The Skeleton Paints a Picture: A Family Skeleton Mystery (#4) Page 6

  “We should be able to handle it,” I said. “What’s the topic?”

  “Their biggest artist influences among the Italian masters—though they can pick a Dutch master if they want.” From the expression on his face, Jeremy had serious doubts about anybody who’d pick a Dutch master over an Italian one.

  “And the crowd goes wild with excitement,” Owen said sarcastically.

  “Ignore him, Jeremy. Anyway, just tell your students to sign up sooner rather than later, and we’ll get them taken care of.”

  “Great. Good seeing you, Georgia. And, um, Owen.” He wandered off.

  “And people say English professors don’t live in the real world. What does Renee see in him anyway?” He paused and stroked his mustache, as if waiting for me to join him in mocking Jeremy and perhaps Renee as well. When I didn’t, he went on, “So we’ve still got time for coffee.”

  After all Owen’s sneering, the last thing I wanted was to spend more time with him, and I was trying to decide between a tactful answer and a truthful one when there was a third tap on the door. I think I actually heard Owen growl deep in his throat.

  “There you are, Georgia!” Caroline said. “Ready for our meeting?”

  We did not, as far as I knew, have a meeting, but before I could apologize for forgetting it, Caroline raised her eyebrows, glanced at Owen, and winked. So I looked at my watch and said, “Wow, I totally lost track of time.”

  “Let’s go into my office for this one.”

  “Great. See you later, Owen. Thanks for the tour.”

  “Anytime,” he said tonelessly. Even his mustache looked disgruntled.

  Once the door to Caroline’s office was closed, I said, “And thank you for the save!”

  “I figured I owed you. I switched shifts with Owen today, not realizing he was planning to lie in wait for you.”

  “Ambush flirting is not my favorite courtship method.”

  “Why don’t you tell him you’re dating that carny. You are still seeing him, right?”

  “You mean Dr. Mannix?” True, Brownie Mannix was a carny from a longtime carny family, but he was also an adjunct professor specializing in American studies. We’d started seeing one another in the fall, and I had hopes that we would continue doing so, but he still had a job in Pennycross, which made it tricky. On those rare occasions that I’d made it back home before the snow set in, I hadn’t been able to spend any time with him because I’d wanted to see Madison and my family. Since then we’d exchanged e-mails, texts, and phone calls, but the relationship was still too new to go long-distance successfully. We’d finally admitted that we were both interested but needed closer proximity before we could be sure we wanted to move forward. Therefore, we were free to date others. Unfortunately, I hadn’t found anybody I wanted to date, and if he had, he’d had the good taste not to let me know. Rather than explain all that to Caroline, I just said, “We’re still in touch, but we’re not exclusive.”

  “You don’t have to tell Owen that.”

  “One, I don’t want to lie. And two, I should be able to say ‘not interested’ to a man without needing an explanation or an excuse.”

  “Well, yeah, you should be able to, but you know how some guys are. They’ll only back off if you’re already taken.”

  “If Owen thinks that way, that’s his problem.”

  “Just make sure he doesn’t make it your problem. With the tenure race off and running, we all need to be careful. Fighting among ourselves is not a good way to impress Professor Waldron. Speaking of which, have you seen Renee and Dahna today?”

  “No, why?”

  “They were sniping at one another in the Roundling this morning, which Mr. Perkins saw. You know he reported back to the Boss Lady right away.”

  “What were they arguing about?”

  “I didn’t hear the whole thing,” she said with some regret. “Might have been about Jeremy.”

  “What about Jeremy?”

  “Didn’t you know? He and Dahna used to go out.”

  “Was it serious or an adjunct romance?” Since we adjuncts change jobs a lot, our relationships often end when one of us moves elsewhere. My experience with Owen was a perfect example of that.

  “I think it was just an adjunct romance,” Caroline said, “and Dahna says she’s over him, but it’s got to be hard listening to Renee go on and on about wedding plans, and this tenure thing isn’t helping.”

