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

  “I don’t think anything for sure, not until we get that blood work back. The trouble is, even if we do find something, by then the trail will be stone cold. And not just because of the weather. So I’m just clearing the brush away now.”

  “So I’m part of the brush?”

  “You’re somebody who knew and worked with the victim but didn’t recognize her when you found her body. And you were running around in hip-deep snow in the wee hours of the morning and getting over a fence without anybody to help you. You did say there was nobody else with you that night, didn’t you?”

  “That’s what I said. From the time I got home that night, I didn’t see another living soul until you police showed up.” I said it forcefully, hoping the truth would shine through. That is what I’d said before, and though Sid having a soul or not was debatable, he most definitely wasn’t living.

  “Is that right?” she said skeptically.

  “Do you think I’m lying?”

  “Everybody lies to the police.”

  “Maybe that’s because you ask questions that are none of your business.”

  She chuckled and said, “If I knew a way to get the job done without asking the wrong questions, I’d do it that way. Now I suppose I’ve worn out my welcome. Thank you kindly for the spaghetti. You sure I can’t help you wash the dishes?”

  “Positive.” I didn’t want her in my house a minute longer than necessary.

  She chuckled again, but I didn’t join in. After she retrieved her jacket and boots, I watched to make sure she actually got into the squad car and drove off before shutting and locking the front door behind her.

  Chapter Eight

  I went back to the kitchen and tapped on the top of the washer. “You can come out.”

  “Is she gone?” Sid said, his voice echoing in the drum of the machine.

  “No, and now she knows there’s somebody in there.”

  “Ha ha, you have struck my funny bone,” Sid said. “Open the lid, would you?”

  I did so, and in seconds he’d reassembled and climbed out.

  “Seriously, Sid, did you think I’d tell you to come out if she was still here?”

  “How do I know what you’d forget? Like, you know, the fact that you knew the woman whose body we found.”

  “I know, and I’m sorry. With the announcement about tenure, Kelly’s death kind of got pushed to the back of my mind. Which is a terrible thing to say, even if I barely knew her. Not to mention my not recognizing her.”

  “How could you have? From the back of her neck and the color of her coat?”

  “Still.”

  “Don’t worry about that, Georgia.”

  I was comforted for two seconds, which is how long it was before he went on.

  “What you should be worrying about is telling that cop your whole life story. Not to mention inviting her to dinner. Coccyx, Georgia, what were you thinking?”

  “What was I supposed to do?”

  “Ask her what she wanted and tell her that if she didn’t have a warrant, she couldn’t come in. You’ve got rights, you know. Does ‘you have the right to remain silent’ ring any bells? I mean, it’s only in every cop show ever.”

  “One, I do know my rights, even though unlike some people, I don’t have time to binge on CSI and Rizzoli & Isles. Two, I didn’t know I was a suspect. Three, if I had made a fuss, that would definitely have raised suspicions.”

  “She’s already got plenty of ossifying suspicions! She thinks you killed that woman.”

  “She doesn’t even know for sure that Kelly was murdered,” I protested. “She’s just fishing.”

  “No kidding, but what she’s fishing for is a killer. Why would she tell you all that stuff if she wasn’t waiting to see how you reacted? But keep telling yourself that she just wanted to come for a friendly visit right up until you’re arrested. Or until she does get a search warrant and finds me.”

  “Geez, Sid, I didn’t think of that.” Hadn’t I read that once you allowed police officers inside your home, they were entitled to snoop around? What if Buchanan had suddenly become curious about my laundry? “Maybe we should ship you back to Pennycross, where it’s safe.”

  “Not on your life! I’m not leaving you here alone. You’re like a babe in the woods when it comes to protecting yourself.”

  “I’ve got nothing to hide, Sid, other than you.” And technically, I didn’t even have to hide him—it was completely legal to have a human skeleton.

  “Cops are only human—sometimes they decide the wrong person is guilty. I should know—they thought I was a killer at Halloween.”

  “That was a special case. Of course they thought it was odd when you disappeared.”

  “And they think it’s odd that you went out in the snow at O-dark-thirty. Though I suppose that’s my fault.”

  “Of course it’s your fault.”

  He looked taken aback. “It is?”

  “Absolutely. It’s your fault that you thought somebody might be in trouble, and that you didn’t think about anything other than helping her, even if it was dangerous for you.”

  “But I got you into danger.”

  “I’m not in danger. I’m only under suspicion, and only until Officer Buchanan finds the real killer, if there even is one. For all we know, the blood test results she was talking about will come back negative, and they’ll decide it really was just an accident. I can suffer a few slings and arrows of outrageous fortune in the meantime.”

  “While you’re trying to get tenure?”

  “Yeah, that. Tenure already sounds iffy if my colleagues are spreading dirt about me. Caroline is the only person I told about that argument with Kelly—I hate to think that she’d throw me under a bus.”

  “She could have told somebody else in the department.”

  “True. We adjuncts do love our gossip. She could have told plenty of people and not meant any harm by it.” I was relieved by the idea. I liked Caroline. Of course, I liked the other people in the department, too, for the most part. The idea of any of them running around telling tales behind my back made me uncomfortable.

