A Skeleton in the Family Page 7

  “How did you know that?”

  “Hey, I read.”

  “I read, too, and I’ve spent my whole life around academics, and I didn’t know that one. Maybe you remember more about Kirkland than you thought.” Since I didn’t know anything about zooarchaeology, I opened another window to search for more information. “According to this, she studies faunal remains like antlers, teeth, shells—”

  “And bones.”

  “Which may or may not be a coincidence. She’s apparently a grand dame of her field and a winner of the prestigious Mejia Medal for Anthropological Studies.”

  “Why anthropology and not archaeology?”

  “Archaeology and zooarchaeology are subsets of anthropology,” I explained, and went on, “Kirkland is a professor emeritus at JTU.”

  Joshua Tay University, which was two towns over in North Ashfield, was a semi-friendly rival school to McQuaid. Our programs and backgrounds were similar, so we competed for the same students. It was one of the few schools in the area that I’d never taught at.

  “She only retired from teaching a few months ago and is now living here in Pennycross.”

  “What was she doing at the con?”

  “Fletcher said she was on campus to meet somebody, and found herself in otaku country.”

  “Fletcher?”

  “I told you about Fletcher.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “Well, I would have if you hadn’t been sulking. You remember seeing that guy sitting with me at Mangachusetts? He’s a part-time adjunct in journalism who works at the Gazette. He was covering the con for the paper, and took that picture of Dr. Kirkland, but when he found out she wasn’t there for the con, he wasn’t interested in her anymore.”

  “Was he interested in you?”

  “Absolutely. After sharing a soda and cookie with me, he swore his undying devotion and pledged his life and fortune to me and me alone. Well, to me and Madison. I don’t know how he’ll react to you—I thought I’d wait until after the wedding to introduce the two of you.”

  “So you like him?”

  “He’s nice,” I admitted. “We’re going out on Friday, as a matter of fact. Now, do you want to talk about my love life or your past life?”

  “I don’t have anything else to say about my past life—maybe Dr. Kirkland does. I want to see her again.”

  “Sid, assuming that we could arrange that in such a way that does not give the good professor a heart attack, what then? ‘Excuse me, but do you recognize my skeletal friend here?’ ‘Are you missing a skeleton?’ ‘Did you kill somebody and skeletonize the body?’”

  “That’s not funny,” Sid snapped.

  I couldn’t remember the last time Sid had snapped at me.

  “I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “I know I used to be human and therefore somehow went from living human to what I am now, but I don’t like to think about the process.”

  “I’m sorry. As for what you are now, you’re my friend. Okay?”

  “Okay,” he said. “So what now?”

  “Shall we see what else we can dig up on the Web?”

  The answer to that was “Not a lot.” There were listings of a career’s worth of scholarly papers and awards, mentions of her three grown kids and her dead husband, and notes from appearances at conferences in her field.

  Sid looked at every scrap of information and every picture we could find, and still felt nothing other than that same sense of fear and guilt.

  It was getting late and Madison was going to be coming up to bed soon, so I needed to get Sid back to his attic. “Tell you what,” I said, “tomorrow I’ll work the adjunct network and see if I can find out more about Kirkland, maybe figure out what she was doing on campus Saturday. Okay?”

  “Okay,” he said grudgingly. “Or maybe we could snoop around her house—there might be something there that would spark a memory.”

  “And we would get in how?” Before he could answer, I said, “Sid, we are not breaking into that woman’s house.”

  “You wouldn’t have to break anything—Deborah could show you how to pick her lock.”

  “Even if that were so—and you know Deborah wouldn’t help—it would still count as breaking and entering. The ‘breaking’ part is metaphorical, as in ‘I’m going to break your head if you don’t get into the clothes basket so I can get you to the attic.’”

  “If I had a tongue I’d be sticking it out at you!”

  “That would be fine as long as you did so from inside the basket.”

  Twenty-three hours later, we were back in my room with Sid sitting in the clothes basket.

  I’d spent every spare moment that day talking to other adjuncts, starting with Charles because he was always on campus, and eventually found out why Dr. Kirkland was on campus. “Here’s the scoop,” I said. “Kirkland was there to meet with a computer science grad student she’s hired to do some statistical analysis.”

  “Wow, that’s really boring.”

  “The only thing more boring was the story about one of the computer science adjunct’s cats I had to listen to before I could ask him about Kirkland. I’d share it with you, but since I dozed off midway through, I’m missing details.”

  “Thanks for that. So, what next?”

  “I was hoping you’d come up with something while I was following the trail of boredom.”

  “I’ve tried remembering, and there’s just nothing else there.”

  “Trauma has a way of messing with memory, and dying is usually pretty traumatic.”

  “Maybe I could find a therapist,” Sid said. “A blind one.”

  For a moment, that almost made sense.

  He went on. “I’m still not remembering anything but Kirkland. You have to go talk to her.”

  “And say what? ‘You don’t know me, but somebody who used to be alive recognized you, and . . .’ I can’t even come up with a hypothetical question, Sid.”

  “Maybe I could get to know her.” Before I could point out the obvious, he held up one hand and said, “Not in person, but online.”

