by Leigh Perry
“Of course, that would also require a fee. Of sorts.” He waggled his eyebrows, presumably going for lascivious.
“What kind of fee?”
“I’m sure we can work something out.” He reached into his pocket for his cell phone. “Give me the name, and I’ll call my friend.”
“Allen Reece: A-L-L-E-N R-E-E-C-E. Or possibly A-L-A-N. He was a sophomore in nineteen eighty, but I don’t know if he actually graduated.”
Fletcher called his friend, and the friend promised to have something to him that afternoon.
“You’re amazing,” I said.
“Reporters like to trade favors. He does this, and I give him a heads-up on something sometime.” Then, ever so casually, he said, “So what’s the story on this Allen Reece guy? Anything for me?”
“No wonder you were willing to lend a hand.” Before he could insist that he’d done so purely for the pleasure of helping me, I said, “There’s no story, just curiosity. If that changes, I’ll let you know.”
“Fair enough.”
By then it was time to leave for lunch, and he escorted me to his car to drive us to the River Inn, the nicest place in town. It’s not gourmet dining by Boston or New York standards, but it’s got staid New England charm, wonderful food, and enormous portions. The Yankee pot roast and sweet potatoes smelled too good to pass up, and I figured I could take the leftovers home. I would have, too, if there’d been any.
“How are you enjoying crime reporting?” I asked Fletcher.
“It’s a lot more exciting than soccer tourneys,” he said. “Catching the murderers was really satisfying—the cops were high-fiving everybody in sight. There aren’t that many murders in Pennycross, and they were afraid they’d blow it.”
“Are they sure the burglars killed that woman?”
“No doubt about it. The guys haven’t confessed to it, mind you—they’re saying they didn’t go near her house.”
“Isn’t it odd that they broke into a place with a burglar alarm? I thought their M.O. was to target places without security systems.”
“How did you know Kirkland had an alarm?”
Oops. “Read it in the paper, I guess.”
“Not in any of my articles.”
“Maybe on TV?”
He looked a touch perturbed, but went on. “The guys’ lawyer is saying the same thing, but nobody buys it.”
I felt kind of bad for the burglars. They were thieves, but they weren’t murderers. I just didn’t know how I could convince the police of that without bringing Sid into the conversation. Hopefully their lawyer was good enough to make a case for them—even if they were thieves, there wouldn’t be any evidence tying them to Kirkland’s house.
Fletcher said, “I don’t know if you want to tell Madison this, but it’s possible that these guys weren’t the ones who broke into your house. They had an alibi for that afternoon—they were installing a system at a house across town, and the homeowner was with them the whole time.”
“The police did speculate that it might be somebody who thought the house was empty. We’ll stay on guard, just in case.”
“And if you should feel the need for a man around the house . . .”
I tried not to make a face. I’d received so many similar offers in the past, men thinking that because I was a single mother surely I needed a big, strong man to protect me. Instead I just said, “I’ll keep that in mind.”
Conversation wandered down other paths, and we had such a nice time that I really regretted having to say, “This has been lovely, but I’ve got classes to teach.”
“Can’t you blow them off?” Fletcher coaxed. “We could go over to my place for a while. . . .”
I smiled, though honestly I thought that was a bit pushy. We hadn’t been dating that long yet. “I can’t. If I don’t show, I don’t get paid.”
He took it gracefully enough, and admitted he had some work he needed to do at the Gazette. So he drove me back to McQuaid, and I thanked him for our lunch with what I judged to be one of my better kisses. Since he repeated his suggestion about indulging in afternoon delight, I daresay he agreed, but I turned him down again.
Two dreary sessions of English comp later, I was wishing I’d taken Fletcher up on his offer. Students argued with the corrections I’d made on their work and disputed my description of what they were supposed to have turned in. One indignant student stridently insisted that he’d e-mailed me his essay on time and it had to be my fault that I hadn’t received it.
Feeling more than a little aggravated, I stayed in the classroom long enough to boot up my laptop and check my e-mail while the student watched. No paper. I felt that after then looking in my spam filter and scanning every file on my computer, I could authoritatively say I’d never received his paper, but then he had to pull out his laptop to prove that he’d sent it. Except that he’d sent it to the wrong e-mail address, which he should have realized—I always send a confirmation that I’ve received an essay via e-mail.
A tussle ensued. He asserted that since he’d finished and e-mailed the essay a whole ten minutes before the deadline, he should get full credit. I reminded him that the rule was that a paper had to be received on time. I agreed to accept the essay if he sent it to me on the spot, and he agreed to accept an automatic ten-point deduction to his score.
When I checked to make sure the essay had actually arrived in my e-mail box, I found a note from Fletcher’s friend at the North Ashfield Times. If I could give him a fax number, he’d send over the information he’d found, but he was leaving the office at five o’clock.
I checked my watch. Four forty. If I ran for it, I had just enough time to get to my parents’ office, with their personal fax machine. I got there at four forty-eight, called the Times reporter, and breathlessly gave him the fax number. A minute later, pages started churning out, and I sat down to read them.
