Mix-up in Miniature (20 page)

I sensed that Uncle Caleb was the kind of uncle every kid should have. What a shame that, for one reason or another, he was taken from their lives.

“What do you remember about the day Caleb died?”

Charles became so agitated, I thought the table would overturn from his restless motions. If Adam noticed, it didn’t prevent him from answering my question.

“It was a very strange day, not that I’ve ever told anyone about it. Ours was not the most open family for sharing feelings.”

“Adam,” Alicia said, a warning note in her voice. I expected her to send her half brother to his room at any moment.

But Adam, looking past Alicia at the outside garden, had gone back fortysomething years. “A phone call came in, and Mother told me that Uncle Caleb had ‘passed on’ and that we should pray for his soul. It was the first time I’d ever prayed for someone’s soul and I wasn’t sure how to do it.”

Alicia seemed conflicted, wanting to hear this family story, perhaps not for the first time, but aware of how uncomfortable it made Charles. She folded and refolded her napkin, straightened the place setting so the silverware was exactly parallel, and finally rang a small bell I hadn’t noticed before.

Immediately the young woman who’d served our lunch was at her side.

“We’re ready for our dessert,” Alicia said.

“Five more minutes, ma’am, while the cherries settle?”

Alicia nodded. Charles took a deep breath. I tried to focus on Adam, who hardly missed a beat.

“Mother didn’t cry as I thought she would, so I remember working really hard to keep myself from crying, too. And I know we all went to the police station that day. She had to take us because there was no one around to mind us.”

“I’m sure there were police reports to fill out,” I said. “About the car accident,” I added, looking at Charles.

“I thought I saw Uncle Caleb at the station but Mother said no, it couldn’t have been. It must have been another man who looked like him. Anyway, I finally realized what ‘passed on’ meant. There’d be no more hot dogs.”

“What a terrible loss for a small child.”

“Mmm,” Adam said, still not fully in the present.

“Did you know Caleb, Charles?” I asked.

Charles frowned, his thick white eyebrows seeming to connect on the bridge of his nose. “Do we really need to bring up unhappy memories, Geraldine? This family has been through enough.”

“I do apologize, but I have a feeling that Adam and Alicia’s uncle may have something to do with this murder investigation.”

“Nonsense.” Charles threw down his napkin and stood. “You’ll have to excuse me. I’m afraid I’m not comfortable with this conversation.”

As Charles left the patio, Alicia turned to me. “This is not what I had in mind, Geraldine. Charles is our executor and a family friend for nearly forty years. Charles is really my honorary uncle, if you want to put it that way.”

That’s not the way I wanted to put it, but I knew it was time to leave. We both stood and walked out of the patio, leaving Adam behind with his happy childhood memories. I suspected tomorrow’s lunch would consist of hot dogs with mustard and relish from an ordinary supermarket.

My biggest regret
as I turned on the ignition in my car was that I hadn’t gotten the twice-promised dollhouse tour, not from Varena, and not from Alicia. I wondered if I’d ever again be welcome at the Rockwell Estate. I pictured Alicia writing out my pink slip.

It would have been nice to try the cognac ice cream, also. My friends called me a dessert alcoholic. I never drank a drop of wine or hard liquor from a glass, but I loved rum cake, almond amaretto bars, wine jelly, and the Grand Marnier poultry stuffing my mother made for the adult table on holidays.

Driving the winding road to my home in the flats, I replayed as much of the lunch conversation as I could remember and asked myself questions I still couldn’t answer.

Why was Charles Quentin so uncomfortable talking about Caleb? I revisited my charitable theory that Charles knew Varena’s secret and wanted to help her keep it even in death. In terms of the murder investigation, however, the more appealing theory was that he had something more self-serving to hide. Two things were clear from my interview with Roberto Sedonis—that Charles Quentin knew Caleb Swingle was alive and hovering around the Rockwell Estate, and that he was party to an argument with Varena on the afternoon of her murder.

“Watch out for CQ” flashed through my mind and I shivered. From the idea that Charles Quentin might be Varena’s killer? Or from the frightening thought that I might have been killed by a man rustling in the woods?

As for Adam George, I was convinced that he wasn’t hiding anything. I figured he’d seen his Uncle Caleb being processed in the police station. Maybe Varena had taken him there because she had no one to watch him while she made the trip to plead Caleb’s case to the police or to tell her brother off or to say one last good-bye.

It might have been the lush patio setting, the gourmet meal, and the awareness that I was surrounded by dollhouses that made me vulnerable, but I’d been pulled in by Adam’s charming, childlike innocence. I pushed away a thought of contacting Estelle and asking her to reconsider her decision to abandon her sweet husband.

It was arrogant enough to think I was qualified to investigate a crime. Was I now ready to pass myself off as a marriage counselor?

A big question was where Alicia stood in all this. Had her motive in hiring me stemmed from a sincere desire to find her mother’s killer? She’d discounted the idea that Paige murdered Varena, and certainly wouldn’t even consider that Charles was anything but a loving family friend.

