttons and got a blank screen on the television set.

  Maddie, still smelling of strawberry bubble bath, climbed on my lap. “What’s wrong, sweetheart?” I asked, stroking her head.

  She rubbed her eyes and laid her head on my chest. “I don’t feel too well. I might not be able to go to school tomorrow.”

  “Oh, right,” Mary Lou said, heading for the kitchen, not a trace of sympathy in her voice.

  “Here we go,” Richard said.

  “What if she really is sick?” Such cold parents was in my tone. I put my hand on her forehead. It was also cold.

  “Grandma, you’re playing right into her little act,” Richard said. He walked over to where Maddie was using me as an easy chair. He reached out and tickled her. She came out of her slump and the two of them ended up rolling on the floor.

  Two servings of tea, one glass of wine, and one hot chocolate got us through an abbreviated version of Clue. Declared the winner, Maddie crawled back into bed and so did we.

  The television news came and went without benefit of our scrutiny.

  Chapter 3

  Breakfast was one time of day that had changed drastically since my family arrived from Los Angeles and moved in with me. As a single person, I usually took my sweet time in the morning, starting with the newspaper and coffee and adding cereal or eggs later. I showered and dressed only in time for the day’s meetings, which might include tutoring sessions at the library, crafts classes for the residents of Lincoln Point’s retirement homes, and various committee work for Lincoln Point’s fund-raising programs.

  Not a hurried life, for the most part. Plenty of time for my new reading pleasure, contemporary fiction. I felt I’d read and reread the classics often enough in my twenty-seven years of teaching to branch out.

  Now there was a mad scramble every morning while four people tried to get along with two bathrooms. I’d given Richard and Mary Lou the largest bedroom and bath suite (small by contemporary standards, at only twelve by fourteen).

  “Only one sink in the master suite,” Richard had said, in an “imagine that” tone. How quickly he’d forgotten his modest roots.

  I took the bedroom between parents and child, and shared the second bathroom with Maddie.

  We were not crowded by 1950s standards. But I’d been to their sprawling Los Angeles home and had seen the plans for the next-generation Porter homestead in Palo Alto, and I could see why they felt cramped.

  This morning Richard left first for an early surgery, followed closely by Mary Lou, on her way to open the gallery where she worked.

  “Thanks for taking the painting, Mom,” Mary Lou said. At least, I thought that was her message as she held a piece of dry toast between her teeth and loaded her work-in-progress into my trunk. I kept my car outside in the driveway since Richard’s new sports car trumped my little Ion for garage space. Mary Lou worked against a slight drizzle, keeping her portfolio close to her body.

  Maddie knew she’d lost the “I’m sick” battle and buckled herself into my Ion only ten minutes later than the ideal departure time on Wednesday morning. She had the afternoon off to allow the teachers at her school to take a class in CPR. I won the privilege of driving Maddie to school and picking her up around eleven. In between I could shop in Palo Alto. Not a bad deal.

  “Isn’t CPR for old people?” she asked.

  Unfortunately, not always, I thought. “I’m sure it’s for when the teachers are visiting their great-great-grandparents,” I told her.

  “My teachers in L.A. were always taking professional days,” Maddie said. “They had things like team-building, but not for sports, and other stuff. I think they just needed a break from us.”

  A very insightful comment, but as a retired English teacher, I felt I needed to speak up for my profession. “Someday I’ll show you all the notebooks I have from my own teacher conference days. They’re filled with information on special programs for reading, writing—”

  I could see Maddie in the rearview mirror, signaling “time out.” Her way of cutting off speeches about the old days. We moved on to planning the present day.

  Maddie and I decided that the afternoon would include lunch, a session on a miniature project or two, a movie and popcorn at home. We also needed to drop off Mary Lou’s painting at the Rutledge Center. A lot to crowd in before Richard and Mary Lou came home for dinner.

  We headed north on the Bayshore Freeway, driving through heavy traffic and a light but steady rain. The hills around us were as green as they would ever get; the rest of the year they were “golden” (read: “dry”). Ken would have said, “It’s our two green weeks a year, always in time for Lincoln’s birthday.”

  In about a half hour, we pulled up to Maddie’s new school, Angelican Hills Elementary, named for its location on Angelica Avenue in Palo Alto. “It’s so funny,” Maddie told every new person she met. “My Los Angeles school was called Stanford Elementary, and now my school near Stanford is named Angelican Hills, you know, like Angeles.”

  We all got it and laughed every time.

