A Skeleton in the Family Page 10

  “Probably safer than fumbling around in the dark.” Sid did fumble a little before finding the switch, and after he flipped it, waited to make sure there was no hue or cry. “Let’s go find my bone.”

  Sid led the way, turning on lights as we went. I followed more reluctantly, feeling exceedingly uneasy about being in a stranger’s house or, technically, being the stranger in the house. Besides, though the place looked clean enough, it smelled funny—a combination of chemical scents, old lady smell, and something kind of stinky.

  The back door opened into a mudroom, and from there we went into the kitchen. I noticed that the dog’s food dish was empty, which might explain the attraction of Sid’s ulna. The kitchen led to the dining room, but I doubted Dr. Kirkland ate in there. The table was covered with specimen jars and nothing inside them looked appetizing. Academics do have a tendency to bring their work home—I was lucky my parents were in literature.

  Next was a fairly generic living room with a TV that was small by the day’s standards of big-as-a-movie-theater screens. The wall was hung with maps and animal photos, not family keepsakes.

  A hall led to a bathroom, then a small bedroom with a rumpled bed, which was probably where Dr. Kirkland slept. The larger of the two bedrooms was outfitted as an office, but it clearly wasn’t large enough. The biggest testament to that was that I saw the piles of books and papers first, then the dog chewing on Sid’s ulna, which I retrieved and tried to give back to him.

  The last thing I got around to noticing was the body of Dr. Kirkland. Well, next to last. The very last thing was her blood pooling on the floor.

  18

  If I’d ever given thought to how I would react upon finding an apparently dead body, I would have guessed that I would either scream or immediately rush over to try to help the stricken person, but I did neither. I didn’t scream, because it was more of a slow realization than a sudden shock, and I didn’t rush over because I didn’t want to make it real. I just stood and wished that I were just about anywhere else in the world.

  “Is she dead?” Sid asked.

  “I think so. Go look.” He didn’t move, and I decided that if she was still breathing, having a skeleton examining her might not help her any. So I stepped closer and made myself reach out to touch her with one finger. She felt cold and stiff, and if that weren’t enough, when I got closer I could see blood and tissue and other stuff that should have been in one of the creepy bottles in the dining room. “Yeah, she’s dead.”

  “What do we do?”

  “Shouldn’t we call the cops?”

  “And explain us being here, how?”

  He was right of course. I couldn’t let the cops find out about Sid, and I couldn’t explain how I’d gotten into the house without him. “Okay, then we’ve got to get out of here.”

  I hesitated just a second to try to decide if I could have left fingerprints anywhere, then backed out of the room. “Turn out the lights as we go.” Since he didn’t have to worry about fingerprints, it made sense for him to take care of anything that needed touching. We made it back to the mudroom and peered out the curtain before going back outside, leaving the door locked behind us. I thought about latching the dog flap so Dr. Kirkland’s pet couldn’t come back out, but decided it was best to leave the place just as we’d found it.

  I really wanted to run back to the van, but I knew it was better to take my time and make sure I didn’t trip and leave some trace that forensics experts would recognize as evidence of a thirtyish single mother with sedentary habits who’d just eaten a medium order of French fries.

  When we got to the van, Sid hid on the floor of the front seat without being asked, even pulling the blanket over his head. I wouldn’t have minded hiding myself, but somebody had to start the van.

  A few minutes later, Sid said, “Georgia, are you okay to drive?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “Your hands are shaking.”

  I looked down and saw he was right. “Maybe I’d better pull over.” I was close to that same McDonald’s, so I parked at the back of the lot, put my head down on the steering wheel, and tried some of those deep-breathing tricks I hadn’t needed since going into labor with Madison.

  Sid patted me on the leg. “It’s okay, it’s okay.”

  “I’ve never touched a dead person. Other than you. Could you have, you know . . . talked to her?”

  “What am I, the skeleton whisperer?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “No, I cannot talk to dead people. Or other skeletons. Your parents checked years ago.”

  “Really?”

  “They snuck me into the med school to visit corpses, and then to the Anthropology Department to commune with my fellow flesh-deprived. Nothing.”

  “Maybe that’s better.” Just the thought of Sid talking to the dead woman started me shivering again.

  “I’m so sorry,” Sid said.

  “It’s not your fault. I wanted to talk to her, too. I don’t know how we’re going to find out about you now, but—”

  “It doesn’t matter anymore. That poor woman is dead.”

  “We’ve got to call the cops. We can’t just leave her like that.”

  “And that dog needs real food.” He rubbed the tooth marks on his arm.

  “I guess we should find a pay phone.” Of course, I hadn’t used one in years, and didn’t even know where to look for one.

  “Crime Stoppers,” Sid said. “You can call them from any phone and it’s completely anonymous. They advertise on late-night TV.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Cross my ribcage,” he said with a trace of his usual humor. “But just in case, let me do the talking.”

  I dialed the number for him—touch screens don’t react to bare bone—and handed him the phone.

