Mix-up in Miniature (8 page)

But I’d have been perfectly happy waiting another hour or so.

“Skip?” Henry asked, getting up to answer the door, straightening his shirt on the way.

“I’m afraid so.”

Henry grinned. “I was ready to leave anyway.”

I doubted it.

—

Once
Henry left, the scene in my living room morphed quickly from a cozy make-out session between consenting adults to a formal inquiry with a member of law enforcement.

I said as much to my nephew, skipping the making-out part.

“It’s not as bad as all that,” Skip said, handing me a folder with four typed sheets. “I figured I’d help you out by bringing you your statement, saving you another trip downtown.”

“I didn’t know I was giving a statement,” I said, with a touch of huffiness in my tone.

I’d mellowed a bit since my encounter with Detective-Nurse Ratched, but Skip didn’t need to know that.

“Just routine,” Skip said. He pointed to the new dollhouse in my atrium. “That from Varena Young? Pretty fast work.”

I explained how the dollhouse appeared on my doorstep this evening. “I suppose Detective Rutherford will think I killed Varena to get the dollhouse.”

Skip made a
pshaw
sound.

I looked at the sheets he’d handed me. The first thing that struck me was Detective Rutherford’s first name.

“Blythe?” I said.

Skip shrugged and mumbled awkwardly. Apparently he also felt that such a lovely name should have been reserved for a less brash persona. I thought it perfect for one of Varena Young’s romance heroines. I pictured a nymphlike Blythe wearing a billowing ball gown, laughing sweetly—not sporting a suit bulging with a weapon and topped off with an attitude.

More annoying than Detective Rutherford’s first name was the notation in the box below the case number:
GERALDINE PORTER—INVOLVED PERSON
.

I felt my jaw tighten. “Involved?”

“It’s nothing. It just means you were there shortly before the murder, likely the last person to see the victim alive.”

“Alexandra Rockwell was her name. Or Varena Young, another perfectly good name.” Why did I have to keep reminding people of that? “And I probably was
one
of the last people to see her.”

Skip nodded vigorously. “Right. Right.” He scratched his head, covered with the same thicket of red hair as Maddie’s, but not as curly. I could almost read his thoughts—
Why is my usually kindly aunt so grouchy tonight?
“Look, I’m going to grab a cup of coffee while you read that over and sign it at the end. Oh, and initial any corrections.”

“Yes, sir.” I saluted.

“Didn’t I say ‘please’?” Skip grimaced. “Please.”

He turned and walked out of the room.

On a good night I would have sprung up and prepared his mug of coffee and a plate of cookies, but I wasn’t completely over the Corazón Cruz incident, let alone the Blythe Rutherford incident, let alone this involved person incident.

Skip rumbled in the kitchen, still dressed in his professional detective outfit—navy pants and tweed sport coat. I resigned myself to reading the report he’d thrust upon me.

From the first page, I felt renewed tension in my shoulders and limbs as I recalled the unpleasant interview in the run-down, offensive room.

“Look at this,” I called to Skip, who’d managed to find the jar of ginger cookies in spite of my lack of hospitality. “There’s at least one typo on each page. I’ve corrected them. Why do I have to initial crossed-out words?”

“It’s…uh…a way to be sure you read it all.”

I looked at him over my reading glasses. “You mean you do this deliberately? Make errors?”

“Something like that.” Skip came into the living room and sat on the chair across from me. He shifted until he was perched on the edge. Getting up close, assuming a trustworthy posture. “I’ll let you in on a little trick of the trade. The typos are there for a reason. If we go to court, you can’t say you weren’t given time to read the statement. Also, your initials are all over it, so you can’t claim that the cops just showed you where to sign at the bottom.”

“Someone thinks I’d lie in court?”

Skip held up his hand. “Of course not, Aunt Gerry. But, you know, the whole purpose of a statement is to lock down a person, so when we get them in court—not that you’re going to court, but procedure is procedure—then we can impeach them if they try and say something different. It’s just routine.”

