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

by Leigh Perry

I thought about it. “You know, you’re right. The adjunct biz is so dependent on networking that I hesitate to totally write somebody off, but it’s time to quit making nice with Owen. The combination of constant come-ons and veiled insults is too annoying to put up with.”

  “Good. You’re going to smoke him in the tenure race, anyway. His publications are crap.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I may have gotten bored and prepared dossiers on all your colleagues. After all, they were suspects up until we discovered the art theft angle.”

  “Couldn’t one of them still be the killer? Maybe one of them draws in his or her spare time.”

  “If one of them draws, there is no record of it or reference to it anywhere. Caroline loves her comics, but as far as I can tell, she’s never tried to draw her own. Since I bet they’d draw attention to artistic ability while they’re trying to get tenure at an art school, we can assume there are no hidden artists in the bunch.”

  “I guess that’s a relief.”

  “It would have made a great way to get them off the tenure list, though.”

  We got home and I started rummaging around the kitchen to find something to eat. Friday dinners tend to be haphazard, since it’s been so long since grocery shopping day, but I thawed a batch of chili I’d frozen a couple of weeks earlier and baked a can of rolls to go with it. Once I opened a can of fruit cocktail for dessert, most of the major food groups were at least nodded at.

  Sid had been tapping away at his laptop while I thawed, baked, and opened, and by the time I was ready to eat, he had a report to share for our dinnertime conversation.

  “I was thinking. A lot of those screen dumps advertising T-shirts are from a store called City Riggers. So I did a little research. You know, online art theft is a huge issue. All kinds of stores have been accused of swiping designs from artists to put on T-shirts, mugs, phone cases, just about anything you can print on. It’s like people think that once it’s on the web, it’s fair game. And it turns out that City Riggers has been accused of foul play a lot. They claim that since they buy designs from third-party artists, it’s impossible for them to know whether or not a design is stolen.”

  “If they hadn’t seen the original, how would they know?”

  “Fair enough. But when the original artists provide proof, they blow them off with a boilerplate we’re-sharing-this-with-our-legal-team-for-review note. Or at the very most, they’ll take the product off their site but won’t provide information to the injured party or pay a fair share of the money they’ve made.”

  “Can’t the artists sue?”

  “Do you know of any FAD students who could afford to sue some place like City Riggers, which is probably owned by a big-money parent corporation?”

  “Good point.”

  “Anyway, this is nothing new, meaning that Kelly even stole the idea of stealing. Which is pathetic, when you think of it.”

  I had to agree. “So any more ideas for more sleuthing?”

  He considered it. “Not right now. You?”

  I shook my head.

  “Movie night?”

  “Go see what you can find.”

  He went to the living room while I cleaned up from dinner, finishing just in time for my cell phone to ring.

  “Hello, Thackery residence.”

  “Hi, gorgeous.”

  “Oh. Hi, Owen. What’s up?”

  “Just making sure you’re okay. I know you’ve been a little nervous about being out there alone at night since you found poor Kelly’s body.”

  “I’m not nervous, Owen. It happened nearly a week ago, and I wasn’t nervous then, either.”

  “Good for you,” he said as if he didn’t believe me. “So I’m finally leaving FAD, and I thought I could grab some Chinese food at May Chung’s and swing by your place so we could have dinner. Would you rather have sweet and sour pork or Kung Pao chicken?”

  “I’ve already eaten.”

  “That’s all right. I’m not that hungry anyway. I could just get some cannoli at Maria’s Pastry and we could go straight to dessert.”

  I could just tell he was leering when he said it. “No, thanks. I’ve got plans tonight.”

  Before he could offer anything else, Sid clattered into the room, “Hey, Georgia, would you rather—?”

  I held a hand up and pointed to the phone.

  “Sorry,” he whispered.

  “Oh, you’ve got company,” Owen said, sounding injured.

  “Just the TV,” I said. Sid made a face, but after Officer Buchanan’s nosing around, I didn’t want any rumors getting back to her about my having a houseguest.

  “I thought I heard somebody say your name.”

  “It’s a documentary about Georgia O’Keeffe. I was named after her, you know.” Before he could ask what channel it was on, I added, “My parents recommended it, so I just finished downloading it.”

  “I love O’Keeffe’s work,” he said enthusiastically.

  Of course he did. “I did not know that. I’ll send you the link for the video and if you get a chance to watch it, you can let me know what you think. Goodbye.”

  He was starting to say something as I hung up the phone.

  “Owen again?” Sid asked.

  I nodded. “Why won’t some people take a hint?”

  “Maybe you’re being too nice.”

  “Why should I have to be rude just because he is? He’s the one whose behavior needs changing, not me.”

  “Okay, that’s fair.”

  “So what do you want to watch?”

  We decided to binge on Community, which rounded out the day with plenty of laughs. Honestly, I needed the distraction. Despite what’d I’d told Owen, I was feeling uneasy about Kelly. Not just because of finding her body, but because of knowing what I knew about her. I couldn’t see how she could rest in peace when she’d been murdered by one of her victims, and though I don’t believe in ghosts—Sid notwithstanding—I was restless.

