Mix-up in Miniature by Margaret Grace Page A

was on the dresser next to a lamp in the child’s room, the other upside down on the floor. I had the impression she was reproducing her own décor.
    “You’ve done a wonderful job, sweetheart.”
    “Now watch this, Grandma. This is the main thing I was telling you about.”
    Maddie had me sit on a stool so that I was at eye level with the second floor of the dollhouse. When I was settled, she pressed her finger on the back wall of one of the bedrooms, about fifteen inches by twelve inches (fifteen feet by twelve feet if scaled to life-size), with a play area in one corner.
    “Watch, watch.”
    I was ready for fireworks, but saw nothing. “What should I be looking for?”
    Maddie frowned and pressed harder on the same spot, then moved her hand around the area. The wall was nicely painted in an abstract design, geometric shapes in primary colors, but I saw nothing unusual.
    “I don’t see anything, sweetheart.”
    Maddie growled and clenched her fists. “There’s a secret room right here behind this wall. I saw it this morning.” She slammed her arms against where her hips would be if she had any to speak of.
    I got up and looked more closely. “Where was it?”
    She pushed so hard I thought the house would topple. “Right here, right here. I just touched this spot”—her finger tapped a bright red circle—“to see if it was thick paint or paper or what, and this wall slid across, like,
zoom
”—another gesture punctuated this highly animated presentation—“and there was another wall and there was a space.” Maddie held her thumb and index finger about two inches apart. “It was like a hallway or something.”
    “The wall slid automatically? So it’s wired up somehow?”
    “Yeah, I guess.”
    “So we should be able to see some electrical…stuff.”
    “Yeah, there must be a little motor and a battery,” she said, feeling along the edges of the wall.
    I placed my finger on a yellow rectangle next to the circle. “Maybe you were pressing here.”
Tap tap.
    Nothing.
    “Nuts. Nuts. Nuts,” Maddie said, pouting between words, as her father had done before her whenever he was stressed. “I should have taken the letter while I had the door open.”
    My ears perked up. “Letter?”
    “There was a letter in the hallway. The secret hallway.”
    “You mean a miniature letter?” I’d fashioned tiny letters for many a room box myself.
    “No, a real letter. A full-size letter.” Maddie held her hands out to roughly the size of a typical envelope that comes in a stationery set, about four-by-six inches. “Like the kind you used to send when we lived in L.A.”
    As if a secret room weren’t enough to intrigue me, the chances of finding a letter—I heard “clue”—in the dollhouse motivated me even more strongly to locate the magic spot.
    Now both our heads and one hand each were battling for space in the bedroom. We moved the furniture out and checked again, including the outside wall, and came up with nothing.
    “It was there, Grandma, really.”
    “I’m sure it was.”
    “You don’t believe me.”
    I put my arm around my distressed granddaughter. “Let’s have breakfast and get you to school. We’ll try again this afternoon.”
    I heard her soft, frustrated “Okay.”
    I couldn’t help thinking—this was how I’d felt when I was told there was no brother.
    —
    Finally the time was right. I was free to talk to Richard and Mary Lou, who would surely be up, while Maddie started breakfast, this time on a real-life scale. I headed for the phone.
    “I’ll be back in a minute,” I told her. “I’m going to call your parents.”
    Thud. Plop.
Maddie dropped the wooden-handled spoon, sending sticky globs of oatmeal to the tile floor.
    She gasped.
    In fact, I thought I heard the gasp before the spoon fell.
    “No, no, don’t call them yet,” she said.
    “I’ll be done before the oatmeal is ready,” I said, confused by her pleading tone. She’d never cared this much for punctuality