My look must have been pitiful. Skip came over to me and put his arms around me.
For the first time in our lives, my nephew provided me a shoulder to cry on, instead of the other way around.
My cupboard wasn’t bare, after all, and Skip availed
himself of an assortment of snack food—slices of brie, crackers, an orange, and a handful of small ginger cookies—while I pulled myself together in the bathroom.
A few minutes later, we sat in the living room, the pale rug seeming to match my mood and, I believed, my complexion.
“I’m so sorry I did this to you, Aunt Gerry. It’s my fault. I should never have told you about Oliver Halbert’s stupid list.” He sounded a lot like Maddie, calling things or events stupid when it was really people who were to blame.
“What if I’d heard about it another way, Skip? Imagine how much worse it would have been for me.” What if I’d found out by emptying a box in the garage? I wanted to ask, but I had no intention of telling Skip the second cause of my distress, that I’d already discovered something unsettling in an innocently marked box.
He bit into the orange, then peeled away a section of its skin. The tangy aroma filled the air and made me thirsty. I made a motion to get up.
“What do you need?” he asked, holding his hand up.
“Just some water.” Skip played waiter and brought me a bottle of cold, sparkling mineral water. He tried to foist a snack on me, but I didn’t dare tax my digestive system. “How’s June?” I asked, switching the topic to Skip’s Chicago-born almost-fiancée (his mother and I could only hope).
“I had a postcard from her of the Willis Tower. She wrote something like, ‘Why don’t you and Gerry build this in miniature?’ It’s not a bad idea, is it?”
“It’s a great idea,” I said, though I hardly meant it. My mental catalog of dollhouse styles did not include a sky-scraper.
“If anyone could do it, it would be you and your group. Anyway, I talked to June today. She’s enjoying her new baby niece,” Skip said. He popped an orange section into his mouth.
“I’ll bet she sent photos through her camera. Do you have them with you?”
“Yeah, as a matter of fact, she did send a couple of pictures.” Skip gave me a serious look. “Do you really want to see photos of a baby you don’t know?”
For the second time this evening, Skip had inadvertently hit the nail on its tiny head.
“No, not really,” I said.
We settled into a short silence while Skip munched and I tried to relax enough to stop the pain in my jaw.
“I have some news on Oliver Halbert,” he said, finally.
“I’m listening.”
“He’s not as clean as we thought.”
“I already know that. He has a DUI.”
“I suppose the little princess dug it up.”
I nodded. “Which makes me wonder why whoever hired him for city inspector in Lincoln Point couldn’t have dug it up.”
“That’s another story. It looks like he, uh, bribed his way into the job.”
“Unbelievable.”
“You know, some people think they’re immune—”
“I remember the theory, Skip, but this seems like an extreme example.”
“Agreed.”
“Does this information give you more incentive to investigate his death as a homicide?”
The last slice of orange and the first sample of brie-on-cracker went into Skip’s mouth, one after the other. “Somebody held up the paperwork on the ME’s suicide filing, and now all this new information makes it suspect anyway. So, yeah, we’re back to square one, and will look into the death as a possible homicide.”
“It seemed very quick to me, anyway—the suicide r uling.”
Skip looked around, as if for prying eyes or ears. “It did to me, too, so I asked around and dropped some hints. And, uh, that may have had something to do with the paperwork holdup I mentioned.”
“You stopped the suicide filing?”
“Maybe.”
It seemed too good to have hoped for, that Skip had actually investigated Oliver’s death, whether because of my earlier insistence or not. My nephew had done what I hadn’t had the energy to do and essentially kept my promise to Susan. I smiled at the thought—the cop was doing the investigating in this case, instead of his retired aunt who made miniature scenes. What a concept.
I allowed myself a flicker of cheer that I was now off the hook with Susan. I doubted she’d be too happy about the side effects of bringing up his sullied past, but not everything in this world was as rosy as we’d like it to be. A fact that was becoming entirely too clear to me and seemed to apply even to things I thought were rosy in my own life.
