Monster in Miniature (24 page)

I closed my eyes and tried to picture the relevant page in my well-worn text for
Macbeth
.

“ ‘Knock, knock. Who’s there, i’ the name of Beelzebub? . . . Knock, knock. Who’s there, in the other devil’s name?’ ” I recited.

Henry started a round of (thankfully) subdued applause.

“Wicked,” Maddie said.

There was a time when I could have gone much farther in the scene. Then I might have deserved the kudos; now I blushed and held up my hand to stop them.

As far as I knew, there were only weak links connecting the porter’s (not this Porter) passage in
Macbeth
to the current use of the phrase in endless jokes told by children of all ages. My students liked to think they were reading the jokes’ origin, however, and whatever made Shakespeare seem like a regular guy, even a guy who invented jokes, was fine with me.

We placed our orders with a young waitress who was overly solicitous to Skip and continued our happy talk.

Maddie’s report: Richard and Mary Lou had taken her last week to see a three-dimensional animated film, an experience that called for special glasses. I knew Mary Lou could relax enough to enjoy a kids’ movie, but I wasn’t so sure about Richard. Maddie’s claim that “my dad even sat through it” made me proud of my son for sticking out what must have seemed like hours of sheer boredom.

Taylor’s report: she’d seen the same movie with Kay and Bill and admitted how scared she’d been, ducking “even though I knew all those creatures weren’t really coming at me.”

“And sometimes they came from behind you,” Maddie added, waving her arms to indicate many directions of attack.

Henry’s report evoked more fear in me than flying creatures in living three dimensions: he’d read about a dollhouse castle, in one-inch-to-one-foot scale, formerly owned and built by a silent film star. The eight-by-eight-foot house was the dream project of the actress and her family. Its chandeliers contained real diamonds, emeralds, and pearls; its china was a set of Royal Doulton. In the chapel lay the smallest Bible in the world, printed with real type.

Those weren’t the scary parts. What frightened me was Henry’s closing suggestion.

“The castle is at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry,” he said. “I think we should all make a trip there to see it.”

I cleared my throat and looked quickly at Skip. “And what have you been up to?” I asked, before he could comment on the trip proposal.

The idea didn’t get by Maddie and Taylor, however.

They squealed in unison.

“Yes!”

The girls proceeded to complain to each other about how they’d never been to Chicago in their whole lives. They failed to mention how each had been treated to a cross-country tour before they started school, summer vacations up and down the West Coast, and countless weekend visits to theme parks.

I didn’t repeat my own sad story, about seeing nothing west of the Bronx until I was almost thirty years old.

Maddie and Taylor didn’t seem to notice that the adults at the table, including Henry, whom I couldn’t bring myself to look at, had already dropped the subject. I knew I’d have to address it later with Henry, but not in public.

A strange feeling came over me as I felt my fear slip away and an image of my suitcase came to my mind. I would have been hard pressed to say for sure how I saw that talk with Henry going.

Skip declined to talk about his work. He treated us instead to a hint of what his Halloween costume would be. “It’s from Shakespeare,” he said.

“So’s mine,” said Maddie, delighted, while I made a mental note to get started on finding decent material for eye of newt, toe of frog, and so on.

The arrival of five bagel platters and drinks all around stifled chatter for a few minutes.

I took a bite of a cinnamon bagel with honeyed cream cheese. I was amazed to find that I’d regained my appetite.

On the way home, Maddie and I decided to take a detour
down another Lincoln Point street that was known for outstanding Halloween decorations. Appomattox Way didn’t take competition as seriously as Sangamon River Road (which had been perhaps a little too serious this year), but its lawn and window decorations were quite extravagant.

One family had given over its entire front picture window to a life-size silhouette of an old woman sitting in a rocking chair, the scene unabashedly reminiscent of one in the movie
Psycho
that featured Norman Bates’s mother. My one required course in college science was a dim memory, and now I wished I’d paid more attention. I wondered what kind of elaborate lighting system could produce a black silhouette on such a bright day.

We parked across from the immobile old woman and walked a couple of blocks, past a lawn that presented a man popping up and down from his casket bed, like a macabre jack-in-the-box, a trick that didn’t seem as humorous as it might have without a real-life murder in Lincoln Point. Next door was a display of ghoulish black creatures—a vampire bat with a large wing spread, and three kinds of vulture.

“Wicked,” Maddie said.

We were about to turn back to the car when we spotted our crafter friend, Karen Striker, disembarking from an SUV across the street. I’d forgotten that she lived on Appomattox. With her delivery date just around the corner, Karen had much needed help from her husband, who guided her to the sidewalk.

What a trick or treat, I thought, if Karen went into labor in the vicinity of the lawn decoration Maddie and I had just passed—a large black cradle marked
Rosemary’s Baby
.

Karen spotted Maddie and me and waved us over.

Maddie was happy to cross the street where she could get a closer look at a family of pumpkins that served as candy bowls. It had already been a half hour since her last meal, so I could understand her need for food.

“We just got back from that big miniatures show in Mill Valley,” Karen said, indicating several large tote bags being dragged from the backseat by her husband, Mark.

“You’ve been all the way to Marin County and back already?” I asked, discreetly pointing to her state of advanced pregnancy.

“I had to go,” she said. “The next show isn’t until after the baby is born. At the last minute, I decided on a Cape Cod for Baby Striker. I realized the Victorian I’ve been working on is never going to be finished before she arrives. I’m hardly finished sewing the dust ruffles for her bedroom. I had to get something I could decorate simply and quickly. So I bought a much simpler style and I already have enough furniture to set it up in just a few days.”

