“Aren’t you using a grid?” P.B. asked. “Drawing it first, then enlarging it for the wall?”
I sighed. He wasn’t the first to ask me this question. “No. I’m doing it freehand. It takes math skills to use a grid. I’m just… making it up as I go along. It’s more organic anyway.”
“Okay, then. The frog’s big because he has to be. In order for you to hear.”
“Hear what?”
“What he’s saying. Most people are visual-they don’t hear what they can’t see. Not blind people, but most other people. Someone here has to use the phone. Good-bye.”
I stood for a moment, phone to my ear, staring down the hallway into the Mansion’s whiteness. I hadn’t solved P.B.’s Christmas problem, and he hadn’t solved my frog problem, but he’d said something important. People don’t hear what they can’t see. I dialed Maizie Quinn, and after work I headed to Encino.
The electric gate leading to the Quinn house was closed. The whole street was less appealing in the dark, and I was glad to be in my car. I reached for the gate’s call box, pressed a button, and talked to an electronically filtered voice. The gate opened. I drove through.
Emma, the two-and-three-quarters-year-old, stood on the porch, holding the hand of a short woman. I parked in the driveway and walked up the flagstone path toward them.
“Lupe,” Emma said, pointing to me, “is that cousin Mandy?”
“No, I’m Wollie,” I said. “I met you a few days ago. Where’s your goose?”
“Goosie asleep.”
Thank God. I introduced myself to Lupe, the housekeeper. Mr. Snuggles raced down the hall to protest my entry. Lupe picked him up and shushed him with a treat pulled from an apron pocket.
“Do you want to play alla myna engine?” Emma said.
“She does not know, m’hija,” Lupe said, bending down to kiss the top of her head. “Only Annika play this game, porque it’s German. That’s the reason.”
Emma, suddenly shy, stuck her hand in her mouth, all four fingers up to the first knuckle. Lupe reached down and pulled the hand back out, murmuring in Spanish. Emma turned and raced down the hallway, Mr. Snuggles close behind. Lupe followed him. I followed her.
We passed two darkened rooms and a third lit with a crackling fire and the flashing images of a wide-screen TV. Emma shouted “Hello, Grammy Quinn!” without breaking stride and was hailed in return, and then the smell of firewood gave way to an odor of baking bread and we were in the kitchen.
It was huge, bigger even than Rex and Tricia’s, a kitchen worthy of a castle. Overhead lights hit every work surface. Strains of Chopin were piped in from somewhere. Maizie stood behind a butcher block, oven-mitted hands on hips as she consulted a cookbook.
Emma ran to the butcher block and climbed onto a stool. Maizie looked up at me.
“Hi, there,” she said, with a smile. “Give me a second. This bread is baking too slowly, and I’m trying to figure out what I did wrong. It better not be my oven.” Behind her was the biggest gas range I’d ever seen outside a restaurant, black enamel with red trim. She turned to it and lifted the lid on a saucepan. Steam rose in a cloud around her.
“It smells great in here,” I said. It actually smelled like Williams-Sonoma.
“Cranberry-ginger chutney. Thanksgiving advance work.”
“And bread?”
“Yes. Corn bread and sourdough.” She wiped flour from her chin with her oven mitt. Her cheeks were flushed, as if she’d been physically exerting herself. “I’m trying two new stuffings this year. You have to let the bread go stale before it’s cubed.”
Cubed. I grew disoriented, hearing in my head, “Cubed: raised to the third power.” Annika’s voice. But Maizie was talking baking, not algebra. The idea that people make bread from scratch only to let it go stale amazed me.
“I may do two birds, a smoked and a classic. I haven’t decided yet. Lupe-” Maizie spoke briefly in Spanish, which jogged my memory.
“Maizie, I found Annika’s boyfriend,” I said. “Rico Rodriguez.”
“Rodriguez. Of course. How’d I manage to forget that? And how’d you find him?”
“Circuitously, and he wasn’t much help, but he remembered Annika’s watch. A Fossil.”
“Annika have a watch,” Emma said. “Mommy have a watch. Grammy Quinn have a watch. Daddy have a watch. Lupe no have a watch. Emma no have a watch. Mr. Snuggles-”
Maizie plucked her daughter from the bar stool, interrupting the inventory. “That’s right, a Fossil. Wollie, it’s so kind of you to do this. I can’t understand why the agency isn’t-. Okay, don’t get me started on them. Emma, let’s show our guest the photo album.”
Emma took my hand. It surprised me, the tiny fingers, unexpectedly cold, finding their way into my palm. With her mother following, she led me back down the hallway, to the room we’d passed. On a far wall was a built-in TV screen, but the rest of the room was devoted to books on floor-to-ceiling shelves. Hardcover. Lower shelves held children’s books, oversized and skinny, alive with color. A miniature wooden rocking chair stood by, occupied by a large plush bear. The fire glowed in a stone fireplace, heavy scarlet drapes shrouded the windows, and a Persian rug covered the floor.
“Grammy Quinn!”
A woman at the far end of the room turned, then rose from a sofa, a soft afghan falling to the floor as she did. The TV screen went dark. Emma let go of my hand to run over and wrap herself around her grandmother’s thigh. Thus hampered, the woman advanced with a smile and a limp. “Hello. I’m Grammy Quinn. Sometimes known as Polly.”
Maizie introduced me and continued to call the woman Grammy Quinn, which amused me, as Grammy’s body, in a bright red jogging suit, gave no indication of advanced age. Her hair was gray but cut short and shaggy, and she wore makeup and some serious-looking jewelry. A very hip Grammy. Emma was persuaded to release her leg only when Maizie repeated the magic words “photo album,” at which point we adjourned to an enormous coffee table surrounded by overstuffed chairs. Emma then climbed onto her grandmother’s lap in a chair alongside Maizie’s. I sat opposite.
Maizie flipped through the pages of a large leather album. Emma pointed at pictures, shouting out names, until Maizie found what she was looking for. She turned the book around to face me.
The photos showed an expedition to the Santa Monica Pier, a Ferris wheel visible in the background. There was Emma, Emma and Grammy Quinn, and Annika holding Emma. Maizie indicated a close-up of Annika alone. “I thought this would be good,” she said. It was a clear shot, but uncharacteristically solemn. I imagined it stapled to a missing person’s report.
I pointed to the one next to it. “This one’s better. It’s more like her.” Grammy Quinn nodded. Maizie liberated the photograph from its plastic sleeve and handed it to me.
Annika was looking into the camera. She had on her brown leather jacket, with a white T-shirt. Her apple-cheeked face was creased in a smile; her hair, brown and straight, was blown back by a breeze. Her lipstick was bright. She exuded affection. She was not quite beautiful, but she was pretty and happy and so animated you couldn’t look at the picture without recalling her laugh and hearing her voice, her English fearless and charming.