“I’m beginning to like your ‘just routine’ less and less.”

Skip finally popped a cookie into his mouth. Sensing my mood, he’d shown great restraint. “I take it you weren’t impressed with Detective Blythe’s bedside manner,” he said.

“She treated me like a suspect.” Silence. I waited a few more seconds. “Here’s where you’re supposed to say, ‘Oh, no, Aunt Gerry, you wouldn’t be a suspect, not in a million years.’ ”

Skip took another cookie, managing to say, “These are great,” before stuffing his mouth again.

I squirmed. “Skip?”

“It’s just—”

I folded my arms and broke in. “Do not say ‘routine.’ ”

“Procedure,” Skip said. No better than “routine,” but at least I got him to exercise his synonym-finding skills. “You have to let the LPPD follow its procedures. People have to be eliminated. As suspects, I mean. That’s how it works. Of course no one in his right mind thinks you killed the woman.”

“Fine. Then let’s talk about suspects. How about Varena Young’s brother? You know, I forgot to tell you, but I heard them arguing upstairs as I was leaving the house. I think there was a third person there also. Another man.”

Poor Skip. He brushed crumbs from his jacket and blew out another agonized breath.

“We’ve been over this, Aunt Gerry.”

“Yes, and what a coincidence that the person who told me about Varena’s brother is nowhere to be found.”

“She doesn’t work there anymore. That doesn’t mean she’s MIA.”

“I guess I’ll have to find her, or him, myself.”

Skip stood and picked up the folder containing my brilliant statement. “This all done?”

I nodded. “You’re leaving?” I asked. I wasn’t nearly finished with my own interrogation.

“Good night, Aunt Gerry.” He turned his back and waved good-bye over his shoulder as he walked to the door.

I couldn’t remember the last time my nephew left my house without a bag of cookies and without giving me a hug.

It also occurred to me that he never did confirm that I wasn’t a suspect. He’d said no one in his right mind… But what about those in the LPPD who were not in their right minds?

It was going to be a long night.

—

I sat
in front of my computer, shiny and new on my dining room table. Richard and Mary Lou had given me a laptop for my birthday, one that finally met Maddie’s criterion of being “not lame.” I had half a thought to wake her up, school night or not, and ask for help. Even a new, smarter machine required some skill at research and she was the queen of browsing.

Before I assumed the role of bad grandmother, I gave myself a pep talk. I could do this. I’d seen Maddie do searches enough times. I had a master’s degree, for heaven’s sake, and I’d done some online shopping. How much harder could finding a family tree be than ordering Christmas presents?

I took a sip of tea and typed in Varena’s name. Up came a page of links, most of which were related to her Regency romance novels, giving synopses, book tour schedules, and an impressive number of awards. I scrolled through a list of her book covers until I got tired of looking at impossibly high waistlines and more-than-puffy sleeves. Did every woman in those days wear her hair the same way—with wispy curls framing her face and the rest of her locks tucked into a frilly cap or piled high on her head?

I needed something more personal about Varena, not about her heroines.

One site claimed to have an exhaustive list of Regency romance authors’ biographies. Each bio was written up in the same format, with sections labeled
LIFE, WRITING CAREER, AWARDS, BIBLIOGRAPHY, FUTURE WORKS,
and
REFERENCES
.

I stopped to read the entry for a Carly Aaronson to get an idea of what kind of information was available. The
LIFE
section was only a couple of paragraphs and ended with the standard line for authors of any genre: Lives in such-and-such a city with her husband,
x
number of children, and
x
number of dogs (or cats). Not very useful for tracking alleged siblings.

The list of books in print for Ms. Aaronson was astounding. I knew from my volunteer library work that romance publishers put out many titles each month and that their authors often wrote up to three or four books a year.

