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

by Leigh Perry

  That only made him look more smug.

  It was late, so I headed to bed shortly after that. I still felt a little unsettled about the disagreement with Sid. We almost never argued, and I hoped it wasn’t going to be more frequent with the two of us being alone together.

  At least we’d gotten past this one relatively unscathed. Sid was happily clacking away on his laptop. Nothing cheers Sid up like creating nice fat dossiers.

  Chapter Eleven

  In the interest of fair play, I got to FAD long before my eleven o’clock class. If Sid was going to be working on our investigation all day, the least I could do was snoop around campus. Unfortunately, the only idea I had was to get back into the dusty files in the Writing Lab. According to the online schedule, nobody was being tutored that morning, so I went over, expecting to find the door locked. Instead Caroline was at the door talking to a student who was wearing a flannel shirt and a knit cap pulled over dark blue hair.

  “Oh Georgia, good news,” she said. “It turns out Kelly had a student assistant. Dr. Thackery, Indigo Williamson. Indigo, Dr. Thackery.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” I said, and Indigo nodded in return.

  “Indigo is in one of my graphic novel classes, but I hadn’t realized they were working with Kelly.” I was grateful for Caroline’s emphasis, which clued me in to Indigo’s preferred emphasis. I was guessing they were gender fluid, but if there was one thing I’d learned from teaching at an art school, it was that I shouldn’t make assumptions.

  Indigo said, “Yeah, I worked here a few hours a week. I didn’t know if you guys still wanted me to help or not.”

  Caroline and I looked at each other, and we both shrugged.

  “Sure, if you’re willing,” I said. I hadn’t realized Kelly could sign time cards—we adjuncts couldn’t—but Mr. Perkins would be able to handle the details.

  “Do you have a shift now, Georgia?” Caroline asked.

  “No, I was just going to work in here if it’s empty. My office is kind of chilly.” It did run cold in there, especially on a bitter day like that one, though I’d never bothered to go elsewhere before.

  “You know, the winters up here are usually pretty rough. You better make sure you can handle it if you want to stay here long-term.” Then she laughed.

  I laughed back, but it was a strain. Between Kelly’s death and the tenure issue, I was starting to hear nastiness in every conversation, and I didn’t much like it.

  Caroline left and Indigo followed me into the Lab.

  “Is this the shift you usually work?” I asked.

  “It’s kind of flexible.”

  “So do you help tutor or…?”

  “No, I just kind of run errands—get coffee and stuff. Or watch the office while Kelly goes to the bathroom. Do you need to take a bathroom break?”

  “No, I’m good,” I said, amused by what the situation had to be. Somebody, somewhere must have owed somebody a favor to get Indigo a plum job like this one. I didn’t know if they were getting credit or a stipend for “helping” at the Lab, but I wasn’t going to mess it up for them even if I had been hoping for time alone.

  Since I didn’t feel comfortable searching through files with somebody else around, I pulled out my laptop instead and made a halfhearted attempt at making notes on next week’s lesson.

  Indigo seemed to be at loose ends as much as I was. They looked at the books on the shelves, opened a couple of file drawers to peer inside, then checked out the stack of papers on one of the worktables.

  “Are you looking for something?” I asked.

  “Just wondering where Kelly’s stuff is.”

  “They packed it up to ship it to her family.”

  “I guess that makes sense.” They sat down at one of the cubbies and pulled out their phone, so presumably they were going to hang around a while.

  Maybe I could take advantage of that. “Had you been working for Kelly long?”

  “Just this semester.”

  “Did you enjoy working with her?”

  They shrugged.

  “I didn’t really know her well myself. Did you? What was she like?”

  “She was okay.”

  “Her death must have been a shock to you.”

  They shrugged.

  So much for getting a more personal view of my former colleague.

  Indigo put the phone away, only to pull a sketchbook out of their green canvas messenger bag and start drawing.

  That reminded me of something. “You wouldn’t know anything about a sketchbook being left in here, would you?”

