Mix-up in Miniature (16 page)

“That’s disappointing.”

I sat back, my euphoria diminished a bit. But at least I had something to take to Skip, other than the word of the nonagenarian he’d all but dismissed. Surely there was a traffic camera at that busy intersection that the police would be able to access. That would give them a license plate, and ultimately the owner of the vehicle.

We could afford to celebrate a small victory. Maddie sensed the mood. “Ice cream?” she asked.

I scratched my head, pretending. “I don’t know. Didn’t we already have ice cream today?”

“Yeah, but I was too upset to enjoy it, and then you got a call and I had to leave some behind.”

“Some” probably meant less than a spoonful.

“Come to think of it, I didn’t enjoy mine that much, either,” I offered.

Maddie jumped up. “I’ll serve.”

“Two scoops for me,” I said.

—

“Mom
and Dad said good night and they love me,” Maddie said, drifting off to sleep under the old baseball afghan.

It touched my heart that she might have had a moment of feeling unworthy or less a treasure to us all.

“Of course they do, sweetheart. And I’m very proud of you,” I said, in case there was even a smidgen of doubt in her mind. “You were a huge help to me and Uncle Skip tonight.”

“And we didn’t break any rules.”

“No, we didn’t.”

Not really.

After the call with her parents, Maddie had climbed into bed more willingly than usual. It had been quite a day for her. Thinking her parents might love her less, no matter how unfounded the supposition, had taken its toll.

For me, I was proud of the way my family was handling the crisis that was, I hoped, already fading into the past. As far as I knew, this misuse of funds on Maddie’s part—I hated the thought of associating any form of the verb “to steal” with my granddaughter—was the first serious problem her parents had had to face with their otherwise perfect child.

Maddie hadn’t tried to defend herself unduly or to deny the allegation against her or to acquire things for herself. She’d admitted she’d lost sight of the right way to solve her money problem, that she’d done something wrong and was sorry about it. I felt strongly she wouldn’t fall into that particular trap again. And I had every confidence that even my son would rise to the occasion and be willing to bend a little as they negotiated a settlement.

“Thanks for letting me help you, Grandma,” she said, her voice starting to drift off. “I didn’t mind just sitting there while you keyed everything.”

“So it’s okay if you never get to surf again?”

“Uh-huh.”

That’s when I knew she was actually talking in her sleep.

I took a
cup of tea to the living room, settled on the sofa, and called Skip. It was very common for him to drop in at this hour or even later, but I couldn’t wait to give him the news.

I told him about our evening’s adventure in webcam land, at the same time trying to shore up Esther’s reputation as an eyewitness. “There must be a Caltrans traffic camera at that corner that you can look at,” I said.

“They do freeways. The traffic cameras belong to the city. Lincoln Point operates them at the big intersections in town—all three of them.”

Good to know who was watching as I sailed along Civic Drive or Hanks Road in a hurry for one reason or another. “So, will you look into whose truck that is? I think this is really a key piece of evidence, Skip.”

“You sure this isn’t about finding out if Henry’s cheating on you?” my nephew asked.

“What?” Too late I realized what a poor excuse for a joke Skip had made. But falling-flat humor was so much better than the falling-out we’d had yesterday.

“We sent Paige Taggart home, by the way,” Skip said.

“I’m glad to hear that. Is there some new evidence that cleared her? Or a new, more viable suspect?”

A not-too-subtle way of finding out how the official investigation was going. I liked to think that I was among the first to learn about new developments in a case that was dear to my heart, but sometimes I had to resort to sneaky ways to get the facts from my nephew.

“We have fingerprint results. Or, you might say, no fingerprint results. The handle had been wiped clean. No surprise, really, but you never know. We can usually count on the stupidity of criminals.”

“So you’ve said. Thanks for telling me about Paige,” I said, recognizing that I wouldn’t be getting more than that tonight.

“I figure she’ll be knocking on your door any minute.”

“It will more likely be you.”

“Might be. I am kinda hungry. ’Night, Aunt Gerry.”

I started to dial Henry, whom I hadn’t seen since midafternoon. He’d left a couple of quick messages, but I’d been tied up with either Maddie or Paige in crisis mode. It wasn’t a standard day when we didn’t check in with each other a few times and I missed talking to him.

Rrring. Rrring. Rrring.

An incoming call rang through before Henry’s number cleared. I clicked over to Paige Taggart. A phone call instead of a knock on my door. Skip wasn’t too far off. It was hard to beat Detective Gowen and his insights.

“I’m out, Mrs. Porter. I figured it might be too late to drop in on you, but I wanted to tell you right away. I can’t believe it. You can’t imagine what it’s like in there. I’m so relieved.”

“I’m very glad to hear it, Paige.”

“I can’t thank you enough for coming to see me and listening to me and all. I’m not supposed to leave town or anything, but I think they realize now that someone is trying to frame me. Like, why would I bother wiping that piece of the weapon clean and then storing it in my room?”

