The Skeleton Paints a Picture: A Family Skeleton Mystery (#4)

by Leigh Perry

  He outlined what he had in mind, I instantly agreed, and we went into the building, arm in bony arm.

  No, not really. In reality, we spent half an hour quibbling over what to do next, but this time we both tried to be fair about it. The decision about Sid taking a shot at the files was a given—the fussing was over the details.

  Sid had thought he could walk around on campus wearing a parka, snow pants, boots, gloves, and ski mask and nobody would think it odd. To be fair, he hadn’t been around people all that much, and the times he had been, he’d been in a costume of one kind or another. From that perspective, this wasn’t that much more strange. So I had to convince him that people would think he was nuts or a criminal or both before we finally settled on my carrying him inside.

  Unfortunately, I didn’t have the rolling suitcase I normally used to tote Sid around—that was still at the bungalow. And unless I was willing to be extremely late to the Writing Lab, a trip back home was out of the question. What I did have was a collection of reusable shopping bags. So half of Sid’s bones went into the blue Stop & Shop bag, while the other half went into a bright red Hannaford bag. I put other bags on top to hide the contents so I could get the bags inside without anybody spotting the bones.

  Between my purse, my satchel, and two bags of bones weighing over ten pounds each, it was a considerable load for me to carry, and I was glad campus maintenance had done a thorough job of clearing the latest accumulation of snow. Slipping and spilling Sid parts all over the sidewalk would not have been a good start for his undercover mission.

  Sid’s idea had been to go to the Lab and work openly, albeit covered up in winter clothing. That wasn’t going to work, and he couldn’t work openly without winter clothing, either. Instead I installed him in my office and then went to the Lab myself to grab an armload of file folders from Kelly’s file cabinets. I really didn’t think he’d find anything worthwhile, given the layer of dust on the cabinets, but I’d been wrong before.

  It turned out I was wrong this time, too, though it was several hours before I found that out.

  In the meantime, I met several students and helped them go through their papers, but every time I got a break, I lugged another batch of files to my office for Sid to look through while retrieving the ones he’d already fruitlessly examined. If anybody wondered why I was moving files back and forth, they weren’t interested enough to ask. Most of my colleagues were teaching during those hours, and the handful of students in the Roundling were either texting, sketching, or sleeping. Some seemed to be doing more than one simultaneously.

  Just before my shift ended, I brought in an extra-large load, and went to plop it on the desk before I got the door shut completely. Sid looked up as I came in, then I saw his eye sockets go wide and his whole body went stiff.

  From behind me, I heard a polite throat clearing, and then Mr. Perkins said, “Dr. Thackery, can you explain why you have a skeleton in your office?”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Later on, Sid congratulated me for my fast thinking, but I’m not sure I actually was thinking. I just blurted out words and hoped they would come out in the proper order.

  “Oh, hi, Mr. Perkins. My bony friend here is for an experiment in writing prompts. There’s something about the human form that inspires a wide variety of written responses: horror, melancholy, nostalgia, um…reflections on mortality. All kinds of…stuff.” He looked completely unconvinced until I said, “It’s a technique my parents use, and they thought a visual prompt might be particularly effective with visual artists. So they shipped me the skeleton for me to give it a try.”

  That soothed him. Professor Waldron had encountered my parents at several conferences over the years and spoke highly of them. If she approved of them, then of course Mr. Perkins would consider any suggestions they made to be excellent.

  “Intriguing. I’d be interested in reading the results.”

  “Of course. I’ll be sure to send you the best essays next week.” I kept a manic grin on my face until he left and I’d locked up behind him.

  “Oh Georgia, I am so sorry!” Sid said.

  “It’s not your fault. I’m the one who forgot to shut the door.”

  “No, you said something like this would happen. You were right and I was wrong. I should never have come.”

  “It’s okay, Sid. We were afraid you’d be seen, but now you have been and we made it through. The only thing is, you won’t have much longer to look through files before it’s time to go to class.”

  “You mean you’re really going to use me as a writing prompt?”

  “I have to. Mr. Perkins will want to read the papers. Sorry.”

  “No, I don’t mind. How often do I get to see you in action in a classroom?”

  “Just keep in mind that this might not be my most polished performance. I’ve only got a few minutes to come up with a reason why I’m waving bones around!”

  I was actually fairly proud of what I had concocted. First, though, I had to get Sid to class. I couldn’t carry him up in the shopping bags because then I’d have to explain how I was putting him back together. Most skeletons on display in academic settings are articulated with wires, nuts, and bolts. Sid was articulated only because he felt like it.

  I had Sid sit in my desk chair, wheeled him through the Roundling to the wing’s elevator, and got him up to my classroom. Then I put him at the front of the class and positioned myself to make sure nobody examined him too closely.

  A few students were already waiting, and when I saw more than one taking cell phone pictures, I resigned myself to the fact that Sid might be going viral. Once the class gathered, I took a deep breath and began.

  An hour and a half later, I wheeled Sid back to my office to a smattering of applause. Only when I was safe inside, with the door thoroughly locked, did I take another breath. Okay, since I was not Sid, I must have breathed in the interim, but I didn’t remember it. All I could recall was the panic coursing through my system in a way it hadn’t since I’d been a grad student giving my first lecture.

