Malice in Miniature

I’d called June at work earlier, planning to invite her to dinner. I knew she had more pressing things on her mind than Maddie’s television debut, but I needed to keep her grounded. She wasn’t in her office at the time. I left a message but wasn’t surprised when I didn’t get a call back. I enlisted Maddie to go and knock on June’s door to see if she was interested in American Chinese food, but no answer there, either.

But I suspected there was. With Maddie there was always the chance that she picked up much more than we would like.

Homecoming time in the evening was almost as mad a scramble as breakfast in my newly busy home. Now at six thirty, everyone was talking at once, eager to share the best and the worst of the day, carrying snacks to the bedroom so they could nosh while changing their clothes, too hungry to wait for dinner. Maddie nearly bit her lip waiting to take her turn and talk about her upcoming television appearance.

Arms and elbows bumped during our table-setting tasks. As we opened each box, another delicious aroma filled the room: jumbo shrimp, kung pao chicken, hot and sour soup, fried wonton, fried rice, pork egg foo young (for Richard only), and two vegetable dishes.

Much talk and eating later, I needed one more shrimp and jabbed my fork (Mary Lou was the only one who used chopsticks) into one of the last pink chunks. After a few bites, “As Time Goes By” sounded from the kitchen counter, where my cell phone was charging. I was glad for the excuse not to participate in the usual debate about dessert whenever Mary Lou brought home Chinese take-out.

“They do eat dessert,” Richard said tonight. “They have green tea ice cream; they have sponge cake with coconut icing . . .”

I put one finger in my ear to drown out the noise from the dining room. An advantage for me was that no one cared who was on the phone right now. Maddie had commandeered the floor, talking with excited gestures, describing her hat tricks for the umpteenth time. I knew her parents were happy for anything that got her spirits up, and I heard no negative comments from Richard about missing school for entertainment.

It had been a long time since I’d gotten an SOS call from Skip. The last one I could remember was when he was almost twelve, right after his father died. He’d broken his nose falling from a fence in his own backyard. He’d called me because he thought his mother would be mad at him for ruining her flowerbed and getting blood on her roses. That’s when Beverly realized the depression that had set in while she was mourning her husband was taking too much of a toll on her son. She made an impressive turnaround after that.

My guess was that Skip wanted to talk about his relationship with June, and with his mother three thousand miles away in Hawaii, I was the best he had.

Maddie had been allowed to break a dinner rule and have “stuff” at the table. At the moment she was demonstrating how to roll a rectangle into a cylinder. I walked as casually as I could from the kitchen through the atrium, making it look like I was headed for one of the bathrooms. I was out the door without having to make up a story about the garbage.

Skip looked as despondent as I’d ever seen him. He was in his work clothes, except for the tie that he’d thrown onto the backseat.

I reminded him that Maddie was going to be on television tomorrow and explained how details of that event commanded more attention than anything I might be doing.

“Thanks.” He reached to the back floor of the car and pulled up a briefcase. “This is kind of informal, but I want you to look at some photos.” He slipped a folder out of the briefcase, opened it, and handed it to me.

I squinted, then reached up and turned on the dome light, which helped a little. I looked at a set of six photographs, all of women in their late twenties or early thirties, all blondes. “A photo array? Like a lineup?”

“This is not official. We already have Drew’s ID, but it never hurts to have a backup. My car’s not the best environment, I know, but see what you can manage. I want you to look at these photos and tell me if you recognize any of these women.”

We sat in his very plush sports car, turned to each other as much as possible with an enormous gearshift in the way. Skip drank from a large plastic soft-drink cup that had been sitting in a holder. It was a mild night; in many other parts of the country, where February still meant ice and snow, it could be called a spring evening.

I tapped the middle photograph in the top row. All the women had fairly thin faces, but this one’s pointy chin was unmistakable. And she had an attitude that was apparent even in the grainy photograph. “Her,” I said. “I recognize her.”

“She was coming out of the door to the jail, walking into the foyer this morning.” Was that just this morning?

“What’s this all about? I know this must be Rhonda Edgerton, or Goodman, as she still believes, because Zoe told me she had just left the visiting area.”

“Skip, I’m missing my dinner here.” Not quite true, but there was that one shrimp impaled on the end of my fork.

“You have a point.” He shifted in his seat, replacing the folder in his briefcase. “The Chicago PD is looking for her, just to question her as they always would an ex, and they have no record of her taking a trip in recent history. No flights, no trains, no buses.”

He took a long breath. “Maybe. But also no hotels or motels, no credit card activity, and no relatives in the area.”

