The Skeleton Stuffs a Stocking Read online

  All of that matched both Charles’s poetic description and Yo’s more prosaic facts, and of course the timing and the employer cinched it. There was even a photo. It looked like a badly reproduced copy of a driver’s license or work ID picture, but it was infinitely more than we’d had before.

  “Hello, Rose,” I said. I didn’t really see either the lover or the frightened runaway Charles had described. She was just a normal-looking woman with slightly stooped shoulders.

  I reread the news story. “The report is kind of skimpy.”

  “Not really,” Sid said. “I’ve looked at a lot of these missing person announcements these past few days, and it’s pretty standard. The only time they go into more detail is if it’s a child or somebody with impaired faculties. Or if the family makes a fuss, of course.”

  I nodded, thinking about how much fuss I’d make if anybody in my family went missing. “She lived in West Litchfield, not Pennycross.” West Litchfield was the next town over and wasn’t considered as desirable a place to live, so housing prices were lower.

  Sid said, “Now that we’ve got this, we can—”

  “Before we do anything else, we need to show this to Charles and make absolutely sure that Annabelle Mitchell is his Rose.”

  “You’re right,” Sid said. “Do you want privacy for this?”

  “Definitely not.” If I was going to break Charles’s heart, I wanted company. I got out my phone to text him.

  georgia: Are you available?

  Charles responded by calling me. I knew he had to be anxious, but of course he attended to the amenities first. “Good afternoon, Georgia. I hope you’re doing well.”

  “I’m fine, thank you, and I’ll be more polite next time, but right now I may have some information. Does the name Annabelle Mitchell mean anything to you?”

  “Not that I can recall.”

  “It might be Rose’s real name. Annabelle Mitchell disappeared from West Litchfield around the time Rose showed up here, and her description matches what you told me about Rose and what Yo said about the remains.”

  “And Miss Mitchell never reappeared?”

  “I’m still looking into that, but it doesn’t seem so.” I hesitated for a second. “Charles, I’ve got a picture of Annabelle to send you. Can tell me if she was Rose?”

  “I’ll be happy to take a look,” he said mildly.

  “Hold on.” Sid texted me the link, which I then copied to forward to Charles. “I just sent it.”

  “I see it.” There was a long silence.

  “Charles?”

  “I beg your pardon for the delay. I wanted to be completely certain. It’s Rose.”

  I wasn’t sure if this was good news or bad news for Charles, which meant I didn’t know what to say.

  “How did you find her?” he asked.

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t tell you. My source wants to stay confidential.”

  “I certainly wouldn’t want you to violate that. Do you think this will help you find out what happened to Rose? Or rather, to Annabelle.”

  “I’m sure it will.”

  “Have you told the police?”

  “Not yet. I wanted you to know first.”

  “That’s quite thoughtful of you. Then you’ll be calling them this evening?”

  “Well, an anonymous tipster will be.”

  “Could you tell me, in the course of your investigation, have you found out anything more about Annabelle?”

  “A little, and I might find out more.” Or Sid might, given that he was busy doing something on his laptop. “Would you like me to send you what I’ve got so far?”

  “Tomorrow will be soon enough. Not that I’m assuming you’ll continue to work tonight, I hasten to add. You’ve already done so much.”

  “I’ll have more for you tomorrow,” I said firmly.

  “Thank you, Georgia.”

  “I know this is a stupid question, Charles, but are you okay?”

  “I’m not entirely sure how I feel.”

  “Do you want to go to dinner or something?”

  “You’re very kind, but I think I would prefer to be alone tonight.”

  “Call if you need me.”

  “Thank you again,” he said, and hung up.

  Sid, who’d typed quietly while I was on the phone, said, “Are you okay?”

  “I guess. I was so excited about finally having a name, and now I feel terrible. Maybe I should have broken it to him more gently.”

  “It’s not like Charles wasn’t already pretty sure that was Rose we found.”

  “There’s a big difference between pretty sure and completely sure. Anyway, now he knows. So what are you doing?”

  “Tracking down the digital footprint of Annabelle Mitchell.”

  “Does that mean you want to stay on the case rather than leave it to the police?”

  “After what Treasure Hunt said this afternoon? Of course I do. We’re way ahead of the cops and getting further ahead every minute.”

  “Only because we know who the dead woman is and they don’t. Where’s your burner phone? I should go ahead and call it in.”

  “Yeah, about that…”

  “Did you use up the minutes? Or did you misplace it during your cleaning frenzy?”

  “No, I’ve got plenty of minutes, and I know exactly where it is, but I was thinking. Georgia, do we have to tell the cops?”

  “Of course we do.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they need to know so they can investigate.”

  “Is it even a priority for them?”

  “Sid, you know Louis isn’t going to forget about a murder.”

  “Yeah, okay, but I don’t see why we should give him our lead. We’re the ones who figured out the carney connection.”