  “I want to report a disturbance,” he said, and gave Kirkland’s address. “The dog never runs loose, but he’s been in the yard barking, and I haven’t seen the lady who lives there all day. She’s old and I’m worried something might have happened.” Then he gave the phone back to me so I could hang up. “That should do it.”

  “I just hope nobody saw us. Or got my license plate. Or—” I shook my head. There was nothing else we could do. “Let’s go home.” I started to back up, then stopped and put the van back in Park. “Wait a minute.” I got out, grabbed the fruit basket out of the backseat, walked to the nearest trash can, and chucked it in. Back in the van I said, “There’s no way I could ever eat that.”

  19

  As soon as we got home, I sent Sid to the attic and heard his door shut just as Madison was dropped off. Somehow I managed to pay attention as she told me about the awesome anime videos she and Samantha had watched, the awesome manga collection her friend had, and the awesome chicken dish Samantha’s mother had made for dinner. Apparently she’d had an awesome day.

  We watched something on TV that wasn’t awesome enough to make me remember what it was five minutes after the credits, then headed for our respective bedrooms. I took a quick spin around the Internet to see if anything about Kirkland had shown up or if an APB had been issued for me, but there was nothing.

  I did sleep that night, but I’d probably have been better off if I hadn’t. Every time I drifted off, I found myself in another nightmare. Twice I was arrested for breaking into Kirkland’s house, once I was arrested for killing her myself, and in the horror-movie version, Dr. Kirkland came knocking at my door, much as Sid had all those years ago, but instead of being a nice, clean skeleton, she was decayed and awful.

  The worst was the dream in which Kirkland was still breathing when I found her, and I was able to get her to the hospital in time to save her. I cried when I woke from that one because I so wished that had really happened.

  As soon as I was out of bed the next morning, I got back on the Web and checked the site for the TV station
in Springfield, which was the closest city. All I found was a tiny paragraph about a woman being found dead in her Pennycross home. The police were investigating, but details were being withheld until the family was notified. I printed a copy of the report and slid it under the attic door for Sid.

  For the rest of the day, I alternated between my usual weekend chores of laundry/bills/housework, going online to gather more and more details about Dr. Kirkland, and waiting for the police to come knocking at my door. Fortunately Madison was busy with a social studies project and didn’t notice that I was distracted.

  The TV station in Springfield gave the story a fair amount of play—Kirkland was moderately well known, albeit in a specialized field, and murders were fortunately rare in Pennycross. Early accounts said that she’d been found dead, with the hint that the circumstances were suspicious. Our anonymous tip wasn’t mentioned. The dog, which I learned was an Akita, got the credit for alerting the authorities with his barking.

  It was later announced that the death was murder, and it was tentatively linked to the rash of break-ins that had been keeping Deborah so busy. They thought the burglars had broken in thinking that nobody was home, but things got out of hand when they found Dr. Kirkland there. One of Kirkland’s adult sons confirmed in an interview that his mother had a tendency to concentrate so thoroughly on her work that she could easily have missed it if the burglar had rung the doorbell or knocked before breaking in, even if the dog had barked.

  There was no mention of a second break-in by a single mother with a really skinny cohort. By dinnertime I was ready to believe that I hadn’t been seen at Dr. Kirkland’s house, or if I had been, I hadn’t been identified.

  Once I was sure Madison was asleep that night, I snuck up to the attic to catch Sid up on the news, finishing with, “It looks like we dodged the bullet. Can you imagine what would have happened if we’d been caught?” The loss of my job, jail time for the break-in, possibly suspicion of murder. That was just for being in the same room as Dr. Kirkland’s body. Once Sid was brought into the picture . . . it would have been a real-life nightmare to rival mine from the previous night.

  “Now I feel guilty for suspecting her of murdering me,” Sid said.

  “She’s not necessarily in the clear for your murder. Her murder was just a break-in gone wrong—it had nothing to do with you.”

  “Do you really think that’s what happened?” he said skeptically.

  “I guess. Honestly, I’ve been pretty much focused on ‘Please, please, please don’t let the cops catch us.’”

  “I get that. It just didn’t seem as if anything was stolen.”

  “We didn’t look at her bedroom that closely—they could have taken jewelry from there. And I didn’t see a purse.”

  “Her computer was still in the office.”

  “I saw drops of blood on the keyboard. I don’t think anybody would be able to fence it. If they had sold it and the police found it, blood evidence would make it easy to track back to the killers.” I was proud of myself for that line of reasoning. All those hours watching various incarnations of CSI and Law & Order had not gone to waste.

  “I guess that makes sense,” Sid said. “And I guess that’s it for trying to find out about me. About what happened to me, I mean. We’ve hit a—”

  “Sid, please don’t say dead end.”

  “Yeah, too soon. We’ve run out of gas.”

  I could have nodded, clapped him on the scapula, and gone to bed, but if I had I wouldn’t have been able to sleep. I’d been furious when I first found out Sid had been murdered, and that was just with murder as a theoretical construct. Now I’d seen a woman just after she’d been murdered, and it wasn’t theoretical anymore. Moreover, Dr. Kirkland would have the police hunting for her killer, with her family and the press watching them to make sure they did their job. All Sid had was me. I couldn’t let him down.