“She must be using that alias for everything, then. Did you look up Rita Gold?” He gave me his what-do-you-think expression. I answered his nonverbal accusation. “How do I know if you had time to do that? I just told you this afternoon.”

“If Rita is Rhonda, clearly that’s not the only alias she’s using. But it’s nothing you need to bother about, Aunt Gerry. It’s under control.”

“Did you ever question . . . excuse me, I mean, when you questioned the cameraman who found Brad’s body, did you learn anything?”

Skip grunted. “I’ll bet you do. The poor guy is on extended leave, just trying to deal with the trauma to his little girl. He wasn’t much use to us as far as having seen or heard anything before he arrived.”

“My turn again, okay? There’s something else. I didn’t bring you out here just to look at a photo array.”

He nodded, slowly, as if the topic had been on his mind a long time. “I think it’s my job. I don’t see how I can have a normal life.”

“It’s always going to be a problem. I’m never going to be able to guarantee that I won’t be investigating one of her sorority sisters or a dear aunt, let alone that I can be home for dinner every night.”

“I think June knows about the dinner part already. And you’re not always going to be arresting her best friend.”

“You don’t give out speeding tickets.” Why was I being so literal? I knew what he was trying to say. “Sorry to be so difficult, Skip. If you can forget about your job for a minute, do you think you want to be with June for the rest of your life?”

He started, nearly spilling his drink, then laughed. I realized the phrase was daunting for someone so young. “Do I love her? Yes. Do I want to marry her? Well . . . more than I have anyone else, if that means anything.”

“Have you told her that in a way that she understands? You don’t have to answer me, but answer that for yourself.”

“I see what you’re getting at. If she doesn’t know where she stands in general, that might be why she’s reacting this way. I mean, I know it’s more complicated than that, with Zoe in jail and all, but I think I know what I need to tell her.”

“Just talk to her, kind of pave the way? I’m sure she’s come to you for help proving Zoe is innocent. Maybe you could just, you know, feel her out about me.”

Was this sixth grade, where Tiffany would ask Courtney to find out from Derek if Josh liked her? I noticed he hadn’t warned me off the case, which he usually did.

“I’ll do what I can.” I ruffled his red hair, just as I did often to Maddie’s. If he was going to act eleven years old, I was going to have the benefit of it.

“Look who was knocking on the door when I walked by the entryway,” I said. Mary Lou gave me a suspicious look, Richard waved “hey, man” to his younger cousin, and Maddie jumped up with “Uncle Skip, Uncle Skip.”

Skip got himself a plate and dug deep into the boxes of food, using chopsticks. June’s influence, we all knew.

Maddie was sharing research she’d done on the Channel 29 website. She read from the pages she’d printed out.

“ ‘Lincoln Point and the Lincoln Point Park District are proud of its community-oriented shows, including news, sports, lifestyle, and education.’ Which one are we, Grandma?”

Richard cleared his throat. Mary Lou jumped in. “I’d say part lifestyle, since you’re promoting a wonderful, fun hobby, and part education, because you’re educating people.” She turned to Richard and gave his arm a nudge. “Who knows, sweetie, this might kick-start a career for our daughter in show biz. Then we can be the wonderful, supportive parents who get thanked at the Oscars.”

“Wow,” Skip said, around a mouthful of egg foo young. “What are you going to wear? One of those glitzy designer gowns?” (Who said he wasn’t a sensitive guy?)

“This might be something you can talk about or write about in school,” Mary Lou said, swiveling back to face Maddie. “You still have show-and-tell, right?”

“No busy prints,” I said, in case Skip’s wardrobe question was for me. This cross talking was almost worse than breakfast.

“It’s way too small. And we’re not painting, Mom, we’re crafting. What do you think, Grandma? What are you going to wear?”

I hadn’t given it much thought beyond wearing my NAME pin (and no flowered housedress). I’d been a member of the National Association of Miniature Enthusiasts since it started in the 1970s and loved its little member pin, in the shape of a house.

“I read somewhere that Lincoln used to put papers, like, his lawyer documents in his hat sometimes, because his office was so messy,” Skip said, surprising me again with the breadth of his interests. “Maybe you could do that with the little hat you’re making.”

“What are you doing reading history?” Richard asked, dipping his napkin in water to clean a spot on the tablecloth. He’d made a mess trying to emulate Skip and Mary Lou using chopsticks for the last of the egg foo young.

“Something plain,” I said, getting around to Maddie’s question. “We want people to be looking at the hat and the materials, not us.”

Uh-oh. Were we encouraging a career in entertainment? I consoled myself with the thought that, for the time being, she’d forgotten about police work.