  They straightened up and looked at me sharply. “Kelly wasn’t an artist.”

  “I know, but another student came by looking for hers. I haven’t seen it, but if you were working here—”

  “I don’t know anything about it.”

  “I figured it couldn’t hurt to ask. You know, I could use a cup of coffee if—”

  “Sorry,” they said as they shoved the sketch pad back into their bag. “I’ve got to get going.”

  “See you later. Will I see you again this week?”

  But they were gone.

  “I bet Indigo and Kelly got along just great,” I said to myself. On the good side, I could finally look at the files. On the bad side, by the time I had to leave for my class, I’d only made it through half of one drawer and had found nothing but copies of old essays.

  After the class, lunch, and my second class, I would have liked to go back to the Lab, but it wasn’t going to happen. For one, Dahna was on duty tutoring somebody. For another, Wednesday afternoon is one of the times I keep office hours to meet with students. I had a steady stream of them with questions about grades, assignments, how many classes they could miss without affecting their grades, and whether I would be willing to grant an extension to the current deadline. For the first three, I pulled out a copy of the class syllabus and pointed out the answer, printed in nice, plain type. For the fourth, I answered on a case-by-case basis, depending on the sincerity and creativity of the excuse offered.

  By the time all that was done, it was almost time for Kelly’s memorial service. I locked myself in my office and changed from my thick jeans and warm pine green sweater into a dark brown pair of wool slacks and a considerably less warm, but more formal, burgundy sweater. For the first time in a month, I switched out of my toasty UGG boots and put on a pair of moderately dressy flats. I wondered if I would ever get a chance to wear shorts again if I got tenure at FAD.

  To keep from having to walk outside, where it was once again snowing, I made my way through the maze of wings to get to the campus chapel. Only, it wasn’t called a chapel—apparently “chapel” had been deemed too conventional for art students. Instead FAD had a Sanctuary.

  The Sanctuary was a round room with lightly stained wooden beams against cream-colored plaster. The floor was an ornate mosaic of wood with all manner of religious symbols: crosses, different varieties of stars, crescent moons, yin and yang, and tucked in here and there, what I suspected were Klingon symbols from Star Trek. Niches along the wall were filled with statues showcasing just as much religious variety, interspersed with student paintings of religious subjects. Included was a portrait of Luke the Evangelist, the patron saint of painters, but it was a variant on the traditional pose. Normally, he’s shown painting the Virgin Mary, but this version had him drawing with a stylus on an iPad.

  Several rows of chairs were set up in a half-circle, with a podium and a poster-sized photo of Kelly up front. I spotted Professor Waldron, Mr. Perkins, Caroline, and the others from our department clustered together near the front and I joined them, greeting them with the nods and half-whispers reserved for funerals and memorial services.

  The chairs were mostly empty, but since I’d come a little early, I’d expected them to fill up before the service got started. In fact, only a handful of other people showed. I recognized some as faculty members and a trio of people from campus administration, and there were about a dozen students
, including Indigo. I nodded at Indigo, but perhaps they didn’t see me because they didn’t nod back.

  Then there were one or two people who looked like they might be connected with Kelly from outside the school, but I didn’t identify anybody as family. Of course, I told myself, Kelly could have had dozens of friends who couldn’t make it to Falstone, given the wintry weather, but it was a sad showing, just the same.

  I’d had occasion to attend a fair number of academic memorial services over the years, but just as the Sanctuary was different from most campus chapels, the service was a bit unusual too. Kelly hadn’t been an academic in the normal sense, so that meant nobody could talk about her contributions to the field. She hadn’t had an advanced degree, either, so there were no jokes about how absent-minded or focused she’d been when working on her dissertation. Those differences alone cut the service in half.

