Monster in Miniature (11 page)

“Not tonight, sweetheart,” I said, leading her back to bed.

Maddie crawled under the covers, which I then lifted over her shoulders, tucking her favorite afghan under her chin. She still used the baseball afghan I’d made for her father in my extreme knitting phase. More than thirty years old, and washed at least once a week when Richard used it, the red, white, and blue strands were showing signs of wear. I wondered when my granddaughter would be ready for a more mature design. It had been a while since I’d knitted or crocheted anything larger than three inches, so I might have lost patience for crafting life-size bedcovers.

Maddie’s final words of the day: “I told you, Grandma. I told you Mr. Halbert was a jailbird.”

She was asleep before I could congratulate her as well as work on synonyms with her.

Eleven o’clock seemed too late to call Susan, though last
night she hadn’t considered it too late to just show up on my doorstep.

My three-hour afternoon nap killed any chance I had of getting in synch with a normal night’s sleep. I wondered about going to Oliver Halbert’s apartment, under the cover of darkness, but I still wasn’t comfortable leaving Maddie alone in the house, especially at night.

One thing I could do in my own home was return to the project lying in wait in my garage. Maddie’s room was separated from the garage by the fourth bedroom plus the entryway, so I didn’t have the excuse that noise would wake her. Besides, Maddie was like her father in that very little could wake her from a sound sleep.

I put on a warmer sweater and sturdier shoes, ready to do battle with boxes. As I walked through my kitchen to get to the garage door, I had the thought of baking more ginger cookies instead of opening cartons. My snack supply was running low. What if Skip or someone else dropped by and my cupboard was bare?

It took only one full minute for me to come to my senses and enter the garage. Opening a box labeled
Bronx
, in bright red marker, seemed a safe enough venture. The box must have been on the shelf with the cartons from work and Henry took it down by mistake. I placed it on my workbench, pulled up a stool, and went to work on the sealing tape.

To my surprise, the contents of the box pertained not to our life-size apartment on the Grand Concourse in New York City, but to the wonderful dollhouse replica Ken built just before he became ill. Maddie and I were still working on furnishing the model. I smiled as I thought how the dollhouse version wouldn’t have fit anywhere in the pocket-size (only six hundred and fifty square feet) apartment Ken and I lived in when we were first married.

Ken had piled all the plans for the miniature apartment, plus his notes and calculations, and scraps of extra material into the box when he’d finished. I’d been busy with a full teaching load at the time, as well as volunteer tutoring and, of course, my miniatures hobby, and hadn’t paid a lot of attention to the day-to-day progress as Ken built the apartment replica. I’d been waiting for my turn—the thrill of decorating the interior. Now I realized what pains my husband had taken to get the details correct.

He’d collected a folio of photos of the real rooms as a reminder of the layout and structural specifications. The photos were candids he’d pulled from various albums and frames.

The Bronx apartment had been Richard’s first home. I looked at a photograph of him as a toddler, his high chair wedged in a corner, his smiling, chubby face with probably more milk on it than he’d drunk. It was hard not to choke up.

Images flooded my mind—of my amazing granddaughter sleeping nearby, of my wonderful daughter-in-law, Mary Lou, of Beverly and Skip, and I felt a surge of gratitude for the family who were around me now, all stemming from Ken in one way or another.

I sniffed back any sad thoughts and reminded myself that I should be cheered by the lack of anything untoward in my first box of the night.

I pulled another box forward, this one with
Drawer, Bottom Right
in bold type on a label. I remembered when Ken’s secretary, Esther, an older woman we were both fond of, called to tell me the boxes were ready and that she and Artie would be bringing them by the house. At the time, I was grateful that she’d labeled the boxes so carefully because that’s what Ken would have liked. None of us could have known that I’d leave them alone while the tape dried and start to peel off, that it would take a crisis of giant proportions to get me to pay attention to the boxes again.

The contents of this box were predictable—bank records for the office account, calendars, memos to clients. I riffled through enough of the memos to be able to read the letterhead and rule out any correspondence with Patrick Lynch.

So far, so good.

At the bottom of the box was a large bulky envelope, marked
Personal
. I emptied the contents on my worktable and found myself facing an outfit for a child, from three to six months old, according to the brand’s label on the pink-and-white onesie. I unfolded a white bib with pink trim, and a tiny hat and jacket, both in the same pattern as the onesie.

The lovely layette must have been put into the box in error. I imagined Esther mistakenly putting clothing that belonged to the baby of one of her friends or relatives in with Ken’s records. The outfit seemed slightly worn, so it wasn’t meant to be a gift. It had been in the envelope for a long time, as attested to by places where the creases had permanently faded the fabric. I wondered if Esther had ever missed the set.

I shook out the large manila envelope to be sure I’d seen everything. Out came a small white envelope containing photographs. I took out the three photos and peered at a Polaroid shot of a young Ken Porter holding a baby. I looked more closely. In the background was a sprawling institution of some kind. It was an east-coast kind of facility with a red brick façade and large maple trees lining a long driveway and a lush green lawn. A school or hospital, I guessed, but none I recognized.

