“Linda, did you tell Rosie about how David Bridges’s lips were… how his lips were when they found him?”

“Glued together? Nuh-uh, I thought it was too gross.”

I knew that the police hadn’t released that detail. Did Rosie know because she did it, or was it one huge coincidence that the killer had used glue, just as Rosie imagined she would thirty years ago. Rosie had told her story with such guilelessness, I couldn’t believe she knew the implications.

“Thanks, Linda,” I said, though I didn’t feel grateful.

My attention switched to Rosie’s father. A man who hadn’t been in my consciousness for many years now loomed at the front of my mind. He took shape as a former refrigeration specialist who now worked for Callahan and Savage, who stole a bank record from me, and who was angry enough to want to kill David Bridges thirty years ago. Had it all finally come together for him? It was altogether possible that Larry Esterman knew of his daughter’s fantasy and carried it out for her. Except that the deed pointed to Rosie and he wouldn’t have wanted that.

Every hour today seemed to have created more problems and questions for me. I’d heard many stories, but I was no closer to the truth than I was at noon on Saturday when I heard of David’s murder.

I hung up and called Maddie’s cell. She loved getting calls on it directly, although lately she told me she much preferred text messages. I had no trouble manipulating two sets of tweezers at the same time, to place a delicate bead on a piece of fabric, but I didn’t think my fingers could work the tiny buttons on the phone pad to send a TM.

“Hi, Grandma. I’m helping Mrs. Reed make some ferns like the ones in the Duns Scotus hotel lobby. Remember that bridge and how those trees made it look like you were in a jungle?”

Yes, and how the bushes and rocks could hide a mugger and purse thief. I hoped one day I could look at a garden like that and not think of crime. “I remember, sweetheart.”

“Look at this,” Maddie said, showing me, in person, a miniature version of a large leaf, like the kind you’d see in a real jungle, or in a hotel lobby atrium. “Guess what it’s really made of, Grandma.”

Linda stood behind her, her look daring me to spoil my granddaughter’s fun.

I took the leaf from her and scanned it. “I have no idea.”

“It’s sticky paper!” Maddie was delighted to have fooled me. Or she thought she’d fooled me. (She’d left telltale scraps of paper backing on the table behind her.) “See how the sides of the leaf stick to each other, and all you have to do is shape it with scissors and snip off little pieces to look like separate leaves.”

“Nice work. I’m glad you two had a good time.”

“Uh-huh. We had two kinds of Popsicles,” Maddie announced.

“The fruit-flavored ones,” Linda added, as if to gain health points.

I knew that Linda was addicted to sugary sweet Popsicles, the kind with a long list of artificial ingredients on the box. I liked to believe Sadie’s homemade ice cream was better for Maddie, but if sugar kept her from nagging me about where I’d been, it was okay with me.

After Linda and I made a plan to “talk later,” Maddie and I headed home. I waited but never got a question from Maddie about what I’d done during my several hours away this afternoon. Had she learned reverse psychology? Did she think that if she didn’t ask me, I’d voluntarily give her an update on the David Bridges case? I wouldn’t fall into that trap.

“I’m sorry I didn’t pick you up today,” I said, turning right on Gettysburg Boulevard toward home.

“No problem.”

No problem? No leg-kicking? No bargaining to tag along wherever I was going next? Maddie knew about David’s death from the announcement at the groundbreaking ceremony at the high school and she knew of my Internet search for Callahan and Savage. She must have known I’d gone to Skip’s office a couple of times since then, and therefore that there was an investigation going on. Where was the whining? Where were the incessant pleas to help?

“You were okay with Mrs. Reed?”

“I told you, we made ferns and ate Popsicles.”

“A perfect day.”

Why wasn’t I happier that Maddie had enjoyed herself, out of harm’s way, while I continued to dig around, entertaining strange men in my car near Joshua Speed Woods?

I had to admit I missed Nancy Drew.

Chapter 18

Maddie hadn’t always loved dollhouses and miniatures. It had taken the Bronx apartment dollhouse to win her over. I’d abandoned the project after Ken died and Maddie started working with me to help me get back to it. It was completely furnished now but there was always something to add, like the cracker crumbs we’d whipped up last night.

As a hobby, miniatures had a lot going for it. Unlike say, golf or skiing, you didn’t need to leave home to do it. And you could make progress on a project in as little as ten minutes. Often while heating dinner in the microwave, I’d pop over to one of my crafts areas and apply a quick coat of varnish to a tiny table or bookcase, or I’d test a gluing job I’d done in the morning.

Tonight we worked for a while on our separate Alasita projects, Maddie on her soda fountain, I on my Christmas scene. Neither was very inspired, I felt, but maybe our real life was so exciting that we needed a stable, boring miniature life.

Maddie added two new flavors to her ice cream parlor tonight, Tasty Taylor and Dusty Doug.

“The dust stands for malt powder, the way Sadie uses it on her sundaes,” she informed me-needlessly, because Sadie’s dusty road sundae was my favorite after her chocolate malt shakes.

I had some embroidery to finish up on the Christmas stockings I’d bought in Benicia last week, but the whole scene still left me cold. I couldn’t remember being so dissatisfied with a project. Certainly not the replica I’d made of Lincoln’s Springfield, Illinois, home. Not the street of shops I’d put together, that included a flower stand, a bookstore, and a haberdashery. I hoped something would occur to me before the end of the week when our projects needed to be finished.

“I’d like to make a robe for the Bronx bathroom,” Maddie said.

“We can look through our scraps,” I said.

It made my heart swell that we could talk like this, each knowing what the other meant. I knew that Maddie didn’t mean a life-size robe or the New York borough that was three thousand miles away, and she knew that I was referring to pieces of fabric to put together for a tiny article of clothing.

Terry cloth was hard to work with; the nap was so large and spread out on most selections that the robe or towel wouldn’t be able to drape well over a tiny tub or rod. We had several choices, such as dipping the fabric in a glue and water mixture to shape it, or using a thinner fabric with a tighter weave that looked like terry.

We chose the former. I made the glue bath while Maddie rummaged through the box of fabric scraps and found the shade of blue she had in mind.

I heard her groan as she cut the material. “It’s picking up everything,” she said, showing me what would end up as a sleeve, with tiny beads clinging to it. She had a hard time shaking them off as they clung to the almost magnetic fabric. “It’s just like my winter terry robe at home. It’s as sticky as tape sometimes.”

The revelation flashed in my mind like the only neon sign in Lincoln Point, the one in the window of Jeff’s Video Arcade on Springfield Boulevard. Terry cloth picks up things-pieces of thread, hair, lint, and now beads. Why not a tiny oval mirror?

I pictured the hallway on the eleventh floor of the Duns Scotus Hotel. The scene was vivid, playing out before me: Cheryl in her robe, leaving David’s room to get ice. Cheryl and Rosie arguing, then wrestling with the locker room box. One of the tiny mirrors, not glued on properly (that was the hardest to imagine) coming off in the struggle and sticking to Cheryl’s robe. The mirror finally falling from the robe in the entryway to David’s suite.