  It was obvious from his generic remarks that the dean hadn’t known Kelly other than as a line in the department budget, and he quickly turned things over to Professor Waldron. She did her best to stretch out the story of how she’d come to hire Kelly and spoke with sincere admiration for the work she’d done with students, but the closest she came to the requisite funny anecdote was something about Kelly double-scheduling two students for critiques, and it was so uninteresting that only Mr. Perkins could manage a warm chuckle.

  Afterward came the usual invitation for others to come speak about Kelly, but when the only response was awkward shuffling, the dean came back to the podium just long enough to invite everyone to join him for refreshments in the Sanctuary’s reception room. Even the music played for the recession had an impersonal feel.

  As I told Sid later, I’d known people so disliked that any number of people would have been willing to kill them and others so beloved that it seemed impossible that anybody would ever harm them. But with Kelly I couldn’t see that anybody even cared that she was dead.

  Still, Sid was sure she’d been murdered, and when I got up and turned around, I was reminded that he wasn’t the only one. Officer Buchanan was standing in the back of the room surveying the sparse crowd. As soon as I spotted her, she saw me and gave me a grin that made chills run down my spine.

  Chapter Twelve

  If that feeling of dread I felt when I saw Officer Buchanan watching me was typical of what an innocent person felt when confronted by a cop, I couldn’t even imagine how a guilty person would feel. Of course, I knew it was impossible for her to prove I’d killed Kelly. For one, I hadn’t done it, and for another, I had no motive. That didn’t stop me from wanting to run and hide. Since I wasn’t going to do that, I went the other direction. Meaning that I went right to her.

  “Officer Buchanan, you’ve surprised me again. Did you know Kelly?”

  “She and I lived at the same apartment complex, so I guess you’d call us neighbors,” she said, “but mostly I thought it would be nice to have the police department represented here. There was plenty of room, wasn’t there? Did she not have many friends?”

  “Apparently not,” I said. “Have you found out anything else about her death?”

  “Not yet,” she said. “Would you mind telling me who’s who? I’d like to see some of the other people she worked with.”

  Did that mean I wasn’t a suspect after all, or was this a test to see how I’d react? I had no idea, so I figured I might as well do as she asked. “The tall lady in the dark blue pantsuit is Professor Waldron, the chair of the English department. The gentleman with her is the dean.”

  “The little fellow?”

  “No, the smaller one is Mr. Perkins, our departmental secretary. The taller one is the dean.”

  “Who else?”

  “The crew of people trying to pretend they’re not watching us is the rest of the adjuncts in the English department.” I had a hunch Caroline was telling them how the police had already spoken to me, and I wondered how the rumor mill would mangle the facts this time.

  “I met the guy with the mustache already,” Officer Buchanan said.

  “That’s Owen Deen. To his right is Dahna Kaleka, in the mustard-yellow blouse. Next to her is Caroline Craig, and next to her is Renee Turner.”

  “What about the guy with the beard?”

  “That’s Renee’s fiancé, Jeremy Nolan. He’s not in our department—he’s a painter.”

  “And those people over there?”

  “Other art faculty, I believe.”

  “Who else?”

  “Students. Some administrative people. I’m not sure who that guy in the brown sports coat is.”

  “That’s the one I do know. He’s a reporter from the Falstone Journal.”

  “That’s nice, that he and Kelly stayed in touch all these years.”

  “He didn’t know her—the people she worked with are long gone. He’s here covering the services for the paper.”

  “Oh.” So much for my getting background information about Kelly. “Well, those are the people I know. If you’ll excuse me, I haven’t had dinner and I’m going to get myself something to eat.”

  “You bet. Thanks for the help. I’ll be seeing you.”

  I wasn’t sure if she meant to sound threatening or it was my own anxiety, but I made myself head to the refreshment table at a sedate pace.