If she’d had someone particular in mind to accuse, she hadn’t let on. Alicia had never pointed me in the direction of an individual or hinted that she had a clue about who the perpetrator might be. Did she think I was going to consider everyone in the household simply as sources of information, not suspects? Did she expect me to uncover a random killer prowling the Heights, one who broke into the Lord and Lady Morley room and murdered Lady Varena?

I came back to my earlier thought that Alicia herself had killed her mother and that she’d befriended/hired me for purposes of misdirection. She could have been among the many Lincoln Point citizens who thought I had influence with the LPPD. What better way to assure that the police wouldn’t consider her a suspect?

With little traffic to pay attention to, my mind took off, expanding on the matricide theory. I imagined the family’s early years when, it seemed, Varena was essentially a single mother of two, on her own, except for possible support from her brother until he was sent away. She worked at her writing and perhaps other jobs to keep her little family together. I guessed she didn’t have a lot of time for the young Alicia.

Now, day after day (just to add drama to my narrative), Alicia had seen Varena mentoring an unrelated college student, Paige Taggart, nurturing her as a writer and spending time with her at a hobby Alicia had no use for. It might be enough to turn daughter against mother. I felt a sudden need to call and warn Mary Lou until I shook myself out of the nightmare by remembering that she was a perfect wife and mother. There was nothing like a murder investigation to mess with someone’s head. How did the real police do it day after day and still sleep at night?

There was the final question of the sword handle fragment the police found in Paige’s dormitory room. It occurred to me that I should find out if there was a sign-in log in the building. I’d ask Skip if the police had thought to check. Couching the query in other, more flattering words, of course.

I tried to picture the seventysomething Charles Quentin, in expensive tweeds and rich leather loafers, trying to fit in as he entered a college dorm. I saw him break into Paige’s room, and hide the murder weapon among her shoes. Then I saw myself taking a photo of a white-haired older gentleman and showing it to the sentry in the foyer of the dorm.

“Have you seen this man?” I’d ask.

I groaned at my inadequacy for the task of effective investigating. I knew there was a reason I’d spent a career teaching fiction and not writing it.

—

Thanks
to the long-winded conversation I had with myself, it wasn’t until I reached the well-recorded intersection of Gettysburg and Springfield that I noticed the same car had been in my rearview mirror since soon after I left the estate driveway. A dark blue sedan with a sole male driver. I couldn’t see the whole license plate, but I could tell by the fact that it began with the number two that the car was an older model. The state of California was well past two as the initial number. Richard’s new car boasted a seven, in fact. The age of the vehicle didn’t tell me much except that it probably wasn’t Charles Quentin or a Rockwell following me. If anyone was actually following me.

But if not, why did the car make a right as I did and continue up the road toward my Eichler neighborhood?

Dum, ta da dum, ta da dum, ta da dum.

I started at the sound. It was really the car behind me that rattled me, not the familiar marching tune of my cell phone. “Hello,” I said to my Bluetooth device.

“Hey, Grandma, we’ve been home.”

The friendly voice settled me. “And I’ve been what?”

“Away So Long.” I heard the grin in her words. “Is your meeting over?”

In more ways than one. “Yes, sweetheart, I’m on my way home now.” With no unwelcome company, I hope.

“There’s nothing to do here.”

Which I interpreted to mean,
The grown-ups in my life won’t let me use the computer.

“Maybe you and Uncle Henry can work on the new dollhouse.”

“We did for a while, but we tried everything to find that room. Nuts. We even blew on everything, but I know Uncle Henry was just joking when he said we should do that. Maybe I was dreaming and there is no room.”

Not a chance. “I think it will just take a little more time.”

I told Maddie my brilliant idea to have my crafters group work on the secret-room project this evening. I didn’t mention the demolition derby approach that was my backup plan.

“Nuts. I can’t believe I’m stuck. And now there’s nothing to do here.”

I smiled, wishing I were there to tickle my granddaughter out of her punishment blues.

I stopped at a small intersection. The set of traffic lights, which I passed through many times a week, marked the entrance to my Eichler neighborhood. This afternoon, however, the signals sent two messages to my brain. One said
STOP
; the other said
HOLD DOWN THE RED CIRCLE
.

“Maddie, I think I have a clue about the secret room.” I recited the phrase from the note I believed to be from Varena’s brother Caleb. “Does that mean anything to you?”

“Huh?”

I didn’t think so. What made me think the phrase had to do with the dollhouse in the first place? I repeated the instruction anyway.

“Hold down the red circle,” Maddie said, slowly.

The way her voice rose at the end, I knew we’d done it.

“Duh!” she said. “I gotta go, Grandma. I got it. I got it.”

It was hard to obey the speed limit and all the red and green circles for the next mile.

I forgot about the old sedan until I saw it behind me as I approached my house. Obviously I had nothing to worry about. It was my imagination that the car had slowed down before it passed me.