  “We’re going back to Lincoln Point for lunch, right?” Maddie asked me. She stood by the curb, hooking on her brand-new backpack.

  “I thought we could eat in Palo Alto, maybe invite one of your friends here
to come with us, and also her mother or whoever picks her up.”

  “Nah, nah. I’d rather have a Willie’s bagel and a Sadie’s ice cream. Yum, yum.”

  “Okay, okay,” I said, but she didn’t seem to get the parody.

  This was unusual behavior. As her father said, Maddie had always made friends easily. I wondered what was holding her back this time. Surely the self-consciousness and self-doubt of puberty hadn’t already set in? I never thought I’d be wishing my tomboy granddaughter would get involved in sports, but the circumstances required it.

  I wasn’t so worried that I forgot what I’d set my sights on, however—an enormous superstore of crafts just one freeway exit away from Maddie’s school. I headed straight for it once I let Maddie and her stiff, new backpack off.

  It was harder and harder to find dollhouse and miniatures stores these days, but an hour or two in a large crafts and fabric store went a long way to providing inspiration and general supplies for my hobby.

  Maddie was a recent convert to dollhouses and miniatures, having always preferred to hit and kick balls around a field wearing a team shirt. The project that had won her over was the model of the Bronx apartment Ken and I had lived in when we were first married. He’d built it to what we miniaturists called full-scale—one inch for one foot of “real” space—and Maddie and I were now decorating it, keeping as close as possible to how the real apartment looked at the time.

  “I used to think dollhouses had to be all frilly with pink flowered wallpaper and all,” Maddie had said, especially pleased when I’d agreed to a miniature hockey stick in the hallway, where Ken always kept his—a souvenir from his college days.

  Today I was on the lookout for bookcase materials for the apartment. I thought of the decidedly non-frilly book-cases, constructed of plywood and cinder blocks, that Ken and I used during our first years in the apartment. The plywood part would be easy to model since I had an abundance of wooden crafts sticks in my storage bins. I cruised the aisles of artificial flowers and other “nursery” items and finally settled on a sheet of gray florist’s foam that could be cut to look like cinder blocks. One thing a crafter knows: if you’re looking for something shaped like a block, don’t restrict yourself to the block aisles.

  Before I was finished, I’d added several other items to my cart. I arrived at the checkout station with a three-inch pale green bathrobe (a puffy sticker that was part of a bathroom set) for the apartment; picture frames (gold filigree stickers) to have on hand; and a large book with pages that could be used for floors, wallpaper, and the occasional handmade greeting card. I also treated myself to a new paper scorer so I could keep one at each crafts station (they were legion) in my home.

  A pleasant day so far. I enjoyed the rain, especially since it was never very cold by Bronx standards, and I still had an afternoon with my granddaughter to look forward to.

  I saw Maddie standing at a bus shelter outside the school talking with another little girl. When Maddie saw me, she bounded across the parking lot, slightly bent from her backpack, waving both arms at me. I remembered times in Los Angeles when I’d pick her up at school and I’d have to pry her away from a circle of little girls and boys.

  “What’s your friend’s name?” I asked her when she’d settled into the backseat of the Ion.

  “Her? Kyra. She’s not exactly a friend.”

  “What would make her a friend?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  I thought I knew the answer. Kyra would have to turn herself magically into Devyn, Maddie’s best friend who was still “home” in Los Angeles.

  Maddie had thrown her wet backpack onto the front seat today, so she wouldn’t have to go around to the traffic side of the car. I noticed paper or cardboard sticking out of one of the dozens (it seemed) of zippers. A postcard.

  “Have you heard from Devyn?” I asked, guessing the card was part of the reason for her bad mood.

  “Yeah, she sent me a postcard from when my class went to Disneyland after the Christmas break.”

  Still my class. As if she were on a short vacation from where she should be. “How is she?”

  “I miss her.”

  Uh-huh. Poor Maddie was having withdrawal pains from her early childhood friends, perhaps thinking to remain loyal to them by not making new friends in Palo Alto. Call me Grandma Psychologist.

  “I’ll bet she misses you, too.”

  Maddie nibbled on an energy bar—a product of Mary Lou’s campaign to encourage healthy snacks.

  “I guess. Are we going to drop Mom’s painting off before lunch?”

  Grandma Psychologist would call this avoiding the “homesick” topic.

  “Are you starving? Would you rather eat first?”

  “Nuh-uh. I’m happy with my nutritious, tasty snack.”

  A healthy laugh broke the tension that psychological analysis can bring.

