A Skeleton in the Family
Praise for
A SKELETON IN THE FAMILY
“Dr. Georgia Thackery is smart, resourceful, and determined to be a great single mom to her teenager. Georgia is normal in every respect—except that her best friend happens to be a skeleton named Sid. You’ll love the adventures of this unexpected mystery-solving duo.”
—Charlaine Harris, #1 New York Times bestselling author
“Adjunct English professor Georgia Thackery makes a charming debut in A Skeleton in the Family. Georgia is fiercely loyal to her best friend, Sid, an actual skeleton who is somehow still ‘alive.’ When Sid see someone he remembers from his past life—who later turns up dead—Georgia finds herself trying to put together the pieces of Sid’s past as she works to hunt down a killer. Amateur sleuth Georgia and her sidekick, Sid, are just plain fun!
—Sofie Kelly, New York Times bestselling
author of Cat Trick
“No bones about it, Leigh Perry hooked me right from the beginning. An unusual premise, quirky characters, and smart, dry humor season this well-told mystery that kept me guessing until the very end. It’s too bad Perry’s sleuth is fictional—I’d invite Georgia over for dinner in a heartbeat.”
—Bailey Cates, national bestselling author of
Bewitched, Bothered, and Biscotti
“A delightful cozy with a skeleton who will tickle your funny bone.”
—Paige Shelton, national bestselling author of
If Bread Could Rise to the Occasion
A
SKELETON
IN THE
FAMILY
Leigh Perry
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA)
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
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A SKELETON IN THE FAMILY
A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author
Copyright © 2013 by Toni L.P. Kelner.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
Berkley Prime Crime Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group.
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eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-62507-1
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / September 2013
Cover photos by Shutterstock.
Cover design by George Long.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Contents
Praise for A SKELETON IN THE FAMILY
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
To John W. Holt.
Technically you’re only a brother by marriage, but after all these years, I’m keeping you.
Acknowledgments
It’s always a challenge to start a new series and create a new world, so I need to thank a whole lot of people for their help:
My husband, Stephen P. Kelner, Jr., who I can always count on.
Charlaine Harris and Dana Cameron, the fastest beta readers in the West. Or East.
My daughters, Maggie and Valerie, for putting up with it all.
My agent, Joshua Bilmes, for endless support.
My editor, Ginjer Buchanan, for ideas I never would have thought of myself.
Dana Cameron again for insight into anthropology, knowledge of reference collections at universities and museums, and experiences from her life in academia.
B. K. Stevens, Rhea Paniesin, and Sara Weiss for sharing their knowledge of the trials and tribulations of adjunct faculty members.
Sue Senden for answering every stupid question about skeletons I could come up with.
David Kronen at Bone Clones, Inc. (www.boneclones.com) and Diana at The Bone Room (www.boneroom.com) for providing gloriously icky details about denuding skeletons. (Sadly, I didn’t get all those details into this book, but there’s always next time.)
Jan Dumas, for introducing me to her adorable keeshond, Byron, who inspired the fictional Akita of the same name.
My Facebook friends, who never failed when I needed to know about Angry Birds, pet doors, housebreaking dogs, and other gaps in my knowledge needed for this book.
1
Saturday Evening
If I’d ever had reason to consider the notion, I’d have been willing to bet that if I walked into a room that held a dead body, the body would have been the first thing I noticed. As it turned out, it wasn’t even close.
In my defense, to say that the room was cluttered would have been an understatement. The bookshelves had overflowed and slopped books onto the floor, the walls were covered with maps and diagrams, and there were stacks of paper everywhere.
Besides, I hadn’t gone looking for a corpse. Or rather, I hadn’t gone looking for a whole one. I’d just wanted an arm bone, an ulna to be precise. Since said ulna had last been seen in the possession of a fluffy red dog with a creamy white tummy, my attention was initially all for that dog, who was comfortably situated in a doggy bed on the floor just by the door. The bed was made of wicker, with a plaid cushion, and I think the fact that I took note of that proves that I’m really not an unobservant person.
“Sid!” I called
out. “I found the dog.”
“Finally!” he replied, clattering down the hall. We were trying to be at least semi-stealthy, but Sid can’t help rattling when he walks.
