A Skeleton in the Family

by Leigh Perry

  She snorted again. “Why don’t you donate it to JTU?”

  “If I feel like giving a five-thousand-dollar donation, I’ll give it to McQuaid.” After talking to Yo, I’d done some research—Sid was worth at least that much.

  “McQuaid! That idiot Ayers wouldn’t know what to do with a decent specimen if he had it. Look, you’re an adjunct, right? How would you like something better? I’ve got pull here—I’ll get you a real job.”

  “Don’t you have enough skeletons?” I could see several articulated ones hanging in the storage room next door.

  Donald said, “I’m afraid my sister takes the loss of P-A-F-60-1573 personally. She was in charge of inventory when it disappeared.” He sounded a bit smug.

  “It wasn’t my fault the damned thing went missing! It was left hanging in an undergraduate classroom, as if a bunch of undergraduates would know the difference between a real skeleton and a Halloween decoration. Then somebody walked off with it, and I got the blame.”

  “When did that happen?” I asked.

  Donald consulted the file. “It was found to be missing during a routine inventory in early nineteen eighty-two.”

  “What difference does that make?” Mary said.

  “Only that in nineteen eighty-two I was six years old, so I couldn’t possibly know what happened to your short Asian woman.” I went around her, and started putting Sid’s bones back into the suitcase. I could tell from her face that she wanted to stop me, but we both knew she had no legal leg—or femur—to stand on. Still, I think she’d have tried to argue the point if her brother hadn’t pulled her aside. They muttered together while I made sure I’d retrieved all of Sid’s parts.

  Before I left, Donald was polite enough to say, “Thank you for your time, and please let us know if you change your mind.” I didn’t even get a good-bye snort from Mary.

  I managed to keep from running out of the building, but I didn’t really breathe easily until I had Sid back in my van with the door locked.

  “I’m taking you home right now!” I said to the closed suitcase, and for once, he didn’t argue with me.

  36

  Madison wasn’t home from school yet, so Sid and I sat in the living room. He could jump into the armoire if we were suddenly interrupted. I’d skipped lunch to make the trip to JTU, so I was eating an apple while we talked.

  “Did you recognize either of them?” I asked Sid.

  He hesitated long enough that I knew the answer before he spoke. “No, not really.”

  “Crap. Then that was another waste of time.”

  “Not completely. Now we know for sure that I’m definitely not Patty.”

  “Who?”

  “It’s easier to say Patty than to say P-A-F-60-1573.”

  “Are we personifying much?”

  “Me, personifying a skeleton? Why would I do that?”

  “Good point.”

  “Anyway, whoever I am—or was—it’s not the woman in JTU’s records.”

  “Agreed. So unless we want to postulate the use of that same code-number format in another collection—only meaning something completely different, or some sort of clerical error—then somebody intentionally gave you the same code number as Patty.”

  “Who is missing.”

  “Well, yeah. You’re here.”

  “But where’s the original Patty?”

  “Maybe she came to life, too?”

  “Unlikely. And yes, I know I’m the last one in the world who should be talking about unlikely events.”

  “I didn’t say anything,” I said, taking another bite of apple. “According to the doctors Kirkland, Patty went missing in nineteen eighty-two, which is around the time you were sold to the carnival.”

  “So picture this. Fall nineteen eighty-one, and I’m hanging unnoticed in the back of a classroom. Some exuberant Theta Chi members, perhaps led by Rich Kirkland, run off with me to use as a Halloween decoration. I turn out to be the life of the party.”

  “So to speak.”

  “In fact, I’m so popular that they decide to keep me. But then the annual inventory takes place, and Rich learns—perhaps through his mother or siblings—that his theft has been detected. He’s afraid somebody will find me in the frat house and trace me back to him, so he and his buddies sell me to the carnival.”

  “But that doesn’t answer the question of where Patty went. Let me take a run at that one. I’ve got a skeleton I want to conceal, and I decide the best way to do that is by hiding it in plain sight.”

  “The purloined-letter approach.”

  “Exactly. So I put a fraudulent ID number on my skeleton, and stick it in the back of a classroom where it gathers dust until the frat-boy brigade shows up.”

  “And the real Patty?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe she ended up in a carnival, too. Maybe she was sold to some other collection somewhere or hidden in an attic. Maybe she was destroyed. As long as there is a Patty, there’s a good chance nobody will notice it’s the wrong Patty.”

  “Which means that I’m the skeleton that somebody wanted to hide.”

  “A murdered skeleton,” I reminded him. “Whoever it was wasn’t just trying to hide a skeleton—he or she was hiding a body.”

  “Which is creepy.”

  “No, the creepy part is that it had to have been somebody at JTU who substituted you for Patty.”

  “And that same person probably killed me?”

  I nodded. “I’m starting to think that the only way we’re going to figure out who you were is to find out who killed you.”

  “But how can we find out who killed me without knowing who I was?”

  “Catch-twenty-two,” I said. “Not to mention the fact that we don’t know what to do next either.”

