A Skeleton in the Family

by Leigh Perry

  “But—”

  “But me no buts unless you have a butt of your own.”

  “Like your reporter beau?”

  “Eavesdropping much?” I’d expected the comment, and welcomed it if it would take his mind off of sacrificing himself. “Anyway, now we know that somebody is looking for you—we just need to find out who he or she is first. Speaking of which, I don’t suppose you saw or heard anything that could help identify him?”

  He shook his head. “I was downstairs when I heard somebody at the back door, and I made a beeline for the armoire. It wasn’t until I’d locked myself in that I realized it wasn’t one of you guys.”

  “How did you know?”

  “You and Madison use keys, and Deborah picks the lock. Breaking a lock sounds different than either of those. Of course, what I should have done was jump the guy, or at least grab a phone to call the cops.”

  “No, what you should have done was exactly what you did. If somebody is looking for you, it’s doubly important that we keep you hidden.”

  “I guess,” he said, sounding dissatisfied. “Anyway, the guy didn’t talk, and of course I couldn’t see anything. Georgia, I need a peephole. I tried looking through the keyhole, but the line of sight sucks.”

  “Good idea. Can you do it yourself while Madison and I are gone tomorrow? There’s a drill in the toolbox.” I was hoping there’d be no more break-ins, especially with both the alarm system and the dog in place, but it would be a nice change for Sid to be able to spy on Madison and me while he eavesdropped.

  “Sure,” he said. “Maybe I can do something useful if anything like this happens again. If we’d had the dog yesterday, at least he could have barked.”

  “Excuse me, but you did warn Madison to get out of the house. You may be the skinniest guardian angel in history, but you got the job done.”

  “I bet the dog would have kept him from getting in at all.”

  “Does this mean you’re okay with Byron?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “No, but I would rather you be happy about it.”

  “I wouldn’t say happy, but I can deal as long as I don’t have to walk him. Or feed him. Or interact with him in any way.”

  “Insofar as I can control those circumstances, we have a deal.” With that settled, I was ready to move on to the real problem. “I don’t suppose you’ve remembered anything else, like who killed you?”

  “No, but I did do some serious thinking, which is why I was downstairs yesterday when our burglar showed up. I was using your parents’ computer.” My parents had taken their laptops with them but had left their older desktop model in the downstairs den that served as their home office.

  “Bone dude, you are rocking the computer age. What were you doing?”

  “The other night we were talking about my being a missing person, so I thought I’d look for people who’d disappeared from JTU during the appropriate era. I used some search engines and looked at the files for the local paper, but I didn’t find anything.”

  “It seems like somebody would have noticed a student disappearing.”

  “That’s what I thought, too, but if there was a hue and cry, it’s never made it to the Web. Then I went to the site with those JTU yearbooks from before and started looking at pictures, thinking maybe I’d recognize myself.”

  “Anything?”

  “Nothing. But I did get the idea of checking to see if anybody had been in one year’s yearbook but not the next. You know, somebody who was a freshman in nineteen eighty-two who didn’t show up as a sophomore in nineteen eighty-three, or a sophomore who didn’t show up as a junior, and so on. Since that wouldn’t help if I was a senior when I died, I found a copy of the commencement program to find students who never made it to graduation. Then I put all that information into a database.”

  “That must have been tedious as hell.”

  “Hey, I don’t sleep, eat, or work. Tedium is kind of my thing.”

  Ouch. I reminded myself to go get Sid some more reading material.

  He said, “I started in the late seventies and worked up to eighty-two, and ended up with one hundred and seventy-eight students who disappeared between one semester and another. Of those, seventy-four were women, so I scratched them off the list.”

  “That’s still a lot of possibilities.”

  “The next step will be to Google all those guys to try to track them down. That ought to eliminate a few more. Can I borrow your computer overnight so I can get on it?”

  “Be my guest.” I brought it to him, then told him good night, checked that the alarm system was armed, looked to make sure all the doors and windows were locked, put my baseball bat next to my bed, and went to sleep.

  41

  The next morning, my laptop was sitting outside my bedroom door with a note tucked into it:

  Down to 85 possibilities.

  Eighty-five was still a lot, but the needle-concealing haystack was getting smaller all the time. Maybe we could find out who Sid was without breaking into other houses or finding any more dead bodies. Between Byron and the every-bell-and-whistle alarm system Deborah had installed, I was reasonably sure our house would remain secure while we kept looking. As for Madison, she’d promised to be extra vigilant on the way to and from school and said she’d send me regular texts with her status throughout the day.

