Sweetest in the Gale - Olivia Dade Page 0,40
the things girls were allowed to do, the things they were taught, to elbow her way into things she wasn’t supposed to do.”
If he’d been the recipient of such an approving beam from Ms. Wick, he imagined he’d feel exactly as pleased as her student currently looked.
“I think you’ve touched on a key point there, Amanda,” she said. “Let’s talk a bit more about that, and then discuss the specific techniques Lee used to recreate her scenes in three dimensions, as well as how art and public service are often intertwined. After that, you’ll have some time to consider what you’d like your own educational dioramas to include. I’ve also brought one of my own dioramas for your inspection. If any of you manage to solve its mystery before the end of the week, I have a reward for you.”
Over twenty heads swiveled toward the table near her desk, where her cloth-covered diorama was evidently waiting.
“I Googled her dioramas, and they’re extra-gory,” Tori whispered to her friend. “This is the best day ever.”
“Bring on the carnage,” the pale girl declared with unmistakable glee. “Do you think the reward is, like, an invitation to watch an autopsy?”
Pinching the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger, Simon sighed.
As the students spent the end of the class planning their own dioramas, Simon claimed one of the magnifying glasses provided by Ms. Wick and studied her work up close.
The diorama she’d created included three rooms of a small house: a bedroom, a bathroom, and a living room. The living room was charred almost beyond recognition, with a blackened corpse on the floor. The edges of the bedroom also showed evidence of fire, but the room hadn’t been incinerated in the same way as the living room. The bathroom, in contrast, appeared entirely undamaged, pristine other than the hair clippings glistening with faux-moisture in the marble sink’s drain.
According to the written information provided, two brothers had lived in the house. One, Kaden, lay dead in the living room. The other—Barron—had managed to escape through the bedroom window in a panic, the encroaching flames too intense to attempt to save his sibling.
Outside the dwelling, a police officer stood near her four primary witnesses and suspects. The surviving brother, of course, but also an ex-girlfriend of the victim, who was suspected of having violated the restraining order Kaden had filed against her. Lingering nearby were a neighbor with a grudge—the two brothers had a habit of throwing loud parties late at night, evidently—and a landlord who’d threatened consequences if Kaden didn’t stop smoking inside the unit.
Simon had all week to solve the mystery, so he decided to study the witness statements another day and focus on the diorama itself today. Not so much the evidence of murder contained within and outside the miniature home, but rather the evidence of Ms. Wick’s labors. The diorama as a piece of art, rather than a crime scene.
Simon could not claim to be an aesthete, by any means.
Still. Her artistry, however macabre its inspiration, was…astonishing. Rigorous precision coupled with unbounded creativity and skill. Some of the furnishings she’d bought as is, perhaps, but no miniature store provided half-burned recliners or stacks of papers on a desk, their written contents just visible with a magnifying glass and the use of tweezers, or the impression of a heeled shoe in the dirt outside the living room window, or a bandage on an elderly landlord’s arm.
He would have bet his 401K that the suspects’ clothes were hand-stitched. She hadn’t missed a detail, not the miniscule lighter just poking out of the neighbor’s back pocket, not the way all the men’s shoelaces were double-knotted, not the spurned ex-girlfriend’s choppy haircut.
To complete her gruesome creation, Ms. Wick had to have mastered an astounding array of mediums and techniques, and her hands must have been steady as a neurosurgeon’s.
Everything was exactly in scale, which required mathematical skill too.
The realization pleased him more than it should have.
The final bell rang while he was still lost in contemplation, but he barely noted the buzz of students chatting, packing up their backpacks, and heading out the door, bound toward home or work or extracurricular activities.
“Are you ready to make an arrest?”
Her voice, though mischievous, didn’t quite contain the warmth of their previous meeting, and he knew why. But her body next to his, their shoulders almost—almost—touching, radiated heat in a way that made him want to close his eyes and simply breathe in her faint scent of turpentine and