“If you could tell me the time of David’s death…?” I’d asked, to no avail.

Skip had brushed off the fact that David had been beaten, not poisoned. That his body hadn’t been left in the old locker hallway, as might be indicated by Rosie’s little amended scene. That there must have been many other people from David’s current life with a better motive to kill him than one who hadn’t seen him in thirty years. (How about Ben, that unhappy employee in the jumpsuit, for example? Or the son he hadn’t seen in years.) That Rosie was one of the last people I’d expect to have the will or the strength to beat someone to death, especially a large man like David Bridges.

I wondered where the locker scene had been found, where Rosie was now, and where she had been between ten thirty last night and seven o’clock this morning. I couldn’t be at all sure how long she’d been in bed when I woke up. She might have been fully dressed under the covers, having sailed in only a moment before.

I wished I knew where and when David was killed.

I wished all I had to think about was what fun it would be to see Henry Baker’s woodworking.

I barely had my car in Park when Maddie ran up to me. She and Taylor, trailing behind her, were soaking wet. I caught a glimpse of the backyard swimming pool and marveled at her hearing, or some other sense that told her I was approaching the house.

“I’m sorry I skipped out like that, sweetheart,” I told Maddie, bracing myself for a wet hug and a barrage of whining.

I got both.

“I know what you were doing, Grandma.”

I tickled her bare midriff, always an effective distraction, then addressed Taylor. “So, what have you two been up to?”

Henry came out of the garage as the girls gave alternating reports of their hour and a half of fun. A little television, a little computer work, and more swimming.

I allowed myself to enter the world of Henry’s workshop, physically and mentally, and forget the stress of the day. Thanks to Ken, I recognized a good-quality new band saw in the corner and an old table saw next to it.

Henry showed us a rocking chair he had just finished, a beautiful cherrywood creation with the longest, most graceful rockers I’d ever seen.

“It’s in the style of Sam Maloof,” he said, as if I might know who that was.

“I’m afraid I don’t know much about life-size furniture,” I said. “Ken knew every style of architecture backward and forward and he taught me a lot, but he wasn’t interested when it came to interiors. And, as for me, I’ve always stuck to dollhouse-size furniture.”

“I didn’t mean to name-drop. The Maloof style’s very well known in the circle of furniture designers. His work is in museums and in the White House.” Henry pointed to a photograph of Jimmy Carter in a woodworking shop. “He had a lot of fans.”

I stepped back to admire the chair again. “It’s like a piece of sculpture,” I said.

“‘Art at the service of utility’ is Maloof’s trademark. But you might relate better to these chairs.” He steered me to another corner of the workshop, where about a dozen tiny rocking chairs were lined up. All standard sizes for room boxes and dollhouses, all in different wood tones, all beautiful.

My breath caught. I bent over the worktable, my arms folded lest I break something.

Henry picked up a chair that was an exact replica of the life-size Maloof rocker. He handed it to me. “They’re not as delicate as they look.”

I ran my hand across the curved piece on the top back of the chair-as smooth a finish as I’d ever felt, fabric store visits included. “How did you do this?”

I meant the question as rhetorical, but Henry answered. “It’s a technique called ‘bent lamination.’ I cut thin, curved layers of wood using a band saw, and then laminate them back together.”

He showed me a form that he used to bind them. The assembly resembled a wood sandwich, with the forms as the bread and the rocker as the meat.

“Which one do you like best?”

I picked up a dark mahogany-stained half-inch-scale chair. “They’re all amazing, but I love the color of this one.”

He took the chair from my hand and wrapped it in a piece of newspaper. “Take it, please.”

I felt my face flush. “I couldn’t. Maybe I can buy it-”

He shook his head. “I’d be very pleased to see it in one of your dollhouses.”

Taylor, who’d been giving Maddie her own tour of the wonders in the garage, came up to us. “Grandpa’s always giving things away,” she said. “He says then he has an excuse to make more.”

I understood that theory very well, but I’d never given away anything as beautiful as the rocking chair being offered me now.

Henry’s grin was lopsided, in a charming way. “See? It’s nothing really. I hand them out all the time.”

“I don’t get things like this all the time. Thank you very much.”

I turned away. Someday I’d try to figure out why I found it so hard to accept gifts.

My gaze landed on a smaller workbench, filled with scraps and broken furniture. A chair missing its rungs, a table with only three legs, a lamp with a broken shade.

The collection took on the appearance of a trashed room. Or a trashed locker hallway. I remembered Rosie’s plight.

The mood was broken. The life-size world called.

Chapter 6

It seemed wasteful to drive a two-car convoy back to San Francisco, but like most Californians we’d built our lives around having independent transportation. Maddie and I made another stop at home and then took off for the Duns Scotus about four o’clock. We set a time to meet Henry and Taylor in the lobby so we could go into the banquet room together and be seated together.

When we got to our room, I took out the key I’d borrowed-stolen?-from Skip’s desk. I slid the key in the slot and waited for the green light. None. But in my experience with hotel key cards, they often didn’t work the first time. It had to do with the speed with which they were inserted, I thought. I tried again. No green light.

I pulled out the key card I’d received at registration and worked hard to pull off a switch without alerting Maddie. My own key card worked, of course. Skip’s key card must be for David’s room. Or for one of the other five hundred rooms in the hotel, I realized.

“I know we talked about doing something fun,” I told Maddie as we got resettled in our room. “But it’s already kind of late. The banquet is at six and I have a couple of things I have to do. Would you mind waiting until tomorrow for a real San Francisco experience?” Not one in a hotel where a murder victim recently worked.

She put her hands on her narrow hips. “Are you going to investigate?”

Maddie gave every syllable its due, with equal emphasis. “Investigate” and its many inflections had become one of her favorite words, once she understood how exciting it could be to help her Uncle Skip.

“I’m going to… uh… check things out in case we have our next crafts fair here.”

That was enough to provoke an outburst of giggles. “Here,” she said. “Instead of the Lincoln Point high school multipurpose room, like every year since I was born.” There was incredulity, but no question mark in her tone.

“Once, when you were about three, we had it in the city hall auditorium,” I said.

She blew out a raspberry-something I hadn’t seen from her since that time we had the crafts fair in the city hall.

Maddie let me go peacefully, saying she had a lot of computer work to do.

“Tell me about the project,” I said, though I was eager to go on my mission to the eleventh floor.

“Oh, it’s just gaming stuff. We’re learning how to make GUIs. That’s graphical user interfaces.” She said these words with great ease and familiarity. Was it that long ago that Maddie had a hard time pronouncing “Abraham Lincoln”?