The Skeleton Stuffs a Stocking

by Leigh Perry

  Sid looked solemn, and his tone reflected that. “I’m sorry, I know this isn’t what you want to hear, but a body has been found that we think is Annabelle Mitchell.”

  “Oh,” she said in a small voice. “I guess I knew she was dead. I mean, why else would she disappear the way she did?”

  “Can you tell me about her?” Sid said gently. “There’s not a lot of information on your Facebook page.” When she didn’t answer right away, he said, “Maybe it would be better if we spoke another night.”

  “No, I’d like to talk about her. I’ve been trying to get people to listen for years.” I heard her blow her nose. “I met Annabelle during my freshman year. She was the custodian for my dorm. At first, I didn’t notice her much. Kids can be self-centered, and as long as the place was clean, I never thought about who did the cleaning. I found out later that even though I didn’t pay any attention to her, she was paying attention to me.

  “About a month into the semester, I got the worst case of homesickness you can imagine. I hadn’t made many friends on campus, and I was missing my girlfriend and my family and my dog so bad it hurt. I got so depressed that I didn’t leave my room for three days straight other than to go to the bathroom. I didn’t eat or bathe or even get dressed. I figured nobody cared about me anyway, so why bother?”

  “That sounds awful,” Sid said. Given his situation, he’d never been away from home without me, so I think Lauri’s experiences horrified him that much more.

  “One afternoon, there was a knock on my door. I yelled for whoever it was to go away, but when she kept knocking, I finally opened the door, and there was Annabelle with a pizza, a salad, and a bottle of soda. In fact, it was a pepperoni and pineapple pizza, a salad with creamy Italian dressing, and Diet Dr Pepper. All my favorites.

  “She said, ‘I thought you could use something to eat,’ and I just started bawling. She hugged me, even though I must have smelled terrible, and stayed with me until I stopped crying and ate half the pizza and most of the salad. We talked and talked and talked. Well, I talked. Annabelle just listened. Afterward I felt so much better. It wasn’t until she’d pulled some chocolate chip cookies out of a bag and apologized for not knowing what kind I liked that I even thought to ask how she’d known what to bring me.

  “It turned out that she’d seen what trash I dumped in the can outside my door, and when she realized I hadn’t left the room for so long, she decided to bring me food. Here I didn’t even know her name, but she knew what kind of pizza I liked. Can you imagine?”

  “She sounds special,” Sid said, his voice choked up. He’s a sentimental guy, and I had no doubt that he’d have had tears in his eyes if he’d had either eyes or a mechanism for creating tears.

  “Anyway, I started finding my footing on campus after that, and even though I still got homesick, I was never that miserable again. Plus Annabelle checked on me regularly. I found out I wasn’t the first student she’d helped, not by a long shot. Cupcakes for birthdays, tissues and chocolate for breakups, chicken soup for colds. She was the best. Until one day in my junior year, she disappeared.”

  “This was around Thanksgiving?” Sid asked.

  “I guess, but I don’t know exactly when. I’d been back from Thanksgiving break for about a week when I noticed a different custodian on our floor and asked where Annabelle was. The new custodian didn’t want to talk about it, and neither did the head of the department, so it took me a while to find out that nobody knew where she was. That’s when I went to the police to fill out a missing person report. Annabelle didn’t have any family, so there was nobody else to do it.”

  “And the police didn’t have any luck finding her?”

  “I don’t think they even tried,” she said indignantly. “First the cops in Pennycross said I had to go to West Litchfield because that’s where she lived. Then some West Litchfield cops came to the dorm and asked a bunch of us questions about Annabelle, and then they spoke to her boss and coworkers. But they never came back again, and as far as I know, neither police department did anything else. I got the local paper to print a story about it, hoping it would generate some leads, but as far as I know, that didn’t do anything either. That’s when I decided to create the Facebook group.”

  “I went through the posts—” Sid started to say.