  I said, “Not on your life. So to speak.”

  “I won’t think any less of you if you want to stop.”

  “Well, I’d think a lot less of myself. So, next steps . . . Our only link is still Dr. Kirkland.”

  “I don’t want you being linked to a murder victim.”

  “I’m not—we’re not. Your interaction with the woman, whatever it was, predates her death by three decades.”

  “I don’t know. . . .”

  I didn’t know, either, but I was willing to pretend I did. “Anyway, we were kind of distracted at her house, but did anything there spark more memories?”

  He shook his head.

  “There’s going to be more coverage of the case, and probably more stuff about her life and career. We’ll keep following the stories online—maybe something else will catch your attention.”

  “Like what?”

  “Maybe you’ll recognize one of her children. Or an associate. I bet there will be coverage of the funeral.”

  “Maybe,” Sid said, clearly not convinced.

  “Come on, we’ll think of something. What’s the rush? You’re not getting any older!”

  That got me a quick grin, but just as I was about to head downstairs, he said, “Georgia, don’t you think it’s kind of funny that she was killed now? I mean, I recognize the first person from my past in thirty years, and less than a week later she’s dead.”

  It had been in the back of my mind, too, but I hadn’t wanted to say so. “The police think it was part of the break-ins.”

  “If I were going to kill somebody around now, I’d make it look like a break-in, too. Not that I would.”

  “Sid, I never even thought that. You have a warped sense of humor, but you’re not a killer.”

  “Maybe I was,” he said sadly.

  “Cut that out!”

  I got him settled with a stack of manga and hoped it would cheer him up, but I knew from that moment on that I couldn’t give up until I found out who Sid had been in life. I was sure he’d been a good guy, but if not, we’d deal with it. Whoever he’d been in life—whatever he’d been—he deserved to know the truth.

  20

  As soon as I finished with my first class Monday morning, I went to the adjunct office to scour the Web for information on Kirkland’s murder. As far as I could tell, there had been nothing of importance found since the last coverage I’d read, but that didn’t stop me from reading as carefully as if I were proofing my doctoral dissertation.

  I was still at it when a shadow fell on my screen and I noticed Fletcher standing behind me, looking at what I was reading.

  I closed my laptop with a snap. “Excuse me,” I said stiffly. “It is considered impolite to read over another adjunct’s shoulder.”

  “Sorry. Old reporter habits. We stick our noses in everywhere.” He grinned, and it was a great grin, but I could tell he thought it would be enough to win me over.

  It wasn’t.

  I deliberately turned away from him, reopened my laptop, and angled it so he’d really have to get into my personal space to see what I was looking at.

  He must have realized I was pointedly ignoring him. “I really am sorry, Georgia.”

  I looked at him, and decided that he was looking appropriately sincere. No grin. So I relented. “It’s okay this once, but it’s hard enough to share space with this many people without having to think about somebody looming behind me.”

  “No more looming, I promise.”

  He sat down at his desk and turned to face me. “Obviously you heard about that professor being killed.”

  Since I’d expressed a fair amount of interest in Dr. Kirkland just the other day, I figured it wasn’t a violation of shared-office protocol for him to ask. “I did. Kind of a bizarre coincidence. I ask about her, and then she ends up dead.”

  “You also asked if I’d ever covered a murder, and now I’m doing just that.”

  “Also bizarre, which means I’ve p
robably used up my store of bizarre coincidences. I wish I’d asked you if you’d ever interviewed an English instructor who’d won a multimillion-dollar sweepstakes.”

  He laughed.

  “Is it creepy for you, covering a murder, asking the kinds of questions you have to ask?”

  “The old pros at the paper say I’m lucky it was a relatively clean crime—and not a child. Anecdotes ensued. So I shouldn’t complain. I have to admit that I was worried about talking to the dead woman’s family, but the son I interviewed was very reserved, so it wasn’t too terrible.”

  “Old New England reserved?”

  “More like cold-fish reserved. But people react to death in very different ways.”

  “The stories I read said that it was connected to the break-ins around town.”

  “That’s what the cops think.”

  “Good. I mean, I’m sorry it happened, but glad it had nothing to do with—with her being here at McQuaid the other day.”

  He looked at me curiously, but let it go, probably not wanting me to slap him down again. “I tracked down the person she was here to meet, thinking there might be a human-interest angle, but it wasn’t that interesting.”

  “Don’t tell me—meeting the chancellor to discuss a guest lecture: ‘Zooarchaeology for Dummies.’”

  “Not even close. She was supposed to be meeting a grad student in the computer science building but got lost. Apparently she had some old data from the stone ages—literally and figuratively. He said she had pages of measurements and numbers and hired him to put it into a database. But get this: part of her data was on an eight-and-a-half-inch disk!”

  “Seriously? Is there even a machine on campus that would read it?”

  “Apparently there is.”

  “I suppose it could have been worse. It could have been punch cards.”

  “Wow, those are before my time.”

  “Mine, too, I’ll have you know, but we used to have a Christmas wreath my mother made out of old punch cards and spray-painted silver. It was surprisingly pretty.”