A Skeleton in the Family Read online

  I repeated my story, hoping it sounded more plausible to her than it did to me. If she could tell I was lying through my teeth, she was at least polite enough to hide it until I’d finished.

  Then she said, “I’m sorry, ma’am, but I don’t know anything about any skeletons being sold from this show. My father was still in charge then, but I’m sure I would have known.”

  “That just goes to show that your father didn’t tell you everything,” the man counting money said. “Don’t you remember that chester who used to run the dark show? He had a skeleton hanging outside that was rigged to move to scare the townies.”

  Ms. Fenton sighed, but didn’t bother to correct him. “This is my husband—”

  “Call me Treasure Hunt,” he said.

  “Dad is big on nicknames,” Brownie explained.

  “What good is a carny without a nickname?” Treasure Hunt asked. He put a rubber band around a stack of twenty-dollar bills and made a note on a piece of paper before going on. “It was back in eighty-two. The dark ride was a wax show then, plenty creepy, and the ride operator had himself a skeleton to hang out in a cage outside. There was a motor to make it wriggle and build up a tip.”

  I nodded. I could only understand about two thirds of his words, but he was talking about Sid, all right.

  “I was working as outside man for him that week—his usual guy got DQed for being overly friendly with a couple of townie girls, and we hadn’t found him a new one. So I was there when he hung up the skeleton. Only he said it was a cast, because he knew Brownie—”

  “He means my grandfather,” the current Brownie said.

  “Well, even a clem would know I didn’t mean you, college boy.”

  Brownie rolled his eyes while I tried to figure out if I’d been insulted. Actually, I was sure I had been, I just wasn’t sure how badly. I was starting to think that the man was using carny lingo just to bug me, and I was determined not to ask for annotation.

  “Anyway, the operator knew Brownie wouldn’t have let him put out a real skeleton. It wouldn’t have been respectful.”

  I said, “Excuse me, but didn’t carnivals back then have tents with ‘alien babies’ and ‘the missing link’ in jars?”

  “Sure we did, but the devil babies and pickled punks were all gaffed. Brownie had standards—he always ran a Sunday-school show.”

  “So it wouldn’t have been okay to show the real thing, but it was okay to fake people out?”

  He just grinned, and I knew where Brownie—the younger Brownie—had gotten his grin. “I didn’t figure out it was genuine until it had been hanging there a couple of weeks. That’s when he started to get funny about it.”

  “Funny?” I said, wondering if this was another instance of carny lingo.

  “He acted like he was scared of the thing, said it was going to come after him. We put it down to the drinking of course—we’d known he was a drinker, but he’d started hitting the bottle pretty hard about that time, and Brownie was thinking about DQing him because of it. Then one day I was looking at that skeleton, and damned if it didn’t look real to me. So I waited until there wasn’t anybody around, and I licked it.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “If you lick a bone, your tongue sticks to it.”

  Yo had neglected to mention that bit of trivia to me, and as much as I adored Sid, I’d never had a reason to lick him. “I didn’t know that.”

  “A carny needs to know the difference between real and gaffed,” he said in a superior tone. “I told the operator that he was going to have to get rid of it before Brownie found out, and he said he’d be glad to. He was still acting afraid of it, and said he was going to grind it or beat it with a baseball bat, and a couple of days later, it was gone. Of course, if it ended up in that townie’s attic, he must have sold it to him instead. It would have been just like him to do that and then pretend he was short on money.”

  “So he didn’t have it long?”

  “Maybe two, three weeks.”

  “Do you know where he got it?”

  “He bought it from some kids. College boys, from the look of ’em.”

  “Do you know which college?”

  He gave me a look that even a non-carny could interpret.

  “I don’t suppose there would be any records.”

  “Lady, all I know is three townies with their noses stuck in the air came round one night when I was out front and wanted me to get my manager.” He snorted. “The operator went out to the parking lot with them and came back a few minutes later with the skeleton in a sack, laughing because he’d only paid a double for it. I didn’t get any names, and I’d be mighty surprised if he did.”

  “Can you tell me which town you were set up in?”

  He threw up his hands. “It was thirty years ago! Ask me who was with the show then, and I’ll you, but don’t ask me to try to remember which Podunk town it was.”

  “I can look it up in the route book if you know when it was, Treasure Hunt,” Ms. Fenton said.

  “It was nineteen eighty-two, like I said. Around the time of the blow-up. You remember, when some damned townies decided it would be funny to mess with the generator? We had to stay in place an extra week waiting for repairs. Don’t you remember how much ice and flash we had to give out afterward, and it wasn’t even our fault!”

  Dana just said, “We were so fortunate nobody was injured.” She went to a file cabinet, pulled out an old binder, and flipped through it. “The blow-up happened in Granville. The previous week we were in Great Barrington, and the week afterward, Brimfield. You sure it was in that window, Treasure Hunt?”

  “Around that. A man doesn’t forget the first time he licks a skeleton.”