  About a half hour later, we reached the city limits of Lincoln Point. Checking Maddie’s hunger level one more time, I drove past Bagels by Willie, on Springfield Boulevard, our main street of shops. Up ahead was Hanks Road, site of the Rutledge Center, the building that housed our local Channel 29 studio, a large workshop area, and many hallways and classrooms.

  Rutledge Center comprised a complex of buildings that had been an elementary school at one time, and was now an all-purpose city facility. It was common for Lincoln Point natives to still refer to it as the Rutledge School. I’d been to the center a few times, but never to the television studio.

  I’d been a guest on Channel 29, as part of a documentary on the literacy project at Lincoln Point Library and on a couple of other occasions, but those programs had been taped off-site. A historic downtown hotel had provided a much richer backdrop than was possible in the studio. The same Nan Browne, whose daughter didn’t get a painting commission and who didn’t like Mary Lou, was the hostess on all of the occasions.

  I turned the corner on Hanks Road and saw the familiar center buildings. They were all one-story, beige stucco with blue roofs. Some were connected by covered walkways and it was hard to tell where one building ended and another began. I didn’t know exactly where the artists’ work area was, so I pulled into the parking lot at the first opening. I drove a short way and braked. Harder than I needed to. Maddie jerked forward against her seat belt.

  Along the southeast side of the property, yellow crime-scene tape waved in the damp February breeze.

  Oh, no. Could this be where the murder took place? In all the bustle of the morning, I hadn’t even looked at the newspaper. I knew Zoe’s boyfriend was an artist. Richard and I had only guessed that he was the murder victim since June began (and ended) her short story with his name. June had also said something about Brad’s being part of the Lincoln-Douglas stage crew. It made sense that he, like Mary Lou, was working in the Rutledge Center. Still, that didn’t mean the murder had been committed here. Except, apparently, it did.

  “A case, a case,” Maddie said, with inappropriate glee.

  “Not again, not again,” I said to myself.

  My first impulse was to turn around and head back to Willie’s, enjoy coffee and a cinnamon bagel, and forget I’d ever seen the streaming yellow decoration. Maybe it was left over from a party. Perhaps it was tape used by a construction crew. It might even be part of a set for a studio program on the crime fighters of Lincoln Point. I drove a little closer, Maddie now straining to see out the windows. “It says, ‘police line, do not cross,’ ” she announced with exuberance.

  No more wishful guessing. With all good intentions, doing an errand for her mother, I’d brought Maddie to a crime scene. I hoped all that was left of it was the rope. Once I allowed my attention to roam to the rest of the complex, I saw that the taped area was confined to only one set of concrete steps, those leading to the Channel 29 studio.

  There was no officer stationed there or at the other entryways; people were coming and going through the other doorways as if nothing had happened.

&
nbsp; From the backseat came Maddie’s voice, pleading to be let out. “Let’s see, Grandma. Maybe we can help.”

  “I think we should just go and have lunch and come back later, sweetheart.” After I drop you off at home.

  “No, no, Grandma. All the other buildings are all clear, see?” She pointed toward the west wing of the complex. “We can get in over there.”

  She was right about that. The rest of the buildings, where the offices, community outreach classrooms, and the workshop areas were located, were apparently open for business. “I don’t know—”

  I could see Maddie fold her arms across her scrawny chest. “My mom will be upset if she gets here later and the painting isn’t where it should be.”

  She was good, no question. I gave in, not because of her persuasive reasoning, but because I saw enough people, including children, entering and exiting the other portals of the buildings.

  I parked in the northwest lot, as far away from the yellow tape as I could get. The next question was whether to take Maddie inside the building. I could leave her in the car. It was a nice neighborhood. Except for the crime scene.

  Definitely safer to have her with me, I decided, though I wasn’t sure what I was protecting her from.

  I knew Maddie wouldn’t have been as thrilled to be inside a building that used to be an elementary school if it weren’t for the potential mystery surrounding the colorful buffer zone.

  “Is this what Uncle Skip came to talk to you about last night?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. Not a lie. Skip had simply uttered the word “murder” and, without a context, I had no idea if a few yards of “do not cross” around the east stairway had anything to do with what had sent Zoe to jail.

  We walked down a long hallway lined with classrooms. Signs on the doors indicated that the children and adults inside were taking lessons in topics as diverse as portrait drawing, beginning computers, and the tax code. We walked up to one particularly noisy room, peeked through the small window in the door, and spent a couple of minutes watching student belly dancers, young and old, in bright, gauzy costumes.