I remembered Susan’s insistence that Oliver didn’t own a gun and, in fact, hated them. “Whose gun was it, by the way?” I asked, not long after I considered myself off the hook. I had to admit that I was looking for ways to stay off a more delicate subject.
Skip shook his head. “Unmarked. Oliver never had a registered gun. It was a small factor in the decision to look further.” He paused. “Can we go back to Uncle Ken for a minute?” Skip asked.
“I don’t know.”
Buzzz.
I jumped, then took a long breath and settled down. The doorbell ring was a single, short burst, leading me to the good guess that it was Beverly, who knew Maddie would be sleeping nearby and wouldn’t want to disturb her.
Skip let his mother in. “Join the party,” he said. Decidedly not the term I would have chosen.
Beverly’s chatter, usually most welcome, started immediately. “I just dropped Nick off at the airport, and I drove by on the off chance that you were up, and what do you know, the lights were on, and you’re up. Plus, even though I’m now without my boyfriend—what do I call him, anyway? The retired cop—I can still have the companionship of my son, the cop, besides that of my best friend.” By now she had reached the living room and embraced me. “I think I told you Nick was going to Seattle for a family thing. I didn’t go because I needed some quality time with my own family.”
Beverly finished her entrance in the kitchen where she took a bottled water from the fridge. It was true that we hadn’t spent as much time together as usual this fall since she and Nick had taken a couple of weeklong vacations to visit Nick’s far-flung relatives, but on my better days I felt nothing but delight that she and Nick had found each other.
Tonight was the first time since I’d met Beverly, when she was a teenager getting ready for college, that I felt awkward around her. I dreaded telling her (or not) about Ken. The two had doted on each other all their lives. Beverly was born with a heart defect, causing her big brother to be even more solicitous of her. Ken’s prestige in his profession was a source of great pride for his sister; his death was a great loss to her. His good name was as important to her as it was to me.
The same was true for the other brother-sister pair who came to mind. Oliver Halbert and Susan Giles. I wondered if Susan had been told the status of her brother’s case—and that of his good name.
I tuned in to my present-day living room in time to hear Beverly’s question to Skip.
“Are you here on business?” she asked him.
He pointed to his plate, now a collection of cracker and cookie crumbs mixed with the peels from his orange and traces of its juice. “I came to eat.”
For a dizzy moment, I saw the curvy orange peels as the face of a pumpkin, the scattered seeds located where eyes should be, the clear juice its blood. I shook my head and shuddered.
To my dismay, out of the corner of my eye, I saw that Beverly had caught the moment.
“Okay,” she said, opening her palms in surrender. She heaved a loud sigh. “Am I missing something here? I know I didn’t talk to you much this week, but how much could have happened in a couple of days?”
I knew Beverly was also aware that I’d never answered her question at dinner: was something wrong? I wasn’t sure when I’d be able to respond, unless it was when I could say with certainty, “No, everything’s fine.”
That moment wasn’t now, for sure.
Skip stood up, pushed his sleeve back, and tapped his watch. “This is no time for a party, I guess. I’m out of here. Come on, Mom. I’ll escort you to your car and even follow you home with lights and siren.”
Beverly looked at me. “Gerry?”
“Skip’s right. It’s time for bed,” I said. I yawned and hoped it looked real.
With a three-way standoff, there was nothing to do but say good night.
I’d been in bed only a few minutes when my phone rang.
I picked it up quickly, since there would be an extension ringing also in Maddie’s room.
“I’ve been trying to reach you all day, Gerry.” Susan’s normal voice was back, with its pleasant southern lilt. I appreciated it less at this hour. “Did you hear the news about Oliver? I’m so relieved.”
It was a sad commentary on recent affairs—learning that Oliver had been murdered was what it had taken to give Susan some relief. I was sure her satisfaction had to do with her desire for justice for her brother. It also said a lot to me about how we viewed our loved ones and how we wanted others to view them. That Oliver was a victim was more acceptable to his sister than thinking he’d given up on life—on her.