The next photo was taken on the same property, it seemed, but close up to Ken and the little girl (judging from the plethora of pink on the child). From the child’s size and the way Ken was holding it, I guessed it was not a newborn, but probably a few months old. Probably from three to six months, as the clothing label said.

Until he fell under the spell of leukemia, Ken had aged well. He’d never changed his hairstyle or gained or lost a noticeable amount of weight, so he’d looked the same (at least to me) over the course of decades. So, how old was he in these photos? It was hard to tell. I studied his clothing—casual pants and a windbreaker. Like his hair and his weight, his wardrobe was also a constant. He hadn’t been one to follow the styles of the day. I tried to remember when Polaroid cameras were popular. It had been years since I’d seen one, but I assumed they were still available.

For now, without benefit of any other information, I had to say that in these photos, Ken was either a little younger or about the same age as when I met him.

The last picture was mostly an extreme close-up of the little girl, looking absently toward the camera; only Ken’s arms and chest were showing.

I shuffled back through the three photographs. Ken had a serious expression on his face, neither happy nor displeased, but rather the straight-lipped expression he got when he was accepting something he wasn’t quite thrilled about. Maybe he wasn’t in the mood for a photo shoot that day. Maybe the baby was cranky, whoever she was.

My heart skipped. I didn’t recognize the setting, but more to the point, I didn’t recognize the baby, either.

How personal was this child?

The nagging thought that Ken might be the subject of an investigation by the late Lincoln Point city inspector didn’t help. What else was there that I didn’t know about my husband of more than thirty years?

I needed to think rationally. Wouldn’t Ken have had friends with babies? Colleagues with children? His partner in the architectural firm was much older; the child could have been Artie’s granddaughter. Indeed, the little girl in the photograph could have been anyone. His college room-mate’s young niece. A distant cousin twice removed.

Although the harmless possibilities were endless, the fact remained that photographs of this particular baby had been worth a special place among Ken’s belongings, packed carefully among articles of clothing that it seemed would fit her, in an envelope marked
Personal
.

I had to take one more look at the clothing and the photographs and then I’d move on. I gathered the clothing on my lap and looked at it more closely. Besides the brand label, which I didn’t recognize, I saw a number on each piece. A black laundry mark: four nine five. Did the child, the clothing, and the institution go together? Was I looking at an orphanage? Perhaps Ken donated money to them at one time and this was a publicity photo. Maybe it wasn’t personal at all.

Did I really want to know?

As light as the knocking was, it startled me. The clothing slipped off my lap. I bent to retrieve it and knocked over the pile of office correspondence and the Polaroids.

Someone was beckoning from the other side of the garage door. I moved toward it, gathering the fallen objects as I went.

“Aunt Gerry?” Skip’s voice. “It’s me. Are you okay in there?” More tapping. “The garage light is on. I figure you’re working overtime on one of your architectural projects.”

I smiled in spite of the discomfort I was feeling. The image of the large facility behind Ken and a strange child was burned in my brain.

Skip couldn’t have known how right he was.

 

 

I thought of standing perfectly still, until Skip went
away, or slipping back into my house and opening the front door to him. But it was hopeless pretending I hadn’t been rummaging around in my garage. I acknowledged Skip’s knocking, directed him to the side door of the house, and let him in through the narrow passage between my house and the next.

“What’s up out here?” he asked, entering the garage. “It’s freezing. Aren’t you cold?” He stamped his feet, presumably to warm them.

Ordinarily, I’d remind my California-native nephew of how distorted his ideas of “cold” and “winter” were. “If you’d ever lived in the Bronx,” I’d tell him, “you’d know what real cold weather was like.”

But tonight I didn’t feel like reliving those days in any form.

I pulled my sweater closer. “As a matter of fact, I am cold,” I said. “Let’s go inside.”

He looked at the papers I’d been going through, now spread over the concrete floor. I followed his gaze across the littered area, to the pages on the floor. In the short time I had before answering his knock, I’d dumped the pink clothes and the photos back into the box and put another box on top of it.

“What’s all this?” he asked, his arms embracing the clutter.

“I’m just cleaning out some stuff.”

He reached down to retrieve the pages on the floor. “Let me help you with these,” Skip said.

“No need.” I rushed to stop him, bumping into him. “Really, there’s so much junk out here. It’s about time I got rid of some of it. I need more storage space for my crafts. You know how much room I need when I’m building a dollhouse. I had a nap this afternoon so I’m not sleepy at all, and I thought I might as well do something useful.”

While I rambled, Skip’s gaze flitted from one box to another, some on the workbench, some on the dusty floor. I was acutely aware of the labels:
Consulting Jobs, Middle Desk Drawer, Files Credenza #1, Files Credenza #2
, and so on.

“This is Uncle Ken’s stuff, isn’t it?”

“As I said, I’m cleaning up.”

“The stuff’s been here for years.” He pointed to the empty shelves above us. “I put it up there myself. There a reason you’re choosing to go through it right now?”