Murder in Miniature (4 page)

I insisted on adding carrot sticks and milk to the menu, principally to assuage my guilt over not preparing a proper dinner. I was sure eating pizza at ten thirty at night was not what her parents pictured as they sent their only child off for an extended visit with Grandma Geraldine. I had only one week left to correct all my errors; Maddie was due to fly home next Friday.

Maddie must have read my mind. “This is what grandmas are supposed to do,” she said. “I love late-night pizza.”

“Still, let’s make this our little secret,” I said, chasing a mushroom across the cardboard box.

Maddie laughed. “When I call to say good night, I’ll tell them we had tofu and broccoli.” I tried to picture my tall, husky son lifting a forkful of bean curd to his mouth. His wife’s influence, I decided, if not the overall spirit of Los Angeles.

Ken, who thought his O-type blood required him to eat red meat no less often than every other night, said we took Richard out of the Bronx a little too soon. Richard was a toddler when Ken’s architectural firm offered him the opportunity to open a West Coast office. Beverly, six years younger than Ken, had already gone west to college, so it worked out nicely for the family.

Four phone calls interrupted our elaborate dinner party. The first was from Gladys Stephenson, the original Dollhouse Chairperson for the fair, thanking me for filling in for her and wanting a briefing on how things had gone. The second was from Mabel—she forgot her cash box in the school hall, and could she have Just Eddie’s pager number. She wanted to be sure he kept an eye on it. I gave her the number, and hung up mumbling “lots of luck” under my breath. Call number three was from Roberto, my fifteen-year-old literacy student at Lincoln Point Library. He was writing a late-night letter to his girlfriend and wanted to know how to spell
longingly
. I obliged.

The fourth call, which came when I was moments away from being trounced, thanks to Maddie’s third Yahtzee of the game, was from Peter Balandin, Linda’s first ex-husband. Marriage number one had lasted only until Peter finished his doctor’s degree in civil engineering, at which point he decided he and Linda had “grown apart.” In truth, Peter had grown closer to one of his teaching assistants at the university. Linda still called on him for favors, working on his guilt.

“He owes me,” she’d said. I pictured Peter’s name on a debt list, with all the doctors and nurse supervisors Linda ever worked for, all the landlords she’d ever paid rent to, and probably all her friends, me included.

Evidently the favor this evening had been that Peter would take care of Jason for the evening.

“She was supposed to meet me for a late dinner to hand off Jason, but she never showed,” Peter said, his telephone voice sounding irritated.

I wondered how Jason would feel, knowing he was being handed off here and there, as if he were a set of Peter’s engineering drawings.

Peter’s annoyance aside, I saw an opportunity to gather information. “Where was she supposed to meet you? What time? Is Jason still with you?”

Peter did his best to answer my questions, in order. He sounded too calm about Linda’s failure to show up to suit me, but I realized that, for all he knew, Linda had been with me all evening and had simply failed to appear at dinner.

“Burger Heaven, at nine thirty. Jason is here. He’s been with me since school got out. Linda was supposedly busy with something until nine.”

“The crafts—”

Peter didn’t care. “Jason says he doesn’t know where his mother is.”

I had the nasty thought that Peter could afford better than Burger Heaven. Unlike ex-husband number two, Chuck Reed, who did odd jobs and was always broke, Peter had a high-paying job as a consultant for a real estate firm. (I sensed another pro-growth vote.) On the other hand, Peter was not Jason’s father, adoptive or otherwise, but Linda called in an imagined debt from him quite often. It was hard to know whom to root for, except for Jason, who’d had less than his share of quality family life.

Lately Jason was the scapegoat for all the mischief at Abraham Lincoln High School. He’d allegedly started a fire last week in the cafeteria kitchen when they ran out of his favorite pudding. A few weeks ago, he supposedly sprayed all the mirrors in the girls’ lavatory with colorful graffiti. This latter deed for no good reason, other than his own willful disregard of authority, according to said authority. In all fairness, Jason wasn’t always the culprit (in fact, that time it was the vice principal’s own son who’d sprayed
I LOVE YOU ALL
in the girls’ room), but whenever any monkey business happened, Jason was likely to be blamed first.

“Gerry?”

Peter, calling me back to the moment. “I haven’t seen Linda since early this evening,” I said into the phone. “She left our tables at the crafts fair and—”

“That’s Linda being Linda,” Peter said. I’d heard those words earlier from Beverly, but with an undercurrent of affection. I resented hearing them in Peter’s cold tone. “Anyway, I’m taking Jason home with me tonight, so if you see Linda, let her know.”

Please
would have been nice, but clearly too much to ask.

When Peter hung up, I was only the tiniest bit more informed on the Reed family—at least I knew Jason was not in jail.

