A Skeleton in the Family Read online

  “A union?”

  “Oh, don’t say the U-word—colleges don’t like it when adjuncts go in for collective bargaining. We’re just trying to pool resources.”

  “How many are in your group?”

  “About thirty. No one has a decent retirement plan, and we’re looking to change that. The idea is for me to be the guinea pig.”

  “I’ll try to make the experiment as painless as possible,” he said, looking more cheerful. Maybe I could only bring him a pittance in fees, but thirty pittances might add up to a car payment or three.

  Rich started asking questions about my finances, and entered my answers into his computer. I gave him points for not sneering at my income or paltry savings, and even my credit card debt only prompted him to say, “That’s probably the first thing I’d like to look at—I bet we can get you a better interest rate than you’re paying now.”

  When I’d answered all his questions, he said, “Let me look at some current offerings, and I should be able to suggest some things to consider.” He started scrolling through windows on his screen.

  I figured that I’d better get to the real reason I’d come before he presented me with something to sign or buy. “You know, I think I knew a Theta Chi from JTU who used to date my aunt. I can’t remember his name for the life of me, but he was a big guy.”

  “Moose?”

  “That’s it.” It had to be.

  “I pledged with Moose—great guy, but I haven’t heard from him in years.”

  I was relieved—though I’d purposely kept the relationship vague, I had been worried he’d offer to reconnect me with my old pal Moose. “He used to tell our family the funniest stories about you guys. Did you really pull all those pranks?” I tried to make it sound as admiring as possible.

  “We may have played a few jokes,” he said with what was surely intended to be a boyish grin.

  “So the story about the professor’s car?”

  “No, it was the football coach’s van. And it was completely filled—it took us days to blow up all those balloons!”

  That had been a shot in the dark, but vehicles are a popular target for collegiate pranksters. “But the office . . . ?”

  “That was a professor. We wrapped every book, every pen, every piece of paper. Even wrapped her can of Sprite—an open can.”

  We laughed merrily, and I thought I’d bonded with him enough to get to the question I wanted to ask. “Did you really run off with a skeleton?”

  He barely chuckled. “Did Moose tell you about that? That one was supposed to be a secret.”

  “Oh, sorry.” Feeling bad for Moose and not wanting to get him into trouble, I added, “He’d had a lot of my grandmother’s eggnog at the time. I doubt he even remembers saying anything.”

  He looked somewhat mollified. “I don’t suppose it makes any difference now. But it was just gathering dust in that classroom, and I doubt anybody at JTU even noticed it was missing.” He looked back at his screen. “Of course, we took it back after the party.”

  I didn’t have to be a parent or a teacher to know that was a lie, but I was too distracted to call him on it, and it wasn’t by his recommendations for investment opportunities I should look into. I was stymied by a seeming impossibility.

  I did try to look interested as I took the hefty sheaf of materials he printed out for me, and I really was planning to look the stuff over—just because he was a skeleton-napper didn’t mean he wasn’t a good financial planner. But I wasn’t thinking about money market accounts as I drove back to Pennycross.

  It just didn’t make sense! Unless some other Theta Chi students had stolen some other skeleton from some other collection which then ended up in Fenton’s carnival, Rich’s story meant that Sid had come from JTU. Which was impossible—he didn’t have JTU markings.

  Unless . . . What if Yo had simply misread the ID number? She’d been tired and not all that invested in the result. It was such a simple explanation that I convinced myself that it had to be true. Madison was already home when I got there, so I had to save my brainstorm about Sid’s brainpan until she went to bed. Then I hotfooted it up to the attic and told Sid what I’d found out.

  “Can I look inside your skull to check those numbers?”

  “Mi cranium es su cranium.” He popped his skull off of his spinal column and handed it to me.

  I peered inside but couldn’t get a good angle in the dim attic light. “Have you got a flashlight?”