  “Speaking of the tenure thing, I hope it’s not going to affect our friendship.”

  “I hope not, too. I sure don’t want it to.”

  “I’ve never been in direct competition with a friend for a job before. Well, I suppose I have been, but it’s been via resume and private interview, not this kind of situation.” I was tempted to ask her who she thought had the best shot at the position, but I didn’t think it would be diplomatic, so I changed the subject. “Have you heard anything about services for Kelly?”

  “She’s not from here, and the funeral will be held out of state, so we’re off the hook for that. The campus memorial service will be Wednesday evening.”

  “That’ll be good. I don’t know who her close friends on campus were, but I’m sure they’ll want to be there.”

  “I don’t think she had that many friends,” Caroline said. “Not to speak unkindly of the dead, but she wasn’t all that friendly, at least not to me, and I never saw her with anybody else in the faculty or staff.”

  “I just chalked it up to her being busy.”

  “That may be it.” She hesitated. “Was is it really awful, finding her?”

  “Yes and no. At first when I found the car, I was thinking she might still be alive. So I had an adrenaline rush like you wouldn’t believe. Then when I did find her and she was clearly gone, it didn’t seem real. Maybe if I’d seen her face…”

  “That sounds like a yes to me. Though I know it’s not the first time you’ve seen a dead body. I mean, you found that murdered girl in the haunted house last year.”

  “I didn’t find her. One of the people who worked there did. I just happened to be with my sister, who was in charge of the place.”

  “Wasn’t there a murder at your daughter’s high school? And didn’t something happen at Joshua Tay University?”

  “What did you do, Google me?”

  “Come on, Georgia. You know how we adjuncts gossip. It helps distract us from our lack of a career path. You gossip as much as the rest of us.”

  “I guess it’s more fun to gossip than to be gossiped about. Speaking of which, did you tell anybody about that kerfuffle I had with Kelly? Remember, when she lit into me for giving a kid a bad grade after she critiqued his paper?”

  “I might have. It wasn’t a secret, was it?”

  “No, of course not. It’s just that the police seemed to think it was more of a deal than it was.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that. The cop who was here questioned a bunch of us. If you ask me, she was just trying to milk the investigation to get out of traffic duty or clock some overtime. We all know it was just an accident.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Georgia, can I give you some advice?” Before I could answer, she went on. “I don’t exactly know what went on at those other schools, but you might want to tread carefully around here. Tenure and messing around with the police don’t really go together.”

  I tended to agree, and I sure wasn’t going to mention the fact that I was afraid Officer Buchanan considered me a suspect.

  By then it was time to report back to the Writing Lab for my shift, but as I left, I couldn’t help thinking that Caroline never had said who she’d told about the incident with Kelly.

  Chapter Ten

  My shift at the Writing Lab matched Owen’s predictions. Of the first three appointments, two of the students had papers due the next day while the third student’s paper was due in an hour. Needless to say, that precluded prolonged discussions about the intricacies of structure or idea generation. The best I c
ould do was help them edit their work and make it stronger, and in the case of Mr. My-paper-is-due-in-an-hour, I stuck to basic proofreading and making sure his citations were in the proper format.

  My fourth appointment was late, and I spent the spare time rummaging around Kelly’s desk, but either she hadn’t kept many personal items at work, or Mr. Perkins had done his usual efficient job. Not that I expected to find an envelope marked “Read in case of my unexpected death,” but I did have time to kill.

  I gave up when my last appointment showed up, out of breath and apologetic. Walking her through her paper took the better part of an hour, which put me past the end of my shift. Once she was gone, I realized I was starving and locked up the Lab before anybody else could drop in.

  On my way to The Artist’s Palette, the best of FAD’s eateries, I stopped by Mr. Perkins’s office to ask if he’d noticed a sketchbook mixed in with Kelly’s belongings, just in case that student ever came back, but he assured me he had not.