I know that every family has secrets. From friends I’ve heard whispered tales of ancestral bootleggers, draft dodgers, illegitimate offspring, and even more colorful characters. But somehow my family hit the jackpot. Our skeleton in the closet is literally a skeleton. A skeleton named Sid, who refuses to stay in the closet. He walks, he talks, and he makes bad bone jokes.
So naturally he finds it hard to walk quietly.
He stopped right behind me. “Uh, Georgia?”
“Don’t worry—I’ll get it.” Sid isn’t fond of any dog, for obvious reasons, and he was definitely not a fan of this particular one. The ulna it was chewing on was Sid’s, and he needed it back.
I knelt down and patted the dog, who seemed pleased by the attention, at least enough to quit gnawing for a moment. One paw was still holding the ulna down, so I had to slide it out while patting with the other hand. It let the bone go a lot more easily than I’d expected, but then again, it’s not like there was any meat left to hold canine interest for long.
Still patting, I held the ulna out behind my back so Sid could reach it, like passing the baton in a really strange relay race. A long moment later, he hadn’t taken it from me. “Sid? You want this or not?”
“Georgia, stand up.”
I did so, hoping the dog wouldn’t make a grab for the ulna.
“Now look at the desk.”
“What?” It was also covered with papers, surrounding an open laptop.
“The other side of the desk.”
I leaned over, and when I saw somebody lying on the floor, I froze in place. Nobody was supposed to be home. Then I realized the woman wasn’t moving. Her eyes were open and unblinking, and her face was bloodied.
All I could think of was that any minute a horde of cops was going to rush in, and I was going to have to explain what I was doing there with two dead people: a fresh one in front of me and a skeletal one behind me.
2
Sunday, Thirteen Days Earlier
The front door lock opened smoothly when I inserted the key, even though my parents had been out of the country for several months. Of course, my sister, Deborah, had been in to check on things, and she would never have allowed the front door of her own parents’ house to squeak.
“Honey, we’re home!” I sang out as I stepped into the foyer.
“One of these days somebody is going to answer you when you do that,” Madison said as she followed me inside, “and you are going to have a heart attack.”
“Then it’s a good thing you learned CPR,” I said. This time I’d had a particular reason for announcing our presence, but Madison didn’t know that.
“It smells okay,” she said, sniffing. “I thought it would be stuffy from being closed up.”
“Your aunt has been keeping an eye on the place. She must have aired it out.” Or somebody had.
Normally when we move into a new place, my teenage daughter and I make a thorough inspection, planning where to put our belongings and checking for items we’ll need, like curtains, rugs, and, in one memorable instance, a working toilet. This time we were already familiar with the layout of the old yellow Victorian house, from the comfortably worn living room furniture to the recently renovated downstairs bathroom to the wall of family photos hung in the dining room. After all, I’d grown up in the place.
My parents, both tenured English professors, were off on a dual sabbatical, and when they heard I’d landed a job at McQuaid University, they’d offered to let us live at the house. I’d only argued a little bit about their insistence that it be rent free—it was the second week of September, and I’d been without a job since the spring semester, so my bank account was getting a little lean.
Madison and I started bringing in our stuff and emptied the U-Haul trailer attached to my green minivan in fairly short order, partially because we’d done it so many times before and partially because we didn’t really have that much stuff. Moving frequently has that effect.
Also, since we’d known the house had plenty of furniture, we’d sold or given away the junkiest of our stuff and were planning to store the rest in the basement.
“Why not use the attic?” Madison wanted to know on our third trip down the uneven concrete stairs. “Won’t stuff mildew down here?”
“There’s a dehumidifier, and it’s better to climb one flight of steps down than two up,” I said. “Besides, there’s too much stored up there already.” There was one particular thing in the attic that I wasn’t going to be talking about.
Once everything was at least in the house, if not put away, we went to see if there was anything edible in the kitchen and found sandwich fixings, fresh fruit, and diet soda in the refrigerator; a loaf of bread in the breadbox; and a selection of basic supplies in the cabinet. As with the well-maintained lock, I recognized my sister’s handiwork.
“It’s going to be so cool living near Aunt Deb,” Madison said as she reached for ham and mayonnaise.
“Fabulous,” I said with far less enthusiasm.