  “I’m sorry you wasted your time,” Biegler said. “Nothing useful ever came out of it. At first it was ‘thoughts and prayers’ posts and a couple of psychics who wanted me to pay them to investigate. After a while, it was just people posting links to their missing person pages. I don’t know why I kept it up, but every time I started to take it down, I’d think that maybe, maybe…” She blew her nose again. “I guess it was a good thing I stuck with it since it’s how you found me.”

  Sid looked at me as if to ask what he should say next, and I shrugged, letting him know I didn’t have any ideas. He said, “Ms. Biegler, here’s the situation. The body I mentioned earlier was found in Pennycross. There was no ID found, but I have reason to believe it was Annabelle Mitchell.”

  “Has she been dead all this time?”

  “It looks as if she died no more than a month after you last saw her.”

  “How did she die?”

  “I’m not sure the police have issued a report yet,” Sid said. I knew he just couldn’t bring himself to tell Lauri that Annabelle had been strangled. “The police also don’t know who she is.”

  “How did you find out?”

  “I can’t tell you,” Sid said. “Two people have given me confidential information, and I’m trying to keep them out of this. But you might appreciate knowing that she met somebody during that last month, somebody she cared for deeply and who cared for her, too.”

  “Really? You’re not just trying to make me feel better?”

  “Really. Now I’m going to ask you a favor. I haven’t spoken to the police, and don’t want to quite yet. Are you comfortable with that?”

  “You bet I am! They never cared about Annabelle. I found out what would be necessary to ID her body if they had to, and I told the police they should grab her hairbrush or her toothbrush or her um…dirty underwear to save so they could have something to compare DNA with in case they found, you know, a body. But they just blew me off.”

  “Maybe they were planning to use dental or medical records.”

  “For that, they’d have to get permission from next of kin, and Annabelle told me she didn’t have any family.”

  Biegler had really done her research. I was impressed. I was also wondering how we’d be able to link the body to Annabelle Mitchell without bringing either Charles or Sue Weedon into it. Even if I sent the police my anonymous tip, how could they establish it was Annabelle we’d found?

  Biegler said, “What are you going to do next?”

  “It’s a long shot, but I’m going to try to figure out what happened to Annabelle.”

  “You mean who killed her?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “Art, you are the first person to give a single hoot about what happened to Annabelle in all these years. Even the other people she took care of at Bostock have forgotten about her. So you go ahead and keep those secrets for those other people. I won’t tell a soul, other than my wife.”

  “Thank you, Lauri. I’ll let you know when we know more. And don’t take down the Facebook page yet. Just in case.”

  “I won’t.”

  Sid hung up.

  “Why did you want her to keep the page up?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure—it just seems like the killer might be following it out of guilt or caution. Taking it down might alert them that something is up.”

  “Then you don’t think Lauri killed Annabelle?”

  “Do you?”

  “Anything’s theoretically possible, but no, I don’t think so.”

  “Me either. Unfortunately, that leaves us without any suspects.”

  “We just found out Annabell
e’s real name this afternoon,” I pointed out.

  “True.” Sid steepled his hands. “Given what we’ve heard today, what do we know?”

  “We know Charles has great taste in women. Annabelle must have been a sweetheart. Also observant, to realize that Lauri was hurting and what would cheer her up. She sounds like a good worker, too.”

  “But the college didn’t make much of a fuss about her disappearing. Never having been in the work force, I don’t know how it’s usually done, but it seems as if they should have taken notice.”

  “You’re right, that is odd,” I said. “I mean, I don’t know that anyplace I’ve worked would freak out about an adjunct disappearing, but according to what Lauri said, Annabelle had worked at Bostock for at least a couple of years.”

  “That’s something to check into,” Sid said. He caught me yawning, then looked at the clock. “Coccyx, Georgia, it’s late. You go to bed and let me putter around and see what I can find.”