Maddie agreed that it would be a good idea to take along the Lincoln-Douglas room box, even though it wasn’t finished. It would be nice to show the television viewing audience where the top hat and cane would fit into the scene (on a folding chair that was yet to be made). We had a couple of hours in the morning to add some touches.

One positive thing about Maddie’s day off from school— I wouldn’t be leaving her stranded as I did yesterday. The memory of it was enough for me to give her extended hugs throughout the morning.

I looked out the window to check for June’s car. It wasn’t in the driveway. Either she’d already left for work or she hadn’t come home. I missed her and decided I’d make more of an effort to find her and make sure she was all right. As far as I knew, she had no knowledge of the unpleasant message left in her trash. I wasn’t sure whether that was good (she didn’t need anything to make her more upset) or bad (but did she need to be warned?).

Maddie had continued to ask questions about June. I knew she was worried. I wished I could keep this and all unpleasantness forever out of her world. Although that wasn’t possible, I was certainly stalling as long as I could.

Maddie and I spent about an hour after Richard and Mary Lou left making tiny rally posters, some with VOTE FOR LINCOLN, others with VOTE FOR DOUGLAS, and mounting them on long toothpicks. We stuck them in the “dirt” around the stage, along with flag toothpicks that came ready-made from a party store. I wished I’d used different flowers for the vegetation around the stage. It was too late to change now, however. Miniaturists were never completely happy with their creations, but, for better or worse, there was nothing more permanent than a good glue job.

We’d come to the fun part of building a scene—we looked through countless drawers and boxes that held tiny random objects to see if we could use anything for the debate scene.

A wooden box had potential for a podium, but it would take some creative woodworking. We put that in the pile of “maybes” for weekend work. Maddie found a button that was in the shape of a saxophone.

“There must have been a welcoming band,” she said. “And someone left their instrument.” Maddie told me about rallies she’d attended with her mother where there was music. (Some of the gatherings were beyond her remembering, I knew, since Maddie had been strapped to her mother’s back.)

“We can use bells also,” I said. “People at these events used to ring them to cheer their candidate. There were also parades and picnics on the day of the debates back then, but we don’t do that anymore.”

“Too bad.” I knew my granddaughter was a parade-and-picnic kind of girl. “There was a lot of trash around at our rallies,” she said.

“We’ll have to check to see when staples were invented, but I know for sure that scanners and copy machines were not around in 1858.”

We showed up at the Channel 29 studio ten minutes early, in our best unbusy clothes. Maddie had settled on her brown corduroy pants and a pale yellow long-sleeved T-shirt with no logo (hard to find in her wardrobe of sports apparel). It had taken an emergency run of my washer and dryer to get her ready. She allowed me the rare opportunity to throw her sneakers in the wash, also.

This time there was a sentry, a young African-American woman, at the window between the waiting room and the control room. Maybe they had security only when they were expecting someone. I thought that would defeat the purpose, but it wouldn’t be the first example of poor management I’d encountered at the Rutledge Center.

“I’ll tell Ms. Browne you’re here,” the woman said. Her intricately braided hair was covered with tiny, colorful hair clips, no more than half an inch long. I’d seen them in bags in the cosmetics section of the market and wondered what I could use them for in a miniature scene. Now I noticed that the part that clipped onto the woman’s hair looked like the jaws of a dump truck. And some of them were yellow. Hmmm.

We waited about twenty minutes, reading year-old magazines and reviewing our shtick a few more times. When I called a halt to reiterations, saying I thought we were ready, Maddie rehearsed by herself, mouthing the words and using hand gestures to mimic the crafting of the hat.

When Nan Browne appeared, Maddie jumped off her chair, wide-eyed. I thought she was going to salute. Or bow down. As far as I knew, Maddie had never seen Nan on television, but even hearsay star power was strong, it seemed.

“Misled,” she said. “You deliberately misled me. Once I got back here I thought I remembered who you were and made a few calls to confirm. You’re just a—”

Nan sighed, but didn’t repeat her greeting to Maddie. “We’ll have to get set up. Let’s see your stuff.”

I never minded when Beverly or Richard or Skip referred to my supplies and raw materials as “stuff,” but coming from the put-out Nan Browne, it sounded offensive. If it weren’t for Maddie (and, yes, the potential of seeing a clue to Brad’s murder in the studio), I might have walked out.

“How’s your daughter doing?” I asked. “Did your interview with her put her out front in the running to replace Brad Goodman?”

Nan gave me a look that would have melted the lens cap (if they had such things) on the studio camera. “She’s doing just fine, thank you.”