“Hey, you know I love you best of all, Scarecrow!”
“Thanks for the reassurance, but that’s not the problem. As an only child, you’ve been spared the experience of having a perfect big sister.”
Deborah had her own successful business, never carried a balance on her credit cards, kept her car serviced and washed, and each year she had her tax returns sent in by the time the groundhog went looking for its shadow—all of which was in distinct contrast to my lifestyle. True, I’d pleased our parents by following their footsteps into the halls of academe, but being perennially untenured had tainted my image. The whole unwed-mother thing might have bothered them, too, had they not adored Madison unreservedly. Of course, Deborah claimed that Madison took after her.
After we’d eaten sandwiches with apples for dessert and had cleaned up nearly to Deborah’s standards, we took the trailer back to the closest U-Haul depot to ensure there were no late charges. When we got back, I assumed we’d continue to unpack, but Madison asked, “Do you mind if I take a ride?” Her bike was always the last thing packed and the first thing unpacked, and not just because of logistics.
“I think what you’re really wondering is: ‘Can I toddle around and figure out where the cool kids hang out?’”
“Mom, we’ve been in Pennycross a jillion times. I already know where the cool kids hang out—or where they would if anybody used the word cool anymore. Let alone ‘toddle.’ Besides which, I have no interest in cool kids. I’m looking for my fellow nerds.”
“Then you’re going to Wray’s.” The combination comic-book store and game shop had been there since I was buying X-Men comics and twenty-sided dice. “Since that just happens to be next to Arturo’s, you can bring your tired old mother some ice cream when you come back.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out some money.
“Dark chocolate?”
“Do they make other flavors?”
“Rumor has it.”
“These newfangled inventions . . . Speaking of which, be sure to take your cell phone.”
“Please.”
“Sorry.” As if Madison wouldn’t sooner leave the house without her jeans than without her phone. She gave me a quick kiss on the cheek and scooted out.
3
Once she was gone, I set up my laptop on the coffee table in the living room to make sure my parents’ Internet connection was up and running and ended up getting caught in a flurry of e-mail. That meant I was concentrating on the screen and didn’t see the door to the armoire behind me slowly drift open, and the noise of my typing masked the sound of movement as the skeletal figure emerged from the gaping blackness.
Had the worn oriental carpet not muffled the footsteps, I w
ould have heard the feet scraping against the floor as the creature stepped into the room, even though his feet were bare.
In fact, they couldn’t have been any more bare—bare of clothing, bare of skin, bare of anything—there was only bleached white bone from head to toe. Or rather, from skull to phalanges. Like something out of a nightmare, the skeleton moved across the floor.
It stepped toward my unprotected back, one fleshless arm reaching for me, but an instant before that mockery of a human hand touched my shoulder, I saw his reflection on my computer screen. “Sid! I’m working here.”
“How did you know?” the skeleton demanded.
“How long have I known you?” I wasn’t about to tell him about the reflection or he’d think of a way around it next time.
“Hey, can you blame me for wanting to jump your bones? Get it? Jump your bones?”
“I got it the first thousand times you made that joke, Sid, and it hasn’t been funny since the first time.” Then I reconsidered. “No, I giggled the second time, too.” I sent off the e-mail I’d just finished typing, and said, “So do I get a hug or what?”
“I wasn’t sure you’d care, since you didn’t even bother to come up to the attic to see me.”
“You weren’t in the attic, were you?”
“But you didn’t know that.”
“I suspected,” I lied. Years back, my parents had bought the battered but sturdy armoire for Sid to use as an emergency hiding place for those times when he couldn’t get upstairs to the attic without being seen, and Deborah had installed locks inside and out so nobody could open it unexpectedly. In addition to hiding in there, Sid wasn’t above using it for a spot of eavesdropping—his hearing was excellent despite his lack of ears.
“I had to wait to make sure that the coast was clear, which is your fault, since you’re the one who wants to keep Madison from finding out about you.”
He sniffed as if to say he suspected I’d been stalling.
It made no sense for a skeleton to sniff, but of course there wasn’t anything about Sid that did make sense. When your best friend is a walking, talking human skeleton, you pretty much give up the expectation of logical explanations and just stick with the reality of his existence.