The Skeleton Takes a Bow (A Family Skeleton Mystery)

by Leigh Perry

  Sid was one of the few people I’d told about Charles’s unusual living arrangements. Of course Charles must be good at sneaking into buildings. How else would he have managed to squat in colleges all through New England?

  “No, wait,” I said. “Patty Craft’s body wasn’t found until the day after Irwin went missing, so Charles couldn’t have known she was dead and wouldn’t have had a motive.”

  Sid paused, but not for long. “The police seem to think it was a fifty-fifty chance that the death was suicide instead of an accident, right? And she wasn’t found immediately after she died, was she?”

  “That’s what Deborah got from her pal on the force.”

  “So maybe it was suicide, and Charles found the body and a suicide note. But, not wanting his friend’s memory besmirched, he took the note. So there he is, feeling hurt and angry that his friend has killed herself, and he sees the man he blames. For all we know, Irwin could have been mentioned in the note!”

  “By that reasoning, your theoretical note could have blamed George W. Bush!”

  “But Bush wasn’t murdered that very day. Irwin was.”

  “Okay, fine. Even if your murder-in-retribution-for-causing-suicide idea is right—which I’m not saying I think it is—doing something like that doesn’t fit Charles at all. Maybe he’d destroy a suicide note, but he wouldn’t leave his friend’s body alone like that without at least calling in an anonymous tip. It would be . . . unseemly.”

  “‘Unseemly’? That’s your defense of the guy? That he wouldn’t do anything unseemly?”

  “Fine, then. You heard the killer’s voice. Did he sound anything like Charles?”

  “I didn’t hear him that well,” Sid said.

  I just looked at him.

  “Okay, no, he didn’t sound like Charles, but he didn’t sound enough unlike him to rule him out. Who knows what Charles sounds like when he’s angry?”

  “Then who did Charles call to help him hide the body?”

  “No idea. That should be the first line of investigation.”

  “We are not investigating Charles!”

  “You’re that sure he didn’t kill Irwin?”

  “Yes.” But I usually try to be honest with Sid, and I had to say, “Okay, not one hundred percent sure. I suppose anybody could be a killer under the right circumstances. And I can see him confronting Irwin if he really thought he’d caused Patty Craft to commit suicide, but I don’t see him murdering the guy.”

  Sid snapped his finger bones. “I’ve got it! What if Patty Craft was murdered, too?”

  “Oh, come on, Sid. You can’t have Charles killing Irwin to avenge Patty if he killed Patty himself!”

  “But what if Irwin killed her?”

  “Now you’ve lost me.”

  “If Patty Craft’s death was fuzzy enough that the police can’t be sure it was suicide or accident, then how can they be sure it wasn’t murder? Irwin could have played games with her meds so that she took more than she intended to—”

  “Wait, wait. Why would Irwin want to kill her?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he has a hot new girlfriend he’s planning to bring to Pennycross with him, and he didn’t want his old girlfriend hanging around like the ghost at the feast. Maybe he just didn’t like her anymore. What about life insurance? He could still be her beneficiary.” He casually waved any objections away. “Whatever the reason, if he killed Patty and Charles found out, Charles could have confronted him over that and had it escalate to murder. At which point he decided he didn’t want to go to jail because he’d have to wear those tacky orange jumpsuits, so he hid the body. It could be in any of the college buildings where he’s squatted over the years.”

  “I’m not buying any of this,” I said.

  “You’re just mad because I came up with a theory that explains all the facts and you didn’t.”

  “It doesn’t explain anything!”

  “It sure explains why Charles won’t talk about the unsavory thing Patty did.”

  Sid had a point, though I wasn’t willing to tell him that. “Charles is my friend, and I trust him. Are you that desperate to make progress? Or are you jealous of me spending time with him?”

  “Please. Check how many Facebook friends I have and then look at how many you have. If anybody has a reason to be jealous of friendships, it’s you, not me.”