Then I read them again.
I was convinced.
Sid was Allen Reece.
45
Technically, it was more correct to say that Sid had been Allen Reece, and while I was convinced of it, I wasn’t sure Sid would be. I needed more than the bare facts from the newspaper articles and police reports Fletcher’s friend had sent me.
One of the people interviewed had been Allen’s roommate Edward Vinton. I realized that name sounded familiar, so I checked Sid’s database of possibilities and, sure enough, Edward was on the list. Even better, there was contact information for him, including a phone number. He’d become a Realtor and had an office just outside San Francisco. It was after five by that point, but not in California. Maybe I could catch him at work.
First I called Deborah and asked if she’d pick up Madison from the house and feed her dinner. I wasn’t sure how long the call would take, and I didn’t want Madison worried after last week’s scare. If I thought she’d have done it, I’d have asked Deborah to tell Sid what was going on, too, but I knew that would never happen.
Before dialing, I spent a few minutes devising a cover story, hoping that at last I had a convincing one.
“Hello, Vinton Realty.”
“May I speak to Edward Vinton, please?”
“Speaking.”
“Hi. This is Grace Taylor. I’m a student at McQuaid University.”
“Always glad to hear from the alma mater. Unless you’re asking for money, that is.” He chuckled.
I chuckled back. “Actually, I’m working on an assignment for my journalism class. My teacher, Mr. Fletcher, dug up some old news stories, and told us to cover them as if they had just happened. I ended up with one about Allen Reece’s disappearance.”
“Wow. Allen Reece. That’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time. That goes back to, what, nineteen seventy-nine?”
“Nineteen eighty,” I corrected him. “That’s the last time anybody saw him, anyway. Most of my cl
assmates are just using the previously published accounts and police reports for their source material, but I thought I’d get a better story—and a better grade—if I dug deeper. That’s why I’m calling you.”
“There isn’t any new information about Allen, is there?”
“Not that I’ve been able to find.” That was a lie, but it was considerably more believable than the truth. “Do you mind if I ask you some questions about the case?”
“Sure, why not? I had some crazy homework assignments back in the day, too.”
“Great. According to the information I have, Allen was a junior in computer science, and he disappeared over Christmas break, but the investigation didn’t start until January.”
“That’s right.”
“Why didn’t his family report him missing?”
“He didn’t have a family—his parents and his baby sister had died in a fire the year before. Allen was away at school at the time.”
“That’s awful.”
“Yeah. The sister was only six years old.”
Six years old. The same age I’d been when I’d found Sid.
I went on. “So he’d been planning to go home for Christmas with his girlfriend, only they had a fight the week before, and he decided not to go.”
“What happened is, he caught her with another guy. I asked him to come home with me instead, but he said he needed some time alone. He was thinking of going skiing or something. I left a couple of days before the end of term and told Allen to call if he changed his mind, but he never did.”
“The last day of the term, Allen attended all of his classes, but that was the last anybody saw of him.”
“Yeah. When I got back to school after the first of the year, there was no sign of him. I thought he might still be licking his wounds, so I didn’t tell anybody at first, but after a week, I told our RA, and he called the cops.”
“I understand that his suitcase and some of his clothes were gone from your room.”
“Right. The cops figured he’d taken off and would show up again eventually. When he didn’t, they looked at the whole picture: unfaithful girlfriend, Christmas alone, still mourning his family. It looked like suicide.”
According to what I’d read, the cops had fully expected to find a dead body out in the woods, probably during the next hunting season. When no body was ever found, the assumption was that Allen had killed himself elsewhere. With no family around to push the case, the disappearance had eventually been forgotten.
“Do you think it was suicide?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I guess you never really know what’s in another guy’s head, but I wouldn’t have expected Allen to kill himself. I knew he’d lost his family, but he was seeing a counselor down at Student Services to help him deal. He was keeping his grades up, and he wasn’t worried about money because of insurance, and he had an internship to help with tuition. I thought he was doing okay, or as okay as anybody could be in that situation. I swear I would never have left him alone if I’d thought that would happen.”
“What about the breakup with his girlfriend?”
“If everybody who’d ever been cheated on committed suicide, there’d be nobody left. I don’t think Allen was that serious about Corrie anyway—obviously she wasn’t serious about him.”
“Corrie?” The name hadn’t been in the Times.
“Corrie Melville was the girl. They’d only been dating a few months, and I could have told him it wouldn’t last. She had her eye on another guy and only started dating Allen to make him jealous. It worked—she just forgot to tell Allen about it. I hear she even married the second guy, so I guess she really was serious about him.”
“Was Corrie upset about Allen’s disappearance? Did she blame herself?”
“Not so you’d notice. Mostly she was mad because everybody on campus found out about how she’d treated Allen, but the next week there was something else to gossip about.”
“If Allen didn’t kill himself, what do you think happened?”
“I kind of hoped he just ran off, maybe joined a circus or hitchhiked around Europe, and he’d show up someday with great stories, but I never heard from him again. Of course, I transferred schools the next year myself, but as far as I know, he never came back. So I guess he’s dead after all.” He paused, and had to clear his throat before saying, “Is there anything else I can tell you?”