“I’m glad the police came through for you, Susan.”
“Me, too. And I’m sure you had something to do with it.”
“Not really.”
“I just wanted to be sure you know that I still want you on the case,” she said, not acknowledging my confession.
Wasn’t the term “on the case” reserved for sworn officers of the law? Susan and Maddie needed a lesson or two in the way the criminal justice system worked. Detective Skip Gowen would be happy to enlighten them.
“I don’t think it’s either necessary or wise for me to do anything about the investigation,” I said, though I realized my half-asleep monotone couldn’t be too convincing.
I had no intention of bringing up her brother’s less noble pursuits, recently come to my attention, and was surprised when Susan introduced the subject herself.
“Is it because of what they’re saying? My brother was not a criminal, Gerry.”
Was Susan referring to Oliver’s DUI, the insurance fraud charges against him that were dismissed, or the way he’d gained his city inspector job?
“Some of it seems to go back a long way, Susan.”
“I know. I probably should have told you, but I figured if I did, you wouldn’t bother with his case.”
“It’s hard to work without all the facts,” I said. Susan didn’t have to know that I hadn’t spent as much as five minutes with the facts (and a key that would open doors) that I did have.
Before she let me try to sleep, Susan extracted a promise that I would at least go to Oliver’s apartment, reclaim the room box, and look about, as she put it.
I turned over and wondered how long I’d be “looking about” at the clock on my nightstand.
Lying in bed early Sunday morning, I tried to come up
with a plan to make the day constructive in some way.
I heard Maddie shuffling around in the kitchen. I pictured her in her mottled brown T. rex slippers with their large open-jawed heads, long tails, and short arms. They barely fit her anymore unless she crushed the back with the heels of her adult-size feet, but she’d rescued them from the trash more than once when Mary Lou tried to get rid of them. To keep them safe, she left them at my house, where she knew her grandmother would never do anything to make her unhappy.
Except for today, when I had to dispose of her in some way so that I could do my clandestine police work. I didn’t feel I could impose on Henry two days in a row. Besides, Taylor had mentioned going to a birthday party today for someone in her class. Maddie, whose school life was ten miles away, not surprisingly hadn’t been invited. I thought of calling my crafter friend, Linda Reed, but I knew Maddie would be bored since Linda was very fussy about who touched her miniature projects.
“Dollhouses are not for kids,” she’d famously said at one of our meetings.
Rrring. Rrring.
I’d lost track of the number of times a phone call had come to my rescue this week. Here was one more to add to the total.
“I have an idea,” Beverly said. I marveled at her generosity, that she didn’t hold a grudge after last night’s near snub. “I think what we all need is a day of fun. We could go to a museum or a dollhouse store.”
Beverly wasn’t that much into miniatures, notwithstanding the fact that she always oohed and aahed at the right times when Maddie and I showed her the fruits of our labor. I was touched that she was bending over backward to get things back to normal.
“Well—”
“Before you say no, let me remind you about the Rachel Whiteread show in San Francisco. Wouldn’t that be great to see? Huh?”
My sister-in-law and best friend knew my weak spot, all right. I’d been talking about Whiteread, the British artist, ever since I’d read about her exhibit, Place, consisting of nearly two hundred handmade dollhouses arranged to replicate a hillside village. I’d heard from people who’d seen it, however, not to expect a sweet country scene. The dollhouses were empty and run down, lit with bare bulbs in some cases, red lamps in others, leaving the viewer with the experience of having visited a haunted, abandoned village.
It sounded perfect for my current mood.
Too bad I hadn’t thought of doing something like that for Halloween, instead of building just one ordinary haunted house.
“I definitely want to see the exhibit before it goes on the road again, Beverly. But you know what would work better for me today?”
“What?” she asked, followed by a pause too short for me to answer. Then, “Say no more. What time shall I pick up the little princess?”
Clearly Beverly was open to doing anything for the sake of family unity. No wonder I loved her. No wonder it was tearing me up to keep things from her.