Mourning In Miniature (9 page)

“Not exactly.”

My heart sank, my last miniature amount of hope flitting away. I clung to his qualified answer. He hadn’t given me an outright “no.” “Can you at least tell me where his body was found?”

“A group of teenagers found him when they went to Joshua Speed Woods for some early morning necking. We don’t know if that was the actual scene of the crime, though the last word was yes, probably he was killed right there. The kids’ statement says that the trophy was next to the body. They picked it up to see whose it was. I have a feeling every one of them handled it, so we’re still sorting out whose fingerprints are recoverable.”

Up to now, when I’d had occasion to pass by or talk about the wooded area to the west of the main part of town, I imagined the look on the face of one of Lincoln’s closest friends, Kentuckian Joshua Speed—if he could have known that his namesake woods were used mostly as a lovers’ lane. Now, for a long time, I’d remember it as a murder scene.

The worst realization at the moment, however, was that Rosie lived on Joshua Speed Lane, which bordered the woods.

I felt the strangest regret that I hadn’t listened more closely to Rosie when she described her long-ago relationship to David. All the times she’d gone on and on at the crafts table, and most of us absorbed less than half of what she said, I guessed. She’d mentioned one “date gone bad” as I recalled. I didn’t care at the time, but now I wished I knew precisely how badly it had gone.

Skip bent down to the floor on the side of his desk and picked up a brown paper bag. Too large for lunch. Big enough for evidence.

I was on pins and needles as he reached into the bag. What he pulled out was one of the last things I would have guessed, right before “a flock of seagulls.”

Skip took his time. Rosie’s locker room scene emerged from the bag, one tiny, gray locker at a time. I couldn’t blame Skip for playing out the drama.

I didn’t remember so much red in the décor. I looked more closely. The scene had been trashed.
I hate David
had been written in red paint across three or four adjacent lockers. The tiny jersey with David’s old number thirty-six had been torn to shreds. There was “trash” everywhere, in the form of bits of cloth and paper and a deflated football.

“Where did you get this?” I asked.

“Can you identify the item?”

I gulped. I felt as though I were in a witness box. Or on trial myself.

“It’s Rosie’s,” I said. “I mean it looks like Rosie’s. What do you think it means?”

“My question exactly.” He placed the room box on his desk. “Look carefully. It’s been dusted, as much as we could, considering where we found it, but you still shouldn’t touch it.”

The most I could ever hope for from my nephew was that he would answer half the questions I asked. I didn’t push the issue, lest I inadvertently give away something that incriminated Rosie.

I squinted at the ravaged scene. I reached into my tote for the magnifier I always carry and held it close. It took a great effort not to run my finger across the red paint. I grimaced as if it were real blood.

I saw what had impressed Skip. The most striking addition to the scene was a bottle of poison. It seemed Rosie had taken a piece of white filter paper from the coffee system that every hotel room has these days and fashioned a small cylinder to resemble a bottle. She’d used the plastic packaging from a coffee pouch to shape a bottle top. Not too many people would have been able to identify this clever use of found objects, but it happened to be my specialty. The work had been done in a hurry (or in a state of torment) but was what my crafters group would have declared “cute.”

Except for what was written on the bottle. Rosie—or someone else, I reminded myself—had drawn the shape of a label, with a skull and crossbones and the word
poison
.

Lavana Rollins had been right when she called it a strange piece of evidence that I’d find “very interesting.”

“Well?” Skip said. “What’s it supposed to be? Something other than a clue to her state of mind? And, by the way, there’s more potential evidence that I can’t tell you about right now.”

I felt it necessary to explain the craft group’s Alasita project to Skip, hoping the context would work in Rosie’s favor. “Before the vandalism, it was like a prayer for a happy meeting between Rosie and David,” I said.

“I’ve heard of that.”

“You have?”

“When June and I went to Mexico we saw a version of Alasita. They had parades and dancing and all, but the miniatures were nothing as fancy as this. They were more likely to do something rough or just buy a little key chain if they wanted a car or a house.” He rummaged around the back of his desk and extracted a wooden owl. “June got me this. To bring me wisdom.”

“You said there was something else. More potential evidence? Not that this is evidence.”

“Yeah, well, never mind that right now.”

“But David wasn’t poisoned. Doesn’t that count?”

“Gotta go, Aunt Gerry.”

I managed a few more Q-and-As before he got serious about my leaving. The gentle pressure on my arm as he led me from his cubicle told me that it was time.

If I ever needed an owl, it was now.

 

 

I drove north on Springfield Boulevard toward my
neighborhood, and it so happened, Henry’s also. Since this was the main street for markets and shops, there was medium-to-heavy traffic this Saturday afternoon. Not usually an impatient driver, right now I couldn’t wait to see how Maddie was faring.

Skip had been as forthcoming as he was going to be. It was neither surprising nor unusual that he’d gotten more from me than I’d gotten from him. After all, he was highly trained in investigative and interviewing techniques. I didn’t know whether to be ashamed or proud of myself for getting away with the hotel key card.

I’d given Skip a watered-down version of Rosie’s behavior of late, trying to make her out to be less a stalker than she was. It couldn’t hurt to act as a character witness to balance out her miniature crime scene. I told him the truth about my temporary roommate, that I’d seen her leave David’s doorway about ten thirty last night and then saw her again in her bed when I woke up this morning.

“If you could tell me the time of David’s death . . . ?” I’d asked, to no avail.