“I was wondering . . . What was Allen like?”
His voice warmed, and I could tell he was smiling. “He was a great guy. Funny, too. It didn’t show all the time because of what he’d been through, but you could see the real him now and then. Liked to watch Monty Python and the Marx Brothers, stuff like that. He didn’t have a lot of friends—he’d just transferred to McQuaid after the fire—but he was the kind of guy who’d do anything for you. I’d only been rooming with him since September, but I didn’t hesitate to ask him to spend the holidays with the family.”
After that, I was completely convinced, and that was before what came next. “One other thing: You mentioned Allen’s internship. Was that through the computer science department?”
“I think so, but he wasn’t actually working with anybody in computer science. He was doing something for an archaeologist or paleontologist, something like that.”
“The police reports mentioned a Dr. Jocasta Kirkland,” I said, which was a flat-out lie—Kirkland’s name hadn’t shown up at all.
“That sounds right,” Vinton said.
I’d have cheered if Vinton hadn’t still been on the phone. After all the time and effort, I’d finally linked Sid to Dr. Kirkland. I restrained myself long enough for the requisite amount of politeness, then hung up.
I was about to shut down and zoom home to share the news with Sid when I remembered one thing that had rung a bell as I spoke to Vinton, something about Allen’s unfaithful girlfriend. I went to the online yearbook and found her picture. Corrie was pretty enough. Maybe her hair was a little over-sprayed, but not too bad. It was just that she looked familiar. Where had I seen her before?
I found the JTU alumni site, and searched for her name. “Here we go,” I said to myself. “Maiden name: Corrina Melville. Married name: Corrina Melville Kirkland.”
Corrie was Corrina, Dr. Kirkland’s daughter-in-law, the woman who’d snubbed me at the memorial service. She’d dumped Allen for Dr. Kirkland’s son Rich.
46
After that I shut down my laptop and packed it away, then locked up and headed for my van, but I did so purely on autopilot. Too many ideas were running through my head for me to pay any attention to what I was doing. I’d set out to find out who Sid was—had I found out who’d killed him as well? Or at least why?
The killer could have been Rich, getting rid of a romantic rival. Or maybe Allen had confronted Corrina about her infidelity, things got out of hand, and she accidentally killed him. In either case, once Allen was dead, Rich could have gotten rid of the body. Making it into a skeleton would have been easy with his access to his mother’s lab. Then he could have sold it to the carnival to muddy the waters still further.
Or maybe one or both of the twins had taken on the gory job to protect their little brother. That would explain why they’d been so intent on getting Sid back. Unless one of the twins had been the killer instead—I didn’t have a motive, but that didn’t mean there hadn’t been one. Maybe Mary had a crush on Allen and become angry when rebuffed. Ditto for Donald—neither of them were married, so I had no idea what their orientations were.
Any of the Kirkland siblings or Corrina could have broken into my house to try to get the skeletal evidence back. But what about Jocasta Kirkland? What reason would any of them have had for killing her? How could that murder be tied to Allen’s death? Could it have been a coincidence?
I realized I was at the house and parked in the driveway despite having no clear memory of mak
ing the trip, so I grabbed my stuff and went inside. Then I stopped. The alarm system hadn’t beeped when I opened the door. A quick look at the control panel showed that it wasn’t armed. I’d have to talk to Madison about that, especially since Byron wasn’t on duty either. I’d asked Deborah to take him along, since I hadn’t been sure how long I’d be. That was all to the good. I wouldn’t have to find some way to distract him while I spoke to Sid—we’d run out of rawhide sticks.
“Sid, it’s me!” I called out. There was no response, so I assumed he was still sulking. I tapped on the armoire in case he was in there, but he didn’t tap back. Next I checked my parents’ office. He wasn’t in there, either. “Sid, come on down! I’ve got something to tell you.”
When he didn’t reply, I started for the attic, lugging my laptop. The attic door was unlocked, which I took as an invitation.
Sid wasn’t up there. I looked around, but there was nowhere to hide, not even for a skeleton.
“Sid?” I said, going back to the second floor. I went through all the bedrooms, even opening closet doors in an echo of our burglar the previous week. No Sid.
Back downstairs, I went to the armoire and opened it. No Sid. Then I went through every room, even the basement.
“Sid! Where are you?” But I knew he wasn’t there. An empty house has a kind of hollow feel, but I’d never expected to feel it there. I don’t think I’d been completely alone in that house since I was six years old and Sid came to stay with us.
Sid was gone.
47
Sid was missing, and I had no idea where he’d gone or how he’d gotten there.
Okay, Sid wouldn’t have just walked out. He wouldn’t have risked exposing us that way. That gave me an idea, and I went back to the attic. Sid’s bacon-patterned rolling bag was missing, too. So somebody had carried him out, somebody who knew about that bag.
I yanked my cell phone out of my pocket and dialed. “Deborah? Sid’s gone.”
“Hallelujah! It’s about time you got rid of him.”