  “Sure.” His headless body walked in the direction of an old dresser Sid used for storage, and banged his patella against a table. “Aim my head this way, would you? I can’t see what I’m doing.”

  “Sorry.” I carried him to where he could look inside the drawer his body had opened.

  “Found it,” he said, and handed me a pink-and-white plastic flashlight.

  “Hello Kitty?” I said. “Oh, man, was this Deborah’s?”

  “I grabbed it from the Goodwill box when she moved out. It still works fine.”

  If the evening produced nothing else, at least I knew what to get Sid for Christmas. Maybe by December I’d even figure out why a creature with no eyes needed light in the first place.

  “Hold Kitty for me, would you?” I pushed his hand into place so I could see the numbers more clearly.

  “Coccyx. P-A-F-60-1573.”

  “That’s what Yo said,” Sid said, his voice echoing oddly from his upside-down skull.

  I wrote the numbers down on a pad of paper on Sid’s table, noticing that the pen was from a Holiday Inn and the pad was from Toys for Tots. Had we always stuck Sid with castoffs, or was it a habit the family had fallen into? If his head hadn’t been right there, I’d have started a Christmas list for him that very minute.

  “Now what?” Sid wanted to know after I’d given him back his skull.

  “I’m not sure. I want to know what this ID number means, but if I ask somebody at JTU, they might lay claim to you. Since Rich and his frat brothers stole you, legally you do belong to them.”

  “Not unless they grant me tenure!” Sid said indignantly.

  “Granted, but I still think we might get in trouble.”

  “Is there perhaps somebody who used to be at JTU who might help? Somebody who is not necessarily completely loyal to that institution?”

  I hit myself on the head when I realized what he was implying. “Like an adjunct, you mean? Of course. I bet we either have somebody at McQuaid who knows that system, or we have somebody who knows somebody who knows that system, or we have—”

  “Stop now. Please.”

  “Anyway, I’ll see what I can find out tomorrow and cross my fingers that word doesn’t get back to JTU.”

  “Hey, if they come get me, I’ll just steal myself this time. No cage can hold me!”

  “Truly you are the Houdini of skeletons. Though I guess, at this point, Houdini is the Houdini of skeletons. Anyway, now that we have a plan, I’m off to bed.”

  “Sleep well,” he said a little wistfully. Sid didn’t sleep as far as we could tell. I wasn’t sure if that led more credence to the skinny-zombie theory or the bone-bound-ghost idea.

  “I’ll get started on this first thing tomorrow!” I said, and he looked happier.

  The way things worked out the next day, I wished I’d just promised him a new flashlight.

  27

  On Wednesdays, I had a long gap between my morning class and my afternoon stints, which meant I had time to work the adjunct network.

  The first step was to check the JTU faculty list. I saw some familiar names, including Charles’s, but unfortunately I didn’t know anybody in the right departments. Still, I had access to a room full of people who might, so I started making my way around the office.

  I started with Kazmi. She was in chemistry, which didn’t have anything to do with skeletons, but she knew m
ore of the other adjuncts than I did and gave me the name of somebody else to talk to, who referred me to yet somebody else. Eventually I heard tell of a biologist who’d worked at JTU for two years and, even better, it was thought that she’d cataloged specimens while there. Unfortunately, the biologist in question was Sara.

  Since she already didn’t like me, I was reluctant to devise a new cover story. Most of mine didn’t even fool people who trusted me, let alone somebody like Sara. But I wasn’t going to tell her about Sid, either. Instead I was going to try to finesse the situation with a subset of the truth.

  Though Sara seemed to be working at her desk, I knew her eagle eyes hadn’t missed a step of my information-gathering trek through the room, so I didn’t bother to act casual. “Hey, Sara. Have you got a minute?”

  “Not really,” she grumbled, but turned my way.

  “I hear you worked at JTU for a while.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’ve got a skeleton that might have come from their collection, and I’m trying to figure out the markings it’s got on it.”