You might think four bedrooms is a lot for one person,
but not for a crafter, especially since Eichler rooms tended to be small, not like the enormous master suites and walk-in closets in the newer suburban developments. I still slept in the largest bedroom (twelve by fourteen) only because it provided a view of the patio, blooming with different plants each season. My crafts supplies and projects were barely contained in Ken’s home office, spreading out into the two guest rooms.

Maddie always preferred to sleep in the corner bedroom nearest the street, which had been her father’s, and which held my computer system, such as it was.

“You might as well just call this a plug-in typewriter,” she’d told me on day one of her visit a couple of weeks ago. She spread her lips into the half smile she’d adopted when her teeth began coming and going. “You have no good software. You’re two versions behind on everything. And you’re still using dial-up for the Internet. It’s an achromism.”

“Close,” I said, happy that she’d taken up my word-a-day challenge. A supplement to her sports-fact-a-day habit. “I think you mean anachronism. But remember, I have e-mail now.”

She’d brushed the back of her hand across her forehead. “I know. Whew.”

Tonight I found Maddie sitting on the floor in the bedroom next to her own. This was the overflow area, dominated by the one project I couldn’t bear to finish.

Before he became ill Ken built a full-scale model of our first studio apartment on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. The whole apartment would nearly have fit into our Eichler atrium. The door, of both the apartment and Ken’s model, opened to a combination bedroom and living room. The kitchen was just to the right. When Ken and I were in the six-by-four kitchen together, there was much hip bumping, which at the time led to very late dinners.

No wonder I like miniatures, I thought.

But I couldn’t bring myself to outfit and decorate the model apartment once Ken became incapacitated.

Maddie asked me about it every time she visited, and I made one excuse after another. Too busy (“but you’ve furnished four other dollhouses since Grandpa died”). Don’t have the right materials (“you have piles of wood and fabric here, Grandma”). The weather hasn’t been right (“how does that matter?”).

Now I came upon Maddie peering into the model apartment. When she saw me, she walked her index and middle fingers up to the tiny front door.

“Let’s work on this, Grandma. We can do it together. For Grandpa.”

I felt my tears rush around inside my head, overwhelming my eyes and my nose. I breathed deeply. Maddie seemed to grow in front of me, from one scale to the next. Bigger, older, and wiser with each step. How could she be more adaptable than her grandmother?

I pulled myself together. “We’d have to make it all pink,” I said.

Maddie’s smile touched my heart. I leaned over and she put her arms around me. I felt her tears on my cheek. They reminded me that I wasn’t the only one who missed Grandpa.

I took my cell phone to bed with me. In between reading
and clipping articles in the latest issue of
Miniatures
magazine, I hit redial for Linda’s number. I left the landline free for her hoped-for incoming call.

Which came at two in the morning, waking me from a sound sleep. In my experience, calls in the middle of the night never brought good news. My first thoughts were always of Beverly, who’d made more than one trip to the emergency room for episodes related to her childhood scarlet fever, then of Richard and his family, just because they were so far away.

The phone line was noisy. “Hello,” I said, two or three times. I heard a faint female voice that I guessed was Linda’s. I thought I heard traffic in the background. My caller ID box had no information beyond
Private Caller
.

“Linda? Linda, is that you?” I asked, now fully alert in spite of the hour.

“Can you come and get me?” It was a scratchy communication, but definitely Linda.

“Where are you? What happened?”

I was aware of Maddie standing at my bedroom door, sleepy-eyed, in an oversize red-white-and-blue team shirt (basketball? hockey?) that must have been her father’s. Of course, she would have been awakened by the extension phone ringing in her room, kept on for security.

I covered the mouthpiece with my hand and whispered to Maddie. “It’s Mrs. Reed,” I said, meaning,
Don’t worry, it’s not your parents
. I tried to control the concern in my voice.

I wondered how much Maddie had overheard and what she thought of it. First I’d told her Linda was at home sleeping off an allergy attack, now Linda was calling at two in the morning and I was asking where she was.

Linda’s voice again, in short bursts of speech. “I’m at a no-name gas station off 101, near the on-ramp to 87. My car’s still at the school.” Nothing so simple as a flat tire, which I suspected, and no answer to “what happened?” but my relief at the sound of her live, if shaky, voice overcame any curiosity for the moment. Then fear crept in, and I pictured Linda tied to a chair (not gagged, but maybe wounded and bleeding). My heart raced. “Are you…?” What to ask—with Maddie now curled up beside me on my bed, questioning me with her eyes. There would be time later for explanations.

“I’ll be there,” I said. “I’ll leave right away. Can you keep your cell phone on until I see you?”