By contrast, Jane Austen, also included on the site, was credited with only six novels, total, for her career. Not very productive, but I doubted that Ms. Aaronson’s twenty-five novels to date would be studied two hundred years from now. Though it pained me to admit it, I didn’t think my friend Varena’s body of work would be the subject of future book groups either.

I wondered if Varena, at her age, had been able to keep up with that schedule herself, or if she had help. Skip had mentioned a research assistant, Paige Taggart, who’d been at the Rockwell home all afternoon while I was there. I made a note to pay her a visit, hoping she might still be around to collect her things, if nothing else. With a name like Paige, there was a good chance she spoke unaccented English and might be able to enlighten me as to the whereabouts of Corazón and Varena’s brother.

Searching the romance site, I was proud of myself for finding a not very clearly marked pathway to clicking on a particular letter of the alphabet for authors. I headed over to the
Y
s.

A small, postage stamp-size image of Varena popped up, startling me for a moment. I choked up. Yesterday, I’d been in the presence of a vibrant woman; today I was left with a tiny, posed photograph of her.

I cleared my eyes and nose and read:

Varena Young is the pseudonym of Mildred Swingle. Born between the two world wars on a farm in the Central Valley of California, she eventually obtained a GED and left the West Coast for Chicago. She was hired by a publisher, who…

Wait. There was too much wrong with this picture.

Mildred Swingle? I couldn’t think of a less romantic-sounding name. Varena Young was a perfect pseudonym, and the world assumed Alexandra Rockwell was her birth name.

Varena Young had dropped out of high school? I had great respect for the GED program, and even tutored students on the way to earn the certificate, but I’d imagined Varena an insatiable scholar from her first day of school at a private boarding school in England, not a late bloomer.

And what was this about her being born in California’s Central Valley, which meant a place like Merced or the farmlands of Stanislaus County, not exactly a breeding ground for duchesses.

I read a few more lines:

She wrote for nearly twenty years before entering the Regency romance genre and her career took off.

Reason told me there couldn’t be two Varena Youngs of the same age writing in the same genre. But, as indispensable as the Internet had become, errors abounded and mix-ups like this were bound to happen.

And how appropriate. Mistaken identity was one of the tropes of Varena’s genre, Regency romance novels—and of Shakespeare’s plays, I recalled with a smile.

I remembered trying desperately to nudge adolescents toward an appreciation of the humor of twins being mistaken for each other, or of girls and boys disguising themselves as the opposite gender. Much to my dismay, very little of Shakespeare had amused the teenagers of Abraham Lincoln High School. I wondered if I’d have fared better teaching the complete works of Varena Young. To the girls, anyway.

Mildred Swingle, indeed. To me it was a hilarious comedy of errors featuring a duchess and a farmer’s daughter.

I realized it was well into Tuesday morning. I had no business sitting at my desk at this hour. Computers baffled me in the light of day. Why did I think I could get anything useful done after midnight?

“Time to pack it in,” Ken would have said.

And I did.

It must have been a rough, confusing day for me to go to bed without another glance at the brand new dollhouse in my atrium. I did give some thought to its miniature television set, however. An incongruous addition to an old dollhouse.

I fell asleep wondering where I could get a TV for one of my own dollhouses, and if I could buy tapes—or was it chips?—of “The Ed Sullivan Show.”

Maddie jumped on
my bed, landing on my legs, as she hadn’t done for many years. The effect on my body was much greater now that she was a tall, bony eleven-year-old. She was dressed for school, fortunately without her backpack, or I’d never have been able to get up.

Maddie’s voice was urgent. “Grandma, Grandma. You have to come and see what I found.”

I blinked a few times and put my pillow over my head, only partly teasing. “I’m sound asleep,” I said in a genuinely groggy voice.

Maddie laughed like a toddler, bringing back happy memories. “Come on, Grandma. Wait till you see what I found this morning. Did you know our new dollhouse has a secret room?”

“It’s not exactly ours, sweetheart, and no, I didn’t know. Have you been working on the house already?”