  Thanks to the low turnout, there was an overabundance of food, rare at a college event, so I filled a plate with deli meats, cheese, crackers, and cookies. Even though I’d only mentioned food as an excuse to get away from Officer Buchanan, I really was hungry. Some of the students were hovering nearby, as if unsure of the proper etiquette, so I stopped by them long enough to say, “You know, they’re going to throw out what doesn’t get eaten, so you might as well dig in.” Then I stepped back to avoid the stampede. FAD’s dining facilities aren’t bad, but I’ve rarely met a college student who couldn’t use some extra calories, especially if the price doesn’t get added to their tuition bill.

  I considered joining the other English department adjuncts, but I’d have plenty of excuses to talk to them later, while I hadn’t had a chance to meet as many people in the school’s other departments. Luckily, I did know one of the art instructors in attendance: Lucas Silva. We had both worked at a community college near Boston a few years back and there’d been a bit of a mutual attraction, though we’d never progressed to anything beyond lunch dates. Still, it was enough to give me an entree into the group.

  I stepped into range of their conversation and waited through a discussion of natural light at different times of year until Lucas noticed me.

  “Georgia, how you are you holding up? It’s such a shame about Kelly.”

  “Heartbreaking,” I agreed. “I didn’t know her well, but it’s always sad to lose somebody so young.”

  “Georgia, this is Ashwin Inamdar from Illustration, Jacqueline Lewis from Sequential Arts, and Greg Azzopardi from Animation.” Ashwin was a well-built Indian man, shorter than me, with a buzz cut; Jacqueline, who was pleasantly curvy and dark-haired, looked younger than most adjuncts; and Greg was an affable bald man with a slightly nervous smile. Lucas himself was curly-haired with improbably black eyes and long, elegant fingers ideal for holding the paintbrush that was his favorite tool. “Folks, this is Georgia Thackery from the English department.”

  We traded collegial nods, since the plates of refreshments prevented handshakes.

  “Thackery…” Greg said thoughtfully. “Aren’t you the one who found—”

  Lucas elbowed him. “Come on, man.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Yes, I found Kelly’s body. It was…not fun.”

  “Sorry, I shouldn’t have said anything,” Greg said, his smile more nervous than ever.

  “It probably would have been worse if I’d known who it was—I didn’t find out until much later. Was she a good friend of yours?” It was a rough segue, but he was feeling too guilty for bringing up the finding-a-dead-body thing to notice.

  “Yeah, no, not really. Not lately, anyway. We went out a
few times when she first started working here.” He shrugged. “It didn’t work out, but we parted friends.”

  Ashwin snorted. “You say that now, but that’s not what you said then.”

  The smile faded as Greg said, “That was years ago.”

  It seemed unlikely that a long-ago failed romance would cause a murder, but I’d heard of stranger motives, so I mentally filed it away. I was going to try to think of a way to ask the others about their relationship, but Jacqueline helped out before I had to.

  She said, “How did you know Kelly, Ashwin?”

  “We went to the same gym. When we were both in the spinning class, we took turns driving because the parking was so bad downtown, but I when I switched to cardio, our schedules didn’t mesh and we fell out of touch.”

  Sid would do something with that. No obvious motive, but Ashwin would have known where Kelly lived and what her car looked like.

  “Lucas?” Jacqueline said.

  “We met at a faculty thing. She mentioned she was interested in going back into journalism, so I tried to hook her up with a couple of reporters I know. Nothing came of it, unfortunately. The only time I saw her was at campus events, except a few times when she came by to ask about art concepts so she could do a better job with critiquing papers.”

  “It doesn’t sound like she had any real buds,” Jacqueline said. “That’s really sad.”

  “So you weren’t very close, either?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “I only spoke to her a handful of times, and that was mostly for work. She didn’t know comics, and we got together so I could explain enough of the common tropes for her to work with my students. I recommended some stuff for her to read, but though she didn’t come out and say so, I could tell she thought sequential art was a waste of time and talent.” She gave Ashwin a pointed look. “She’s not the only one around here who thinks that.”

  “Hey, I never said comics are a waste of anything. I’m all for artists being able to make a living so they can afford to work on their real art.”

  “So comics aren’t real art?”