  “You two could trade funny cat pictures and Harry Potter GIFs all day long, and it wouldn’t help. It was the guy you used to be who had a connection with Kirkland, and we don’t know anything about him. If you were a him—for all we know, you were a woman.”

  “Hey!”

  “Well, I don’t know the difference between a boy skeleton and a girl skeleton.” Despite the many hours I’d spent with a skeleton, I was hardly an expert on bones.

  “The guys on CSI can tell as soon as they see a skeleton.”

  “That’s because they’re trained forensic scientists. Even if we have any forensics people in the Pennycross Police Department, I don’t really want to explain to them why I have an unidentified skeleton.”

  “Who said anything about the police? There’s a physical anthropology department at McQuaid, isn’t there?” Of course he knew the school’s departments—he’d been reading my parents’ school bulletins for years.

  “That’s not a bad idea.”

  “Don’t sound so surprised. I’m a brainy guy, even without the brain.”

  “Of course, if I take you to McQuaid, you know how you’re going to have to travel.”

  “Coccyx! Fine, bring on the ossifying suitcase.”

  13

  Part of the joy of working in colleges and universities is the vast number of knowledgeable people dying for someone to take an interest in their specialty—surely bone experts would be as eager as anybody to show off.

  After my morning class the next day, I checked around the adjunct office to see if anybody in there had skeletal skills, but Charles was fairly sure the only one who might was Sara, and as I’d already learned, Sara didn’t play well with others. Sid and I were going to have to look elsewhere.

 
The Anthropology Department seemed like our best bet, so I got the suitcase out of my van to wheel to Easton Hall, easily the largest building on campus. There was a persistent squeak but I knew full well that Sid himself was making the noise, not the wheels of the bag. He really hated riding in the suitcase.

  The Anthropology Department was on the third floor, and since I didn’t want to lug Sid up the stairs, I was searching through the maze of hallways and doors for the elevator when I saw an office door start to open. Hoping it was nobody I knew so I wouldn’t have to explain the bacon bag, I hurried past but heard somebody say, “Georgia?”

  I tried to come up with an excuse as I turned, but when I saw who it was, I relaxed. “Hi, Charles. What are you doing—?” I stopped, realizing what he was probably doing, and switched tracks. “How is your week going?”

  “Splendidly, and I hope yours is the same.”

  “I don’t suppose you know where the elevator is.”

  “I would be happy to show you.” He took me down a narrow hall and waved me to the left. “Your carriage awaits.”

  “Thanks, Charles. See you later.”

  He courteously waited until I was in the elevator before giving his usual half bow.

  “Who was that?” Sid said from inside the suitcase once the elevator door had slid shut.

  “Charles Peyton. Don’t worry. He’s the one person on campus who will never be nosy about what I’m doing.” I suspect Charles would have been equally discreet about anybody, but he seemed to feel he owed me particular service. He had a secret of his own, one I’d discovered by accident and had never even told Sid, and Charles had never forgotten that.

  McQuaid wasn’t known for anthropology, and the department was small: only four professors were listed in the directory. The door to the main office was open, and either a secretary or a student was tapping away at a laptop covered with a skeleton-pattern decorative skin. I knew it was either a secretary or a grad student because she didn’t look up when I stepped inside—an undergrad would have.

  “Excuse me,” I said.

  “Yeah?” the girl said, still not looking up.

  “I’ve got a skeleton, and I was wondering if I could get somebody to take a look at it. It’s nothing crime-related or anything, it’s just that—”

  “Fill out a form.” She pointed at a messy stack of badly photocopied pages on top of a bookshelf along one wall.

  “Thanks.” I sorted through them before I found one with the heading Skeletal Examination Request. Naturally there were no pens in sight, so I pulled one out of my satchel and filled in the blanks: Date, Name, Number of Bones, Condition of Find, and so on. I hesitated over Location Found—I couldn’t fit my overly elaborate cover story onto one line—and finally wrote “parents’ attic.” Then I started to hand it to the girl.

  “Put it in Dr. Ayers’s mailbox.”

  I would have, but when I looked at the row of mail cubbies, I saw that the one labeled Ayers was already stuffed full. Moreover, the papers toward the bottom were curling—they’d been in there awhile.

  “Is Dr. Ayers not in residence this semester?” I asked

  “Nope. He’s in Belize. Along with most of the department.”

  “When will he be back?”

  “As if he’d tell me anything.”

  “Is there anybody else who can work with human bones?”

  “Anybody who can? Yes. Anybody who will? I sincerely doubt it.”

  I took a closer look at the girl. Mid to late twenties. Hair died Crayola red, but not recently, so there was an inch-wide line of brown down the part. She was so pale she probably hadn’t been out of the basement during daylight hours for the past six months, and her college sweatshirt and plaid pajama pants gave the impression that it was two weeks past laundry day. Her desk was covered in photocopied journal articles, and there was a battered notebook with carefully written numbers in front of her. She still hadn’t stopped typing.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “You’re Dr. Ayers’s student, but you didn’t get to go out into the field with him because you’re approaching the deadline for your dissertation, and you don’t have time to waste messing with a skeleton when you’ve already done your research.”