“Yes, yes.” Maddie had grabbed my old bathrobe from a chair in my bedroom and now she held it open, looking like a bullfighter who’d been stuck with ragged blue chenille instead of a snappy red cloak. “Come on, come on.”

“You went to the dollhouse instead of the computer?”

She gave a slight nod. “When are you ever going to wear that new robe we gave you last Christmas?”

“It’s my backup.” My head was still in my computer search for Varena Young. “I could have used your help last night,” I said, sticking my arms into the comfortable robe. “I was trying to do a search, and I didn’t get anywhere. It’s about the lady who died yesterday. I don’t think she has a website of her own, and I’m not sure I can trust what’s on the generic sites.”

“Huh,” Maddie said, hardly pausing before telling me, “your slippers are right here.”

I’d told her about a case, invited her help, and her response was another “Huh”?

No screaming, “Let me do it! Let me do it!” I hoped my granddaughter wasn’t ill.

I’d been hoping to ask Maddie about genealogy sites or blogs or other ways to find out about the personal life of a celebrity. Surely having or not having a brother wasn’t too intimate a detail to be public. I’d gone through the standard hoops, plugging in “Alexandra Rockwell,” but the name was more common than I thought. I’d been bleary-eyed by the time I learned of the possible Mildred Swingle connection and hoped Maddie would come to my aid.

I’d also been surprised last night when Maddie didn’t shuffle into the living room when Skip arrived. Her room fronted on the driveway and she invariably heard his car. She’d typically make her sleepy way to wherever we were, and offer to help solve his case.

Not today, though. No “Please, please, please.” I was tempted to feel her forehead for signs of a fever, but I didn’t want to frighten her. I needed to call my son before breakfast and clarify the state of her health.

“Uncle Skip came by. I guess you didn’t hear him,” I said, pushing my feet into my slippers, which were older than my robe.

“I must have been very tired, probably from waiting so long for you to come home for ice cream.”

At least she hadn’t lost that edge. “Because I was Away So Long,” I said, reaching out to her most ticklish parts. “Aren’t you smart, getting that little dig in so early in the morning.”

Also, another bit of avoidance, I mused.

I thought of all the times I wished Maddie would not get involved in law enforcement, even from the safety of her computer. I should be relieved about that now, not focusing on the needs of my little unsanctioned investigation.

But this was a sudden and unexplained reversal of roles. It had taken me a long time to get my granddaughter away from computers and interested in dollhouses. Now here I was trying to woo her away from a new house back to cyberspace.

Maddie took my hand and pretended to tow me into the atrium where the dollhouse awaited. We arrived at the threshold, the moment she’d been waiting for.

“
Ta da!
Isn’t it great, Grandma?”

It was early enough in the morning that no sunlight crept in to spoil the effect. Maddie had turned on a tiny light here and there in the dollhouse and a magic world awaited. I saw that she’d added little touches with items from my own crafts drawers. A box of cereal, bowls, a loaf of bread, and a pot of jam sat on the kitchen table, ready for the dollhouse family’s breakfast. Upstairs, she’d placed clothes and toys strategically on beds and chairs. One tiny sneaker was on the dresser next to a lamp in the child’s room, the other upside down on the floor. I had the impression she was reproducing her own décor.

“You’ve done a wonderful job, sweetheart.”

“Now watch this, Grandma. This is the main thing I was telling you about.”

Maddie had me sit on a stool so that I was at eye level with the second floor of the dollhouse. When I was settled, she pressed her finger on the back wall of one of the bedrooms, about fifteen inches by twelve inches (fifteen feet by twelve feet if scaled to life-size), with a play area in one corner.

“Watch, watch.”

I was ready for fireworks, but saw nothing. “What should I be looking for?”

Maddie frowned and pressed harder on the same spot, then moved her hand around the area. The wall was nicely painted in an abstract design, geometric shapes in primary colors, but I saw nothing unusual.

“I don’t see anything, sweetheart.”