I didn’t think Paige needed to hear Skip’s answer about dumb things killers do, presumably stashing the weapon being one of them. Besides, Paige was in a talking, not a listening, mood at the moment.

Over the next many minutes I found myself saying “Uh-huh” and “Really?” often as Paige went on and on about her experience at the Lincoln Point police station. I heard that she’d been “stored in a disgusting basement cell while the police tried to figure out what to do with me”; that “if it weren’t for you, Mrs. Porter, those guys never would have believed my dollhouse story;” and that “they finally gave me this little cup of water before I died of thirst.”

As Paige wandered through tales of her brief incarceration, I wandered into my crafts room for a visual distraction. It wasn’t unheard of that I’d put a caller on my speakerphone at times like this—such as when Linda Reed went off on a tangent about how none of her son Jason’s teachers understood him, or how the nurses coming out of school these days weren’t willing to work the long hours she’d put in when she was that age.

I’d even been known to do a small chore while a caller talked incessantly, not requiring input from me.

With three dollhouses on what used to be a picnic table in front of me, surely I’d be able to find something useful to occupy the large fraction of my brain that didn’t need to follow Paige’s every word. There was always a paint touch-up to dabble at, or a thread to be snipped, or a piece of furniture that called for a drop of glue, or a drawer of scraps to be silently sorted through.

I’d begun knitting a multicolored rug for the floor in front of the hearth that was the centerpiece of my pueblo, but the pattern required too much concentration for multitasking, especially at this hour.

One of the houses, a lovely Cape Cod that had been built by my crafter friend, Karen Striker, was finished, destined for a local school for a raffle to be held between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Henry had offered to deliver the house in the next few days. My gaze landed on the bell-shaped tag Karen had made from scrapbook paper, neatly printed with the name and home address of the school secretary who was organizing the donations. I smiled as I saw that Karen had hung the tag on the tiny doorknob of the neatly trimmed little cottage.

Something about the tag reminded me of the murder investigation, or a comment Varena had made during our wonderful, brief meeting. But before I could make the connection, Paige’s voice poked through with a complaint about her time served as prime suspect.

“Then they asked me again how come I went into the room where Varena’s body was,” Paige was saying. “I told them, like a million times already, that I was on my way out the front door and I heard a crashing noise coming from the hallway, down by the Lord and Lady Morley room, so I went to check.”

Now I was interested. I hadn’t heard this particular detail of Paige’s discovery of Varena’s body. “What exactly did you see, Paige?”

Paige breathed heavily. “Like I told them, by the time I got all the way down there, no one was there except Varena”—Paige paused for a breath—“but the back door at the end of the hall was open, which it hardly ever is.”

“Did you look outside?”

“No, I wish I did, so I could have told the police who it was. They said, even if I caught a glimpse of what he was wearing it would help, but I just flew over to Varena. I thought she fell but then I saw her head was all bloody and…”

Paige’s voice seemed to be full of a deep sadness and I wished I could put an arm around her.

“I’m sorry to put you through this again, Paige.”

“I called nine-one-one and…”

What a strange mind I had. Suddenly the connection to the tag on the Cape Cod cottage came to me, as if Varena herself had tapped me on the shoulder to remind me of how she’d designated the dollhouse she planned to donate to the bookmobile fund-raiser.

“Paige, I have another question for you that has nothing to do with that room and that terrible experience. Can you help me with it?”

“Sure.” Said between soft sniffles.

“You said you saw the dollhouse, the same one that’s now in my atrium, at the Rockwell Estate, correct?”

“Yes, in the Lord Weatherly annex. It’s a little sitting room next to the bedroom I use. It has a nautical décor. The real Lord Weatherly was a sailor in Scotland in the nineteenth century, I think.”

I could hardly contain myself. I paced my own dollhouse room. “Did you see it there before Varena died? Or only after you got those texts and emails the other night? The ones about the envelope that was in one of the dollhouses.”

“That dollhouse you have now was always in that room. Varena didn’t move the houses around much. I think she liked to pretend she was visiting each little setup as if it was a certain street in a town, you know? And that room was the beach. We both loved the beach.”

And I loved the idea of my friend and miniatures enthusiast Varena Young doing what I did often, especially on nights when I couldn’t sleep—taking a pleasure trip to visit my houses and room boxes.

“Was there another dollhouse in that room also?”

“Oh, sure, there were two or three houses in almost every room, except the Morley room and the ones we used as bedrooms.”

“Did you go into the Lord Weatherly room anytime during the day yesterday, before five o’clock?” Which was the time of her discovery of Varena’s body, not necessary to mention again.

“Uh-huh. I go in there all the time because I use the closet as an extension of mine. Laura uses it, too. The ones in our rooms are so small.”