  I would have argued the point with him, but I couldn’t get a sentence out before I started yawning again, so I left him clattering away on his computer. I didn’t envy Sid much of his lifestyle, but sometimes I wished I could get back some of the time I spent asleep.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Bostock had scheduled a meeting for all adjunct faculty at lunchtime on Tuesday, and thanks to my missing one shuttle and having to wait for another, I just barely made it on time. I would have been stuck in the nosebleed section at the back of the tiered lecture hall had Charles not been saving me a spot. When I made it to the third row and slid into my seat, I was surprised to find that Brownie was there, too, sitting on the other side of me from Charles. After an awkward pause, at least on my part, we collided for an even more awkward kiss on the cheek.

  I gratefully turned to Charles. “Thanks for saving me a seat. How are you doing?”

  He smiled faintly. “I’m fine, thank you.”

  I didn’t believe him, but a packed lecture hall wasn’t the place for a personal conversation.

  “As for you, Dr. Mannix, I don’t want you to think that I’m not glad to see you, but what are you doing at Bostock?”

  “I was supposed to meet Charles for lunch, but he got his schedule confused, so when I showed up and he said he had to come to this meeting, I talked him into bringing me along.”

  “Really?” I said, when what I was thinking was more along the lines of What the patella? For Charles to forget a lunch engagement was shocking, and I was glad I’d already planned to check on him.

  Brownie kept going as if Charles forgot lunch dates all the time. “I’m looking forward to this. I never could resist a contentious faculty meeting, and it’s even better when it doesn’t affect me.”

  “Are you that sure this one is going to be contentious?”

  “Are you kidding? I just wish I’d brought a popper to park outside. I could have made a killing selling popcorn and candy apples for people to eat during the show.”

  “Maybe you do belong at a business school.”

  “It’s true, I am a strong believer in the power of entrepreneurship. If I worked here, I could bring in my parents to lecture.”

  “I would pay to see that.”

  “With my parents? Everybody involved would have to pay to see it. They don’t do freebies.”

  A moment later, six people came in through the door at the front of the hall. Or rather, two groups of three. The trios were careful to stand on opposite sides of the podium.

  “That’s unexpected,” Charles said.

  “What?” I asked.

  “The woman in the pinstripe suit is Provost Kozlov, and the woman and man next to her are the Director of Human Resources and Director of Recruiting respectively. They’re the ones who called this meeting. The other three women, the ones who are pointedly not looking at the provost’s party, are the professors who’ve been leading the union efforts.”

  “I guess I’m not the only gate crasher,” Brownie said.

  “So it seems.”

  After consultation with her associates, Provost Kozlov stepped to the podium and tapped on the microphone to make sure it was on. “I think we should get started now, if people can take their seats.”

  The rumble of conversation in the hall died down.

  “I wanted to make you aware of some issues concerning Bostock. As some of you may have heard, we are in the midst of renegotiating an agreement with our tenured and contract faculty members, and while talks are still proceeding, the process is not going as quickly as we’d hoped.”

  The most irate looking member of the trio of union proponents openly scoffed.

  Provost Kozlov pretended she hadn’t heard her and went on. “I’ve just been informed that since the various arms of support staff are not involved in the negotiations, they do not intend to take part in a strike, should one occur.” I could tell that she was trying not to smirk at the union people, but she couldn’t quite manage it, especially when they showed their own angry surprise so openly. “Our assumption is that adjunct faculty, who are also not involved in this issue, will meet with their classes as usual.”

  There were a lot of murmured comments from the adjuncts in the hall, but they weren’t loud enough for me to determine the direction in which most people were tilting. Brownie leaned over to whisper, “#NotAllFaculty.”

  Professor Lefebre, a professor in the English department who had an office near my cubicle, said, “If I might speak to that point, Provost Kozlov?”

