It was already after nine o’clock, and a school night of sorts. I’d had a late night with Barry, and a long day, with stressful driving to and from San Francisco. I had to decide whether presenting the evidence we’d dug up was urgent. I thought not. The police already had Barry. Our little revelation was just icing on the cake, more a thrill for Maddie than something that would be a breakthrough in proving fraud, but nothing to clinch the murder case.

I felt another trick coming on, on Maddie, who, I knew, could be in the car and buckled up in a matter of seconds.

“That’s too bad, Skip. We’ll see you tomorrow,” I said. Maddie was hanging on my every word, so I made a sad face for show.

“You don’t want to give the little redhead a vote, do you?” Skip asked.

“Uh-huh, thanks. You have a good night, too.”

Maddie had returned to the last of her tuna casserole. She drained her glass of milk and heaved a big sigh for a little girl. “We have to wait, huh?” It pained me to have deliberately kept her away from her big moment. “It’s a good thing I have a lot of homework to keep me busy tonight,” she said.

In an unusual turn of events, Maddie told me she wanted to do some computer work early this evening. It seemed too much to hope that an interesting school project had balanced out the disappointment of a delayed meeting with the police.

“Are you late turning in an assignment?” I asked, though she’d never been one to cram at the last minute.

“No, I’m just excited about the programming and I’m almost finished.”

“Can you tell me about it?”

We cleared off the last of dinner dishes and loaded them into the dishwasher.

“It’s nothing. You’d be bored.”

“I might be able to learn.”

“Okay, I need to fix some things on my avatar.”

“Never mind.”

“I’ll show you later.”

“Let me know when you’re ready to say good night.”

Maddie was at the door to her room. “Grandma?”

“Yes?”

“Knock, knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“Digital.”

“You mean digital your mother you flunked math? Or digital your father you lost the game? Or-”

“Okay, okay.” She entered her room and closed the door.

Tomorrow I’d confess that we were telling that one before she was born. Except we were referring to our fingers.

I’d already started Maddie’s Christmas present and was glad to have a chance to work on it without prying eyes. My idea was to replicate her father’s old bedroom, which was now essentially Maddie’s room.

Maddie’s things had been slowly crowding out Richard’s, but she seemed reluctant to do this and often said she missed his baseball mitt, now stored in Richard’s attic, or some other object that had been prominent in the room. I had enough photographs (and a good memory) of Richard’s room the way he left it, and I thought it would be a nice surprise to give Maddie a miniature version. Then she’d be free to decorate the life-size room any way she wanted.

One of the hardest items to reproduce in miniature was Richard’s baseball bedding. The ball and bat patterns on novelty fabric were usually large, with each graphic several inches in width or length-not suitable for a bed that was itself only six inches long.

Thanks to the younger members in my crafters group, who kept up with modern technology, I now had a solution to the problem. I was able to purchase a package of eight-and-a-half-by-eleven sheets that were a combination of plastic on one side and fabric on the other and would go through my printer. I’d simply have to scan a photo of Richard’s comforter, size it as I wished, print it on the sheet, and remove the plastic backing. Voila, I’d have the exact fabric I wanted.

If I couldn’t do it by myself (these things were never as easy as they sounded), I knew I could call on Karen or Susan in the group, so I wouldn’t have to invoke Maddie’s help.

Tonight’s project, phase one, was to sift through photo albums to find the right view of the comforter. While I was at it, I’d select a photograph of Maddie and me, as she’d requested.

I sat in the cool atrium and turned page after page of history, starting with the books dedicated to Richard’s preteen years. I found a few good candidates for photos to use, but I didn’t stop. I kept going through later albums, caught up in the reverie until I’d gone through Madison Porter’s birth announcement, infant years, and early birthday parties.

When she came out in her soccer pajamas and her eleven-year-old body, I was startled into the present.

She may have wondered why I hugged her tighter and longer than usual.

“I’m ready to sleep,” she said.

“I’ll be right in.”

After I take a minute to ponder the passing of the years.

Maddie was in bed, ready for a brief recap of our favorite moments of the day and a good-night kiss. I brought her a snapshot I’d found from Richard’s birthday party in the spring. Maddie and I were sharing a happy moment eating multilayer cake.

She looked closely at the photo. “This is perfect. Thanks, Grandma.”

“I’ll take it back for now, then, and put it in a frame.”

“It’s okay. It’s better like this,” she said, standing it against the base of her lamp.

I noticed she’d already turned her computer off.

“I thought you were going to show me your atavar.” She laughed. “It’s avatar, Grandma. I forgot and shut down. And I’m ready to sleep, okay?”

“Of course.”

“There were too many favorite things, today, anyway, Grandma,” she said. “I could never pick. There was class and Ghirardelli and talking to Marina and tuna casserole and finding the date mix-up and…”

She trailed off, exhausted from the long list of wonderful things that had happened to her today.

I hoped life would always be that way for her.

Chapter 22

I started my work on the model of Richard’s bedroom by cheating. I’d bought a tiny baseball glove from an online hobbies and miniatures supply store. Linda would be so ashamed of me. She, and many of the other crafters I knew, would have been manipulating pairs of tweezers, stitching tiny pieces of leather together, to make the glove. If I took that approach to my hobby, I’d get one thing done a month, if that. I was much too impatient.

At a miniature show in San Jose last fall, I’d met a woman who was displaying a four-inch-by-six-inch quilt made from 576 pieces. Each piece seemed no bigger than what fell from my nail clippers.

For me the joy of miniatures was in the originality and personalization of the scenes I made, not in the craft of making pieces more easily bought, like mahogany four-poster beds, or stuffed easy chairs with hand-stitched upholstery. Or like the rocking chairs Henry Baker turned out, I mused.

In my own defense, I did add two or three handmade pieces to each room box, and I had a few from-scratch specialties that I prided myself on.

One item I loved to make was the tiny pair of eyeglasses I put into my scenes. I made these with needle-nose pliers and fine-gauge wire of different colors. Any clear plastic, cut to size, served as a lens. When I was really ambitious, I added tiny beads to the rims and earpieces, for a Hollywood look. For sunglasses I dipped into my boxes of envelopes with photographs and negatives from the days before digital cameras. Small pieces cut from the edges of negatives made a convincing sunglass lens. I doubted the memory stick Maddie talked about, that was in her camera, would prove as useful in twenty years.

By ten thirty, I was ready to turn in. While working on a tiny trophy-cut out from foam board and painted bronze-for Richard’s bedroom, I’d thought over the facts of the David Bridges murder case. I’d been doing well, putting it in the back of my mind, until I took out a new container of tacky glue, and an image of David’s lips came to me. Once Maddie and I talked to Skip tomorrow about our interview with Marina, and our new evidence of fraud, I was finished. The only curious loose end was why Larry had stolen the bank record from my tote. And, of course who had killed David.