“I don’t have my cell phone. It must be in my car. I’m at a pay phone. I used all my change making this call. You can almost see the booth from the freeway. I think I’m near the San Jose airport.” Linda’s voice broke. I couldn’t tell whether she was crying or there was static on the line. “I’m not hurt or anything, Gerry, so don’t worry.”

Don’t worry, indeed, but her comment gave me a little relief. I wanted to grill her right then, hold her hostage, so to speak, until she told me where she’d been all evening, why she left her crafts fair post. But it wasn’t the time. She clearly needed rescuing, not scolding. I knew Linda didn’t have many friends, just one or two acquaintances among her colleagues at the convalescent hospitals; the patients there were in no shape to socialize. And Linda didn’t belong to all the crafts clubs in town as I did, but rather treated her art as a solitary hobby. So, whom else could she have called?

I had a vague picture of where Linda was calling from. The San Jose airport was about ten miles from Lincoln Point, the area mainly industrial. I hoped we’d be able to stay connected by phone.

“I’ll have my phone on,” I told Linda. “You just stay right there. What’s the number? I’ll call you once I’m in my car.” Maddie, who was paying rapt attention, leaned over and scooped up the pad of paper and pen I keep on my nightstand. She held the pad firmly across her bony knees while I wrote the number of the pay phone.

When I hung up, Maddie disappeared down the hall. I felt a nervous chill along my sweaty back. No question of being too tired to drive; I was energized by adrenaline (my layperson’s interpretation of why I was more awake than if I’d had eight hours of sleep). I splashed water on my face and threw on the knit pants and sweatshirt I’d worn at the fair. I grabbed a pair of clean socks and my sneakers, then snatched my purse from the chair by my bed. Ready to go.

Then I stopped. What about Maddie? Should I leave her home or drag her out in the middle of the night? I thought of waking my neighbor and leaving Maddie next door. In spite of Linda’s claiming not to be hurt, I had no clue how she would look (bruised? bloody?) or whether the trip might be frightening to Maddie. Nor did I know for sure that whatever danger Linda might have encountered was now over. I imagined someone standing over her, forcing her to make the phone call.
Call the police
, a little voice in my brain said,
why else do you have a nephew on the force? Let
him
go to a strange neighborhood and pick up a stranded citizen of Lincoln Point.
But then a stronger voice, Linda’s, said,
Don’t you dare
.

No option seemed good, but I didn’t have to choose.

Maddie was at my door, dressed in her jeans and jacket, cap facing front, holding a package of breakfast bars and a banana.

“Mrs. Reed might be hungry,” my granddaughter said. An amazing little girl. So what if she didn’t like pink?

Maddie buckled herself into the backseat on the passenger
side. If she had questions, she held them close.

“Sorry to get you out of bed, sweetheart,” I told her, tucking a blanket around her wiry body. Her red-tinged curls caught the light from the bulb in the garage-door opener, and I ruffled them gently.

“Is Mrs. Reed all right?” I hoped that was her only concern, and not our safety, for example.

“Oh, sure. She sounded fine. Just stranded.” I put a happy spin on it, as if Linda, miraculously recovered from an allergy attack, had been dancing all night with the owner of her favorite crafts store, who then forgot to take her home. I doubted Maddie bought it, but she didn’t challenge me. “Why don’t you try to sleep?” I suggested.

By the time I backed out of my driveway and started down the street, Maddie had nodded off. I heard her even breathing. Oh, to be ten, I thought.

I wished I’d listened to Skip when he suggested I get a GPS for my Ion. According to my techie-cop nephew, right now I’d be able to type “gas station” on some keypad and get addresses for all the pumps in my vicinity. Lacking that, I went by instinct and the scanty directions Linda had given me. I took 101 South, the Bayshore Freeway, toward the San Jose airport. A couple of miles down, I called the pay phone number Linda had read off. I was glad I kept a headset in the car, though California law still didn’t require hands-free-only cell phones. The line seemed to ring for an eternity. I half expected an answering machine to click on, forgetting for a moment that the ringing phone wasn’t on Linda’s kitchen counter.

After an inordinate number of rings, Linda picked up.

“I’m back here,” she said, sounding breathless. “I walked a little way from the phone, trying to see if I could get closer to a main street, but I don’t think so. It’s not that nice-looking around here, if you know what I mean. It’s like a frontage road. It’s…dark.”

Creepy
was probably what she wanted to say. Linda sounded like a lost child. Normally, Linda carried her extra pounds well, with excellent posture. The added height from her beehive hairdo gave her an overall air of confidence and command. This new timbre in her voice didn’t fit that image. Also gone was the strident, bitter divorcée, able to make Christmas shopping at Michael’s crafts store seem like a lost-time injury.

“I see signs to the airport,” I told her, feeling hopeful.

“Keep going until you can exit to 87.”