  After that mental image, I couldn’t think of any more questions, at least not ones that any of them would be able to answer, so I thanked them for their time. Ms. Fenton said she hoped I’d enjoy the carnival, and I said I was sure I would, but I knew I wouldn’t. In fact, after I left the three of them in the trailer, I headed for the exit, even though I was dreading getting back to the van.

  I was going to have to tell Sid that we’d hit another dead end.

  If a trio of college students had had a skeleton in a sack, chances were that they hadn’t come by it legally, but had likely liberated it from their school as a prank. So now we could be fairly sure he’d come from a college, but which one? The carnival had been somewhere in Massachusetts when Sid arrived, and Massachusetts was lousy with colleges. The only two we could eliminate were McQuaid and JTU.

  I’d nearly made it back to the neon arch that marked the midway entrance when I heard somebody calling, “Dr. Thackery!” I turned and saw Brownie loping toward me.

  “I’m glad I caught you. My father just remembered something that might help you. I asked him how he knew that the townies were college students, and he said it was because two of them were wearing sweatshirts that said OX on them, like a college mascot. He only remembered because he said the one who wasn’t should have been, because he was as big as an ox. Anyway, if it had just been one of them wearing a shirt like that, it might have just been somebody who bought a shirt, but two of them? All you’ve got to do is find a school that has an ox as its mascot.”

  “That’s great!” I said. “Offhand I don’t know which school it could be, but I can find out. Thanks so much!”

  “Let me know how it goes.” He handed me a business card and walked me as far as the arch. Just as I turned to go, he said, “Something else I wanted to tell you. You know Dad was just laying on the carny slang for your benefit, right?”

  “I suspected.”

  “Not that he doesn’t use a fair amount, but this was excessive, even for him. He’s got this thing against townies.”

  “But you don’t?”

  “Depends on the townie.” He grinned. “So if you decide to tell me wh
y you’re really trying to track down that skeleton, I’d like to know.”

  Talk about wasting a good cover story! “Brownie, I can almost guarantee that you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  Now I couldn’t wait to get back to Sid, and back home to the computer to search for collegiate oxen. Finding Sid’s origins was still going to be like finding a needle in a haystack, but the haystack had just shrunk substantially.

  25

  My burst of optimism was unfounded.

  Yes, Sid was thrilled by the news, and speculation kept us happily engaged all the way back home. It was even better when Madison texted me to ask for more time at Samantha’s. With her gone, we could get onto the computer right away. That’s when we hit another dead end. As far as I could tell, there was no college in New England whose mascot was an ox.

  In fact, I couldn’t find a single college in the country that used an ox. The closest was a high school team—the Blue Oxen. Going further afield, there was the Minnesota Blue Ox roller hockey team, but it hadn’t been founded until 1995, which left them out of the picture.

  “Still, college boys and Dr. Kirkland,” Sid said. “That’s got to be the link.”

  “Except that, at that point, she was already at JTU. Their mascot is a Wildcat.”

  “So maybe the guys who sold me weren’t wearing college sweatshirts.”

  “Or maybe they weren’t college kids at all, and the link with Dr. Kirkland has nothing to do with a college.”

  That only stopped him for a second. “No, from everything you’ve heard, Dr. Kirkland’s work was her life, and we know I was college age, so that’s the most likely place for me to have known her.”

  “I guess that’s logical. Maybe you’d recognize the JTU campus.”

  “Another road trip?”

  “How about looking at pictures on the Web?”

  “Boy, you know how to suck the fun out of things.”

  “Hey, at least I have lips with which to suck.”

  “Cheap shot!” He nudged me to one side. “Let me drive. I’m faster.”

  “You’re noisier, anyway.” I moved to another chair so he could take over the keyboard. He was getting awfully fast. I only wished I’d known that when I was typing all those essays and papers during my grad-school days.

  As I watched, he Googled up the JTU Web site and started looking at the pictures posted to attract students—sunny days with smiling students studying on the grass, brightly lit classrooms filled with smiling students, smiling students conferring with distinguished faculty members, suspiciously clean dorm rooms peopled by smiling students. . . . After twenty minutes of viewing a parade of smiling students, I said, “Anything?”

  “Maybe. I’m not sure.” He paused. “No, not really.”

  “You know, these are current shots. It seems to me that I ran across a site that has uploaded digital files of old college yearbooks. Maybe we could find one from the right era.”

  “Good idea!” Sid’s finger bones flew across the keyboard to find the site I’d mentioned, then to track down a 1982 JTU yearbook. He started flipping through the pages.

  There had been smiling students back then, too, but their hairstyles and clothes were different, and more important, the buildings they inhabited were different. At some point, JTU must have had as busy a building program as McQuaid.

  “You know, this does kind of . . . Maybe . . . Yeah, I think this could be something,” Sid said.

  “Really?”

  “It doesn’t look familiar, exactly, but it doesn’t look strange either.”

  “You’re not filling me with confidence, Sid.”

  “I’m trying!”

  “I know, I know, but—” He flipped past a virtual page. “Wait! Go back!”

  “What?” He pressed the back button and went back to a montage of pictures labeled Greek Life. “More like geek life if you ask me.”

  “Look at that guy in the picture in the middle of the page.”

