This Labor Day brought the usual gathering to my home for a traditional barbecue, with the welcome additions of Nick, Henry, and Taylor. Richard and Mary Lou would be driving home from Tahoe and stop here first. The downside was that they’d take Maddie home to Palo Alto at the end of the day.

The highlight of the afternoon was to be the unveiling of Maddie’s technology camp project.

Maddie was beside herself with excitement, spending a great deal of energy for days before, polishing her work and preparing her presentation. She wanted us to gather around the computer in her room to watch the game she’d designed.

At ten in the morning, Maddie made an announcement to me.

“I’m going to clean my room,” she said.

I liked the game already.

“Can I help? I could vacuum for you,” I offered.

She shook her head. “I’m afraid you’ll find my DVD and play the game without me.”

“You have no respect,” I said, going for the tickle area.

Maddie came out several times in the next hour, with requests I’d never heard cross her lips: “Do you have any dust cloths?” “Can I serve refreshments in my room?” “Do you have a bigger sponge?” and, finally, “I need a big trash bag, Grandma.”

“Do I get a preview of the game?” I asked. “Everyone will be here pretty soon.”

“No previews. I want you to be surprised, too.” Frankly, I thought I’d had enough surprises lately.

With everyone milling around my house, the most recent crime scene in town, there was bound to be some talk of Cheryl, who was awaiting trial for the murder of David Bridges.

Linda had been following every word in the press, with its daily revelations about the marriage of society couple, Walter and Cheryl Mellace, and the business dealings of Mellace Construction. She summed it up for us. “Cheryl expected a moment of romantic exhilaration in Joshua Speed Woods, where she would give herself to David again after all those years.” She released her hands from their position in front of her bosom and opened her arms. “But David couldn’t give up the sweet deal he had going with Walter, who had company on the side himself. If only Cheryl hadn’t wanted more than a marriage held together by their status in the community and their children! Poor David”-now Linda raised her hands over her head, as if they held a trophy-“that was the end of David. It’s the stuff of Hollywood.”

I thought I heard a few groans and an “Amen.”

After lunch, we all crammed into Maddie’s bedroom, as clean and sweet smelling as it was when I’d prepared it for her a month ago, but hadn’t been since. I couldn’t figure out where she’d put all her worldly goods. Her desk had only the computer on it; her two night tables held pitchers of Linda’s ice tea and lemonade mix and plates of cookies I recognized as Beverly’s chocolate chip.

Maddie dimmed the lights and a hush fell over us. She clicked on an icon on the desktop of her computer.

We heard the music first. The theme from The Pink Panther. Soon, a title sequence appeared on the screen, in rainbow colors. A Good Team, it read, while small graphical images floated by. I saw a piece of rope, a silver candle-stick, a small revolver, a knife, a wrench, and a section of lead pipe.

“I get it,” Linda said. “The weapons from Clue.”

“Shhh” came from many sources in the room, especially Richard and Mary Lou.

Next up was a room that looked familiar. My atrium? Not a photograph but a pieced-together room, almost like a comic book, but more realistic, with all the elements of my atrium-planter beds, ferns, blooming plants. Was that even the same chair-and-table set? It certainly was the identical floor plan of walls, glass doors, and a patchwork slate floor.

On the screen, a man entered from one of the patio doors. A whoop erupted when we saw that the head of the man was Skip’s, from a photograph. The head and body were only loosely connected, but there was a large, unmistakable LPPD detective shield in the center of the man’s chest, and a magnifying glass in his cartoonlike hand.

The rest was no surprise.

Out I came from the left patio doors, and out came Maddie from the right, both also holding magnifying glasses.

The three of us walked around the patio, inspecting leaves, grass, and furniture, bending now and then to get a closer look. After a while, the Maddie character found a piece of paper in the bushes and held it up. The screen went blank except for the image of a treasure map, followed by another dark screen with the word Aha! How fitting, I thought, an updated version of silent movie placards.

After another minute or so of action in the atrium, with more “evidence” being turned up, we heard the voice of the real Maddie coming from the Maddie on the screen. I could see that I needed a whole new vocabulary if I was to participate fully in the twenty-first century.

“I used an object-oriented program to create my video game,” the screen Maddie said. “Choosing predefined motions, I was able to model the actions of avatars of three detectives-a man, a woman, and a teenager.”

“A teenager?” Mary Lou interrupted.

“It’s fiction,” Maddie, the preteen, said.

“What’s with the detective work? Is there something going on that I should know about?” Richard asked.

“Shhh,” Skip said, but the narration was over anyway.

The presentation ended with a bow from all of the players, and a roll of credits: written and produced by Madison Porter. The Pink Panther had played throughout the game, at various levels of volume.

In the dim light I looked over at Richard and Mary Lou. I didn’t even try to hide my tears. Maddie’s production had taken less than ten minutes to watch, but we couldn’t have been prouder if it were an Oscar-winning feature film.

Maddie switched the lights on and smiled at her audience. “If anyone has any questions, I’d be happy to answer them to the best of my ability.”

In fact, there were questions from the more technically literate of the group, and there were more viewings of the video. I’d have to wait to watch it again when my vision cleared.

I moved one room closer to Maddie, as Richard and Mary Lou took my bedroom for the night. They’d decided they’d done enough driving for one day. Fine by me.

I went in to say good night to the family star.

“I’m so proud of you,” I said, in case she hadn’t heard me the first few dozen times.

She looked at me with sleepy eyes. “We do make a good team, don’t we, Grandma?”

“The best.”

“Remember the coin I threw in the Ghirardelli fountain?” she asked me.

“Of course.”

“I wished you and Mr. Baker could be BFF.”

I smiled. “You’ll be the first to know.”

Before I turned in, I went to the crafts table that held my Christmas scene. I took two Christmas stockings and sketched out names that I would embroider on them later. One would say Taylor, and the other, Henry.

It was a tiny addition, but held the promise of something big.