  Sid, bless his chest cavity, seemed to recognize what I was feeling and kept me supplied with hot chocolate and cookies until I was about to burst. I think he watched over me while I slept, too, which would have looked disturbing to anybody who wasn’t us.

  The rest of the weekend was a wash as far as investigating went. Instead I was reduced to doing things like grading papers, laundry, grocery shopping, housecleaning, and catching up with the family. It snowed part of Saturday, which made Sid happy because he got to use the snowblower again. I even let him borrow the car keys to move the minivan in the driveway so he could clear around it. I told him I had complete trust in him, but I also knew that with the piles of snow lining the driveway, it wasn’t like he could go far off track into the yard. As for the mailbox, it wasn’t really damaged—I just had to set it back upright again.

  Chapter Twenty

  Having finished going through Kelly’s files, Sid was fine with staying home on Monday to catch up on his gaming, social media, and an online course in psychology he was taking. My own day was pretty normal, too. I did swing past the last couple of departments to check for artists’ signatures and traded texts with Lucas to see if he’d remembered whose signature he thought he recognized, but nothing came of any of it.

  My last task for the day was to take care of paperwork. I didn’t have to fill out a time card for the classes I taught—I got a flat rate per classroom hour, no matter how much time I spent outside of class prepping and grading papers. But for the work in the Writing Lab, I had to turn in a time sheet to get paid. So I added up my hours, filled out the appropriate form, and went to Mr. Perkins’s office to hand it in.

  Mr. Perkins was typing as efficiently as he did everything else—only his fingers and eyes seemed to be moving. I know he saw me standing at the door, but he finished whatever passage he was working on before acknowledging me.

  “Here’s my time sheet,” I said and handed it to him.

  He inspected it as carefully as if I were getting paid enough per hour to
bankrupt the college. “I’ll turn this in right away.”

  “Thank you.” Then I had a thought. Though Kelly’s assistant didn’t seem to be doing much to earn their pay, they had shown up during a couple of my shifts and actually brought me coffee once. “Is there anything special I need to do about Indigo?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Indigo Williamson, the student assistant at the Writing Lab. I can’t sign time cards, so I figured you’d have to handle it.”

  “There is no assistant assigned to the Writing Lab as far as I know. Certainly no funds were budgeted for that.”

  “But Caroline and Indigo told me—” What exactly had they said? “I must have misunderstood.”

  “Indeed?” he said with profound disinterest and resumed typing.

  I peeked into the Lab on my way past, but Indigo wasn’t around, which was probably just as well. I wouldn’t have known what to say to them. Sid, on the other hand, had plenty to say when I got back to the bungalow and told him of my discovery.

  “So you’ve let our star suspect hang around the Writing Lab? Because you realize that he is our star suspect now.”

  “They.”

  “They? You think he was working with somebody?”

  “Indigo is gender fluid—they prefer they and them.”

  “Oh, right. So you let them loose in Kelly’s office?”

  “They said they were Kelly’s assistant. How was I supposed to know any different? I mean, why would they spend hours in there for no pay or credit?”

  “I think we know the answer to that. They must have been looking for the cache of artwork that I found. Somewhere in there is proof that Kelly stole from them.”

  “They did try to get me out of the Lab a couple of times,” I said. “We’re just lucky that they don’t have a key.”

  I had work to do that evening, but it was hard because I was mightily distracted by Sid’s scheming and plotting. He’d have cheerfully kept on discussing our plan all night long if I hadn’t reminded him that one of us had to sleep. Fortunately, he decided to make a dossier for Indigo, which kept him from waking me up before I needed to be awake on Tuesday morning.

  Though Indigo hadn’t told anybody what their imaginary schedule was, they’d shown up for my shift on Tuesday the week before, and I was betting they would do so again. Sure enough, they showed up shortly after I did and looked around.

  “No appointments?”

  “Not for a while,” I said. I’d canceled the one I’d had, rescheduling it for later in the day.

  “I can hold the fort here if you want to go get coffee or something.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  I pretended to work until they were settled, sketchbook in hand. Then I said, “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Why have you been hanging around? I know you weren’t working for Kelly.”

  They stiffened, and for a minute I thought they were going to bolt. But they must have realized it wouldn’t do any good—one call to security would find them if I wanted them found. They relaxed again or tried to. “What I said was that I was Kelly’s assistant, which I was. I never said it was a paid gig.”

  “So you volunteered to hang around here for hours every week out of the goodness of your heart? Because art students have so much free time? Try again.”

  “I was helping her,” they insisted. “It just wasn’t Writing Lab stuff. It was a private project of hers.”

  “Something to do with art theft?”

  Sid kicked me under the desk. He’d insisted on coming to help in case Indigo went into a murderous rage, and was in his suitcase with the lid open so he could leap into action if it was called for. The kick was because he’d wanted me to finesse the information gathering, and I hadn’t. I wasn’t particularly good at finesse.

  “What do you know about it?” Indigo asked.

  “Enough. Did she steal one of your designs?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Did Kelly steal your work? A T-shirt design? Is that why you were angry at her?”

