by Leigh Perry
“Oh please, don’t start on real art,” Lucas said with a groan. “I don’t want Jeremy to come lecture us about how only FAD’s fine art students are serious artists.”
Apparently this was an old argument. The conversation moved to ridiculous prejudices against various forms of art, and after that, it meandered into mild complaints about being an adjunct. But as we chatted, I couldn’t help thinking that Jacqueline was right. It sure sounded as if Kelly had had a lonely life. For a moment I felt guilty that I hadn’t reached out more. Then I remembered how she’d blown me off when I’d tried to pass the time of day. Maybe, for whatever reason, Kelly had liked living alone. I just wished she hadn’t died alone, too.
Chapter Thirteen
At some point, I looked around and realized the reception was pretty much over. The students and administrators had left and as I watched, Professor Waldron exited with Mr. Perkins in her wake. Several of the other English adjuncts were making a last raid on the refreshment table while campus catering waited impatiently to clean up. Officer Buchanan had slipped away without my noticing it, or for all I knew, she’d been eavesdropping while I’d been playing sleuth. The woman was downright disconcerting.
I said my goodbyes to the artist crowd, got an invite from Lucas to go to lunch very soon, went to throw out my empty plate, and was about to leave when I spotted Dahna standing near one of the sculpture niches, her face in her hands, sobbing.
I couldn’t leave her like that.
“Dahna?” I said, touching her lightly on the shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” Dahna managed to say, “I did not realize how much the service was going to affect me.”
“Don’t apologize. I just didn’t realize that you and Kelly were close.” I reached into my purse and found a much-needed tissue to hand to her.
She wiped her eyes. “We weren’t, not recently at least, but she was very welcoming when I first came to FAD. I didn’t have any friends here and it made my first few months so much more pleasant.”
“Really?” I didn’t intend to sound so skeptical, but Kelly had barely noticed it when I started at FAD.
“I know, she became more reserved as time went on. Isolated, really. I believe she grew weary of making relationships here—you know, adjuncts come and go, but she remained. And she was so terribly unhappy.”
“Why did she stay? My friend Lucas said she wanted to go back into journalism.”
“She did, very much, but she couldn’t find a job. When she was hired as a reporter at the Falstone Journal right out of school, she was hoping to use the work there as a stepping stone to bigger newspapers. But then the paper was sold to a conglomerate—most of the content is generated elsewhere, with only one page that’s specific to Falstone. So they only needed one person, and of course, kept the most experienced reporter.”
“Last one in, first one out,” I said, having experienced that a few times myself.
“Exactly. So many newspapers have been shut down, and Kelly couldn’t find another reporting job, which is why she took the job at the Writing Lab. She was an excellent proofreader and editor, and she needed a job to pay her bills, but she never meant to stay here.
“When I first met Kelly, she was still sending out résumés daily, but as time passed, she lost hope.” She started to tear up again, and I handed her another tissue. She wiped before saying, “When I first learned of her death, I confess I was afraid that she might have done away with herself.”
“Was she that depressed?”
“No, quite the contrary. These past few weeks, she seemed happier than I’d seen her in ages. It was as if things were turning around for her. I hoped she had either found a new job or perhaps a new lover. But when Professor Waldron said she was dead, I remembered an article I’d read about suicide, and how people are almost relieved once they decide to kill themselves. Their friends and families interpret this as improvement in their moods, but in fact, it’s a very dangerous sign.”
“The police don’t seem to think it was suicide.” I hesitated for a moment. “I don’t know if this will comfort you or not, but you know, I found Kelly out in the woods. Her car was stuck in the snow, and if she’d really wanted to give up, she could have just sat in her front seat and waited for the end. But she was trying to get out of there. There were marks in the snow that showed she’d tried to get back up to the road, and when she couldn’t, she took off through the woods. She kept going as long as she could—she never gave up. I don’t know if that makes it worse or—”
“No, no, it makes it better. So much better.” I thought she was reaching for another tissue, but instead she reached for me and hugged me firmly. We had not been on hugging terms before, but if she felt it that strongly, I was willing to oblige.
We walked back to the English wing together and retrieved our coats, and then I made sure she was okay before I let her drive home. She rolled down her window at the last minute and said, “Thank you for your kindness, Georgia.”
“Anytime.”
“But I must warn you, I still want that tenure position.”
“Bring it!”
She was smiling as she drove off, which I thought was an excellent sign.
Chapter Fourteen
Though I thought my gossip crop was pretty slim pickings, Sid was delighted to get even those scraps. Since I’d eaten fairly well at the reception, I didn’t care about fixing dinner, so instead I got myself an apple and sat right down to tell him everything.
“A thwarted lover, a scorned artist, and an abandoned friend. This is great!”
“I don’t know about the thwarted lover piece. Greg said they quit dating a long time ago.”
“Perhaps he’d tried to rekindle it and was slapped down. That’s what we crime-solving types call a trigger.”
“You’ve been watching Criminal Minds late at night again, haven’t you? Sid, you know the serial killer stuff gives you the willies.”
