The Skeleton Paints a Picture--A Family Skeleton Mystery (#4) Read online

  “If you were being careful, you wouldn’t have been out in the woods in the middle of the night.” By then I had everything but my outerwear on. “Why am I getting dressed?”

  “Because I need you to come see what I saw.”

  He grabbed my hand and pulled me to the front door where my winterizing accessories were hanging. “Get your coat.”

  “Fine.” I put on all the gear, then put my keys and cell phone into my pocket. “What did you see?”

  “I’m not sure. That’s why I want you to come!”

  “Okay, okay.” I followed him outside, wincing as the frigid air hit my face, and let him lead me around the rear of the house. The snow was close to two feet deep back there, and Sid had to help me make my way through it, all the while insisting that we needed to hurry.

  Finally, we got to the fence, and he said, “See? There!” He pointed to the right.

  “I see something,” I said doubtfully and squinted. “It’s a car, isn’t it?” It was bright red or I might not have even realized what it was.

  “I think so. Should there be a car back there?”

  “I don’t think so.” There was definitely no road or house in that direction. It looked as if the headlights were on, but dimly, as if the battery had nearly run down.

  “Could somebody be stuck out there? I’ve read about people getting stuck in the snow and not being able to get out. People have died that way!”

  I took a long look, but if anybody was moving in the car, I couldn’t tell. In retrospect, I realized I should have called the police right away, but at the time all I could think of was getting to whoever it was in the car. “Sid, I need you to boost me over the fence.”

  “Okay, but I’m coming with you.”

  Under the circumstances I should have told him to wait in case there was somebody in the car to see him, but I didn’t want to go down there alone. “Just keep out of sight as best you can.”

  “You got it.”

  Since Sid’s strength isn’t defined by muscles, he’s as strong as he believes himself to be, and that night he was feeling particularly brawny. He easily lifted me over the fence, then climbed over himself.

  It turned out to be a good thing he’d insisted on coming. The snow beyond the fence was even deeper than it was in the bungalow’s yard, making for slow slogging in snowdrifts that were up to my waist. Even with Sid’s help, I just barely made it.

  When we got close enough, I started calling out, “Hello? Is there anybody in there?”

  There was no response, and a few seconds later, I saw the car—its hood was crumpled against a tree, and the windshield was shattered. There was a deep trough in the snow, showing where the red hatchback had plunged off the road several hundred yards away and down a steep drop-off.

  When I finally reached the car, I saw it was halfway buried in the snow, making it nearly impossible to open the driver’s door. I peered in through the window and saw a deflated airbag on the dashboard and a jumble of things that had been flung around in the crash, including a pocketbook and a thoroughly battered laptop, but that was all.

  “There’s nobody here,” I said in relief.

  Sid walked around the car and said, “Over here.”

  The passenger door was open, with signs that somebody had scrambled out that way and then tried to get up the incline to the road. To my dismay, those signs included splashes of blood.

  “It looks like she tried to get up to the road but didn’t make it,” Sid said, then pointed to another track, leading away from a rut in the snow, as if somebody had tumbled down.

  “Hello?” I called out, but there was no answer.

  Sid and I started following that second track of snow and more smears of blood.

  She hadn’t gotten much farther. There was a gully a few yards away, and a figure in a dark parka was lying, face down, at the bottom. It looked as if she’d lost her footing, fallen that way, and hadn’t moved again. When I saw a coating of snow covering her arm, I knew she had to be dead, but I said, “We’ve got to make sure,” and started to look for a way to descend safely.

  “I’ve got it,” Sid said and scrambled down so he could kneel beside her. He put one bony hand on her back and used the other to touch the little bit of bare neck that her short-cropped hair had left exposed.

  Then he looked up at me and shook his head. “She’s gone.”

  Chapter Four

  An hour or so later, I was sitting in the back of a police cruiser. Though the heater was running and I had a cup of hot, overly sugared coffee in my hands, I was still shivering. I wanted to blame it on the fact that my clothes were wet from melting snow, but I was pretty sure it was more reaction than anything else.