Skip had brushed off the fact that David had been beaten, not poisoned. That his body hadn’t been left in the old locker hallway, as might be indicated by Rosie’s little amended scene. That there must have been many other people from David’s current life with a better motive to kill him than one who hadn’t seen him in thirty years. (How about Ben, that unhappy employee in the jumpsuit, for example? Or the son he hadn’t seen in years.) That Rosie was one of the last people I’d expect to have the will or the strength to beat someone to death, especially a large man like David Bridges.

I wondered where the locker scene had been found, where Rosie was now, and where she had been between ten thirty last night and seven o’clock this morning. I couldn’t be at all sure how long she’d been in bed when I woke up. She might have been fully dressed under the covers, having sailed in only a moment before.

I wished I knew where and when David was killed.

I wished all I had to think about was what fun it would be to see Henry Baker’s woodworking.

 

 

I barely had my car in Park when Maddie ran up to me.
She and Taylor, trailing behind her, were soaking wet. I caught a glimpse of the backyard swimming pool and marveled at her hearing, or some other sense that told her I was approaching the house.

“I’m sorry I skipped out like that, sweetheart,” I told Maddie, bracing myself for a wet hug and a barrage of whining.

I got both.

“I know what you were doing, Grandma.”

I tickled her bare midriff, always an effective distraction, then addressed Taylor. “So, what have you two been up to?”

Henry came out of the garage as the girls gave alternating reports of their hour and a half of fun. A little television, a little computer work, and more swimming.

I allowed myself to enter the world of Henry’s workshop, physically and mentally, and forget the stress of the day. Thanks to Ken, I recognized a good-quality new band saw in the corner and an old table saw next to it.

Henry showed us a rocking chair he had just finished, a beautiful cherrywood creation with the longest, most graceful rockers I’d ever seen.

“It’s in the style of Sam Maloof,” he said, as if I might know who that was.

“I’m afraid I don’t know much about life-size furniture,” I said. “Ken knew every style of architecture backward and forward and he taught me a lot, but he wasn’t interested when it came to interiors. And, as for me, I’ve always stuck to dollhouse-size furniture.”

“I didn’t mean to name-drop. The Maloof style’s very well known in the circle of furniture designers. His work is in museums and in the White House.” Henry pointed to a photograph of Jimmy Carter in a woodworking shop. “He had a lot of fans.”

I stepped back to admire the chair again. “It’s like a piece of sculpture,” I said.

“‘Art at the service of utility’ is Maloof’s trademark. But you might relate better to these chairs.” He steered me to another corner of the workshop, where about a dozen tiny rocking chairs were lined up. All standard sizes for room boxes and dollhouses, all in different wood tones, all beautiful.

My breath caught. I bent over the worktable, my arms folded lest I break something.

Henry picked up a chair that was an exact replica of the life-size Maloof rocker. He handed it to me. “They’re not as delicate as they look.”

I ran my hand across the curved piece on the top back of the chair—as smooth a finish as I’d ever felt, fabric store visits included. “How did you do this?”

I meant the question as rhetorical, but Henry answered. “It’s a technique called ‘bent lamination.’ I cut thin, curved layers of wood using a band saw, and then laminate them back together.”

He showed me a form that he used to bind them. The assembly resembled a wood sandwich, with the forms as the bread and the rocker as the meat.

“Which one do you like best?”

I picked up a dark mahogany-stained half-inch-scale chair. “They’re all amazing, but I love the color of this one.”

He took the chair from my hand and wrapped it in a piece of newspaper. “Take it, please.”

I felt my face flush. “I couldn’t. Maybe I can buy it—”

He shook his head. “I’d be very pleased to see it in one of your dollhouses.”

Taylor, who’d been giving Maddie her own tour of the wonders in the garage, came up to us. “Grandpa’s always giving things away,” she said. “He says then he has an excuse to make more.”

I understood that theory very well, but I’d never given away anything as beautiful as the rocking chair being offered me now.

Henry’s grin was lopsided, in a charming way. “See? It’s nothing really. I hand them out all the time.”

“I don’t get things like this all the time. Thank you very much.”

I turned away. Someday I’d try to figure out why I found it so hard to accept gifts.

My gaze landed on a smaller workbench, filled with scraps and broken furniture. A chair missing its rungs, a table with only three legs, a lamp with a broken shade.

The collection took on the appearance of a trashed room. Or a trashed locker hallway. I remembered Rosie’s plight.

The mood was broken. The life-size world called.

It seemed wasteful to drive a two-car convoy back to
San Francisco, but like most Californians we’d built our lives around having independent transportation. Maddie and I made another stop at home and then took off for the Duns Scotus about four o’clock. We set a time to meet Henry and Taylor in the lobby so we could go into the banquet room together and be seated together.

When we got to our room, I took out the key I’d borrowed—stolen?—from Skip’s desk. I slid the key in the slot and waited for the green light. None. But in my experience with hotel key cards, they often didn’t work the first time. It had to do with the speed with which they were inserted, I thought. I tried again. No green light.

I pulled out the key card I’d received at registration and worked hard to pull off a switch without alerting Maddie. My own key card worked, of course. Skip’s key card must be for David’s room. Or for one of the other five hundred rooms in the hotel, I realized.

“I know we talked about doing something fun,” I told Maddie as we got resettled in our room. “But it’s already kind of late. The banquet is at six and I have a couple of things I have to do. Would you mind waiting until tomorrow for a real San Francisco experience?” Not one in a hotel where a murder victim recently worked.

She put her hands on her narrow hips. “Are you going to investigate?”