  I managed to resist pointing out that Facebook friends weren’t anything like real friends—since Sid couldn’t really have other real friends, that would have been mean. But I didn’t keep myself from saying, “Then you go investigate all your friends, and leave mine to me.”

  It was not my proudest moment, and I hope Sid felt as bad about some of his retorts as our conversation devolved to early junior high school levels. He finally stomped over to his computer—at least, he tried to, though all he could really manage was really loud clattering—and I went downstairs to work.

  At least I tried to.

  I didn’t want to believe Charles was involved in Robert Irwin’s death, and I kept dismantling all of Sid’s theories in my mind. There was just one thing I couldn’t get around. If Patty Craft’s death was connected to Irwin’s disappearance, and I was sure it was, then the only known link between them was my friend.

  23

  As I’d expected, Madison did venture out of her room at mealtime, but also as expected, none of us were feeling particularly friendly toward one another that night. So we dealt with it in time-honored New England fashion. We acted as if nothing was wrong.

  Over dinner, Madison asked me how my first day teaching at PHS had been, and we shared tidbits about her classmates. Sid recounted an amusing story about a student who’d spent fifteen minutes trying to get his locker unlocked only to realize that he was at the wrong locker. Nobody tried to get out of cleaning the kitchen or taking out the garbage, and we agreed on a show to watch on TV without any argument. In contrast to our feelings toward one another, we all lavished Byron with affection. Well, Madison and I did. Sid did go as far as he ever went with the dog, which is to say that he handed him a pizzle stick every time Byron looked like he might possibly be considering the idea of chewing on any part of Sid.

  It was perfectly polite and perfectly peaceful, and I hated every minute of it. I was pretty sure that Madison and Sid felt the same way as I did, but nobody knew quite how to thaw out the situation. I was fairly sure that as the head of household, more or less, I should be the one to make the first move, and if it had just been me and Madison, I would have. Had it just been me and Sid, we’d have fussed at each other and then gotten over it, as we had many times in the past. The dynamics of the three of us had me flummoxed.

  Fortunately, by Friday morning, things had improved. Nobody came out and apologized, but the tension was definitely loosening up. Our “good mornings” were genuine instead of forced, and Sid joined us for breakfast instead of squeezing in an extra few games on Facebook.

  It didn’t hurt that when Madison was stuffing books into her backpack she pulled out what looked like one of Sid’s bones and said, “I almost forgot. I got this at school.”

  “Sid, I told you to leave the rest of yourself at home,” I said.

  “That’s not mine!” he said.

  “It is now,” Madison said, handing it to him. “One of the dads gave this out Wednesday at career day, and I thought you’d like it.”

  Now that it was closer, I could see it was a bone-shaped ballpoint pen. “Let me guess. Doctor?”

  “Pharmaceutical sales rep,” she said.

  “Cool!” Sid said, twirling it around. “Thanks, kiddo!”

  “You didn’t tell me it was career day,” I said.

  “I forgot.”

  “I could have come to talk to you guys.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Might I remind you that last time you came to a career day, you spent three
-quarters of the time talking about the benefits that adjuncts don’t get?”

  “Oh yeah. That was the week I found out I’d been turned down for tenure.” Technically, one of the weeks. “I could have stuck to the positive aspects of my work.”

  “They already know what a teacher does, Mom. They spend their whole day with teachers.”

  “What about the joys of academic research?”

  “We’re in the middle of science fair projects—how many kids do you think would like the idea of doing research forever?”

  “Good point. And what could be as exciting as being a pharmaceutical sales rep?”

  “I asked Aunt Deborah if she wanted to come, but she had a conflict. I’ll get her next year.”

  “Oh boy,” I said, “Mr. Dahlgren will love it if she teaches all the kids how to pick locks!”

  “Maybe she can get lock picks to hand out,” Sid suggested.

  Madison rolled her eyes at us, but it was definitely an affectionate roll. Any mother of a teenager would know the difference.