“I can handle it,” he insisted.
“As for the scorned artist, if Jacqueline killed everybody who dissed comics, she’d be the most prolific serial killer in history. Professor Waldron sniffs every time she says ‘sequential art,’ even though Caroline’s class is already twice as popular as any of hers.”
“Maybe Kelly did more than sniff. Maybe there was this huge Twitter flame war between the two of them and it ended…in death.”
“Well, let me know if you find any screenshots of Twitter battles. As for Dahna, don’t be mean. She was really distraught.”
“It could have been crocodile tears.”
“Sid, if you’d seen as many students as I have trying to cry about their grades or dead grandmothers to get a deadline extension, you would know the difference between real crying and the phony stuff. She was crying.”
“I bow to your expertise—crying isn’t my thing.”
True. He had no tear ducts, after all.
“Still,” he said, “the very real tears could have been delayed remorse about her crime.”
“Motive?”
“Nothing yet, but it’s still early days.”
“I take it you didn’t find anything online or you wouldn’t be so excited about what I got.”
“No, not so much. I printed out Kelly’s dossier for you, but it’s pretty skimpy.” He handed it to me with a discontented look.
“If it’s any consolation, it looks as if Officer Buchanan thinks it’s murder, too.”
“I can’t believe you helped her.”
“Don’t you think it would have been suspicious for me to say, ‘Sorry, I don’t believe in helping the competition’?”
“I suppose not.”
“Hey, maybe she’s the killer. She’s got that creepy smile going on.”
“Georgia, that is ridiculous. She’s a police officer.”
“Yeah, but she did know Kelly—they lived in the same apartment complex. Maybe they had some sort of inter-apartmental squabble.”
“You are really grasping at straws.�
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“Dude, you’re the champion of straw graspers. I mean you—Wait, you already checked Buchanan out, didn’t you?”
“Of course I did. It turns out she has an alibi. She was at a darts tournament in Fitchburg. A police darts tournament, followed by dinner with a bunch of cops. There are a dozen pictures on Facebook. Not even I can break that alibi.”
“Then why was she at the accident scene?”
“I don’t think there are that many cops in Falstone. When something major happens, they all come running, even if they have the night off. Anyway, she’s not the killer even if she does have some strange power to make you tell her stuff you ought to be keeping to yourself.”
Sid hates it when I blow raspberries at him because he can’t return the favor, so of course I gave him a really long one.
He thunked me on the skull in reply.
This set the tone for our conversation for the next half an hour or so.
Eventually I got around to looking at the dossier on Kelly, and Sid hadn’t just been being modest when he said it was skimpy. She’d only had two jobs since college—the newspaper job and the one at FAD. Her parents and one brother were in Wyoming, and there was no indication that they were anything but fond of one another. Plus there was plenty of evidence that they hadn’t been in Falstone on the night of Kelly’s death—there’d been a blizzard in their part of the state that weekend, and a number of pictures on Facebook proved that they couldn’t have left town if they’d wanted to. Kelly had no current boyfriends or girlfriends, and no hint that she’d ever had a serious one. No court cases, no arrests, and she didn’t seem to be particularly active on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or Instagram, though she did like scoping out men in kilts on Pinterest.
“Of course, she could have all kinds of secrets,” I pointed out. “Not everybody likes sharing on social media.”
“Even so, I would expect to get something from her friends’ electronic footprints, but I got nothing.” He drummed his finger bones against the table, which makes an awful lot of noise. “What about those files in Kelly’s office?”
“I just barely got started on them. It’s going to be hard to get to the rest.”
“Why don’t I go tackle them rather than you wasting your time with them?”
“Do you think I’m missing stuff?”
“No, of course not. It’s just that you’ve got enough to do already, whereas my schedule is wide open.”
“We could try, but I don’t know that it would be any faster. I don’t see how I could manage bringing more than a few folders home at a time, and there are four stuffed file cabinets.”
“You don’t have to bring anything home. Smuggle me onto campus and I’ll do the work there.”
“I don’t know how we could swing it, Sid. It wouldn’t be safe.”
“You could leave me in the Writing Lab overnight.”
“Too many other people have keys to that place—Mr. Perkins gave them to all of us who are helping out, plus he’s got a set. The custodial staff must have a set, too, not to mention campus security. What would you do if somebody showed up? There’s no handy washing machine to duck into.”
“I could stay hidden in my suitcase until the campus quiets down and only work until people start stirring. And I could barricade the door with a chair or something so nobody could come in on me.”
“At which point they’d know something was going on and break the door down. Then what?”
“Then they’d find a suitcase—a locked suitcase. Or if I didn’t have time to get into the bag, they’d just find a bunch of bones. Weird, but it’s a college campus. They’d blame it on student pranks.”
“And what would they do with that pile of bones?”
He shrugged. “Put me in storage somewhere, and I’d get out. Eventually.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me.”
“Okay, I need a better plan. But between us, we can work out the details.”
“It’s not happening, Sid.”
“But Georgia—”
“No. Period. Full stop.”