  “Which we wouldn’t have been able to do if Charles hadn’t told me the dates to look at. Had I let him go to the cops, they’d have gotten to Fenton’s ahead of us.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. I mean, do you think Dana or Treasure Hunt would have told them anything?”

  “Isn’t that all the more reason to share the information?” I said.

  “Okay, say we tell them and now that they have pictures of Annabelle Mitchell to flash around the neighborhood and a more definite date. What if somebody remembers seeing Charles in the vicinity of the Nichols house that month? What if there’s trace evidence on Annabelle’s clothing, something they can compare with Charles’s DNA? That wouldn’t make much of a Christmas present for him.”

  “I never thought about that.” Hadn’t Louis mentioned something about getting the clothes Annabelle had been wearing analyzed?

  “Or how about this? What if somebody saw Annabelle going to the carnival and starts asking questions there? Getting Brownie’s parents arrested won’t do much for your reconciliation with him.”

  “I’m not letting a murderer get away to help my love life.”

  “I’m not asking you to. I’m just suggesting that we continue our investigation as long as we keep making progress and only pass on information to the police as a last resort.”

  “And this is purely to help our friends?”

  “Not purely, but partially.”

  I thought about it. “Okay, we’ll try it your way. But if we get stuck, you pull out the burner phone and we call the cops. Deal?”

  “Deal!” He had me in mid-pinky swear before I could change my mind. Pinky swears are not taken lightly in the Thackery household.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Even though my parents had chased off all their graduate students before dinner, a move I suspect was in response to Andrew’s multiple foot-in-mouth offenses from the week before, Sid decided to forgo joining us. Either he wanted to jump onto the case, or he had more shopping to do, or most likely, a little of both. Dinner table conversation avoided both dissertations and the morality of crossing a picket line, and the meatloaf was enjoyed by all.

  A
fter eating, cleaning, laundry, and catching up on some of the work I’d shoved aside to go to see the Fentons, I went back up to the attic to check on Sid’s progress. “Did you find anything?”

  “I found out why I never spotted a missing person report for Annabelle.”

  “We didn’t have a name or the town she lived in until today.”

  “It shouldn’t have mattered. I’ve gone through a bunch of sites that list missing persons for the whole state. Annabelle wasn’t included on any of them. She wasn’t even listed on the West Litchfield police department’s site.”

  “She did disappear ten years ago.”

  “I found listings for people missing way longer than that. I don’t think the police were looking very hard for her.”

  “So you didn’t find anything?”

  “Did I say that?”

  “Sorry.” Sid tends to drag things out, but I’ve found it’s usually faster to let him tell stories his own way than to push.

  “Next I went to see what I could find out about Annabelle elsewhere. Google gave me nothing but that one story about her disappearance and stories about other women named Annabelle Mitchell. So I went on to social media.”

  “Did you find the digital footprint of a gigantic hound?”

  “More like the footprint of a teeny-weeny guinea pig. Annabelle’s Facebook page looks like somebody showed her how to set it up about a year before she went missing, but then she never did anything with it. The only thing useful was her profile picture, which is much better than the one we had before, so I printed it out.”

  He handed it to me. It was the same woman, but she was smiling, and I saw a glimmer of what Charles had seen in her.

  “So much for social media.”

  “Did I say that?” Sid asked again.

  “Santa Claus doesn’t want you to tease your friends, especially this close to Christmas.”

  “Santa doesn’t like people rushing him either, which is why you have to wait until Christmas to open your presents.” Before I could rebut, he said, “While Annabelle herself was not an active Facebooker, I did find a Facebook group dedicated to her.”

  “A what?”

  He turned the screen so I could see. The heading on the window said, “Missing Annabelle Mitchell,” and there were some snapshots of her, plus the profile photo Sid had printed out. “It was created about a month after Rose showed up in Pennycross, and though there were a fair number of posts at first, it’s mostly gone dormant. It has a hundred members, but only three of them have posted in the last month, and there haven’t been any new members in a couple of years.”

  “Then they haven’t made the connection with the body we found?”

  “Not that I can see. Why?”

  “I’ve read about people with missing family members who spend years checking out every single dead body that matches the description of their loved ones in hopes of finding out what happened. That’s a nightmare scenario if I’ve ever heard one.”

  “Agreed. Anyway, even though this group is mostly inactive now, there’s a little more information about Annabelle, though I had to sift through a lot of posts to get it.”

  “This sounds like a good time to tell you how wonderful you are.”

  “If you must.”

  I struck an adoring pose, complete with clasped hands and fluttering eyelashes. “Sid, you’re wonderful.”

  “Thank you, thank you.” He bowed in his seat before going on. “The weird thing is that most of the posts are people talking about other cases. It’s like an online community formed around missing persons. There are a few tips dating back to when the page was first created, but mostly it’s theories and sympathy, plus the occasional troll comment. Can you imagine trolling when somebody is trying to find a missing relative?”

  “I wish I couldn’t, but I can.”