  “And?”

  “I thought you might know what they mean.”

  “It’s been a few years—I don’t have their system memorized.”

  “Do you know anybody—?”

  “I might, but who’s got the time to find out? You know how many classes I’m teaching?”

  She was teaching five, the same as most of the rest of us, but I knew what she was really saying. “Okay, what do you want in return?”

  “I heard that you’ve got a key to your parents’ office. I’ve got a bunch of one-on-ones with students this week, and I’d rather not have to find an available classroom or try to squeeze them in here.”

  I thought about it. My parents had locked all their file cabinets and desk drawers, and had taken their computers with them, so there wasn’t anything Sara could snoop into, if snooping were part of her plan. Still I didn’t trust her enough to just hand over a key. “I’ve got some meetings scheduled, too,” I hedged, “but my parents have adjoining offices. We can set it up so that you can use one while I’m using the other.”

  “Deal. Give me the ID number, and I’ll check with a friend of mine at JTU.”

  Wow. She had friends? “It’s P-A-F-60-1573.”

  She wrote it down. “I’ll call my friend after we get the appointment times worked out.”

  I was impressed. She didn’t trust me any more than I did her. Maybe that mutual distrust could be the basis for a new and meaningful relationship. But after a half an hour of schedule wrangling, I discarded the notion. We just didn’t like each other.

  After all that, her contact wasn’t available until the next morning, which was coincidentally just before her appointment in my parents’ office. She wasn’t taking any chances on my changing my mind. I’d have found that level of attention to detail admirable in most people—in Sara, it was just a pain in the coccyx.

  The rest of the day was refreshingly normal for a change. I was afraid Sid would be disappointed when I didn’t have any news for him that night, but he was philosophical about it. It didn’t hurt that I’d brought him a bribe: a paperback copy of an archaeology mystery that was written by one of the few academics who didn’t make adjuncts feel like the lowest of the low. I thought the subject matter might appeal, given our current project.

  The next day, Sara was impatiently waiting for me when I got to my father’s office.

  “You’re late,” she said.

  “Your watch must be fast. Did you find out what the ID number means?”

  “You mean you’re not letting me in until I tell you?”

  I just looked at her.

  “Fine.” She reached into her purse for a pad, which just happened to be opened to the right page. “P-A-F-60-1573 does appear to be a JTU file number. The structure matches, at least. The 1573 at the end is a file number—somewhere in the computers at JTU there’s a record with details about the specimen, but I couldn’t get access to it.”

  “Okay,” I said, jotting the info onto my own pad.

  “The P means it was a purchased specimen as opposed to being excavated on site or donated. The A is for Asian.”

  “Really?” Hadn’t Yo said Sid was Caucasoid? “I mean, it’s possible to tell that from the skeleton?”

  Sara shrugged. “That’s the best guess. People of mixed races can skew that.”

  “What about the F?”

  She gave me a disdainful look. “Female, obviously.”

  “Obviously.”

  “The 60 is the estimated age, plus or minus a few years. The detailed analysis will be in the file.”

  Could Yo have been that far off the mark? Wrong race, wrong gender, wrong age? “How reliable is this kind of information? Or rather, how hard is it to determine? My parents had a grad student look at it once, and she said it was a man’s skeleton, and a young man at that.”

  “Grad student in what? Art history? Trust me, JTU is a stickler for vetting their specimens. They wouldn’t have put anything down that hadn’t been verified by at least two scientists—the kind who’ve got their degrees.”

  “What if the skeleton wasn’t from JTU after all? Couldn’t another school use a format that looks like this, but in which the F means something else. Like . . . French?”

  “Anything’s possible,” she said in a tone that showed what an idiot she thought I was to ask such a question. “But I did get the info you asked for, so you still owe me use of the office.” A nervous-looking student turned onto the corridor. “That’s my first appointment, so if you don’t mind—?”