I expected his response to be a rerun of the other night: stomping, door slamming, and so on, but he seemed more disappointed than anything else. Or maybe resigned was a better word. I should have been glad he didn’t argue with me, but it made me uneasy, and the rest of the night was painfully awkward. I was relieved when it was time to go to bed, but kept tossing and turning, feeling as if I was doing something wrong even though it all sounded logical.
The next morning, I thought Sid would make another attempt to talk me into taking him along, but instead he’d left a note on the kitchen table.
Don’t worry about me. I’m going to play Final Fantasy as soon as my party comes online—they’re in England, which means I’ll be busy when you get up. Enjoy your day.
Even though the message was entirely cordial, I still felt snubbed, so I didn’t go by Sid’s room. As I went out the front door, I yelled, “I’m leaving now. See you later.”
There was no response.
As I was about to drive off, I pulled my phone out of my purse, wondering if I should text an apology. Forget it, I told myself and dropped my phone onto the seat next to me. Sid was only sulking in his room to make me feel bad. Which wasn’t going to work! Or at least, not much.
Needless to say, I wasn’t in the best of moods when I got to campus. I grabbed my pocketbook and satchel, slammed the car door behind me, and stomped toward the school. I was in the English wing and nearly to my office when I went to check the time on my phone.
Which I’d left in the minivan.
“Coccyx,” I muttered, more or less under my breath, and turned around to go back outside. Just as I rounded the corner to where I’d parked, I saw the back door of the minivan swing open and a figure swathed in winter wear started to get out.
It took only a second for me to realize who it had to be.
“Sid, what the patella are you doing here?”
Chapter Fifteen
Sid froze for an instant, then jumped back into the minivan and locked the door. That might have been more effective if I hadn’t had the key fob in my hand. As it was, I unlocked the door, climbed into the driver’s seat, and started the engine.
“I hope you’re happy,” I said. “Taking you back to the bungalow is going to make me late at the Writing Lab.”
“I don’t want to go back—I want to go check out those files.”
“I told you ‘no.’ What were you thinking? Sneaking into the car like this? Really?”
“Coccyx, Georgia,” he bellowed, “you’re not my mother! You don’t get to tell me what to do!”
“But—” I went no further because I couldn’t think of what to say. I’d never heard Sid bellow like that before.
“Even if you only count the years I’ve been a skeleton, I’m over twenty-one, and if you add in my previous life, I’m older than you are. So don’t you think it’s time for you to stop telling me what to do?”
I hesitated a long time. “How long have you wanted to say that?”
“A while, actually.”
“Oh.”
“More since I’ve been in Falstone, I think. I was used to somebody else being in charge at your parents’ house. Dr. T. and Mrs. Dr. T. always made the rules, and when you moved back with Madison, we fell into that same pattern. But coming here made me start seeing things differently. I mean, you keep saying we’re a team, but when it comes to what you think we should do versus what I think we should do, it’s always your view that holds.”
“That’s not true,” I said.
“Maybe not a hundred percent of the time, but most of the time.”
I thought over recent conversations. “Yeah, you’re right. Most of the time I do make the final decision. But I am trying to protect you. And me, too.”
“I know that, but you know I would never do anything to get you into trouble and I’m not going to jeopardize my life either. Or whatever you call what it is I’ve got
. It may be weird, but I enjoy it.”
“Other than when I order you around?”
“Yeah, other than that.”
Neither of us spoke for a while. Then Sid sadly said, “You don’t have to drive me back right now. I’ll just stay out here. It’s not like I get cold.”
“No,” I said, and turned the engine off. “You’re right. I mean, my motives were pure. I really have been trying to juggle your safety and my safety.”
“I never doubted that.”
“Thank you. Anyway, that’s what I meant to do, but obviously I haven’t been going about it the right way. Sid, you’re my best friend. My brother from another mother, my bestie, my wing man, my BFF. What you’re not is my child, but I’ve been giving you orders as if you were Madison.”
“Well, I realize one of us has to be in charge.”
“No, not really. We’re adults. Sure we need ground rules just like any other roommates—” I stopped. “Okay, not like just any roommates. You’re a special guy, in a special situation, which makes it trickier. But I shouldn’t be making those rules, and you shouldn’t be having them imposed upon you.”
“Let’s not forget that you’re the one with the job. Doesn’t that put you in charge?”
“That’s a complication, for sure, but it doesn’t make me the head of the household or anything like that. You’d be well within your rights to go live somewhere else.” I was trying not to lose it, but the thought of Sid leaving me nearly brought me to tears.
“No! No, don’t cry. I don’t want to go anywhere. You’re my family, Georgia, you and Madison and Dr. T. and Mrs. Dr. T. and Deborah. Even the dog. But especially you. Please don’t cry!”
“I’m not crying,” I lied, but when Sid handed me an old McDonald’s napkin from somewhere in the back seat, I gratefully wiped my eyes and blew my nose. “Anyway, no more bossing around. You and I are a team.”
“Team supreme?”
“You bet.”
“Fist bump?”
“Fist bump.” Once that was accomplished, I said, “So what’s your plan?”