—

I didn’t
know how long Maddie had been waiting, but there she was, sitting on the curb, shivering slightly, as I pulled up. She jumped to her feet when she saw me and ran to hug me even before the driver’s-side door slammed shut.

My delight increased when she stepped back and pulled a white envelope out of the pocket of her hot pink down vest. Henry came out then, no doubt having wisely stood at the window, safe from the cold, and from Maddie’s unbridled energy, until he saw my car.

“Here it is, Grandma,” Maddie said, waving the speciously ordinary-looking envelope in my face. The treasure hidden in the secret room was the same size and shape as the one I’d found on the Rockwell Estate garden bench. “We decided not to open it until you got here. What do you think it is? Huh? Huh? Maybe it’s a map for a buried treasure?”

Did my granddaughter really want something else to hunt down? I was hoping for a confession, signed by Varena’s killer.

The three of us had something close to a group hug and walked together toward the house, agreeing that we shouldn’t open the envelope in the middle of the street. Maddie talked nonstop in what we English teachers call run-on sentences.

“I finally remembered how with my laptop and my iPod and everything, that you have to hold down the button, you don’t just press and let go, you have to hold, like a second, or two seconds, before it goes on, so I went around the dollhouse bedroom at all the red circles and counted, one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi. The first time on Monday I must have accidentally just leaned on the spot for two seconds, and then when I was trying to get it back, I was just tapping because I didn’t know.”

She finally took a breath as we entered my atrium and took seats around the dollhouse. Maddie had left the panel to the secret room open, not taking any more chances. The house seemed to be smiling, as if it had finally given birth after a long and painful labor during which its midwives were dumbfounded.

We couldn’t have been grinning more broadly if we’d won a fully furnished dollhouse in a raffle.

—

What
a disappointment. “There’s no note. It looks like ledger pages of some kind,” I said, handing the contents of the envelope to Henry.

“I took it out right away this time, just in case,” said Maddie, who still seemed not to care about the boring contents of the envelope. If there was no buried treasure, no gift certificate to Sadie’s Ice Cream Shop, no special online credit card, it didn’t much matter what was in it.

“Good work,” I told her, giving her skinny body another hug, topped with a quick head rub that sent her red curls flying.

“I’m not too good at this kind of thing,” Henry said. “All I remember from a high school accounting class is debits on the left, credits on the right.”

“Which is two things more than I know,” I said.

Maddie had taken out her smartphone and showed us an almost hidden button along the top edge of the phone. She pressed it quickly and nothing happened.

“See,” she said. “Nothing. Now watch.” She held it down, counting, one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, and the device sprang to life with an alien-sounding groan. “Did you see that, Grandma? How it came on?”

“Good work,” I repeated. I turned to Henry. “We should call Skip and get the ledger pages to him as soon as possible.”

“I should have known right away,” Maddie said. “This is how a lot of electronic things work.”

“While you call the station, I’ll start the water for tea,” Henry said.

“Uncle Henry said it’s not just these new phones that work that way.” Maddie leaned across the small table and pulled on Henry’s sleeve. “Tell Grandma how old electrical switches run that way, too, Uncle Henry.”

Unlike Alicia, Maddie didn’t usually interrupt so aggressively.

I finally caught on. How negligent a grandmother could I be?

Maddie had done her job and was pleased with her performance. The payoff for her was that she’d found a secret room and then figured out how to find it again. At a time when she’d been beaten down for her poor judgment and punished for her bad behavior, she needed accolades for a task well done, and I hadn’t given her nearly enough.

Fortunately, I knew exactly which cabinet drawer held leftover party decorations. I made a quick trip to the kitchen and returned to the atrium with a gold paper crown I’d made for one of Maddie’s early birthday parties, along with a few wrinkled but clean
CONGRATULATIONS
napkins from when Richard landed his current position.

“Before we do anything else, I think ice cream and congratulations are in order,” I said.

“Hear, hear,” Henry said.

He began a rendition of “Congratulations to you…” while I crowned my brilliant princess.

From the smile on Maddie’s face, I knew the little party would stave off any thoughts of grand-matricide.

—

Henry
picked up Taylor and brought her to my house so the two BFFs could do homework and hang out. A combination study and play date. Not much had changed since I was in grade school except the vocabulary.

Henry and I were free to do the boring stuff.

Before we started in on the ledger pages, Henry took my phone from the counter, punched in Skip’s number, and handed the phone to me. Apparently he noticed I hadn’t made the call yet.

If I didn’t know better I’d have thought he didn’t trust me to include the LPPD in my investigation.

—

In
a sharing mood, I told Skip about the flimsiness of Mr. Sedonis’s statement, given his utter intimidation by his boss, and mentioned that he might want to check the sign-in log at Paige Taggart’s dormitory and show Charles’s photo around.

“Thanks, Aunt Gerry,” he said. “If it weren’t for citizens like you—”

“I get it. You know how to do your job.”

While we waited for Skip, Henry and I spread out the ledger pages, creased from many foldings, on the dining room table. The four pages appeared to be from one continuous record.