  “A deal’s a deal. I’ll be next door—let me know when you’re done.” I opened the door to Mom’s office to let her in, then I went into Phil’s office. The door between the offices was closed so Sara could have sufficient privacy, and while she met with students, I sat at Phil’s desk and stared at my notepad.

  I came up with four possibilities: One, Yo had completely botched her analysis of Sid’s skeleton, either from ineptitude or lack of sleep. Two, Yo had misled me for a cheap joke. Three, Sid hadn’t come from JTU after all. And four . . . I didn’t want to think about number four.

  Neither of the first two was too bad—I could rectify either situation by finding a more expert expert to take a look at Sid. That could even be good news if Yo had misread all the evidence—maybe Sid hadn’t been murdered after all.

  The third was more problematic, because I’d have to swallow a triple dose of coincidence: Dr. Kirkland being at JTU, her son stealing a different skeleton during the same time period, and a code inside Sid’s skull that only looked like JTU’s identification conventions. That wouldn’t just blunt Occam’s razor—it would shatter it.

  It was the fourth possibility that really worried me. What if somebody had purposely mismarked Sid’s skull? The only reason to do that would be to hide him, and there aren’t that many reasons to hide a dead body. Of course, we already knew that Sid was murdered, but now it looked like he was murdered at JTU. A thirty-year-old murder, even of somebody I’d known, wouldn’t have scared me, but when I tied it to Dr. Kirkland’s more recent death . . . That was scary.

  Yet it wasn’t as scary as what Sid came up with after I shared my speculations.

  28

  “Please tell me you’re kidding.”

  “Seriously, Georgia, this will work. We need to get a look at the files at JTU to research my ID number, your pal Charles has access there, and you yourself dubbed me the Houdini of skeletons. You practically suggested this plan yourself!”

  “No, Sid, I did not suggest that we get Charles to leave you at JTU so you can prowl around all night.”

  “Why didn’t you? It’s so obvious!”

  “It’s obvious that you’re insane.” Since it was Wednesday night, Madison was at her Yu-Gi-Oh! tournament and Sid and I were in m
y bedroom. I’d worried he’d be upset, freaked, even frightened by the news that something was off about his ID markings. Instead, he popped out with this crazy scheme.

  “What could go wrong?”

  “Charles could open the suitcase and see you.”

  “You said he was trustworthy.”

  “He is, but . . . Okay, you’re right. Charles won’t do that if I ask him not to.” Even though Sid had never met Charles face-to-face, or face-to-skull, he’d grasped that we could trust him to take Sid’s suitcase, leave it outside the door to Dr. Kirkland’s office, and never look back to see what was going on. “Okay, then. The office is bound to be locked.”

  “I’ll either slip enough of myself under the door to open it from the inside, or find a chair to stand on so I can drop pieces of myself through the transom. I’ve spent hours looking at photos of that campus—just about all of the offices have transoms over the doors.”

  “What if the transom isn’t open?”

  “I can get it open. And if all else fails, I’ll break the door lock. I’m sure I can get in, but if I can’t, I’ll crawl back into the suitcase and wait for Charles to get me in the morning.”

  “What if somebody steals your suitcase?”

  “I’ll escape as soon as possible and either get home on my own or call you to come pick me up.”

  “What if a security guard sees the suitcase and takes it to the security office?”

  “You’re going to put Charles’s name on it, so he’ll call Charles to come get it. Otherwise I’ll escape as soon as possible and either get home on my own or call you to come pick me up.”

  “What if—?

  “I’ll escape as soon as possible and either get home on my own or call you to come pick me up. Look, Georgia, I am eternally grateful for all the work you’ve done to help me find myself, but this is something I can do. Please let me do it.”

  I didn’t like it, but I didn’t see how I could refuse. It was Sid’s life. More or less. “All right, I’ll ask Charles to help, but if he says no, we’re giving up the idea.”

  Of course Charles agreed without hesitation.