  “Professor Waldron setting you guys against one another could lead to a whole lot of stories coming out.”

  “I’m afraid you’re right.” I had some odd ones in my background, too, mostly involving Sid and murder, but I didn’t want him to think he was putting my career at risk. He was already feeling guilty enough.

  “So what we’re going to have to do is get proactive,” he said.

  “Sid, I don’t want tenure enough to dig up dirt on my colleagues.”

  “We’re not going to. Unless one of them is the killer, of course.”

  “The killer—?”

  “Obviously the only way to get that cop off your back and clear your path to tenure is to find the killer ourselves.”

  “I don’t know, Sid. My running around asking questions could make me look more suspicious, not less.”

  “Not when we figure out who the real killer is.”

  “Then what about Professor Waldron? Do you think she’s going to want to give tenure to somebody who plays detective instead of publishing papers?”

  “She doesn’t have to know. We can be discreet. We’ve always been discreet in the past.”

  “Not that much. Some of the adjuncts here have heard rumors. Caroline was one of the people we called about the girl who was murdered in October, so she knows I got tangled up in that case.”

  He waved a bony hand. “You worry too much.”

  “Maybe you don’t worry enough. This isn’t a game.”

  He paused for a long time, and at first I thought I’d convinced him. Then I thought he was peeved. It turned out to be a lot more complex.

  “I know it’s not a game, Georgia. Murder is never a game. I may know that better than anybody.”

  “Oh Sid.” I knew he was talking about his own murder, and he was right—nobody could better know than he did. “Do you… Are you starting to remember mor
e?”

  “No, my memory still starts on that day I met you, but sometimes I think about that guy I used to be, and what his life would have been. I wonder if he’d have met somebody and settled down, had a family.”

  “You have a family. You have us.”

  “But it’s not the same. I mean, I love you guys, I really do, and I’m happy. For all I know, maybe I’m happier than that other guy would have been.”

  “But you’ll never really know.”

  “That’s right. And we’ll never know what kind of life Kelly Griffith would have had. So if we can help figure out what happened to her, don’t you think we should?”

  “But the cops—”

  “We can do things the cops can’t, and you know it. You understand academia, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And I’m me.”

  “Right again.”

  He held up a fist. “Which makes us what?”

  I couldn’t just leave him hanging, so I bumped his fist. “The team supreme.”

  So we were back in the sleuthing business. I reflected when I got to bed that night that I really should have seen it coming.

  Chapter Nine

  Despite our resolution, we didn’t do a whole lot of detecting or investigating that night. Once the dishes were done, I had papers to grade while Sid went online to see what he could find out about Kelly’s death. A couple of hours later, he regretfully announced that he hadn’t found much. The death hadn’t caused much of a splash and had only gotten as much play as it had in the Falstone Journal because Kelly had worked there several years earlier. The coverage didn’t hint at it being anything other than a tragic accident, and I wondered if that meant the police were keeping it under wraps or if Officer Buchanan was working on her own.

  The only new information Sid found was that Kelly had grown up in Wyoming and had no family nearby. That seemed to rule out any of her relatives as her killer, which was a relief. Not only would it have been really upsetting to find out that she’d been killed by a family member, but I would have had zero access to those people. And despite Sid’s enthusiasm, we knew that anything face-to-face would have to be handled by me. Sid came up short in the face department.

  Still, neither of us were discouraged. Sid is the most optimistic person I know, and when I went to work the next day, I knew he’d be spending his hours burning up the Internet to see what else he could find.

  I only had one class on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but unfortunately for me and my students, it was at eight in the morning. Once it was over, I headed for the Writing Lab. At the staff meeting, I’d signed up for a two-hour shift starting at ten thirty. Since I knew almost nothing about how things worked there, I was hoping that if I arrived early, one of the other adjuncts would be there to enlighten me. I was right, but unfortunately it was Owen who was finishing up with a student when I arrived.

  “Good morning, Georgia! I knew you were taking the shift after me, so I reserved some time to show you the ropes.” He ushered the student out unceremoniously and shut the door behind him. “So we won’t be interrupted while I give you the grand tour,” he explained.

  I didn’t think the office warranted a tour even if it was twice as large as mine, but I nodded.

  “That was Kelly’s desk,” he said, pointing to one end of the long rectangle of a room. “The cubbies are available for students to write in, but I don’t think they get used much.” Two of them were piled high with books and magazines, and the third was dusty, so he was probably right. There were more books on the shelves above each workstation, and a quartet of file cabinets separated the two halves of the room. “The books are old textbooks, guides to writing research papers, style books, and resource materials for generating ideas. Not that anybody uses them. Kids mostly just come here to get their papers proofread, and half the time, it’s an hour before deadline.”

  “That’s when I used to finish my papers,” I said. “I bet you were the same.”

  He looked momentarily indignant, then relented. “You’re probably right. Anyway, I don’t know what’s in the files—papers from years gone past most likely. You’re welcome to look inside if you’ve got a week to kill.”

  “Maybe later,” I said, thinking that Sid would like nothing better than to go through every single drawer and folder. “How does scheduling work?”