  Provost Kozlov stepped aside, and Professor Lefebre took her place. She started by smiling warmly at the people seated in the hall. “Colleagues, I’m afraid I disagree with Provost Kozlov. Then again, what is academia without disagreement?” She smiled again, and I think she was going for collegial that time. “I believe that an issue that affects one professor at Bostock affects us all, and as fellow academics, we all welcome the chance to show support for one another. In that spirit, I would ask that all faculty members, even those not directly affected by the contract under negotiation, respect our efforts to improve working conditions.”

  More murmurs, and Brownie added, “#LibertyEqualityFraternity.”

  “Shush,” I said, “or it’ll be off with your head.”

  He just grinned.

  Provost Kozlov retook the podium. “While I can certainly understand adjunct faculty members being in sympathy with the aims of the union, I feel I must remind you all that when accepting employment at Bostock, you signed contracts that define your obligations and the penalties for not meeting those obligations.”

  The resulting murmurs were definitely angrier. I wasn’t happy about the intimidation technique myself, and when Brownie said, “#ThreatsRUs,” I didn’t try to quiet him.

  Professor Lefebre reached for the microphone, but the provost maintained her hold. “In fact, if our Bostock adjunct faculty members wish to step into classrooms while the usual professors are on strike, so as to maintain continuity for our student body, our Human Resources department would be happy to talk to you.” The head of HR waved at us cheerily. “The pay rate will be higher than usual to make up for the extra workload and short notice, and speaking as one who celebrates December holidays, bonus cash at this time of year is always welcome.”

  “#WeLoveScabs,” was Brownie’s contribution, and I heard snickers from the people who were close enough to hear him.

  Professor Lefebre gave up on the microphone and projected her voice like the experienced speaker she was. “Colleagues, though I certainly agree that compensation for academics is rarely what it should be, I would be remiss if I didn’t remind you that while this contract will not benefit you at the present time, it could well benefit you in the future, should you be chosen for a tenure track position.”

  “#DontBeAScab,” Brownie said.

  Lefebre went on. “Remember that even if you stay part of the adjunct faculty, we will remain your colleagues, not just here, but throughout your
academic career, no matter where that career takes you.”

  “#WeNeverForget. #WeHaveConnections.”

  The volume of the voices in the hall was well on its way to becoming a roar, and the two parties at the front of the hall started talking at one another with furious gestures.

  I just sat there, getting angrier and angrier. I don’t take kindly to threats, and getting them from both sides made me want to throw something. Madison had asked me what I thought about the situation, and I hadn’t been able to tell her, but now I knew.

  I raised my hand, and when that went unnoticed, I stood up and waited. Charles and Brownie started hushing the people around us until finally Provost Kozlov noticed me. “Yes, Ms.…” She looked at her companions, but it was clear that neither of them knew my name.

  “It’s Doctor,” I said. “Doctor Georgia Thackery, and I’ve been working at Bostock for over three months. I realize you can’t learn the names of all the adjuncts here, but your lack of recognition reinforces the point I’m about to make.”

  The union members nodded emphatically.

  “What about you union people?” I asked. “Do any of you know what I teach?”

  Their faces went blank, and finally Lefebre shook her head.

  “Then you’re helping make my point, too. I’m in English. Your department, Dr. Lefebre. In fact, my desk is on the same corridor as your office. I’m surprised that you’ve never seen me working there, since adjunct cubicles don’t have doors or even real walls.”

  She looked more annoyed than embarrassed.

  “This brings me to my point. Nobody in administration sees me as a valued employee, and none of the tenured faculty see me as a fellow academic. I’m just an adjunct. Temporary. Forgettable. Replaceable.” I paused to let my words sink in. “I want to tell you a story. A married couple I know were in the middle of a nasty divorce. They had a bedroom set in the guest bedroom that neither of them really cared about, but when it was time to divide up their property, suddenly that bedroom set was the most important thing in the world to them because it was another bargaining chip in their dispute. Once the divorce was finalized, the winner stuck that bedroom set back in the guest bedroom and never thought about it until it became useful once more. I think that’s how you people see me, how you see all of us adjuncts.