A Skeleton in the Family

by Leigh Perry

  I looked at Yo to see if she was buying it, but given the bored look on her face, I could probably have just shrugged.

  That’s what she did, and with practiced indifference muttered, “Whatever.”

  I started to hand her Sid’s hand when she said, “How is it articulated?”

  “What?” Of course, most “whole” skeletons are in fact wired together—I vaguely remembered that Sid had had wires and hinges when we’d first gotten him, and there were still holes where the wires and screws had been—but since he had his own methods of cohesion, we’d never bothered to replace the fittings as they broke or rusted, which meant that he really shouldn’t be holding together.

  Sid must have realized the same thing because the bones of his hand suddenly fell apart, with most of them landing back in the suitcase. I tried to look innocent.

  Yo shook her head. “Never mind. Let’s lay him out. I mean, it.”

  I was impressed by the grad student’s skills—she placed the bones into their proper locations as fast as I could hand them to her, as if she were putting together a familiar jigsaw puzzle. Not bad, given that Sid had two hundred bones, more or less.

  Once the bones were in their relative positions, Yo said, “Okay, it looks mostly complete.”

  “Mostly?”

  “A couple of the minor toe bones are missing, but that shouldn’t affect the analysis. Let’s see what we’ve got. He looks robust, so that means probably male.” Then she picked up Sid’s pelvic bone, and stuck her thumb in it. It was a tight fit. “Yep. Male.”

  “Told you so,” Sid whispered without moving his jaw.

  “Excuse me?” Yo said.

  “I said, ‘Is that so?’”

  Yo looked suspicious, but even a sleep-deprived graduate student wasn’t going to think it had been the skeleton talking. She picked up his skull, opened the jaw, and ran her finger over his teeth. “Twenty-eight. He’s missing his wisdom teeth—not sure if they fell out or they were extracted before death.” She pulled over a magnifying lamp, and peered at the teeth more closely. “Huh.”

  “What?”

  “He has fillings.”

  “So?”

  “Do you know where most skeletons come from?”

  “When a mommy skeleton loves a daddy skeleton very much . . .”

  She gave me her best withering glare, but it wasn’t nearly as good as Madison’s, so I was unfazed. She said, “Most skeletons come from India, but they’re from poor areas and they sure don’t have dental work like this. These fillings mean that he—that it probably came from somewhere in the US.”

  Sid had spoken with an American accent from the first, so it had never occurred to me that he could have been from elsewhere.

  Yo kept looking at the skull. “I’d be worried that your parents had gotten rid of an annoying student if it weren’t for the ID marks.”

  “The what?”

  “Here, inside the skull.” She held Sid’s skull upside down so I could look inside, which seemed oddly rude. There was a series of letters and numbers written in there: P-A-F-60-1573. “Those markings tell me that, at some point, this bad boy was part of some sort of collection.”

  “What do they mean?”

  “No idea. There’s no standard system for marking bones—every school and museum has its own conventions. All I can say for sure is that he’s not from McQuaid.” She reached into one of the storage boxes, pulled out a skull, and turned it upside down so I could look inside to see its series of numbers and letters. “We mark our GRAIDs with Sharpies.”

  “Grades?”

  “G-R-A-ID. Gender dash race dash age dash file ID.” She went back to Sid’s skull. “This looks like India ink, but I don’t know what the code means.”

  “What about JTU? Could this have been one of their skeletons?” After all, Kirkland had taught at JTU, though I didn’t know what a zooarchaeologist would be doing with a human skeleton.

  But Yo said, “Can’t be. I worked with some loaner specimens from them last year, and though I don’t remember all their codes offhand, I do know the third one was for gender. F for female, M for male, X for undetermined. Your guy is definitely a guy—even Ayers admits I rock at sexing skeletons.”

  Sid snickered, and I coughed to cover it up. “Maybe it came from a school that was throwing it away.”

  “The term is deaccessioned,” Yo said, “and nobody just throws a skeleton away. Especially not a relatively rare specimen like this.”

  “Why is it rare? Because of the dental work?”

  “Because with that particular kind of dental work it’s almost certainly American, and we don’t get many American skeletons. There’s no established bone trade in this country, and donated bodies usually end up as dissection material. So this is definitely unusual.”

  “What else can you tell me?”

  “Hang on. Sexing is easy—it gets harder from here.”

  Sid snickered again, I coughed again, and Yo ignored us both while she went to work.

  After thirty minutes of her looking at, weighing, and measuring bones—with the odd excitement of consulting charts, making cryptic notes, and entering numbers into a computer—I realized that there was more to the process than was typically shown on TV. I wandered off to look at the other bones in the room, wondering if Sid could communicate with any of them. When I got bored with that, I found a stool and pulled out my phone to check e-mail and play Angry Birds. I was trying to get that third star on level twenty-three when Yo said, “I’m done.”

  “Excellent!” I said. “What did you find out?”

  “The palate shape says Caucasoid—as opposed to Negroid or Asian. Six foot tall, plus or minus an inch. No sign of being overly heavy or overly thin. Adequate nutrition. Teeth in good shape and, as I mentioned before, he had fillings. Four, in fact.”