  I flung myself into my guest chair. “I can’t believe I got away with that.”

  “Got away with it? Georgia, that was a virtuoso performance! I’ve watched a lot of lectures online, and that one was the best ever. Using the skeleton as a metaphor for the structure of a piece of prose or poetry? Genius.”

  “Tell me I didn’t make a pun about humerus writing?”

  “Are you kidding? You brought the house down with that! I almost laughed myself.”

  “It was really okay?”

  “You are a brilliant teacher, Georgia.”

  “I guess it wasn’t too bad,” I admitted. “Though I thought I was going to lose it when that one student said, ‘But this topic isn’t in the syllabus.’ The first time all semester anybody has admitted to reading the syllabus, and it was the worst time imaginable.”

  “Yeah, who let him into class? What kind of artist is he anyway?”

  “Art history, I think. He wants to work in a museum, so attention to detail is important.”

  “I guess,” Sid said with a sniff.

  “Kudos to you, too. The lecture never would have worked without you holding yourself still all that time. I don’t know how you did it.”

  “It was harder than I expected. I’m used to being ambulatory or collapsing into a pile. Just being still was different.”

  “I don’t think you even changed your expression.” For a second I considered the notion that some would say that a skull didn’t really have expressions, but only for a second.

  As part of our newly formed pact for equality, I gritted my teeth and agreed to let Sid stay at FAD overnight. In fact, I suppose I shouldn’t even have been thinking I was letting him do anything. Instead I was assisting in his preparations for getting through the rest of Kelly’s files.

  Fortunately for our plans, yet another bout of snow was predicted for that evening, so the building cleared out earlier than usual. Owen was the last of
my colleagues still around, staying even longer than Mr. Perkins, but once he finished his shift at the Writing Lab, he cleared out immediately. The custodian made a cursory sweep a few minutes later, and I guessed he was either eager to get home or had snow removal to attend to outside.

  I waited another half an hour after that, as the building grew quieter and quieter, and only then did I wheel Sid over to the Lab. Our plan was for me to retrieve him before anybody got to the Lab the next morning, but if I did blow it, Sid would do his mannequin routine again and I would say I’d left him there as a prank. If anything went wrong, he had his cell phone and would call for help.

  I still thought it was risky, but the look of pride on Sid’s skull when I left him convinced me that I’d done the right thing. As long as Sid had been part of my life, we were still working out the parameters of the relationship. Maybe that wasn’t surprising. After all, couples, parent-child pairs, business associates, friends, siblings, roommates—they all had to work at getting along. It’s just that, unfortunately for us, there were no advice columnists we could go to for expert guidance. That didn’t stop me from imagining sending a letter along the lines of, “Dear Prudence: My best friend is a skeleton. How do we organize our collaborations when we solve murders? Signed, Bone Buddy.”

  The parking lot was empty except for my minivan and I quickly brushed off the half inch of snow that had already fallen and made my way carefully back to the bungalow. I felt a twinge when I looked at the driveway and realized that Sid wasn’t going to be able to use his beloved snowblower that night. Or maybe it was a painful twang from my back when I realized I was going to be stuck with the job. Having Sid around had already spoiled me.

  It was only worse when I got into the bungalow, which felt painfully empty. I’d spent over a month alone there before Sid arrived on my doorstep, and though it had been lonely, that was the worst night I’d had there. I texted him to let him know I was home and to make sure he was okay, but his brief replies made it plain that he was focusing on the files and that I should let him alone.

  After dinner, I called my parents to warn them that they had loaned me a skeleton to use for their brilliant new technique, and in order to distract them from questions about why Sid was on campus in the first place, I told them about my shot at tenure. They were enthusiastic and encouraging, which was great. Less great was the avalanche of advice that followed. Since they’d been in academia for their entire working lives, they had strong ideas about how I should position myself to show my qualifications to their best advantage. They both knew Professor Waldron from shared associations, and my father offered to call her on my behalf, but my mother and I overruled that.

  Afterward, I tried to be productive and catch up on some of my work that I’d let slide a bit because of the many recent distractions, but instead I kept picturing Sid in scenarios involving theft, vandalism, and/or fire.

  I had another restless night, and when my alarm went off, the only thing that kept me from shutting it off and going back to sleep for an extra hour was knowing that I needed to sneak in and get Sid back before too many people were around.

  Between the freshly fallen four inches of snow and it being Friday—meaning that there were no classes scheduled—the English wing was nearly deserted. I tapped at the Lab door with our oh-so-original secret shave-and-a-haircut knock before unlocking it. Sid was playing mannequin, a precaution I approved of, but as soon as I locked the door behind me and put a spare chair in front of it as an extra block, he let out a gasp of relief. It was purely for show, of course, but I felt the same way.

  “Everything go okay?”

  “More than okay. Nobody came by, and nobody saw me, and I think I found what we’ve been looking for.”

  “You’ve figured out who killed Kelly?”

  “Okay, not everything we’ve been looking for, but I think I know why she was killed.”

  “You do?”