Maddie growled and clenched her fists. “There’s a secret room right here behind this wall. I saw it this morning.” She slammed her arms against where her hips would be if she had any to speak of.

I got up and looked more closely. “Where was it?”

She pushed so hard I thought the house would topple. “Right here, right here. I just touched this spot”—her finger tapped a bright red circle—“to see if it was thick paint or paper or what, and this wall slid across, like,
zoom
”—another gesture punctuated this highly animated presentation—“and there was another wall and there was a space.” Maddie held her thumb and index finger about two inches apart. “It was like a hallway or something.”

“The wall slid automatically? So it’s wired up somehow?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“So we should be able to see some electrical…stuff.”

“Yeah, there must be a little motor and a battery,” she said, feeling along the edges of the wall.

I placed my finger on a yellow rectangle next to the circle. “Maybe you were pressing here.”
Tap tap.

Nothing.

“Nuts. Nuts. Nuts,” Maddie said, pouting between words, as her father had done before her whenever he was stressed. “I should have taken the letter while I had the door open.”

My ears perked up. “Letter?”

“There was a letter in the hallway. The secret hallway.”

“You mean a miniature letter?” I’d fashioned tiny letters for many a room box myself.

“No, a real letter. A full-size letter.” Maddie held her hands out to roughly the size of a typical envelope that comes in a stationery set, about four-by-six inches. “Like the kind you used to send when we lived in L.A.”

As if a secret room weren’t enough to intrigue me, the chances of finding a letter—I heard “clue”—in the dollhouse motivated me even more strongly to locate the magic spot.

Now both our heads and one hand each were battling for space in the bedroom. We moved the furniture out and checked again, including the outside wall, and came up with nothing.

“It was there, Grandma, really.”

“I’m sure it was.”

“You don’t believe me.”

I put my arm around my distressed granddaughter. “Let’s have breakfast and get you to school. We’ll try again this afternoon.”

I heard her soft, frustrated “Okay.”

I couldn’t help thinking—this was how I’d felt when I was told there was no brother.

—

Finally
the time was right. I was free to talk to Richard and Mary Lou, who would surely be up, while Maddie started breakfast, this time on a real-life scale. I headed for the phone.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” I told her. “I’m going to call your parents.”

Thud. Plop.
Maddie dropped the wooden-handled spoon, sending sticky globs of oatmeal to the tile floor.

She gasped.

In fact, I thought I heard the gasp before the spoon fell.

“No, no, don’t call them yet,” she said.

“I’ll be done before the oatmeal is ready,” I said, confused by her pleading tone. She’d never cared this much for punctuality at breakfast.

I pulled a paper towel off the roll and wet it, ready to kneel down and help clean up the spill.

“Please, please, please, Grandma.”

Maddie, hiding tears, I felt, buried her head in my chest. My first thought was how incredibly tall she’d gotten and how increasingly inadequate a counselor I’d be as she got older. But that wasn’t the immediate problem.

“Maddie, please tell me what’s wrong. I know something is bothering you. Maybe I can help.”

She sniffed a few more times, then broke away. “Grandma, I promise I’ll tell you, but can we please just wait until after school?”

It was a step in the right direction, if not great progress. Maddie had at least owned up to a problem. It broke my heart to think she’d been suffering with it for even a day.

“I’ll wait, but only if you answer a couple of questions,” I said.

I heard her weak “Okay.”

I took a breath. “Is anyone sick? You, your mom, your dad?” I thought a minute and threw in Beverly just in case.

“Uh-uh. No one in our family is sick.”

Maddie crossed her heart and held her right hand in the air.

“Is anyone in trouble?” I didn’t have any idea how to make the question specific. Trouble with the law? Richard was about the straightest arrow I knew. Skip teased him about it when they were kids, and he teased him about it now. Mary Lou was a little more adventuresome, but not in the gamble-away-your-house or lose-your-family kind of way.

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

My cell phone-cum-marching band, wired to the wall through its charger.