  Once we were sure the woman was dead, I’d sent Sid back to the house while I called the cops, making my best guess at where the car had gone off the road and then using the flashlight app on my phone to signal them. It hadn’t taken them long to find me, and then to help me climb up to the road to get to one of the cruisers to wait while they dealt with the dead woman. Thinking about what that meant made me shiver worse.

  Eventually a police woman with short blonde curls and a sturdy build knocked on the window, then opened the door. “Ms. Thackery? The chief says there’s no need to keep you here any longer and that I should drive you home.”

  “That would be great, if I’m not taking you away from anything.” I’d been hoping somebody would offer. I really hadn’t wanted to go back the way I’d come, and the road twisted around enough that the walk home would have been a long one.

  “Not much to be done, really. You want to stay back here or ride up front with me?” I hesitated, torn between curiosity at seeing the front of a police cruiser and wondering if that would be tacky. She added, “It’s right much warmer in the front seat.”

  “Up front it is.”

  Once we’d both climbed in and fastened our seat belts, I said, “I’m sorry, I don’t remember your name.”

  “Officer Ginny Buchanan,” she said.

  “Do you mind if I ask some questions, Officer Buchanan?”

  “I’d be mighty surprised if you didn’t.”

  “The woman I found. She was dead, right?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” she said politely but couldn’t help her tone of voice, which implied that that was one the stupidest questions she’d heard in recent memory.

  “I mean, of course she was dead, but she’d been dead for a while, hadn’t she? Was it okay that I left her there, where she was? It didn’t seem right to drag her out.”

  “Well, the medical examiner will tell us more, but it looked to me like she passed away several hours ago. So you did exactly right. You called us and didn’t disturb the scene any more than you had to.”

  “The scene? It was an accident, wasn’t it?”

  “Even accidents have to be investigated.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Anyway, we should be able to better work out what happened once it gets light. We’re just glad you spotted her when you did. There’s more snow in the forecast tomorrow, and if she’d been out there too much longer, she and the car would have been buried for sure. We wouldn’t have found her until spring.”

  “Then I’m glad I could do that much. Do you know who it is?”

  “You didn’t recognize her?”

  “I didn’t look at her face. I would have had to turn her over and…” Sid and I had both agreed that it wasn’t necessary. “Should I know her? Who was it?”

  “We need to notify the next of kin before we release that information.”

  “Of course,” I said, momentarily thinking of some poor parent or spouse getting that horrible phone call or police visit.

  By then we were nearly to the bungalow, and as we turned down the driveway, Officer Buchanan said, “Mind if I ask you something? What were you doing out in the snow at this time of night anyway?” She sounded casual, or maybe she was working at sounding casual, but I knew it looked odd.

 
Fortunately, I’d had time to come up with an answer. “I couldn’t sleep. I’m only living in Falstone temporarily, you see, and normally, I share a house with my teenage daughter, my parents, and a big dog. I’m just not used to all the quiet, and I thought some exercise would do me good.”

  “So you went out into the woods? I mean, I walked back up that direction, and I saw that fence—I wouldn’t have been able to get over it without help.”

  I hadn’t realized anybody had retraced my steps, and I could only hope Sid had covered his trail well enough that it hadn’t been obvious that two people had climbed over instead of just one. “I only meant to walk to the property line, but then I saw the car, and I guess I got that adrenaline rush you read about. Of course, I should have just called you guys right away when I spotted it, but I couldn’t tell for sure it was a crash until I got over the fence, and by that point, I had it in my head that I could help. Not too bright, really.”

  “Well, your heart was in the right place,” Officer Buchanan said as she pulled up to the end of the driveway.

  “That’s a nice way to put it. Thanks for the ride.”

  “No problem.” I must have been wobbling when I got out of the squad car because she said, “Are you going to be all right by yourself?”