  He nodded. “There’s just one problem.

  “What?”

  “If I’m right, I’m not sure I blame the killer.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  “Sid!”

  “Okay, okay, I’m overstating. What Kelly did was awful, but you’re right, she didn’t deserve to die.”

  “What in the patella did she do?”

  “Let me start with what I found.”

  I sat down. When Sid took that tone, it meant that he was going to go through every step of his mental process and was not susceptible to being rushed. So I might as well get comfortable for his presentation.

  “This,” he said, waving a thick manila envelope, “was inserted in the middle of a big folder labeled First Year Expository. That folder mostly had the kinds of papers you’d expect: ‘My Worst Memory,’ ‘My Happiest Memory,’ and the ever popular ‘Why I Became an Artist,’ but the envelope held something very different.”

  I reached for the envelope, but he pulled it back and continued.

  “Inside you will find a series of photocopies of artwork and a matching series of printouts from websites.”

  “What kind of websites?”

  “T-shirt sellers.”

  “T-shirt sellers?”

  “If you’ll let me continue.”

  “Sorry.”

  He cleared his throat. Well, technically he made the sound of somebody clearing his throat, since he had no throat to clear. “As I was saying, there are photocopies and screen dumps—each photocopy is paired with a screen dump.” He produced an illustration with three images: a sea lion frolicking on a beach, a tiger shark popping up from the surf, and a koala sitting in a tree. At the bottom of the page was a slogan: “Lions, and tigers and bears! Oh my!”

  “That’s clever! They’re all Australian. The real land of Oz. Madison would love that.”

  “We’re not shopping, Georgia,” he said and held up a screen dump of a web page advertising a T-shirt for sale. “Note that the designs are nearly identical.”

  I compared the two images. “They look the same to me. Except for the comma.” The one for sale said: “Lions, and tigers, and bears! Oh my!”

  “We are also not proofreading.” He took the pages away and gave me two more. “What about these?”

  This time it was a cartoon cat curled up with a bunch of mice. “The one on the T-shirt is flipped in the other direction, but it looks the same otherwise.”

  He took them away and gave me another set. “And these?”

  It was a wolf in a forest. “The colors are a little different.”

  “But it’s clearly the same design, right?”

  “It looks like it to me.”

  “Note that these three pictures are in markedly different styles. As if they were done by different artists.”

  “One artist can use more than one style,” I objected, “but I admit that these do look a lot different.” The Oz picture was fairly realistic, the cat was old-style cartoony, and the wolf resembled a Japanese woodblock print.

  “I have reason to believe they were drawn by different people. Look at the signatures on the photocopies.”

  Sure enough, the signatures on the three designs were definitely not the same. One was a scrawled name, one was an interlocking set of initials, and the other was a stylized butterfly.

  “Now look at the signatures on the screen dumps.” He handed me those pages.

  All three had the same signature, in a pretty script font. “Scarlet Letter. I’m guessing that’s not somebody’s real name.”

  “I doubt it, and yes, I did a search on my phone to check.” He paused for me to admire his thoroughness, so I gave him an approving nod before he went on. “There were a dozen more examples like these in that envelope, everything from elaborate illustrations to simple graphics to comic book character action shots. Multiple styles and signatures, but the matching T-shirt designs were all signed ‘Scarlet Letter.’”

  “Okay.” Sid was raising his nonexistent eyebrows, waiting for me to reach some conclusion that was painfully ob
vious to him. “Don’t give me that look—how long did it take you to work it out?”

  He ignored the question. “I’ve concluded that the photocopies are of the original artwork. Which means that the designs being sold were stolen.”

  “By Kelly?”

  “What do you think?”

  I could see it. Kelly working at a job that she hated, with nothing better on the horizon. She had no romantic relationships or even close friendships. It wasn’t hard to imagine her doing something illegal. “So you think somebody found out?”

  “I’d bet my femur—the one without chew marks—that somebody did and then made sure she never stole their artwork again.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  No wonder Sid had said he wasn’t sure he blamed the killer. I wasn’t an artist, but I knew about intellectual property theft. I’d lost count of the student papers I’d received with huge swaths of text taken straight from reference books and Wikipedia. Some students managed to dig up obscure essays, thinking I’d be fooled into believing that from one assignment to the next, their writing ability had evolved from barely literate to academically excellent. And I still remembered the time a student turned in a paper that was not only plagiarized, but was plagiarized from one of my mother’s articles. She’d written it under her maiden name, so he hadn’t made the connection with me. I’d thoroughly enjoyed flunking him in my class, and I’d reported him to administration, which had put him on academic probation for the rest of his college career.

  Still, as angry as Mom and I had been, neither of us had ever been tempted to do anything worse than flunking the guy. Okay, there was talk of kicking him in the shins super hard and/or violence against his laptop, but it had never gone beyond talk.

  So I said, “I don’t know, Sid. Would a stolen T-shirt design really be worth killing over?”

  “Artists can be pretty intense.”

  “True, and I could understand an emotional outburst, but it would have taken serious planning to make it look like Kelly went off the road accidentally. Officer Buchanan seemed to think she might have been drugged, which caused the crash.”