Maddie pounced on it. “Don’t take it, okay? Let it go to voicemail.”

“Your mom?”

Maddie nodded, her eyes more soulful than when she’d sat on Santa’s lap, barely able to talk, and earnestly pleaded for a tricycle.

I gave her a silent “Okay.” I’d made a promise. I hoped I wouldn’t regret keeping it.

Buzzz. Buzzz.

Maddie’s face collapsed into relief. “Grandma, can you get the door? I don’t want the oatmeal to burn.”

She returned to the stove and stirred the oatmeal with a clean spoon. She knew I wouldn’t continue my probing in Henry’s presence, though I hadn’t ruled it out. I needed advice from an adult and Maddie’s parents were off limits, thanks to my rash promise.

“We’re going to continue this as soon as you get home,” I said in my firmest voice. I hoped the hug that accompanied my admonishment didn’t detract from my position of authority.

“Okay, okay, okay.”

I opened the door to a smiling Henry, who bent down and gave me a kiss.

“Nice,” I said. “Have you had breakfast?”

“Not yet. I smell oatmeal, but I had something less healthy in mind, after we drop Maddie off.”

“I like a man with a plan.”

Henry sat and drank coffee while Maddie ate oatmeal and I pretended to be too full from dinner to have any.

For Henry’s benefit, and as another chance to entice Maddie to action, I summarized my needs and failure at the computer. It still wasn’t clear to me why Maddie hadn’t been bombarding me with a million different things she could do for me on the computer, if I’d only let her skip school today.

“I’m trying to find out if Varena Young put out a newsletter or something like that,” I said. “She’s listed on her publisher’s page, but there’s no information of a personal nature.”

“Did Taylor finish the puzzle we started yesterday? The one with no straight edges?” Maddie asked Henry. A conversation ensued about the pros and cons of jigsaw puzzles online and in a box.

I was free to go off mentally on my own, and I took the opportunity. I was sure Varena’s personal assistant, the stiff Ms. Overbee, knew her employer’s personal details. I made a note to ask her, but I didn’t hold out much hope of her cooperation. I needed a way to meet with her and Paige, the research assistant. Or if my lunch with Alicia went well, maybe all mysteries surrounding her mother’s death would be solved.

“How’s your uncle?” I might ask Alicia, catching her off-guard, in case she was prepared to lie. She’d told Henry that she didn’t have an uncle, but she didn’t know that he’d passed the information on to me. As usual, my head hurt from the complicated planning necessary for a good strategy.

I couldn’t help thinking also of the envelope, the full-size envelope that was in the secret room in the dollhouse. If there was a secret room. The dollhouse had come to me unexpectedly, and it was decidedly not the one Varena had offered me. If someone wanted to send me a message, a letter in a secret room would be the perfect vehicle. If the someone was Varena, why wouldn’t she have sent the Tudor that I was expecting? Did Varena have time to do that before she—

“I have an idea,” Henry began, jogging me back. “This is a job for our resident computer guru.” He turned to Maddie. “Maybe when you get home this afternoon, you can work with your grandmother to find the information she needs to help your uncle solve the case.”

Henry couldn’t have put more tempting words into the plea.
Computer, information, uncle, solve, case.

“Maybe, but I have lots of homework this week.”

I put my cup down and laughed, but Maddie showed no sign that she’d made a joke.

Where was my real granddaughter?

—

“Is
it too soon for boy trouble?” Henry asked as we drove back from Maddie’s Palo Alto school. “Strange that she doesn’t want to hop right into this investigation.”

I’d decided not to share the yet-to-be-determined problem Maddie was dealing with, but Henry had picked up on a change in the atmosphere around my granddaughter anyway. I also had no idea whether the three things were related—her sudden avoidance of computer projects, her lack of interest in the case, and the mysterious call from Richard and Mary Lou.

“I hope it’s too soon for boys,” I said. “How about Taylor? Any significant changes?”