Mark made a looping motion with his fingers, indicating that his wife might be a little off balance. “I told her the baby isn’t going to notice anything. She’s going to be focused on breathing and eating. When she’s even awake, that is.”

“Can you imagine having the baby arrive home to a room without a finished dollhouse?” Karen asked. Her expression said that the idea was incomprehensible.

“Can we see the house?” Maddie asked, sparing me the need to respond. She’d just unwrapped her third piece of candy. I knew I should have been more solicitous of her eating habits, but what’s a grandmother to do?

With the great patience he’d need to be a good father, Mark released the tailgate of the SUV and removed tape from a large trash bag. The green plastic fell away, unveiling a lovely prebuilt and painted Cape Cod with two floors and an attic.

With siding on the outside walls, sturdy shingles on the peaked roof, and shuttered, double-paned windows, the house might have been able to withstand the difficult weather of the New England coast as well as the real thing.

“I wouldn’t usually get a ready-made, you know, Gerry, but timing is critical at the moment.”

“I won’t tell Linda,” I offered, though I knew even our purist crafter Linda Reed would have excused a mother-to-be for not playing carpenter during her last month of pregnancy.

With Karen’s permission, Maddie and I rummaged through the purchases that were accessible in her totes. Karen had some wonderful finds, like a miniature fireplace set and scatter rugs, as well as many accessories for each room. We came close to accepting her invitation to go inside for a full report on the dollhouse show she’d traveled more than fifty miles to attend, but the sight of miniatures reminded me of my promise to another crafter in our group, Susan Giles. If I couldn’t find her brother’s killer lickety-split, I could at least repair her room box in a timely fashion.

 

 

“I wish I’d been to the dollhouse show with Karen. I love
Bozo and Koko,” Maddie said, as we settled ourselves on stools in front of Oliver’s room box.

I had fond memories of the two famous clowns, who, under their bulbous red noses and oversized polka-dot outfits, were Phyllis Hedman (Koko) and Barbara Jones (Bozo), the tireless organizers of miniature shows.

We reminisced about shows we’d been to over the past couple of years since Maddie had become involved with miniatures. I remembered an older couple who dressed in identical white suits and offered their beautiful inlaid wood furniture for sale. Maddie tended to remember the accidents—the kids on wheelies who knocked over a miniature book store; the kitchenware vendor who complained about the neighboring miniaturist with “a big butt” (a direct quote from the vendor) who bumped into her table every time he got up and sent mini silverware and tiny spatulas and strainers flying.

It was easy to laugh when we hadn’t been the victims.

The mini construction scene room box of victim Oliver Halbert beckoned and we set to work.

I reattached the Rosie the Riveter poster while Maddie applied paint on a bashed-in corner of the box.

“While you have the brown paint on your brush, maybe you can touch up that workbench top,” I suggested.

Maddie picked up the loosened piece. “This must be new. I don’t remember the flash drive being here,” she said.

Flash drive? Was that anything like flash fiction? Probably not, though I’d read that flash fiction, the designation for stories as brief as fifty words, was undergoing a renaissance thanks to a rash of Internet sites that accepted and even paid writers for it.

I had heard the term “flash drive” as related to computers and had bought one for Richard’s birthday a few years ago, from a catalog, at his request. I wasn’t sure I’d recognize one in the flesh, however. “Where is it?” I asked Maddie.

She pointed to the makeshift finger-length bench top that I’d thought needed a better paint job, the one I assumed Susan had put together in a hurry.

“See, she used a flash drive as the top of the workbench. Wicked.”

I took the item from her hand and looked at the piece of plastic, about three inches long, three quarters of an inch wide, one quarter of an inch thick. Its original red color showed through the sloppy brown brush strokes. I fingered a small metal hook on one end that I hadn’t noticed when the piece was in place in the scene. I thought it might be for threading a key chain through it.

“What exactly is this used for?” I asked the resident specialist.

“It’s just, like, another drive for your computer. You can transfer files with it. You put stuff on it and then you can take it away and plug it into another computer and work on the files, or you can give it to someone for their computer as long as they have a USB port. Are you getting this, Grandma?”

“Barely.”

Maddie took the flash drive back from me and pulled on one end, removing a cover and revealing a rectangular metal protrusion. “Okay, see? You plug this end into any computer, just like you’d do with a keyboard or a mouse, and you can download whatever is on here, onto your computer.”

“So, if there’s information on that drive, I’d be able to get to it from my computer?” I knew I sounded dense, but this was no time for pretense.

She handed the drive back as if it were nothing important, just another mini bench top that had been badly painted. “Uh-huh. Me and Taylor do it all the time.”

Never mind my granddaughter’s cavalier misuse of the objective pronoun, I had more important things to consider. I noticed that the shade of brown used to paint the flash drive was the same as that on the baseboard of Oliver’s apartment as I remembered it, and I did have a good eye for color, if not for computer portals.

Had it been Oliver Halbert and not Susan who’d done the awful paint job? It seemed so. Oliver must have known he was in danger, or might be. It looked as though he’d tried to hide the flash drive containing incriminating information so it wouldn’t fall into the wrong hands. He’d painted it quickly with what he had handy, then set it on top of a wine cork to make a crude table.

His information might have stayed hidden forever if I hadn’t dropped the scene on the floor. And if I didn’t have a very smart granddaughter.

The flash drive, or something like it, must have been what Lynch and Crowley were looking for.