Monster in Miniature (13 page)

 

 

When I was finally brave enough to go into the kitchen
to give Maddie the news about her day, she’d already poured out her cold cereal and had taken the orange juice out for me.

“I can make you some oatmeal, Grandma,” she said, making me feel even more guilty about what I had to tell her.

I kissed her head, then pulled my robe tight around my body. “That would be nice, sweetheart. I love oatmeal on chilly mornings.”

“I know.”

She measured out two helpings of oats and water and went to work. I watched her movements, T. rex’s jaw flopping as she went from the counter to the stove. My granddaughter was grown-up enough to be trusted around a gas flame, but still wore the slippers from her sixth birthday.

“Did you have a good sleep?” I asked her. Small talk before the big announcement.

“Uh-huh. Uncle Skip was here last night, wasn’t he?”

Her comment took me by surprise. I’d thought I was home free. “What makes you think so?”

“I saw his car when I got up to go to the bathroom.”

“Do you always look out the window when you get up for the bathroom?”

“I do when I’m here.” Point taken. “I wanted to come out, but I was so tired I just flopped back into bed.”

“That’s good.”

“Did he know about Mr. Halbert being a jailbird?”

“Yes, he did.”

“Nuts.” She ground the spatula into the pan and then whipped the oatmeal into obedience. “I’ll have to find out something else. What are we doing today?”

“I need to talk to you about that.”

Then I ducked.

 

 

Beverly came and whisked Maddie away. She’d been as
grumpy a little princess as I expected when she received the news in my kitchen, but I knew she loved Beverly and would never let on that she didn’t want to go with her aunt to San Francisco where she’d be entertained by sea lions and street performers.

I noticed she took her laptop with her.

Sundays were limited. Factories weren’t open, so I
couldn’t visit the Ferguson twins’ place of business; construction sites were abandoned, so talking to Patrick Lynch was out of the question. The key to the late Oliver Halbert’s apartment rattled around in my head. Did I dare enter Oliver’s home in broad daylight? He’d lived in an old complex on Hanks Road, only a few hundred yards from where he was found dead on the Fergusons’ porch. I thought it better to wait until dark when I’d attract less attention. I didn’t know his neighbors or how interested they were in the comings and goings in their building, even by someone with a key.

What was left? Where could I go on my day free of worry about Maddie?

An image flitted by. The crime scene. I’d meant to ask Skip if Oliver had indeed been killed on the stoop or placed there later. In any case, a visit to the Fergusons’ home was the best idea I could come up with.

When I finally got back to thinking beyond what had been occupying my mind for the last two days—that my husband may have kept secrets from me—I realized I had no idea where the Fergusons had been during the murder, or what they knew about it. I hadn’t asked Skip nor tracked it down in any way. I’d been selfishly turned inward, to what affected me most.

It was time to reach out.

 

 

I decided to take a gift to Lillian Ferguson. I’d make
something special and also search my supply drawers and put together a collection of miniature accessories suitable for the Victorian-style dollhouse she’d bought at one of our crafts fairs.

Miniaturists always knew the style of dollhouse their friends and neighbors owned, just as Henry could tell me what kind of wood was used for the banisters in his friends’ homes, and my nephew knew what kind of car everyone drove.

Taken as a group, my crafter friends and I would likely be able to rattle off all the dollhouses that populated Lincoln Point: Carolyn, the hairdresser, had a brown-and-cream Tudor, made from a kit she’d bought online; Isabelle, who worked in a supermarket one town over, had built a lovely Cape Cod from scratch; Patricia, a real estate agent in Gail’s firm, was decorating a French peasant farmhouse handed down from her great aunt. We could go on.

My crafts table was a refuge in times of stress. During Ken’s long struggle to stay alive, whenever I wasn’t by his side at the hospital, I was here, making tiny things that gave me great pleasure. Focusing on the construction of miniature books and lamps gave me direction when I was at loose ends, searching for meaning in horrible life-size events.

I reached for a new Flower Soft kit I’d bought for making tiny stalks of flowers. I spread butcher paper on my table and laid out the materials: three plastic pots with colored foam bits, one yellow, one pink, and one lavender; strips of narrow, flexible wire; a container of high-tack glue. Fifteen minutes later, I had my special item for Lillian: a spray of variegated pink flowers wrapped in tissue and tied with a tiny pink bow.

I rummaged around and found a small box with varying lengths of trim and fringe that I’d torn off a swatch book. An interior design store on Springfield Boulevard had gone out of business and thrown away large books of samples for draperies, valances, cords, and other trimmings. It must have been a strange sight for anyone watching Maddie and me as we came upon the pile of books next to the store’s trash bins and lunged for them.

I prepared a small (but not miniature) basket with the newly made flowers, plus trims, beads, and laces to take to Lillian. Just a friendly gesture from a concerned neighbor who heard about the terrible incident at their home. If further talk of Oliver Halbert’s murder followed, so be it.

 

 

As I rounded the corner from Gettysburg Boulevard to
Sangamon River Road, I half expected that Sangamon would be clear of Halloween decorations, in deference to the awful event of this weekend. I noticed that the Fergusons’ home and environs were bare. The front lawn was clear—gone were the skulls, critters, and RIP headstones we’d seen on Friday. But on the rest of the street there seemed to be even more orange, black, and neon green paraphernalia than ever, perhaps inspired by the real-life spookiness that had visited them.