“I was sorry to hear she didn’t get the commission for one of the debate portraits.” I amazed myself at how far I was willing to push this.

“Nothing has been decided yet. Now, if you intend to go on the show this afternoon, we have prep to do,” Nan said.

I took her statement, combined with her look, as part threat, part ultimatum and buttoned my lip as we entered the studio.

The same black drapes hung in folds, with an extra day or so of dust on them, and the same lights, but no fleeing male this time. I wondered if the police still drew chalk outlines to indicate the location and position of victims, or if there were now some laser light that scanned the area. I looked for a molecule of chalk. Better than that would be to uncover a clue to the identity of a killer. In the last twenty-four hours, I’d done exactly nothing to keep my promises to June (wherever she was) and to Zoe (still in jail as far as I knew).

Unless you count wondering, which I’d done a lot of. Was Ryan Colson on duty the night Brad was killed? Had the police questioned him? Why couldn’t the police track Rhonda Edgerton/Goodman? She’d been in the basement of their very building yesterday morning. Zoe had a temper, but was it out of control to the point of murder? Why would June risk her own freedom by lying about Zoe’s whereabouts?

The sound of Nan Browne clapping only added to the questions of the day. Had she been a kindergarten teacher? She was ready to get down to business, using two hands to show us the set. Had she also been a point model at a car show?

I was ready for business also. I saw a small table in the corner near the door to the waiting room. I motioned to Maddie to help me move it across the room, in front of the large Channel 29 logo that would be the backdrop of our video. Maddie yanked at her end but was unable to move the table.

“Wait, this leg is caught on the curtain or something,” she said. She knelt down to release the leg. “Yuck, yuck.”

Uh-oh. Not another dead animal. Or worse. The phrase “dead human” came to me and my breath caught. I dropped my side of the table and nudged Maddie aside. “I’ll get it,” I said.

“Oh, it’s just a cloth,” she said, extracting a piece of black fabric before I could reach it. “But it’s all sticky.” She smelled it. “I think it’s coffee.”

I held out the black fabric and examined its shape. A cummerbund. It had been a while since I’d seen one out of the context of a man’s waist. This one looked handmade and was dusty from being in a corner of the room that the janitor seemed to think off-limits for his broom.

“It’s the tuxedo thing,” Maddie said, spreading her hands across her own tiny waist. “Maybe it’s from Abraham Lincoln when he was here on a show.”

“I’ll take that,” said Nan Browne, who had a habit of startling me with her surprise interruptions and quick retorts. I thought she’d left the room.

What I perceived as a blush on her face fueled my imagination. I pictured a would-be Lincoln or Douglas losing parts of his tuxedo yesterday around the time I entered the studio unannounced.

“People leave things here all the time,” Nan said, rolling up the cummerbund and tossing it in a wastebasket.

Nan cleared her throat, but didn’t acknowledge my insinuation. She pointed to the table Maddie and I had been about to move to center stage. “I didn’t know you were going to need a table. It’s an old wreck. The top is all marked up and we don’t have a cloth for it.”

“We do,” I said. I produced from my tote a pale blue cloth, neatly pressed and chosen for maximum contrast with our black top-hat fabric, but not too bright for television.

I had a sudden thought and a question for Nan, one that was not as disquieting as my others. “Is it possible to go from this studio to the work area where the artists are, without going outside or needing a separate key?”

“Just wondering. Someone recently told me that this studio was connected to the north side artists’ area and you could walk through if you took a certain route.”

Why would Zoe lie about how she got into the building? If you break into a building, does it matter how? I’d have to ask Skip.

Once Maddie’s television debut went down in ratings history, I’d have to get back to visit Lincoln Point’s only prisoner.

With quite a bit of finger-snapping on the part of Nan Browne, such that I pitied the young producer and the even younger cameraman, we all got through the segment. Nan had flubbed the introduction on the first rehearsal (“and her granddaughter, Marty . . .”), but the show itself proceeded without a flaw.

I followed Maddie as she skipped and twirled out to the waiting area when we’d finished. And nearly bumped into our new friend, Stephanie Cameron.

I gave her a grateful smile. I knew the praise would mean a lot more than mine to Maddie. There was something about the approval of strangers . . .

“We can get ourselves on DVD?” Maddie asked, in a high-pitched voice reminiscent of her toddler years. “Can we get it, Grandma? Huh? Huh?”

Stephanie threw her head back. “Ha! You might say that.” She crossed her middle and index fingers. “He and Nan, you know?”

I was sure that Ryan had mentioned a wife when I met him in the civic center. Was Ryan the mysterious shadow? Did it matter?