  “There’s a portal on the department’s website for students to sign up for time slots, and Mr. Perkins set it up so we could all access the list. He e-mailed a memo with the passwords and so forth this morning, but in the meantime, he printed out today’s schedule.”

  “Anything else I should know?”

  “Just that if you see anything around that belonged to Kelly, pass it on to Mr. Perkins. The cops sent an officer over to examine her personal effects yesterday, and then Mr. Perkins boxed it up to send it to her family, but they might have missed something.”

  “Would that officer have been Officer Buchanan?” I asked.

  “That sounds right. She questioned a few of us about Kelly. Did you talk to her, too?”

  “She was the one who brought me home after I found Kelly’s body,” I said, which was true, if not complete. I didn’t want word to get around the department that she’d come to my house to question me further.

  “You should have called me that night, Georgia. I could have provided moral support.”

  “I appreciate the thought, but you wouldn’t have wanted me to wake you at that time of night.”

  “I’d rather lose sleep than have you be all alone at a time like that.” He paused. “You were alone, right? That cop asked if you had company in town.”

  “She asked about me?”

  “She was asking about all of us, what Kelly was like, and how we got along with her. Nothing to worry about.”

  “Okay, good,” I said, though I was still worrying.

  “And you didn’t have company over that night, did you?”

  “Nope, no company,” I said. I was being truthful again. Even if he wasn’t a blood relation, what with having no blood, Sid was family, not company. It was none of Owen’s business, of course, but I wanted at least the appearance of having no secrets to hide.

  “Okay then, if you ever need me, don’t hesitate to call, no matter what time of day it is.”

  “Thank you,” I said, knowing I would never take him up on it.

  “What are friends for? We are still friends, aren’t we?”

  “I thought so.”

  “It was nice when we were more than that, wasn’t it?”

  “Owen,” I said with a sigh. “I’m sorry. I respect you and like you, but not in a romantic way.” I’d told him that the first time he’d suggesting renewing our relationship, but somehow he hadn’t gotten the message. He didn’t get it this time, either.

  “You can’t blame a guy for not wanting to give up on the best thing he ever had.” It would have been more appealing to me if he hadn’t followed that up with a loving stroke of his mustache.

  “So what’s today’s schedule look like?” I asked, eager to change the subject.

  “Nobody is signed up for the next hour,” he said. “We could go get coffee or—”

  There was a tap on the door. “Maybe we’ve got a walk-in.”

  He looked at the list again. “Tell whoever it is to make an appointment and come back later. We aren’t responsible for walk-ins.”

  I ignored him and opened the door. A young woman was standing there, looking around uncertainly.

  “Hi. I’m Dr. Thackery, and this is Dr. Deen. We’re filling in here.” She just looked at me. “I assume you heard the bad news about Ms. Griffith.” Actually I wasn’t so much assuming as hoping, because I didn’t want to have to break it to her if she hadn’t.

  Fortunately for me, she nodded, but she didn’t say anything else.

  “Are you Michelle?” Owen said. “Because if you are, your appointment isn’t for an hour.”

  “Um… No.”

  I
waited for her to offer a name, but she just looked at me. She was tiny in all dimensions, and her turquoise-blue eyes were the most vivid thing about her. “Do you need some help with a paper or something?” I finally asked.

  “Actually I need to get something I left with Ms. Griffith. It’s a sketchbook.”

  “Owen, was there a sketchbook in here?”

  “Not that I know of. What does it look like?”

  The student said, “Um, black cover. Spiral bound. Just a regular sketchbook.”

  “We haven’t seen it,” Owen said.

  “Are you sure?” she asked. “Because, you know… It’s kind of important?”

  Owen looked uninterested, so I said, “The department secretary boxed up a bunch of Kelly’s belongings, and it might have ended up in there. You can go check with him.”

  Her eyes widened, as if she were alarmed by the idea of speaking to yet another stranger.

  I shifted gears. “Or I could ask him and get back to you if you’ll leave your contact info.”

  “That’s okay. Um, I’ll check back later.” She turned and fled.

  “What do you think?” Owen said. “Freshman? Freshmen are always flaky, and freshman art students are definitely the flakiest. So, about that coffee—”

  Before I could answer, there was another tap at the door and Owen made an exasperated sound.

  I recognized the next visitor, a stocky man with reddish-blond hair and a matching beard that didn’t quite conceal his freckles.

  “Hi, Jeremy. Looking for some tutoring?” Renee had introduced me to her fiancé at a campus reception at the beginning of the term, and we’d discovered that we shared an affinity for cocktail wieners. He wasn’t entirely humorless, but it wasn’t easy to get a smile out of him, let alone a laugh. I had no luck this time, either.

  He said, “I’d heard that somebody was taking over the Writing Lab, but I didn’t realize it was you two.”

  “Actually, all of us in the department are taking shifts until they hire somebody new. Didn’t Renee tell you?”

  “She might have—I was working last night, so I was kind of distracted. Anyway, I wanted to tell you that I’m about to assign term papers to my classes, and I’m requiring them to have their papers vetted here.”