Name Games
A Mark Manning Mystery
Michael Craft
À qui d’autre
que Léon?
PART THREE Fingers of Suspicion
Small World
‘ROYAL’ VISIT PLANNED
Local shopkeeper announces a big event in her miniature world
By GLEE SAVAGE Trends Editor,
Dumont Daily Register
SEPT. 14, DUMONT WI—GRACE LORD, PROPRIETOR OF THE NOOK, A LOCAL SHOP SPECIALIZING IN LILLIPUTIAN FURNITURE AND ACCESSORIES FOR DOLLHOUSES, ANNOUNCED YESTERDAY THAT HER STORE WILL HOST THE ANNUAL REGIONAL EXHIBITION OF THE MIDWEST MINIATURES SOCIETY.
The show opens next weekend, on Saturday, September 23, in a large unused storefront on Tyner Avenue adjacent to The Nook. More than 100 renowned artisans and exhibitors will draw thousands of enthusiasts from Wisconsin and beyond.
Plans for the show have been under way for months, Lord (64) told the
Register,
but she learned just last week that Mr. Carrol Cantrell, the reigning “king of miniatures,” has unexpectedly accepted her invitation to judge the show’s main event, a roombox competition.
“Roomboxes,” she explained, “are the preferred medium of most serious artisans and collectors. A single room is constructed in exacting detail, minus its fourth wall, resembling a model for a stage setting.” She added that these rooms are typically built at one-twelfth scale, depicting a particular theme or design period. Figures of people are rarely used, so the finished room-box bears little resemblance to the common notion of a “dollhouse.”
Carrol Cantrell (50), described by Lord as “a very big man in a very small world,” is founder of the Hall of Miniatures, a large Los Angeles-based museum and store known as mecca to the miniatures crowd. Lord added, “Everyone in the field refers to him simply as Carrol, a name that is as readily understood as Barbra or Jackie.”
Grace Lord modestly concedes that she accomplished no less than a professional coup in convincing Cantrell to judge the regional show at The Nook. “For one glorious weekend,” she told this reporter with a wistful sigh, “Dumont, Wisconsin, will be the center of the universe—at least within our little world.”
W
HAT’S IN A NAME?
Any journalist knows that the first order of business is to nail down the facts—the who, what, where, when, why, and how. The first of these, the who, the name of the subject, generally leads the story. The rest merely explains why that person warrants ink. An oversimplification? Maybe. But the fact remains that almost every story is about people. And we come to know people first by their names.
My name is Mark Manning. I’m forty-two, a writer by training who left his career with the
Chicago Journal
late last year, moving north to take over the reins of the
Dumont Daily Register.
My move was greeted with a measure of dismay by city friends, who insisted that my investigative-reporting skills would be wasted “up there on the tundra.” I chose to refocus my career in central Wisconsin because my family roots are here, in a clean, prosperous, generally quiet little town named Dumont (the place bears no resemblance to a tundra). A sizable inheritance from my mother’s family allowed me to buy the
Register.
I now serve as both its publisher and its editor.
My features editor is a woman named Glee Savage—how’s
that
for a handle? On a Thursday morning in mid-September, she ran a story in our “Trends” section announcing that a local shopkeeper, Grace Lord, had secured the services of one Carrol Cantrell as judge of a miniatures show that would soon open. I had never met Grace Lord, though I recognized the family name as having something of a pedigree in Dumont. I had never heard of Carrol Cantrell, despite his stature among the dollhouse demimonde; indeed, this whole business of slaving over bitsy box-sized rooms was entirely unknown to me. Chatting with Glee in a corner of the newsroom, I complimented her on the bizarre story, but couldn’t resist asking, “Are these people nuts, or just eccentric?”
“Neither!” she assured me, feigning umbrage at my comment, stretching her big red lips into a sneer. Some ten years older than I, she peered at me over her half-frame reading glasses, lecturing, “The mini world is serious business, not just some frivolous hobby.” She grinned. “The ‘king’ is arriving this morning to take up residence for the week in Grace Lord’s coach house. She invited me over to meet him—he sounds like quite a character, a good subject for a follow-up feature. Why don’t you tag along?”
It was a slow morning, and my curiosity was piqued, so I did tag along—in fact, I drove. No question, my big black Bavarian V-8 would be apt to make a far loftier impression on King Carrol than would Glee’s fuchsia hatchback, so we pulled away from the
Register
’s offices in style. Turning off First Avenue, Dumont’s main street, I left the downtown area and drove several blocks along Park Street, crossing Wisconsin and Vincennes Avenues, toward Prairie Street. There, in what is arguably the town’s nicest old residential neighborhood, I live with my lover of three years, Neil Waite, and my nephew, Thad Quatrain.
“Hey, boss,” said Glee, sitting next to me in the car, “don’t miss our turn. Tyner Avenue is next.”
Braking hard, I swerved at the quiet intersection, apologizing for the rough ride. I had never been on that particular street before, even though it was only a few blocks from my house. The new surroundings reminded me that even though my family had deep roots in Dumont, the town was still largely unfamiliar to me. It did not yet feel like home.
Glee pointed. “The Nook is just ahead on the left. Grace Lord’s house is next door.”