  “Hey! His shirt says OX.”

  “Not it doesn’t,” I said. “That’s not an O. It’s a theta. That’s a shirt from a fraternity. Theta Chi! Of course Treasure Hunt would have read Theta Chi as OX.”

  “Because it was all Greek to him!”

  I thumped him on the top of his skull, which would have hurt my finger if I hadn’t had years of practice doing it. It didn’t hurt him, either, but it made such a satisfying sound.

  I directed Sid to make a quick search to confirm that there was a Theta Chi chapter at JTU. Moreover, it was the only chapter of Theta Chi in the area. Just to be extra paranoid, I also checked for the sorority Omicron Theta—which really was spelled OX—but there were no chapters nearby.

  “So what were three frat boys doing with a skeleton from somebody else’s collection?” I wondered.

  “Either they took hazing their pledges a bit too far, which would make another great movie, or judging by fraternity stereotypes formed by watching too much TV, they stole it.”

  “Do you suppose we can scope out which of the fraternity brothers was as big as an ox?”

  Sid got us to the yearbook page for the fraternity. There was a photo of what looked like all the guys in the frat, but it was hard to tell because the original photo was pretty fuzzy, and the scan wasn’t exactly high quality. “What about him?” I asked, pointing to a big guy in the back row with a mop of curly hair.

  “He looks oxlike to me,” Sid said. “What are you thinking? That we find him and ask him if he ever stole a skeleton?”

  “It sounds nutty when you say it out loud.” I showed him how to enlarge the photo, but the low resolution on the picture meant that the pictures got blurrier as we enlarged. “Can we figure out what his name was?” There was a list of names under the photo, and since our ox was the eleventh guy in the third row, I started counting off. “Sid, look at the ninth name on the list for the second row.”

  “One, two, three . . . oh. That’s interesting.”

  The name was Rich Kirkland. Dr. Kirkland’s son.

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “Rich and his large friend—who we assume sold you to the carnival—were at JTU, but you didn’t come from JTU. Where on earth did you come from?”

  Sid drummed his fingers on the table, which made a horrendous noise. “I bet Rich could tell us.”

  “I bet you’re right.”

  By the time I had to leave to pick up Madison from Samantha’s house, Sid and I had found out what Rich did for a living and decided how I was going to get to him.

  26

  On Sunday, I finally got the quiet time with Madison I’d been craving. We slept in, went to a used bookstore and the comic book store, cooked Mexican food, and did only the chores necessary for the coming week. Sid stayed quietly upstairs, which I appreciated. I returned the favor by leaving a stack of my purchases from the used bookstore where he could find them.

  Monday was fairly normal—school and work. The only thing out of the ordinary was my call to Rich Kirkland’s office. It turned out that he was a financial planner who offered free consultations to new clients. I made an appointment with him for Tuesday afternoon.

  Kirkland had an office with several other financial consultants in a small brick building with awnings that were the dark green of a dollar bill. I was right on time, and the receptionist smilingly led the way to Kirkland’s office.

  “Ms. Thackery?” he said. “I’m Rich Kirkland.” He stood up from behind a well-polished wooden desk and offered his hand for a firm “trust me with your money” handshake. “A pleasure to meet you.” He didn’t show any sign of recognizing me, which was all to the good.

  As I remembered from the memorial service, he was a tall man, well built, with dark hair, a good tan, and a snazzy suit. He looked prosperous but not showy: frayed cuffs wouldn’t speak well of his financial acumen, and to
o much bling would make it look as if he was gouging his clients.

  “Nice to meet you, too,” I replied. We both sat.

  “What can I do for you?”

  “I’m trying to look ahead toward retirement. I’m a single mother, I have next to nothing saved, and a daughter starting college in a few years, so it may be too late.”

  “It’s never too late to improve your financial position,” he said confidently. “It is better to start sooner, but I’m sure there’s a lot we can do. Before we go any further, let me tell you a bit about my qualifications. I’ve been in financial planning for eighteen years, and I also act as consultant to a number of charitable organizations, including my college fraternity.”

  “Theta Chi, right?”

  “That’s right. Joshua Tay University chapter.”

  “I recognized your tie tack,” I said, grateful he’d worn it to give me an excuse to bring up the frat.

  “Very observant. I was wondering if you’d seen me listed on the frat Web site.”

  “Actually, I saw you at your mother’s funeral and somebody mentioned to me that you’re a financial planner. I figured that you’d understand the academic lifestyle better than the average guy in your field.”

  “Ah. I should warn you that I’m not an academic myself.”

  “Thank goodness for that. I never met an academic yet who could handle money.” I smiled. He smiled back. We were united in our opinion of academics.

  “I take it that you’re in academia yourself?”

  “I teach at McQuaid.”

  “Tenured?”

  “Adjunct.”

  “Ah.”

  The tone was unmistakable. Even he knew enough to diss me, though it was probably more for my income level than for my lack of academic stature. His smile started to fade as he mentally tallied how much money I was likely to bring him, so I decided to sweeten the pot. “As a matter of fact, I’m part of a group of adjuncts.”