  “Why would Ms. Griffith have a student’s sketchbook?” he asked.

  “I have no idea,” I admitted. “All I know is that a student came looking for it.”

  “There’s nothing in our lost-and-found box that matches that description, but if anything is turned in… Her name, please?” He reached for a pen to note it down.

  “She didn’t tell me. If I see her again, I’ll tell her.” I looked around his pristine office. “Have you already sent off the box with Kelly’s things?”

  “Of course. Why do you ask?”

  I couldn’t very well cop to the fact that my favorite sleuthing skeleton would’ve given a spare rib for a chance to look inside, so I said, “I just wondered if I could drop it off at the mail room for you.”

  He raised an eyebrow and frostily said, “That’s not necessary.”

  I realized he’d decided that I was sucking up to try to influence the tenure decision. In a clever attempt to convince him otherwise, I said, “Okay.”

  His phone rang, saving me from having to feign an urgent appointment I’d just remembered, and I made a hasty retreat.

  After a bread bowl of vegetable soup for lunch, I went back to my own office to my own work. I knew Sid wouldn’t be happy with me, but with Dahna taking her shift at the Writing Lab that afternoon, I couldn’t very well walk in and look through file cabinets, and that was the only idea I had. Plus I did have work to do.

  Sid, on the other hand, had had all night and day to look for information online. I was sure he’d have something waiting for me when I got back home.

  Unfortunately, all Sid had waiting for me was an air of dissatisfaction. “That’s all you found out?” he said after I’d described the day’s events. “Georgia, it’s important to move quickly on a murder. We don’t want the case to get cold.”

  I winced, thinking of how Kelly had died.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean it like that. And I guess you did give me some stuff to work with. I mean, it’s pretty suspicious, don’t you think?”

  “What’s suspicious?”

  “Everything and everybody!” He started counting it off on his phalanges. “Owen, Caroline, Mr. Perkins, the mystery student…”

  “How was Owen acting suspicious?”

  “Hanging around and watching you. He admitted he’d seen Officer Buchanan—maybe he sent her after you to keep suspicion from himself.”

  “And his motive would be what?”

  “Maybe he threw a pass at Kelly, and she turned him down.”

  “If turning him down led to murder, I’d be dead several times over.”

  “Suppose he’d taken it beyond making a pass. He was actively harassing her and she threatened to have him fired.”

  “That’s kind of thin. So what did Caroline do that’s so suspicious?”

  “The way she interrogated you about Kelly’s body is pretty telling.”

  “Yeah, it tells me that she was curious. Which I would be, too, in her place.”

  “You said yourself she didn’t reveal who she’d told about your altercation with Kelly. An incident you never told me about, by the way.”

  “There are a lot of things I do in my day that I don’t tell you.”

  “Like what?”

  “If I told you, it wouldn’t be something I don’t tell you.”

  “Touché.” He steepled his fingers. “Maybe Caroline didn’t tell anybody about it, other than Officer Buchanan. Maybe it was an attempt at misdirection.”

  “And what would her motive be?”

  “I don’t know yet, but I’ll think of something.”

  “Let’s just make it something reasonable,” I said. “Mr. Perkins? Other than possibly suffering from OCD, what’s he done?”

  “How do we know he actually sent off Kelly’s personal effects? He could have hidden them.”

  “Not in his office. It would have brought chaos to his carefully preserved order. And not to sound like a broken record, but motive?”

  “Why do they say broken record? A broken record doesn’t repeat—scratched records repeat. Why isn’t it scratched record?”

  “So you don’t have a motive for him, either.”

  “Not yet. And then there’s the mystery student. As Mr. Perkins wondered, why would an art student leave a sketchbook with a writing tutor?”

  “Now that is interesting, but if she’d killed Kelly, wouldn’t she have taken the sketchbook already?”

