Monster in Miniature by Margaret Grace Page B

decision not to join us in our shady dealings. Best wishes, signed, All the Other Potentials on Oliver Halbert’s List.
    Yes, I had been a good creative writing teacher, I mused.
     
     
    “You look a little out of it this evening. Is something wrong?” Beverly asked. She’d held her question until Maddie had left for the kitchen to fill three bowls with ice cream.
    “Other than hosting a dinner of leftovers?” I asked, tensing.
    She pointed to the nearly empty serving bowls on the table. “Chicken cutlets, potato salad, green beans with almonds, and homemade dilly bread. I’ll take your leftovers any day.”
    “Me, too,” Maddie said. “Except for mixing nuts with the vegetable.” She made a disgusted face, which quickly brightened as she plunked a small tray on the table and handed out bowls of chocolate ice cream. By long-standing agreement, she deposited the bowl with the largest amount of ice cream at her place. I was glad to have her back, not for the dessert, but because it meant I didn’t have to tell Beverly what was wrong with me: I was in essence investigating her brother.

    This was a long holiday weekend for Maddie and she was mine until I delivered her to her Palo Alto school on Tuesday morning. Her parents were in San Francisco for a few much-needed days of relaxation, staying in a friend’s oceanside condo. Though Richard cared deeply for his profession as a surgeon, the job was stressful. I was delighted that Mary Lou gently forced him into quarterly getaways and time-outs when he was required to leave his pager in a desk drawer.
    I always loved extra time with Maddie; this weekend there was a bonus in that I could use her as an excuse to leave the boxes in my garage unopened and the foreign key in my purse unused. I had to babysit, after all.
    On the other hand, our bedtime chat tonight was more like a conference Skip might have with his LPPD colleagues.
    “Did you call Mrs. Giles back and give her a report on The Case?” Maddie asked. She was sitting up in bed, arms folded across her chest. The chief of police couldn’t be more intimidating to his subordinates, the aroma of her strawberry bubble bath notwithstanding.
    “Not yet.”
    “Didn’t you find anything out today?” she asked.
    Nothing I could share. (Where did she learn that stare?) I’d discovered that it was going to be harder than I thought to tear open cartons of material that had Ken’s name all over it. I was no chemist, but I’d have bet I wasn’t imagining things when I’d smelled my husband’s slightly musky scent when I unsealed the box of telephone logs.
    “No, I didn’t find out anything.”
    “Then, what were you doing all day, Grandma?”
    “It wasn’t exactly all day. Just a couple of hours.”
    “It was from eleven twenty when you left for lunch with Mr. Baker to almost five o’clock. I wanted to come home sooner, but Mr. Baker said you needed some private time. I figured it was about The Case, right?”
    “I took a nap, remember?”
    “Well, I did,” Maddie said.
    That was a surprise. “You took a nap, too?”
    “No, I found out something.”
    I’d lost the continuity and now saw that the “I did” referred to making good use of the day.
    “You found out something about what?” This was one of those times when it would have been helpful to have a whiteboard and dry-erase markers in Maddie’s room.
    Maddie turned her head and gave me a sideways glance. “About The Case. I used Taylor’s laptop to Google Oliver Halbert.”
    I wanted to ask if Taylor’s parents were aware of the forensics investigation going on in their daughter’s bedroom. There was no use discussing the bigger issue of sleuthing as a hobby for an eleven-year-old; Maddie won those debates hands down. I might as well reap the rewards.
    “What did you learn?”
    “He used to be in jail.”
    I grimaced. “I doubt it.”
    I should have learned by now not to question my granddaughter’s research skills. She threw back the