  “Come on, Yorick,” she said to Sid. “We’ve got rehearsal this afternoon.”

  She held out the bowling bag, and Sid popped off his skull to put it in, dropped in his right hand, and zipped up the bag with the left.

  That was no more impossible than most of what Sid did, but then the skull-less, one-handed skeleton started walking up the stairs. From the sound of it, he got all the way to the second floor before the rest of his bones fell apart.

  “Hey!” I said. “Since when can you do that?”

  “We’ve been practicing,” Sid said from inside the bag.

  Madison was grinning. “Cool, huh?”

  “Definitely, but Sid, are you sure you want to leave the rest of your bones on the floor with Byron around?”

  The dog had just risen from his favorite spot by the back door and was starting in that direction.

  “Coccyx!” Sid yelled. “Somebody get me out of here!”

  Hilarity ensued, at least for me and Madison, while I grabbed hold of the dog and Madison retrieved Sid’s skull and took it upstairs so he could pull himself back together. Then he ran into the living room, jumped into the armoire, and yelled, “Madison, come get my skull. And keep that fleabag away from me!”

  It was, in other words, a normal morning at the Thackery house.

  My workday was also on the normal side, though not from my lack of trying to do a little investigating.

  First off, I tried to get more out of Sara Weiss, but she had her own fixation. Once my classes were over, I headed to the adjunct office so I could try to ease the subject over toward Irwin, but as soon as I walked in, she said, “Enough is enough! I’m approaching this scientifically.”

  “Approaching what scientifically?”

  “The Sechrest Foundation!” she said, as if it were painfully obvious. “So yes or no: have you received an invitation from them?”

  “No.”

  “Okay.” She turned to her laptop and typed something.

  “Is that a spreadsheet?” I asked.

  She ignored me. “Ray and Esteban told me they were invited, and I saw invites in Andrea’s, Matt’s, and Sunil’s mailboxes. So that’s physics, math, and biology represented. But Audrey was invited, too, and she’s in English, so it’s not limited to the sciences.” She tapped her finger on the desk. “The gender split looks even, and the minority sampling is actually better than McQuaid as a whole. Maybe I should cross-reference with where people got their degrees. Should I tabulate undergraduate, master’s, or doctorates? Or all three?”

  “They’re inviting grad students, so advanced degrees couldn’t be the main criteria.” Okay, I was sucking up—a little—but it was for a good cause.

  “Good point. I only have to track undergraduate degrees. Where did you get yours?”

  I told her, then said, “So, have you heard anything more about that guy you used to know who went missing? Robert something?”

  “He’s still missing,” she said shortly. “Could there be some sort of subtle class-system thing happening? Where people were born, or towns of residence . . . ?”

  I thought about suggesting eye color or shoe size but was afraid she’d take me up on it. Clearly she wasn’t going to talk about Robert Irwin until she’d figured out why the Sechrest Foundation was snubbing her. Given the choice of waiting her out or helping her get it out of her system, I went for the slightly lesser of two evils. “Can I see the list of people who’ve received the invites?”

  “It may not be a complete list,” she said. “Not everybody gets their mail here.”

  I ignored the implicit confession that she looked through other adjuncts’ mail—it was no secret that she spent more research hours on the lives of her fellow faculty members than on biology—and took the intricately formatted report she handed me. At first glance, I didn’t see a pattern, either—she’d tabulated all the most obvious factors. I was actually getting intrigued enough by the problem to suggest that she look at research projects, but realized that would also leave out grad students, most of whom hadn’t had a chance to publish much. In fact, of the people listed that I knew personally, none of them had been in academia long enough to amass publications. They were all fairly young. . . .

  “Age!” I said.

  “What?”

  “Age. Everybody on this list is young.”

  “Ageism? How could I have missed that? I could sue for ageism!” She grabbed the report out of my hand and started going through it. “No, wait. Marie didn’t get invited, and she’s younger than Audrey, who did.”