I swallowed hard and took a breath. “This is very important, Paige. Did you notice a tag of any kind hanging from one of the dollhouses in the Lord Weatherly room?”

I heard a low hum, the thinking kind. I hoped Paige was putting herself in the room with the fake sand and seashells, enjoying the salty breeze and smelling the ocean air, which must have been a much more pleasant mental trip than the one the police and I had recently sent her on, where her boss and mentor lay dead.

“I didn’t see a tag,” Paige said, causing my spirits to fall. “I noticed an index card on the table, though. Varena still used three-by-five cards for her outlines. This one had a name and address, but I didn’t go close enough to read it.”

Up went my spirits. Varena had told me she’d tagged the Tudor for me. I loved it that she’d used an index card, part of my stock in trade in the old days.

Paige had more to say and I was listening carefully.

“But I’m almost positive the card wasn’t attached to the house in your atrium, Mrs. Porter. It was kind of halfway between it and the house next to it. Sorry, is that bad?”

“Was the other house a medium-size Tudor?”

“Yes,” Paige said, her voice rising to a triumphant finish, as if I’d just won a prize for the correct answer.

I couldn’t have been happier if I’d won a gift certificate to our local Katy’s Krafts Korner.

A dramatic scene unfolded, as if I were watching a play in my own crafts room. Everything happened in miniature, as I’d expect.

Varena’s brother, Caleb, goes to the Lord Weatherly room where the dollhouse now in my atrium was located. He opens the door to a secret room and inserts an envelope containing evidence that will incriminate someone who wants to harm his sister.

Later I’d have to figure out how Caleb knew the old dollhouse had a secret room. Plus a few other things, but for now, I had a story to finish.

Two men drive a red pickup to the Rockwell Estate. They climb the stairs to the Lord Weatherly room and look for the dollhouse with an index card that has my address on it. But Caleb has disturbed the table and somehow the index card ends up closer to the big old dollhouse with a modern style. The men take the wrong house to my address.

This scenario required that Varena arranged for the pickup before she died, which almost had to be before she met me. It was possible, but it would be nice to find out just who the men in baseball caps were and from whom they received their pickup assignment.

“Mrs. Porter.”
Scratch, scratch
. I heard noises that might have been Paige tapping on her phone to get my attention. “Hello? Mrs. Porter?”

“I’m here, Paige. It’s getting late and I should sign off.”

“Oh, sure. I’m sorry. Sometimes I go on and on. Thanks again, Mrs. Porter. You’ve been such a huge help.”

“So have you, Paige.”

—

My
phone seemed as excited as I was, summoning me to two more calls in the next half hour. The first one was from Henry.

“I started to call you earlier,” I explained.

“I miss you, but I figured you had a lot to work out today. How’s my Maddie?”

I liked it that he thought of Maddie as his.

Henry sat through a summary of my day, including the tears, the parental intervention, the eventual smiles, and the duplicate ice cream sessions. Or maybe he’d wandered out to the workbench in his garage and swept up some wood shavings while I rattled on.

“Poor kid,” he said, not surprisingly on her side.

“Maddie and Mary Lou learned a lot, I believe, and are fine. I haven’t talked to my son yet, but I’m hoping he’ll follow suit.”

“As long as Richard doesn’t make me give back my nice silver key chain.”

I promised to do my best to protect Henry’s right to his present.

The next part of our call consisted of a summary of my talk with Paige Taggart and my theory of how The Little Dollhouse That Could got to my atrium. “Do you think that’s a crazy idea?” I asked, realizing the leaps and bounds it took to get from point
A
to point
B
in my proposed reconstruction.

A short pause and an intake of breath. Then, “He built it,” Henry said.

“You lost me.”

“Varena’s brother built the dollhouse. Remember I told you I thought it was some kid’s first big woodworking project? I’ve seen a few.”

“That’s how he knew it had a secret room.”

“He put it there.”

“You’re brilliant, Henry. Why aren’t you here so I can kiss you?”

“Is that an invitation?”

We laughed, considered the idea of a late date, and middle-agers that we were, deferred it to tomorrow.

“We have to find that secret room, Henry. I hate the thought of breaking the whole house down, especially now that we know Varena’s brother made it for her when they were children.”

“Allegedly,” Henry said.

“Do you think Caleb is still alive?” I asked Henry.

“Uh-oh. Is this a trick question?”

I laughed, remembering when I desperately needed his support as I’d tried to convince Skip that Varena even had a brother.

“No,” I said. “There’s no right answer this time. Anyone could have signed those emails and texts to Paige.”

“And your friend Corazón who told you Varena’s brother was in the house?”

“That seems a long time ago. It could be that he’s alive, but why tell everyone, including her own children, that he died in an accident? There was obviously a special bond if he built her a dollhouse, say it was her first, and she’s collected them over all these years.”

“Maybe the two became estranged and she wanted to keep it private, instead of going public with family business,” Henry said.