  “What about the Kirklands?”

  “What about them?”

  “Isn’t it suspicious that they were that intent on keeping me?”

  “You think one of them was your killer?”

  “Either one would have known how to denude my bones and articulate me. Plus they’d have had the best opportunity to put me in that classroom.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “What about their mother? She could have done it, and they could be trying to cover up her crime.”

  “Don’t forget their financial-planning brother. They might have been doing his dirty work.”

  “Yeah, but he ran off with the skeleton and sold it to a carnival.”

  “Great way to disassociate it from JTU, wasn’t it? Until I woke up, that is. They probably didn’t plan for that.”

  “The problem is, anybody who was at JTU back then could be involved, or at least the people in the right departments. That doesn’t help us figure out who you were.” I rubbed my forehead as if trying to coax some coherent thought out of it. “Maybe we’ve been going about this the wrong way.”

  “Since we haven’t solved anything, I think that’s a fair assessment.”

  I stuck my tongue out at him because I knew he couldn’t return the favor. “We’ve been trying to figure out why you were murdered, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Maybe there’s no murder to be found.”

  “I didn’t get this figure from over-dieting.”

  “No, you got it because somebody went to an awful lot of trouble to make you into a skeleton. Denuding a skeleton isn’t easy, not to mention articulating you the way you used to be.”

  “I like to think that I’m still quite articulate.”

  “That’s true—you do think that.” Before he could parse out the insult, I said, “Given that we’re talking about hours of tough, messy work, the question is: Why would somebody do that?”

  “To hide a body, obviously,” Sid said.

  “And why would somebody want to hide a body?”

  “I g
et it. The killer made me a skeleton to hide me so that nobody would know I was dead. It’s not a thirty-year-old murder case we should be trying to solve—it’s a thirty-year-old missing-person case!”

  We high-fived—gently, because of past experiences—and the warm glow of my brilliant epiphany lasted for about twenty seconds. That’s how long it was before Sid said, “How does that help?”

  “I’m not sure,” I admitted, “but let’s think about it. You were in your twenties when you died, and Dr. Kirkland was a college professor. We’ve been assuming you were a college student. Shall we stick with that?”

  “As a working hypothesis? Sure. I am obviously well educated.”

  “Obviously. Going a step further, we can assume you were a college student at JTU, since your skeleton was hanging there. So we need to check out students who went missing from JTU in nineteen eighty-one or eighty-two.”

  “But we don’t know how long I’d been hanging around in JTU when I was stolen.”

  “True. But we know you were modern, and your knowledge of current events didn’t seem that far off when you woke up. Let’s make the date part of the working hypothesis.”

  “I just want to make sure the working hypothesis works.”

  I heard Madison at the door, and Sid headed for his armoire. Homework, dinner prep, and laundry filled up the rest of the evening. Figuring Sid wouldn’t want to stay cooped up all night, I made sure to give him plenty of chances to get up to the attic unseen, but he didn’t take advantage of them. I had a strong suspicion that he wanted to be around my daughter and me, or at least in the same room, and I didn’t blame him. I didn’t want to be alone that night, either.

  The problem was my training in literary criticism. When you read a novel or short story, you assume that there are links between the various elements of the plot and deeper meanings to every event. So I kept seeing connections in everything that had been going on since Sid had recognized Dr. Kirkland: her murder, the break-in at the adjunct office, the attack on Charles, the intruder snooping around Kirkland’s office the same night that Sid had tried to do the same.

  But did it really make sense to link Sid’s death thirty years ago to Dr. Kirkland’s murder, when the police seemed satisfied it was a simple break-in? Did the break-in at McQuaid have anything to do with the person searching Dr. Kirkland’s office? We couldn’t even be sure that it had been an intruder Sid had dodged—it could have been one of the dead woman’s kids or somebody in the Anthropology Department.

  How could I know which events were coincidence and which were really related to Sid? The only way to know for sure was to keep going and hope that we wouldn’t get into trouble.

  It took me a long time to get to sleep because I kept trying to make sense of it all, but even then, I slept better than I would the next night.

  Between classes, student meetings, and grading papers, I stayed busy all of Wednesday. I barely got a chance to take a breath until I was driving home. That one breath was about all I got, too. I was about a block from home when I felt my phone vibrate to let me know I had a text waiting—I’d forgotten to turn the ringer back on after class. I figured it could wait another minute.

  That’s when I saw the police cars in front of my house.

  37

  There may be something that would panic me more than finding a police car parked in front of my house, but I didn’t take time to figure out what. Instead I was out of the van and running for the front door without any memory of actually turning into the driveway, parking, or turning off the engine. I found out later that I’d left the key in the ignition.

  The front door was unlocked, and to my indescribable relief, the first thing I saw when I burst in was Madison sitting on the couch with a police officer in the chair next to her. My daughter was up in a second to grab me into a bear hug.

  “Are you okay? What happened? Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine, Mom,” she said, but I could tell from her voice that tears were just below the surface. “Somebody broke into the house.”