It was a little before ten o’clock in the morning when I parked in front of the Fergusons’ house. I sat in my car and gazed at the porch, now looking clean and safe in the bright October sun. The shadows cast on the lawn seemed light and nonthreatening; the breezes that lifted fallen leaves had a benign rhythm to them. It was hard to imagine that a lifeless Oliver Halbert had dominated the scene only two days ago, and that now his personal life and his secrets, and that of many others, would be exposed in all their nastiness for everyone to see and talk about.

I tried to remember why I’d thought it would be a good idea to come here. My recollection of the last time I was here brought on a chill and the sense of darkness on the street. How quickly my mood could change. Was I here only for Susan? So that I’d be able to give her some kind of report? Or did I have my own secret need to explore the mystery?

I’d seen official Lincoln Point police reports through the years since Skip had been a cop. In his early years, he’d ask me to look them over for grammar before he submitted them. I never asked if that practice was sanctioned, but I’d taken it upon myself to simply be sure his tenses were consistent and that he had no spelling or grammatical errors. I kept whatever I read confidential.

If I wrote up a report on my activities this morning, what would I say?
At ten hundred hours I was dispatched to Number Three-six-four-six Sangamon River Road in search of information regarding . . .

I was reluctant to fill in the blank—that I was here as much for Ken and Beverly as for Susan and Oliver. The cases seemed to intersect at the Fergusons’—at Sam and Lillian’s home and at Eliot and Emory’s factory—making this visit as good a place to start as any.

End of narrative, as the police reports always said in closing.

I shook my head clear and got out of the car. I trudged up the walkway and climbed the porch steps, keeping as far as possible from the left-hand side, where Oliver’s body had been perched.

Not that I was nervous or superstitious.

 

 

“Well, Geraldine Porter, what a nice surprise,” Lillian
Ferguson said. “Sam is out playing golf. He’ll be sorry he missed you.”

I followed the short, matronly Lillian into a comfortable living room decorated in an English country style. Floral designs covered the chairs, the wallpaper, the curtains, the scatter rugs, and even the lampshades. Her flowery housedress blended in so well I wondered if she’d made everything herself, from the same enormous bolt of fabric. I wanted badly to see how she’d furnished her Victorian dollhouse and where it was located. Whatever the circumstances, it seemed, I was a miniaturist at heart.

I handed Lillian the gift basket. “I collected a few little trims that might work well in your Victorian,” I said, imagining my forehead emblazoned with the word “busybody.”

A model hostess, Lillian made tea and put out a plate (with a floral pattern) of sugar cookies. She sat down and picked up the basket. She lifted the floral spray, wrapped in light pink tissue, by its tip.

She adjusted her glasses and examined the flowers with her fingers. “The glue is still a bit wet,” she said, looking up at me with a smile. “You made it this morning, especially for me?”

“Just for you, thinking of your dollhouse. It might need to sit in the sun for a few minutes to dry completely, but it won’t fall apart.”

“I’m touched,” she said, placing the tiny spray on the coffee table. She turned her attention back to the basket and hooked a short, chubby finger onto a four-inch-long section of loops of fringe in different shades of blue. “This is lovely, too. I know just where I’m going to use it. It will be perfect for the window at the end of the long hallway on the second floor.”

I nodded, knowing exactly where in the dollhouse she meant. “I noticed you took down your Halloween decorations,” I said, then thought I should have waited a little longer to move into an unpleasant topic.

“Yes, it did seem inappropriate to have anything festive or holiday-ish around the house. But we offered to be on the judging committee instead, and that way the Prebles can enter the contest this year. Not that anyone is really in a mood to celebrate, but it’s for the children, you know—they look forward to it.”

Maybe “for the children” explained the escalation of decorations in the neighborhood since Friday. I thought of Maddie’s observation that there was one too many houses without decorations on Sangamon this year. “I noticed an extra house on the street that isn’t competing,” I said, in a gesture toward returning to small talk for a while.

Lillian stiffened. “Yes, the Pattersons have gone dark.” She bowed her head. “Their son was the janitor who was killed in the fire that erupted in our factory last year.”

I winced. I’d gone from bad to worse, reminding Lillian of a family who might be planning a lawsuit against her boys. “How awful. I read about that, but I didn’t know they lived on this street.”
And I didn’t mean to bring it up.

Lillian had her own way of dealing with awkward moments. She picked a five-square-inch carpet swatch from the basket I’d given her. “I think this will go nicely in the upstairs hallway, don’t you? Not everything has to be a print.”

I heartily agreed with her choice of placement for the swatch.

“You know, you didn’t have to bring me anything, Geraldine,” she continued. “I would have been glad to talk to you, anyway.” She replaced the plain green carpet swatch. “I assume you’re here about that boy’s murder?”

“Was it a murder?” I asked, blushing at having been outed and at pretending ignorance of the nature of Oliver’s demise, which I didn’t know was common knowledge already.

“That’s what my boys tell me. You remember Eliot and Emory?”

It made sense that to Lillian, who was close to either side of eighty, I guessed, men in their forties could still be considered “boys.”

“Of course I remember the twins. They were among ALHS’s star pupils.” A slight exaggeration, which was called for, I felt. The boys were no more than about a B or B-minus each. “Did you or your boys know Oliver Halbert very well?”

Lillian put her cup down and folded her hands on her lap. She spoke softly. “We did have dealings with the man now and then since he had an oversight job and my boys are in business. I didn’t pay much attention, but I think Mr. Halbert was going back and forth about my boys. First he said they were not to blame for that fire. The one that killed Andrew, the Pattersons’ son, poor soul. But there was talk that he was opening up another grievance against E&E Parts. We didn’t know what to think.”

“It seems Mr. Halbert had called quite a few people under his scrutiny,” I said.
Including my husband.