The leafy neighborhood mixed nicer, older houses with a few tidy shops, their awnings shading the sidewalk from a benign September sun. Grace Lord’s miniatures store, The Nook, already had banners hung from its eaves, announcing the exhibition of the Midwest Miniatures Society and welcoming the “king of miniatures,” Carrol Cantrell. Adjacent to the shop was a larger, vacant store, its windows soaped from within, its red-brick facade marred by rusty bolt holes where long-forgotten signage had been removed. To the opposite side of the shop, but well distanced from the street, the Lord family home sat serenely among the trees—the rolling, expansive lawn seemed the better part of an acre.
“It’s huge,” I told Glee, slowing the car as I approached the house.
“This area used to be the outskirts of town,” Glee explained, rummaging for something in her enormous flat carpetbag of a purse. “The Lords were always well-off, and a sizable family at that, so they needed the space. But the older generation is gone now, and the others have scattered, so Grace lives here alone.” Glee wagged a hand toward the drive—“You can pull all the way in, back by the coach house.”
The “coach house,” which soon came into view behind the main house, was a big, old two-story garage that looked like a former barn or stable. Like the house, it had walls of white clapboard, but without the Victorian trim. The ground floor still had a sliding barn door, which was closed; the upstairs, under a traditional gambrel roof, appeared to be a nicely finished living quarters, windows adorned with lacy tieback curtains. An open wooden stairway—with treads and banister freshly painted an oily green—rose along the side of the building to a covered porch that protected the door. Potted geraniums marched up the stairs and formed a riotous red hedge beneath the porch railing.
Glee and I got out of the car, closing its doors with a double thud that momentarily silenced birds in the canopy of trees. Glee walked around the car and headed for the back of the house, explaining, “The front door is never used.”
I had noticed, in fact, while driving along the side of the house, that there was no walkway from the front porch to the street. Dimples in the lawn suggested that a flagstone path had once led from the porch to the driveway, now overgrown by encroaching grass and the passing of years. In contrast, the lawn behind the house was crisscrossed by well-trimmed brick walkways. One led from the driveway to the back porch. Another led from the porch to the coach-house stairs. Still another stretched across the yard to a back entrance to The Nook and continued behind the adjacent vacant building where the exhibition would be held, suggesting that both stores were part of the same property.
As Glee and I clomped up the stairs to the back of the house, we heard a yoo-hoo from the upstairs porch of the coach house. Turning, I saw a short, older woman—presumably Grace Lord—waving to us from the edge of the porch among the geraniums and the lower branches of the trees. “Thank God,” she tittered with the birds. “I heard the car and thought it might be Carrol. Needless to say, I’m not ready!” She laughed at herself, as she wore a faded denim work shirt and something wrapped around her hair like a makeshift turban. She hefted a yellow plastic cleaning bucket loaded with rags, rubber gloves, and various spray bottles. Piled near her feet were odds and ends she’d removed from the guest quarters. She attempted to gather this all together so she could carry it downstairs in one load.
“Wait!” both Glee and I shouted to her. Scampering over the path and climbing the stairs to meet her, I offered, “We’ll give you a hand with that,” as Glee told her, “Be careful, Grace.”
Grace put her things down. Through an exasperated laugh, she told us, “I guess I
could
use some help.”
When Glee and I reached the landing of the stairs, she paused to tell Grace, “I don’t think you’ve met my boss yet—the
Register
’s new publisher, Mark Manning.”
I climbed the last few stairs and extended my hand. “It’s a pleasure, Miss Lord.” Stepping onto the porch where she waited for us, I noticed that she stood at least a head shorter than I, barely taller than five feet.
When she realized who I was, she whisked the turban off her head and wiped imagined grime from her palms before reaching to shake my hand. “
Another
distinguished visitor,” she chortled, “and
me
looking like hell.”
“Hardly, Miss Lord,” I assured her. And indeed, her pleasant looks matched her amiable manner. Though dressed in jeans for housework, she had seemingly spent some time primping and grooming that morning, and the tight-set curls of her steely gray hair looked fresh from the corner beauty parlor. Her homey, self-deprecating humor, her diminutive stature, and her occupation as a dollhouse shopkeeper brought to mind a one-word description of the woman: impish.
She confirmed her neighborly nature by insisting, “Please, Mark, it’s
Grace.
‘Miss Lord’ is just a tad unbecoming at my age.” And again she laughed, dismissing the bugbears of spinsterhood.
Endeared by her disarming candor, I simply told her, “Here, let me help you.” And I gathered up what I could of the items she was removing from the coach house. There was a stack of linens, a wastebasket, a framed picture, and a box of junk that might have been cleaned out of desk drawers—scraps of paper, an old phone book, pencil stubs, tangled paper clips, a knot of dusty rubber bands.
Glee reached up, offering to take the cleaning supplies. Juxtaposed with the oversize tiger-stripe purse carried in her other hand, the yellow plastic bucket became an absurd addition to Glee’s carefully coordinated, if over-the-edge, ensemble. I couldn’t help laughing as she led us down the stairs, her leopard-spot heels pecking at the slick green-painted planks.
Oblivious to this, Grace yammered, “It really is a blessing that you arrived when you did. Carrol should be here any minute, and I was running behind getting his room in order.” She added, as a note of explanation for the odd assortment of things that I carried, “I just didn’t think that Carrol Cantrell, king of miniatures, would appreciate spending a week pondering the Lord family’s sentimental old bric-a-brac.”