  “What?” I looked over her head at the officer.

  “Mrs. Thackery?”

  “Ms.,” I said automatically.

  “I’m Officer Louis Raymond. Your daughter is fine, and I want you to know that you should be very proud of her. She did the exact right thing. When she realized something was wrong, she left the house immediately, called 911, and went to the convenience store down the street. She was never in any danger. You’ve got a very smart girl there.”

  “I texted you, too,” Madison said.

  “My phone was off,” I explained. “Did you catch him? Them? The one who broke in?”

  He shook his head. “We suspect the perps heard her arrive and escaped out the back door. We found it ajar, and marks show that it was the point of entry. You’ll want to get that lock repaired.”

  “At least we know a good locksmith,” Madison said with a pathetic excuse for a grin.

  Officer Raymond said, “Two other officers are canvassing the neighbors to see if they saw anything. In the meantime, do you think you could go through the house to see if anything was taken?”

  “Of course.” I thought about leaving Madison downstairs, but she grabbed on to my hand, so we all went through the house together. Though I was still mostly concerned about Madison, I couldn’t help worrying about what might have been stolen. I was supposed to be keeping an eye on my parents’ house, after all. I needn’t have worried. We couldn’t find anything missing.

  The burglar or burglars must have started on the second floor. They’d opened every bedroom closet, the linen closet, and even the cedar chest filled with winter blankets in the hall. But the TV in my parents’ room and Madison’s computer and stereo were still in place.

  “I don’t see a jewelry box,” Officer Raymond said, and I explained that my mother had left hers with Deborah for safekeeping before she left on sabbatical, while living in sketchy neighborhoods had trained me to keep my few valuable pieces nestled among the towels. Everything was where it was supposed to be.

  The door to the attic was still locked, and I used that as an excuse not to take Madison or Officer Raymond up there. My brain was still too frozen to come up with a reasonable explanation for Sid’s living arrangements, even if he were hiding. For the first time I wondered if he was okay.

  I tapped gently at the attic door, trying to make it look like I was just drumming my fingers nervously, but there was no response.

  We moved on to the first floor, but since nothing showed obvious signs of searching, apparently the burglar hadn’t had time to do anything down there. The widescreen TV that had been my mother’s sixtieth birthday gift to herself hadn’t been touched, and that was the most valuable item visible.

  “It looks like you were lucky again,” Officer Raymond said. “Your daughter must have arrived while they were still scoping out the property.”

  “Do they usually pick and choose that way?” Madison asked.

  He shrugged. “Sometimes it’s a quick smash-and-grab, sometimes they’re more particular.”

  We sat down at the kitchen table and Officer Raymond asked about who owned the house and how long Madison and I had been in residence. We’d just finished our explanations when Deborah showed up—a neighbor had alerted her to the police presence—so we repeated the story for her. I could tell how worried she was when she immediately went back out to her truck to get what she needed to install a new lock on the back door, plus an alarmingly large deadbolt.

  “When the hell are you going to catch these guys, Louis?” she asked Officer Raymond. “This is, what, the eleventh house they’ve hit? Not to mention that old lady they killed.”

  I could have kicked her, because Madison went as white as a sheet.

  “You mean the ones who killed that woman were in the house?” she stammered.

  “There’s no way o
f knowing it was the same people,” Officer Raymond said soothingly.

  “Don’t give me that crap!” Deborah said. “You really think we have two burglary rings in Pennycross?”

  Officer Raymond sighed. “Hold it down, Deb. You’re scaring your niece.”

  “Do your job and she’ll have nothing to be scared of!”

  Now he was mad. “You could do some work of your own around here.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “This is your folks’ house, right? Why didn’t you put an alarm system in here? If your sister hadn’t moved in, this house would have been left unoccupied for months, which is like an engraved invitation for lowlifes. In fact, I bet the burglars—who may or may not be responsible for other break-ins in the area—thought it was still vacant. So why no alarm?”

  Deborah glared at me as if it were my fault, when we both knew why Mom and Phil had never wanted an alarm. Sid was always around. “My parents didn’t want me to go to any trouble,” she finally said.

  “They might think differently now.”

  “Fine. I’ll install a system tomorrow.”

  “Good.” He turned back to Madison and softened his voice. “Young lady, I don’t think you’ve got anything to worry about. The burglars aren’t likely to come back here now that they know the house is occupied, and your aunt is going to have it as safe as Fort Knox by tomorrow.”

  I know he meant well, but Madison didn’t look overly comforted, for which I didn’t blame her.

  The other police officers knocked at the door, and the three of them conferred while I made hot chocolate for everybody. Hot chocolate always makes Madison feel better, and I had a crazy image of throwing a steaming cup of mocha into the face of anybody who tried to break into the house. Crazy, but satisfying.

  I really didn’t like the idea of some stranger loose in my house—despite having lived in some borderline neighborhoods, I’d never been broken into before. It made me want to wash everything the burglars might have touched, or at least spray some Febreze around.