  They gave me that jeez-are-you-being-an-idiot look that teenagers do better than anyone. “You’ve got it backwards. Kelly wasn’t stealing anything—she was trying to find the thief.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “Say that again, slowly.”

  They sighed in exasperation. “Kelly found out that somebody was stealing designs from students and then selling them to stores. Which isn’t really news because people in the art and maker community have known about this for years. But it was news to Kelly, and she started looking into it near the end of last semester.”

  “These designs?” I pulled out the stack of papers and spread them out on the desk, ignoring Sid’s kick.

  “I’ve been looking for those!” They narrowed their eyes. “Why do you have them? How do I know you aren’t the thief?”

  “Because I found them, and because I thought Kelly was the thief until two minutes ago?”

  “That’s what you say anyway.”

  “Okay, then how about because I wasn’t at FAD last semester?”

  “The stuff was on the web.”

  “Then how about because I wouldn’t know how? The art wasn’t simply stolen, right? The thief re-created the designs, and in some cases, made changes. Like here on this cat. I couldn’t do that—I can’t even draw stick figures.”

  “It’s easy to pretend to be bad at something.”

  “Fine. Call my parents—they’ve still got some of the art I did in elementary school, mostly for the laugh value. Or you can track my professional career. I have a degree in English, and I’ve never taken an art class, nor have I ever taught at an art school before now. But sure, I could have been nursing a talent for copying art my whole life, just in case I ever got a chance to steal another artist’s ideas.”

  “Okay fine, you’re not the thief.”

  “Good. Now it’s your turn. After all, you really can draw. How do I know Kelly was working with you and not investigating you?”

  “Hey, I’m a victim. And I wouldn’t steal somebody else’s art!”

  “Can you back that up?”

  “How?”

  “Tell me how you became a victim. When did you find out your art had been stolen? And what got stolen?”

  “This is mine,” they said, pulling out the lions, and tigers and bears picture. “Last year I put some designs up on my Tumblr, and this fall a troll posted that I was copying a shirt at City Riggers. I would have just deleted his comment, but he included a link, and it really was my design.”

  “How do you know it wasn’t a case of two people coming up with the same design? That happens sometimes, right?”

  “Seriously?” They held up the photocopy and the screen dump. “Same composition, same colors, same pose. Same typeface!”

  “Except he used the Oxford comma and you didn’t.”

  “Whatever. The point is that there is no way this could be anything but stealing. After it happened to me, I found out that there have been rumors for years that City Riggers and other companies have been stealing designs, but nobody has been able to take them to court. These guys have deep pockets, and most artists barely have pockets at all.”

  “What if you did have a lawyer willing to go after them? How could you prove you drew the design?”

  “I’ve got the original sketches, and I date all the pages in my sketchbooks, and there’s a creation date on the file. I don’t know if that would be enough to convince a judge or not, but it’s never going to come to that because I can’t afford to sue. I sent a C&D letter—”

  “A what?”

  “A Cease and Desist letter. I told them that it was my design, and they said they’d investigate, but a week later they said they’d found no evidence of wrongdoing. I posted about it on my Tumblr, but half the comments I got said I was probably the thief. The only thing I could do was take my designs down.”

 
“How did Kelly find out about this?”

  “I had to write a paper for Expository Writing last semester, and it was supposed to be about an event that made me emotional. Being royally pissed off is an emotion, right? So I wrote about what had happened. Only, I’m not a great writer, so I brought it here to the Lab to get Kelly to take a look. She was really interested. I guess somebody had plagiarized an article she wrote back in college, but she couldn’t prove it and was still mad about it.”

  “Then what?”

  “She helped me improve the paper, I turned it in, and I got an A.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it for last semester. This semester Kelly e-mailed and asked me to come talk to her. This time she had all kinds of questions about my case—that’s what she called it, my case. She wanted to know if I’d had any other designs stolen, if I was still posting my work online—all kinds of stuff like that.”

  “Did you ask her why?”

  “She said she’d found another victim here at FAD.”

  “Who?”

  “She wouldn’t say. She said it was better if her sources were uncontaminated, which they wouldn’t be if we compared notes.”

  “How did she find the other person?”

  “No idea. All I know is that she was fired up about investigating and was planning to write this big exposé about it. Did you know she hated working here?”

  “I’d heard that.”

  “She figured that if she could break this story, she would get some serious attention and then she could get a reporting job at a newspaper or magazine or maybe at a good blog. She thought this was her big chance.”

  “But why? I mean, I’ve done a little research into this kind of theft, and it looks like this topic has been written about quite a lot. Why did she think her story was going to make a splash?”

  “No idea,” they said again, “but she was spending serious time on it. She wanted to know if I knew any other people who’d had their work stolen, and if they’d be willing to talk to her.”

  “Did you?”

  They shook their head. “I did try to help her, though. She had me going through websites looking to see if any of my other designs had shown up. I found one more for sure, and one maybe. The ‘maybe’ looked a lot like my idea, but it had been tweaked quite a bit, and I think the copy was better than my original, so I don’t know if it counts. Anyway, she said it was corroboration.