  “I’ll be fine. I’ve got a friend with insomnia and I’ll give him a call and get him to keep me company by phone if I need it.”

  “Okay, then.” She waited until I was inside with the door shut before backing out again.

  As soon as the cruiser’s headlights disappeared, Sid came clattering toward me with his arms outstretched. “Are you okay? What happened?” Before I could answer, he said, “Wait, don’t say anything until we get these wet things off of you.” In no time he had me out of my coat and boots. Then he pushed me toward the living room, wrapped me in an afghan, and zipped off to bring me an enormous mug of hot chocolate, a ham sandwich, and a mountain of potato chips. “Eat first.”

  “Sid, you’re the best,” I said, taking a bite.

  “You mean I’m the worst! Coccyx, Georgia, if I hadn’t gone out tonight, you wouldn’t have gotten mixed up in this.”

  “I’m not mixed up in it,” I said, “and I’m glad you saw that car. Otherwise that poor woman could have been out there for months!” I repeated what Officer Buchanan had told me. “Can you imagine how awful that would have been for her family, not knowing where she is?”

  “No, and I don’t want to. I don’t want you thinking about it, either. Now eat your sandwich, and I’ll find something cheerful for you to watch on TV.” He surfed through channels until he came across a station showing Singin’ in the Rain, one of our favorites. It was definitely cheerful, but once I was fed and warm, I started drifting off to sleep. The last thing I remembered was the beginning of the “Gotta Dance” sequence.

  Chapter Five

  Sid’s and my moods were subdued the next morning, but by lunchtime, we’d decided not to talk anymore about the poor woman we’d found. Maybe it was callous, but as Sid pointed out, there was nothing we could do for her.

  Instead we focused on my normal weekend activities: laundry, house cleaning, and grading essays. Usually it took me most of the weekend to get all that taken care of, but with Sid’s enthusiastic assistance, we were done by Saturday afternoon. I should have felt bad about him doing so much work, but he seemed to enjoy it. He could actually fold a fitted sheet, something I’ve never mastered. As for the essays, I used to feel guilty about letting him grade student work because he didn’t have an English degree, but he’d taken some online courses and had spent decades with my parents and me—all three of us English professors. So he was really good at it. He sometimes caught things I’d missed.

  The last item on the list was grocery shopping, and Sid tried to talk me into letting him come along, claiming that nobody would notice him with his winter paraphernalia on, but I put my foot down. I did let him ride with me, but he had to stay in the car and hide. That satisfied him, and he was fascinated with the scenery. Falstone is a pretty town, and with a new batch of snow falling, it looked like a freshly shaken snow globe. On the way home, we stopped at DiPietro’s, the local pizza place, for my weekly pepperoni-covered treat, and then we went back to the bungalow for a video orgy.

  Sunday was filled with more shoveling and snowblowing—thanks to another snowfall overnight—a snowball fight, reading, and a nice long Skype conversation with the family. Having Sid around meant I wasn’t nearly so lonely after talking to Madison, and I didn’t sniff as long as I usually did.

  Monday morning, I left Sid alone with his laptop and headed to campus with a much cheerier outlook than when I’d left it three days before.

  Though I’d worked at a variety of colleges and universities during my nomadic adjunct existence, FAD was my first art school, so I was still getting used to the schedule. Every place I’d taught before had classes that either met on Monday-Wednesday-Friday or Tuesday-Thursday, but apparently the norm for art schools was Monday-Wednesday and Tuesday-Thursday classes. Friday was reserved for students to work on projects.

  That didn’t mean I got the day off, of course. Instead I kept office hours, graded papers, planned class discussions in my three sections of Expository Writing, and did all the other work that went into an adjunct’s workload.

  Or rather three-fifths of my workload. In addition to the three classes at FAD, I was also teaching two classes via the web.