  “If he had dental work, maybe I could identify him.”

  “You’d have to have the right dental records to compare the teeth to. It’s not like there’s a database.”

  “Right,” I said, deflated.

  “Anyway, from looking at the teeth, he was in his mid-twenties.”

  I’d have guessed younger, given Sid’s sense of humor, but then again, I laughed at most of his jokes and I was a whole lot older. “Anything else?”

  “There are two fractures. The right wrist was broken antemortem but completely healed long before he died, and one rib was broken postmortem and glued back together.”

  I’d cracked that rib myself when tackling Sid, and had felt horrible about it, but he’d insisted that it hadn’t hurt.

  Yo went on. “There are also two perimortem injuries.”

  “Postmortem is after death, and antemortem would be before death. What’s perimortem?”

  “At the time of death.” She held up Sid’s skull again. “See this dent? Something hit him hard enough to make that mark while the bone was still living.”

  “Is that what killed him?” I said, oddly upset by the idea. Of course Sid had to have died at some point, but like Sid, I’d never liked thinking about the process. It was like hot dogs—I didn’t want to know how they came to be in the form with which I was most familiar.

  “Possibly,” Yo said. “Dr. Ayers would know for sure, but I’d put my money on this.” She picked up a piece of the rib cage. “See this groove here? That’s the mark from some kind of sharp instrument, like a knife. And this is right over the heart.”

  “You’re saying he was stabbed?”

  “That’s what it looks like to me. You’ve got yourself a murdered skeleton.”

  14

  Yo showed me a few other marks on Sid, but she thought they were from when the meat had been removed from the bones or something like that. I wasn’t paying strict attention because I was pretty much fixated on the “murder” thing. Even though Sid had been dead since
before I’d known him, finding out that he was a murder victim was disturbing.

  “That’s the express service,” Yo concluded. “Any questions?”

  “Is there any way to tell what he looked like? I’ve heard about facial reconstruction.”

  “There’s software to do computer imaging, and some people are trained to sculpt or sketch based on the skull, but nobody here can do it. You’d need a place that’s more about the forensics than the anthropology, and you sure couldn’t get anybody to do a job like that for a hang tag.”

  “Just a thought.” If need be, maybe I could finagle some connections from my parents. In the meantime, at least I had more information to work with.

  I reached for Sid’s suitcase, but Yo said, “Have you thought about selling this thing? You could get a few grand for it.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Easy. You know how I said skeletons come from India? I should have said they used to. They changed the laws over there back in the eighties, and now it’s a lot harder to get them. Last week a guy called from a school that’s starting up a new anthro department wanting to know if we had any spares, which we don’t. You want his number?”

  Sid’s skull shifted, probably in indignation that he could no longer restrain, and I reached for it before Yo noticed. “No, thank you.”

  “Whatever,” she said, and helped me pack Sid back into his suitcase. As soon as I had the bag zipped up, she stuck out her hand.

  “One faculty hang tag, expiration date August thirty-first,” I said, pulling it out. “Once in a blue moon security will call to verify that it’s actually me using it, so what kind of car should I tell them I drive?”

  “A black Toyota Corolla.”

  “Good enough. Thanks for your help.”

  “Thanks for the tag.”

  I headed for the parking lot, noticing that Sid didn’t squeak on the way. Once in the van, I put the suitcase on the floor of the front seat, then unzipped it to allow conversation.

  “You okay?” I asked him.

  “Kind of weirded out.”

  “Me, too.”

  “I mean, that girl’s hands were cold.”

  “Silly me. I thought you meant about the other stuff.”

  “Yeah, that, too. Mid-twenties . . . So I’m younger than you are.”

  “Sid, you were in your mid-twenties when I was six. That makes you fifteen to twenty years older than I am.”

  “But I haven’t aged.”

  “You certainly haven’t matured.”

  “Hey, I stayed still all the time Yo was pawing at me. I think that shows that I’ve grown as a person.”

  “Might I remind you of the snickering?”

  “Two snickers, and I couldn’t help it. I haven’t been sexed in a long time.”

  “Mid-twenties? You may never have been sexed.”

  “Please. I was a stud.”

  “Is that a memory or wishful thinking?”

  “A logical deduction from my manly skeletal structure and irresistible personality.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “She said I’m robust—that’s a scientific fact. Of course, my charm goes without saying.”

  “Nothing about you goes without saying. So shall we talk about the elephant in the room now?”

  “She had an elephant skeleton in there? I thought only Tufts had one of those.”

  “Sid.”

  There was a long pause. “So I was murdered.”

  “So it seems. Are you okay?”

  “I don’t know what to feel. How about you?”

  “I’m mad. No, I’m beyond mad. I’m furious.”

  “Patella, I’m sorry, Georgia. If I hadn’t made you take me to the con—”

  “Don’t be an idiot. I’m not mad at you—I’m mad at the person who hurt you. Some bastard murdered my best friend!”

  “I wasn’t your best friend when—”

  “I don’t care!” I took a deep breath. “I don’t think I ever told you this, but do you remember Jean Shannon?”