  “Perhaps she was prevented from doing so. After killing Kelly, she attempted to break into the office but was stopped by a security guard. So she intended to sneak in today, but hadn’t realized that the department would reopen the Lab so soon.”

  “You’re really reaching, Sid. You didn’t find anything online that would have led to Kelly being murdered, did you?”

  “Not a single ossifying thing,” he said with a look of pure disgust. “I read everything she ever posted on social media, and I mean since she started her Facebook account. I even went back to the articles she wrote for the Falstone Journal before she came to work for FAD.”

  “Nothing juicy in local politics or crime?”

  “Oh yeah, hot-button topics like whether the stop sign on Pleasant Street should be replaced with a stop light, and a rash of shoplifting at the dollar store. I’m sure somebody would kill to hide the truth behind big stories like that.”

  “Then maybe it really was just an accident, Officer Buchanan is a loose cannon, and we’re wasting our time.”

  He shook his head. “I’m sure it was murder, Georgia. I’ve just got a hunch.”

  “Really? Your spine looks straight to me.”

  “Oh so very droll.”

  “Oh, come on, Sid. It was a joke.”

  “Really? I thought jokes were supposed to be funny.”

  “Sid—”

  “If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go back to my room and see if I can waste some more of my time.”

  “Sid—” But he’d stomped away already. Despite the fact that he only weighs about twenty pounds, Sid can stomp a mighty stomp when he is so inclined. His bedroom door slammed a moment later.

  I knew I was in the wrong, but his walking off that way—not to mention the slammed door when he knows I hate door slamming—made me mad. So I ignored him and made a dinner I could barely taste, watched an episode of The Flash I didn’t enjoy, and played a computer game that bored me. I started out stewing over his behavior, but as time went on, I moved on to stewing over my own. Finally, I went and knocked on his door.

  “Yes?”

  “Can I come in?”

  “Okay.”

  I went in and saw that he wasn’t at the computer after all. Instead he was sprawled on the bed with a Ms. Marvel graphic novel. And by sprawled, I mean his bones were so disconnected he was barely still a full skeleton.

  “I’m sorry, Sid. That hunch line was a cheap shot. I’m kind of stressed over this tenure thing, but that’s no excuse and I apologize.”

  “Apology accepted.�
�� His bones tightened somewhat. “Does that mean you believe that Kelly was murdered?”

  “Honestly? I’m still not entirely convinced.” Sid’s bones loosened again, so I quickly went on. “But here’s the thing. There have been other times when I wasn’t convinced even though you were, and you turned out to be right. So I’m going to go with your hunch, Sid.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  Sid snapped together and jumped up. “You’re awesome!”

  “If I were so awesome, I wouldn’t have doubted you.”

  “Forget it—I already have. What were we talking about? I have no idea. My mind is a blank. See?” He popped his skull off and held it out so I could see inside. “Nothing.”

  “Nobody accepts an apology like you do, Sid.”

  He grinned. “So about tomorrow…”

  “Wait, were you making a plan while you were in here with your feelings hurt?”

  “I knew you’d change your mind. You can’t resist the thrill of the hunt any more than I can.”

  “I’d be willing to try resisting,” I muttered.

  He ignored me. “I think a two-pronged approach is best. I’m going to go back online to do some more digging and put together a dossier on Kelly. I’m also going to see what I can find out about the suspicious characters you encountered today and write that up, though it would help if you could identify the mystery student.”

  “I’ll try, but other than wandering around looking for her, I don’t know what else I can do.”

  “Maybe she’ll come to Kelly’s memorial service. I saw online that it’s tomorrow evening on campus. You’re going, right?”

  “I probably should. She was a member of my department.”

  “And?”

  “And it would be politically expedient to attend to show my loyalty to the department. All the other people who want tenure will be there.”

  “And?”

  “And fine, I do enjoy the thrill of the hunt. A little. And stop looking smug. It’s impossible for a skull to look smug.”