  She finally looked at me. “Now, let me guess. New hire, but not in my department or even in this building, or I’d have seen you before. Not tenured, or a formal announcement would have gone out. So unless there’s something you can do to help me finish my dissertation, you can leave the form in the prof’s mailbox.”

  Before she could go back to ignoring me, I said, “One question: How long does it take to examine a skeleton?”

  “Depends on what you want to know. A full examination could take a couple of days, plus another two days to write a decent report.”

  I knew that wasn’t going to happen—I’d never tear her away from her dissertation that long. “What about a quick and dirty exam? Just the basics, and you wouldn’t have to write a report about him.”

  “Him?”

  “If it’s male,” I said, ignoring the muffled raspberry from inside the suitcase.

  “An hour or two, which is still more time than I care to spend.”

  “One more question. How long did it take you to find a parking place this morning?”

  “Half a freaking hour,” she snarled, “and that was all the way across campus.”

  Parking was the number-one complaint of McQuaid students, and the expensive parking permits were sold in far greater quantities than the actual number of places available. They were derisively referred to as hunting licenses. To add insult to injury, the parking police were ever vigilant and tickets were outrageously high.

  “So you lost an hour of work time just today. Whereas even a part-time instructor gets a hang tag for the faculty lots.” Since the university was working hard to attract name professors, faculty lots were plentiful and closer to the school buildings than the student lots—I’d passed several empty faculty spots on the way to Easton. “I even have spares. My parents teach here, too, and admin automatically sent them theirs for the year even though they’re on sabbatical.” Knowing the power of a good bribe, I’d tucked one of the tags into my satchel, and I pulled it out to twirl around on my finger. The grad student stared at it like . . . well, like a grad student seeing a convenient parking place. “Still too busy to look at my skeleton?”

  “How long do I get to keep the hang tag?”

  I probably could have offered a month and settled for the rest of the fall semester, but I was willing to be generous. “When is your dissertation due?”

  “May.”

  “You give me a good consult on the skeleton, and you can keep it until it expires in August.”

  “For that you get two hours. I guarantee gender and approximate age, and will take a stab at race. Plus anything else I can find out in that length of time. Nothing written, no liability if I’m wrong.”

  “Deal.”

  The girl reached for the tag, but I put it back into my satchel and handed her the form I’d filled out instead. “After you look at my skeleton.”

  “Have you got the bones with you?”

  “In the suitcase.”

  “Then let’s do this.” She got up, put a battered sign that said Back soon on the door and locked it. “Bring it out to the workroom.” There was an open hallway behind the desk, and the student led the way down it. “FYI, if your bones turn out not to be human, you still owe me the hang tag.”

  “I’m pretty sure he’s human,” I said, ignoring a kick through the side of the suitcase from Sid. “I’m Georgia Thackery, by the way.”

  “Yo.”

  I tried to keep conversant with high school slang in order to communicate with Madison and college slang for communicating with my students, but I wasn’t sure I’d encountered that particular usage before. “Pardon?”

/>   “I’m Yo. Short for Yolanda.”

  The door to the workroom was festooned with an articulated Halloween skeleton with its middle finger bones pointed up defiantly. Yo unlocked the door to reveal a room that would have been kind of creepy to anybody who wasn’t a physical anthropologist or a woman who’d grown up with a skeleton for a best pal.

  A wide variety of bones and skulls filled translucent plastic bins on the metal shelves that lined the walls. Any walls that weren’t filled with shelves were decorated—if decorated was the right word—with enlarged photos of skeletons, with and without flesh, and anatomical charts. There was also a selection of scales, measuring equipment, and tools I hoped Yo knew how to use. In the middle of the room were two worktables topped with the black, inert laminate typically used in labs.

  “Do I have to denude the bones?” Yo asked. “If I do, I’m going to have to leave them soaking overnight. We don’t have a beetle colony.”

  “Nope, he’s clean.” Sid gave himself regular wipes with hydrogen peroxide to make sure he looked his best, which was a lot more pleasant to think about than beetles. I slid down the handle of the rolling bag, then hefted it onto the table.

  “A suitcase?”

  “It’s what he always rides in.”

  Yo gave me a look.

  “Just kidding,” I said with a fake grin. “I didn’t have anything else big enough to carry it in.” I unzipped the bag and reached in to pull out Sid’s right hand.

  “Okay, it’s human,” Yo said. “You’d be surprised how many people bring in bear paws.”

  “Are they that similar?”

  “Sure, to an amateur,” she said dismissively. “How do you come to have a human skeleton, anyway?”

  “It’s been in my parents’ attic for years,” I said, which was true enough. “They used to use it for inspiration for writing exercises.” That was made up, but it would have been a good idea if Sid hadn’t been the skeleton in question. “My sister and I found it while cleaning and got into an argument about it.” Again, there was a grain of truth. Deborah and I had been arguing about Sid for years. “She watches all those crime shows and claimed she could figure out all kinds of things about the skeleton. I bet her that she couldn’t.”