  After teaching and grading five sections’ worth of essays each week, occasionally there was enough time left over that I could read a professional journal, or at least a paper. Maybe half a paper. Sometimes it was just a footnote.

  Not that the conditions at FAD were any worse than at any other college. In some ways it was one of my better jobs. The department was almost all adjuncts—only Professor Waldron, the head of the department, was tenured. That meant I didn’t have to deal with the caste system prevalent in some universities, in which adjuncts always ended up at the bottom. And for the first time in my career, I had my own office.

  It wasn’t large—the artist adjuncts’ studios were twice as big—but I didn’t need as much space as they did. Just having a desk, a file cabinet, two chairs, and a bookcase was a rare pleasure, not to mention the luxury of being able to meet students in private. I’d squatted in my parents’ office at my last job, but that wasn’t nearly so satisfying as having my own place. I’d even put up decorations: family photos, a map from The Lord of the Rings, and the movie poster from the Keira Knightley version of Pride & Prejudice. My favorite part was the door, complete with lock, which enabled me to shut myself off from students and other adjuncts when the desire arose.

  My first class wasn’t until eleven, but I liked getting in early to grade papers and deal with e-mails, many of which were from students asking for information that was spelled out in the syllabus I’d both handed out and e-mailed to my class members the first week of classes. I was just getting settled when there was a perfunctory knock on my door, followed by Mr. Perkins stepping in.

  “Dr. Thackery? I’m sorry to interrupt, but Professor Waldron has called an emergency departmental meeting. It’s right away in the conference room.”

  I knew he was lying. Sure, there was a meeting about to take place and I had no doubt some emergency had arisen, but the gray-haired, slender black man wasn’t sorry about interrupting. If Professor Waldron asked him to, the English department’s secretary would interrupt anybody, anywhere. His devotion was not, as far as I could tell, a romantic attachment, but it was intense. He considered her to be the most brilliant scholar ever to grace the halls of academe and seemed indignant that the rest of the world didn’t share his opinion. He was amazingly efficient in providing support for faculty members who showed the right amount of reverence for her, so I made sure to do so.

  “I’ll be right there,” I said.

  “I’ve got coffee and Danish waiting.”

  Since Professor Waldron liked coffee and Danish, h
e assumed everyone else in the department would, too. Fortunately, I was fine with both.

  I shut down my laptop and headed to the conference room, wondering what the problem was. Professor Waldron was a creature of routine, and she wouldn’t have deviated from her usual schedule of Wednesday morning meetings unless it was important.

  The English department wing, like all the departmental wings, was made up of a long corridor leading from the main building, which opened up into a round room that was sunny, spacious, well-equipped with chairs and couches, and nearly impossible to heat. Somebody in the early days of FAD had dubbed this hub the Roundling. Along the walls were doors to the faculty offices, conference rooms, and the Writing Lab, and there was a small snack bar and tables next to a door to the outside. A wide circular stairway in the middle of the Roundling led upstairs to the department’s classrooms.

  Naturally, given that FAD was an art school, the walls were hung with a frequently changing array of artwork, and there were even a couple of niches for sculpture. The selection that day seemed to be variations on a life model who was either slender, voluptuous, multicolored, or black-and-white, depending on the artist’s vision. One creator had turned her into a “rubber hose” style cartoon character, like the early Disney films. I wasn’t sure if the sculptors had used the same model as the other artists because they were going for the abstract. One was softly curved burnished metal and the other was angular scraps of wood tied together with blue and blood-red rope.

  The English wing had both more and less space than strictly necessary. We needed all of the classrooms because every student was required to take Expository Writing as part of their core requirements, but we didn’t really need the room for students to work or socialize. There was no degree program in literature or writing other than sequential art, so we didn’t have many kids hanging around unless their own departmental hubs were too crowded for them.

  That early in the morning, the Roundling was mostly deserted, except for a couple of students who were taking early morning naps on one of the couches, but the adjuncts were gathering in the conference room.