  “Really? I thought Marie was older. Must be her clothes.” Marie’s style was a lot like Sara’s, come to think of it. “Audrey wears—” I was about to say that she dressed like most of the rest of the faculty but thought Sara might take that amiss. “Then maybe it’s looks. Which is obnoxious, and probably illegal as well.”

  But Sara shook her head. “They sent a letter to Matt.”

  “Ah.” Matt was a nice guy, and a solid scholar, but I could imagine no world in which he would be considered pretty. “Still, all the ones they picked look young, even Matt. That was true with the grad students, too.” Yo’s goth style would have blended in with some of my students at PHS.

  “You may have something there.” She looked me up and down. “That certainly explains why you weren’t invited. Even if you weren’t past their target age, having a teenager adds years to a woman’s age.”

  “Thanks for the self-esteem boost, Sara.”

  “Don’t blame me! I’m not the one who’s only inviting the young-looking ones. Charles’s girlfriend would have fit right in.”

  Great, we were back to Charles’s hypothetical—and probably fictional—relationship with Patty Craft. “I don’t think they were—”

  But before I could finish the sentence, there was an alarm from her computer. She said, “Time to get to class. We can’t all spend the day lounging around the office.” And off she went.

  Since I wasn’t in a lounging mood, I went to my mother’s office to work and also to try to buttonhole Charles to see if I could persuade him to tell me more about Robert Irwin and his nefarious dealings, but he didn’t answer my knocks on his door. Either he was really busy or he was avoiding me. Given Sid’s suspicions, I was really hoping it was the former.

  After a couple of hours of reading freshman papers about the cultural influence of comic books, and not hearing Charles, I packed up to head home. I didn’t get a lot more done there than I had at McQuaid, but it was so much more comfortable to grade homework while sitting on my couch, and nobody was going to catch me when I dozed off over my work. Well, Byron, of course, but since he was curled up next to me, I figured he wouldn’t rat me out.

  24

  I woke up when the front door opened, and tried to rearrange myself so it wasn’t co
mpletely obvious I’d been sawing logs. I was just checking for drool when Madison walked in. With a boy.

  Byron greeted the former with his usual enthusiasm, and the latter with a touch of suspicion. Akitas are protective by nature.

  “Hi, Byron,” Madison said. “This is Tristan. Tristan, this is my dog, Byron.”

  Tristan held out a hand for Byron to sniff and apparently passed inspection.

  “Mom, this is Tristan McDaniel. Tristan, this is my mom.”

  “We’ve already met,” I said, remembering him from my SAT class.

  “Hi, Ms. Thackery.”

  “Hi, Tristan. You’re playing Rosencrantz, right?”

  He nodded awkwardly. He was kind of awkward all over, really. He hadn’t quite grown into his height and had a cowlick that he hadn’t figured out how to disguise with the right haircut, plus bigger feet than any normal person should need. But his eyes were a pretty blue, his smile was nice, and I suspected Madison would have described him to her friends as “totes adorb,” which translated to “totally adorable.”

  “Rehearsal ended early, so we thought we’d practice our lines here, and then work on a biology project,” Madison said. “Didn’t you get my text?”

  “I must have missed it.” I really had been out if the phone’s “you have a text” tone hadn’t woken me. “Why don’t you fix yourselves a snack before you get started? I’ll move upstairs and get out of your way.”

  “Cool,” they said in unison and then beamed at one another.

  They were both totes adorb.

  Madison had casually left Sid’s bowling bag on the floor by the front door, and I just as casually picked it up on my way up the stairs. I was pretty sure Sid realized we had company, but still, I waited until we were all the way up in the attic before unzipping the bag and pulling out his skull.

  “What did you bring me up here for?” he said as I put his skull and hand onto the couch. “You should have put me into the armoire with the rest of me. Don’t you want me to listen in to make sure those two aren’t up to anything?”

  “No, Sid, I do not want you to eavesdrop. Madison and Tristan both know I’m in the house—do you really think they’re going to try anything radical?”