  He made an expression that clearly showed his disgust, even though he didn’t have the benefit of the usual facial components. “Now we get to the meat of the matter. The admin, who created this group, is a woman named Lauri Biegler and she still posts occasionally.” He clicked around a little. “This is Lauri’s Facebook page, where I found something potentially useful. She graduated from Bostock, which is presumably how she knew Annabelle.”

  “She must have known her pretty well to go to the trouble of setting up a missing person page for her.”

  “My thought exactly. I think we’ve found our next person to talk to.”

  We spent a while noodling over how best to approach Lauri Biegler. Speaking to her in person was out of the question—according to Biegler’s profile, she lived in Ohio. We couldn’t call her because we didn’t have a phone number. That left two choices: either post something publicly on the group or send a private message. We didn’t want to go public, and Sid said a private message was iffy because not everybody accepts messages from people they don’t know.

  Finally we decided on a public message telling her that we’d sent a private message, and a private message asking her to get in touch.

  “Should I use my account?” I asked. “Or do you want to use yours?”

  “Georgia, what the patella are you thinking? What if this Lauri Biegler turns out to be Annabelle’s killer?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “If somebody I wanted to kill had run off, I might very well start a Facebook group in order to crowdsource the search for her. And once I’d found the person, killed her, and buried her, I’d keep the page going for camouflage. Plus I’d monitor it in case somebody found the body or if any witnesses came forward so I could go after them, too.”

  “You know, you have a disturbing way of looking at things.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But since Lauri Biegler lives in Ohio, don’t you think we’d be safe?”

  “She says she lives in Ohio. My Facebook profile says I have a cat and eyeballs. Everybody lies on the internet.”

  I still thought Sid was erring on the side of paranoia. “If neither you nor I can post a message, how are we going to get in touch with the woman?”

  “I have several accounts under fake names. Well, technically they’re all fake names, but one is for my real personality while the others were created for just such an eventuality.”

  I had to admit that he was thorough, though I wondered what other plans he’d made for “just such an eventuality.”

  Sid, using an account for an eyeball-equipped cat owner named Art Taylor, signed in and posted the following:

  I may have some information about Annabelle Mitchell, but I’d rather not post publicly. Would you be willing to communicate via private messages or by phone? I’ve sent my phone number by private message.

  For the private message, he sent the number for his burner phone.

  I said, “You realize that the downside of this approach is that we’re going to have to wait for her to respond to us.”

  “Don’t worry, Georgia,” Sid said stoutly. “I will sit by the computer with the phone in my hand, day and night, until we hear from her. I won’t even—”

  The phone rang.

  We’d already decided that Sid would do the talking, something he rarely got to do in our cases, so he answered and put the phone on speaker so I could listen in.

  “Hello?”

  “Yes, I was given this number to call. To whom am I speaking?”

  “Art Taylor,” Sid lied. “And you are?”

  “My name is Lauri Biegler. I moderate the Find Annabelle Mitchell Facebook page. You said you have information about her?”

  “I may have. I’m trying to see what I can find out about a woman who seems to match the woman on your page.”

  “Do you know where she is?” Biegler asked excitedly. “Do you know what happened to her?”

  “First let me confirm that I’ve got the right woman. You say Annabelle Mitchell worked at Bostock College, correct?”

  “Right.”

  “Were you on
e of her students?”

  “One of her students? Maybe we’re not talking about the same woman after all. The Annabelle Mitchell I knew was a custodian, not an instructor.”

  Sid looked confused, and I was, too, until I remembered what Yo had said about Annabelle’s remains showing signs of manual labor and time spent on her feet. That matched a custodian a lot better than it did a college professor.

  “Actually, I wasn’t sure what Ms. Mitchell’s position was, only that she was employed at Bostock, so it could be the same woman.”

  “What do you know about her?”

  This was tricky. We wanted to find out what we could about Annabelle, but we didn’t want to either imply that we were the police or say anything that would encourage Biegler to talk to the police.

  Sid said, “First let me say that I’m looking into the case on an unofficial basis. I’m not a cop.”

  She gave a little snort. “I figured that. The cops never did care about Annabelle, not even when she first went missing. That’s why I kept the Facebook page going. I live out of state, and I’m still more concerned about her than the cops or the college ever were.”

  She sounded angry, which might make it easier for us. Sid went on. “Okay then. I just wanted you to know that I don’t have any official standing. I’m more of a concerned citizen.”

  Even that was stretching a point because Sid wasn’t technically a citizen. The man he’d been, back when he was still traditionally alive, was American, but Sid’s legal status was ambiguous at best.

  Biegler said, “Oh, like in The Skeleton Crew.”

  Sid and I looked at one another.

  “Beg pardon,” he said.

  “That book, The Skeleton Crew, about amateur sleuths solving cold cases?”

  I had no idea what she was talking about, but Sid said, “Right, like that.”

  “So what have you found out?”