  “Your college roommate? I thought you two lost touch.”

  “We did, and I wish it had stayed that way. A while back she got religion and decided she needed to confess to the sins committed during her heathen past, so she started hunting people down on Facebook. When she found me, she asked for my phone number, and I figured it would be nice to talk to her.”

  “Not so nice?”

  “Very not nice. We spent a few minutes comparing notes, and then she started with the confessions.”

  “Plural?”

  “She had a hefty list. First off, she used to help herself to my change jar to do her laundry. Plus, she took money from my wallet that she ‘forgot’ to replace—more than once, mind you. And there was this one guy we met at a party who told me he’d call, but never did. It turns out he did call—she told him I had a boyfriend, thinking she could get him for herself. Except he wasn’t interested in her anyway!”

  “Serves her right.”

  “But here’s the biggie: You remember the sapphire earrings Mom and Phil gave me for high school graduation, the ones that had been Grandmother’s? Jean ‘borrowed’ them for a date and dropped one somewhere. So she threw out the other one and let me think I’d been the one to lose them.”

  “That ossifying piece of sacrum! I remember how pissed your parents were when you told them.”

  “So do I! Even worse—they were disappointed in me. God, I hate it when they’re disappointed in me. Anyway, after all that, Jean had the nerve to ask me to forgive her. She thought we could be friends again. After all, it was so many years ago.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Nothing. I was too busy hanging up. I had to hang up five more times before Jean got the hint that I didn’t want to talk to her anymore. Maybe it was old news to her, but it was hot off the presses to me!”

  “I don’t blame you.”

  “Then you should understand how I feel now. So what if you were killed thirty years ago, and so what if it was before I met you? As far as my feelings go, I just found your body. I’m going to find out what happened, Sid. If Yo was right and it was murder, I’m going to find out who it was!”

  Of course, I didn’t know how I was going to go about solving a thirty-year-plus-old murder, but I didn’t see any reason to bring that up. Instead I said, “I take it that Yo’s results didn’t shake any more memories lose.”

  “Not a one,” Sid said. “I’m not sure I want any more memories, anyway.”

  “I don’t suppose you do. Who wants to remember being hit or stabbed?”

  “It’s not just that. I mean I don’t want to remember being the kind of person who gets murdered.”

  “Blaming the victim much? Do you think you were dressed in a provocative way and incited your killer?”

  “I know perfectly innocent people get murdered every day, but we both read the papers enough to know that most murder victims put themselves in harm’s way. Think about it: a young guy with a stab wound. What if I was a gang member or a dope dealer? A carjacker or a bank robber?”

  “What if you were a nice guy stabbed while trying to save a basket of puppies? Which, I might add, fits your personality a whole lot better than grand theft auto.”

  “Come on, Georgia, we don’t have any clue as to what my personality was like before.”

  We were discussing topics we’d spent years avoiding, but it was obvious that we couldn’t avoid them any longer. “What’s the first thing you remember?”

  “You know that.”

  “Tell me again.”

  “I heard a little girl crying.”

  “And what did you do?”

  “I got myself loose and went to help her. Help you, I mean.”

  “What kind of carjacker’s first action in the afterlife
would be to help a crying child?”

  “You think?”

  “I know. If we ever find out who you were, I don’t think it’ll be anything to be ashamed of.”

  “Thanks, Georgia, but . . . I’m still worried.”

  I took a deep breath. This was Sid’s story—not mine. I couldn’t barrel through if he didn’t want me to. “If you’d rather stop, we will.”

  There was an extra-long pause, ending only when I parked in the driveway at home. That’s when he said, “I want to know who I am.”

  “Then we’ll keep going. We’ll just be careful.”

  “You be careful. I don’t really have anything to lose. Except you.”

  15

  We didn’t have any time to discuss the next steps. I got Sid’s suitcase inside the house and opened it so he could get himself up to the attic, and grabbed an apple on my way back out the door. It wasn’t much of a lunch, but I had an afternoon class to teach. I made it back to McQuaid with minutes to spare and thought I was doing a good job forgetting about skeletons until I referred to The Nightmare Before Christmas twice during class.

  My darling daughter was already home, and if she’d been as hungry as she claimed to be, would have had a figure similar to Sid’s. Since I had plans for the evening, I made her a veggie pizza and, in a burst of optimism, put some salad into a bowl for her. She could handle dessert herself—hunting for my Oreo stash was one of her favorite games. While she was digging in, I went to shower and primp for my date.

  Since Fletcher had said dinner and a movie, I thought jeans would be appropriate as long as they weren’t mom jeans, and fortunately the one pair I had that fit that description was clean. The peacock blue sweater I wore with them was cut just low enough to look hot without being slutty—or so Madison informed me—and I wore short boots instead of my teacher sneakers. A little jewelry, a little makeup, and a lot of second-guessing, and I was good to go.

  As I came through the living room, I had a suspicion. I tapped on the armoire, and there was an answering tap from inside. Sid was either hoping to get a peek at Fletcher or planning to keep an eye socket on Madison while I was gone. More likely, both.