One good thing about middle-of-the-night driving: there wasn’t much traffic on the usually backed-up 101 freeway. Only a few cars and the occasional roaring truck or top-heavy RV. On the other hand, I wasn’t looking forward to stopping in a deserted area. I wondered how I could be frightened of a neighborhood not a dozen miles from my home, but these were industrial streets and freight yards that I usually paid no attention to as I zipped past them on the freeway.

The Ion is a fairly quiet car; I was conscious of Maddie, sleeping in the backseat, and tried to keep the ride smooth by holding my speed down—maybe she’d sleep through the whole episode. Another part of me wanted to go ninety miles an hour and get myself on the California Highway Patrol radar. Then I could flash the get-out-of-a-situation-free card Skip had given me, and gain a police escort.

But the idea was to rescue Linda while keeping everything low-key for Maddie. I turned off at Guadalupe Parkway, still connected to Linda on the pay phone.

“Guadalupe, that’s it,” she said. “Now keep going, going…”

I saw it straight ahead of me on the left. A long row of overly tall billboards and signs, and then a gas sign with all of its lights out. I felt as though I’d been running on empty for many miles, and, though the station was closed (and looked like it would never open again), had finally found a place to fill up. I got off at the next exit and looped back over the freeway.

I heard Maddie stir. “Looks like we’re here, sweetheart,” I said in a light tone, stopping just short of singing a happy ditty.

Linda stood outside the broken-down booth, as far as the phone cord would reach. I figured the booth (the letters
T LEPHO E
were lit up on the top) was not the most pleasant- smelling miniature room one could spend time in. The neighborhood was flat, lined with cement buildings with battered metal washboard-type doors and what looked like a farmyard of containers. The ones that usually were attached to semis, barreling down the freeway.

I searched the landscape for signs of trouble. A suspicious car in the lot, close to Linda. (No.) Loops of colored wires and a timer wrapped around Linda’s chest. (No.) Sounds of gunfire. (No.) Hooded men lurking in shadows. (No.)

I determined we were all clear, unless there was a sniper in the small, dark convenience store attached to the station office. As we approached, I heard Maddie rummaging in the snack bag she’d put together.

I tapped the horn though I could see that Linda had spotted me. I pulled up beside her and stopped briefly, not even putting the car in park, letting Linda fall into the front seat, then took off quickly for the freeway north.

I heard three deep exhales, including my own.

Something about the smell of a slightly overripe banana
made the ride home seem normal. I suspected Linda wasn’t the least bit hungry, but couldn’t refuse a little girl’s thoughtful gesture. (Linda was wonderful with children and with the sick; it was normal, healthy adults she seemed to have a problem relating to.) I nibbled on a raspberry breakfast bar, to show my appreciation. Maddie herself licked an orange Popsicle (not food to me, but simply a way to store sticks for crafts), having somehow managed to assemble a little picnic chest to keep it from melting completely on the trip down. A Popsicle at nearly three in the morning. A picture of Maddie’s mother came to my mind. She had a questioning look on her face.
Don’t ask, Mary Lou
.

Maddie fell asleep again, once she finished her snack. At a red light, I leaned back and added a jacket to the blanket covering her. I needed to keep the car reasonably cold to stay awake. And to protect any remaining Popsicles.

I looked over at Linda as often as possible on the trip home, but she didn’t turn my way once. I knew she was taking advantage of Maddie’s presence, sleeping or not, to avoid a conversation. When I told her Jason was spending the night with Peter, she responded with a perfunctory “Good.”

The brief moments it took for her to enter my car didn’t allow much time for close examination. I saw nothing obvious. No limp or visible bruising or bleeding. She was wearing the turquoise sweat suit she had on at the fair. Her beehive hairdo was disheveled, not easily accomplished since it was always heavily sprayed, but otherwise I saw no signs of distress.

We reached the school parking lot without incident. Linda refused my offer to drive her home and collect her car in the morning—make that a few hours from now. I wasn’t awake enough to argue at full force. I expected—make that, required—Linda to talk as soon as we were free of Maddie. For now, she was safe from my interrogation skills (acute, according to my husband and son).

Linda’s SUV was the only vehicle left in the school lot. I
got out of my car when she did and cornered her before she entered her vehicle, not quite pressing her against the door—impossible, since she outweighed me by the equivalent of several dress sizes—but a barrier nonetheless. Light from a cheap outside fixture over the door of the multipurpose room fell on her face and I saw the accumulated stress of the past ten hours. Her blue eyes were narrow, half-closed, and watery. Lines on her face seemed to have multiplied since I last saw her varnishing her Governor Winthrop desk.
Where is that desk anyway?
flitted through my mind, but escaped quickly as I focused on more significant matters. Up close, as bad as the thin light from the dirty bulb was, I could see that her running (not that she ran) suit was soiled and her jacket pocket torn.