  I firmly shoved all such concerns out of my head to focus on getting Madison to school and myself to McQuaid on time. I thought I was succeeding pretty well with that until I caught myself humming “Dem Bones” as I left my morning class.

  Naturally that was when I ran into my favorite anthropologist crossing the quad. “Hey, Yo. How’s the dissertation going?”

  “Don’t ask,” she said with a glare.

  “Sorry.” Belatedly I remembered how aggravated I used to get when people had plied me with that same question. Deborah had been the worst offender. “Is the parking situation better now?”

  “It was until some asshole broke into my car. Twice in the past week!”

  “Seriously?”

  “The first time they jimmied my trunk, and before I had a chance to get that fixed, they broke the window to get to the glove box.”

  “Did they take much?”

  She snorted. “They could steal the whole thing and not get enough to afford gas for the getaway.”

  I found myself looking at the grad student speculatively, wondering if she was somehow involved in the Sid situation. After all, she’d been the first to find out about him, even before Dr. Kirkland was killed. The car break-in story could have been a cover. Okay, I couldn’t think of why she might have wanted to kill anybody, and she was obviously too young to have killed Sid, but . . .

  The thing was, everybody was starting to look suspicious to me: all the Kirklands, the other adjuncts, my students, pretty much anybody I’d spoken to since coming back to Pennycross. Even Fletcher was starting to look fishy—why had he been so interested in getting a photo of Sid for the Gazette anyway?

  Realizing that I’d been silent too long, I said, “This is getting to be a sketchy place. There was a break-in at the adjunct office over the weekend.” I was watching her for a guilty flash in her eyes, but what I got was irritation.

  “Please don’t start trashing this place,” she said. “Maybe your life isn’t tied to McQuaid, but mine is.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “If the college starts getting a lousy rep, then how much is a degree from here worth? Nobody is going to care that I graduated before things went downhill—they’ll just see that I went to a crap school, which will make it look like I’ve got a crap degree.” Her voice kept rising as she spoke, and people were starting to notice.

  “I get what you mean,” I said. Not that I agreed with her. I’d seen too many academic scandals blow in and out to take them seriously
anymore. Even if McQuaid had a dozen robberies a week, nobody was going to look askance at her degree. What I really got was that she was stressed out of her mind trying to finish that dissertation, and as a result, she’d lost all sense of perspective. Hence the outburst. “Don’t worry, I won’t spread any more rumors.”

  “Whatever,” she said, but it was in a gratified tone, and we went our separate ways.

  Even though I’d mentally cleared Yo from suspicion, I still found myself looking askance at everybody else on campus that day. It didn’t help when I heard a couple of my students snickering about skeletons having permanent boners when I came into class—obviously the news about me having a skeleton had spread. I was much relieved to get home, with my alarm system and vicious attack Akita to protect me, even if the pooch was trending more toward cuddly than fierce.

  Madison requested permission to hang with friends at Samantha’s house that evening, and after a brief discussion about the difference between hanging and chilling, I gave her money to pay for her share of the communal pizza they’d be ordering and drove her over. Then I went home to raid the kitchen for leftovers.

  Fletcher hadn’t called about any kind of rendezvous, and I wondered if he was on assignment or still vexed with me. Since I was definitely still vexed with him, I didn’t call him either.

  Sid came tiptoeing downstairs just as I was finished cleaning up after myself, and whispered, “Where’s the dog?”

  I looked. “Right behind you.”

  “AAAAAAH!” He ran toward me, and Byron, apparently thinking this was a fun new game, cheerfully trotted after him. They made several laps around the room before Sid hopped on top of the kitchen table. Byron barked in good-natured defeat, then sat to watch him. I knew I shouldn’t laugh at Sid’s predicament, but I couldn’t stop myself.

  “Georgia!”

  “Dude, you two are going to have to coexist.” I reached into the cabinet, pulled out some rawhide chews, and handed them to Sid. “Try giving him one of these.”

  Sid gave me a dark look, then held one out to Byron while maintaining the greatest possible distance between them.

  Byron took it and lay down right in front of Sid, who glared balefully down at him. “Now what?”

  “Step around him. If he grabs any of your bones, I’ve got this.” I held up a filled SpongeBob Squarepants squirt gun of Madison’s that had ended up in the junk drawer. A friend of mine used a spray bottle to train her cats not to climb onto her kitchen counters, so I figured it might work with Byron, should he decide that Sid was looking particularly delectable.

  Sid climbed down gingerly, and when Byron didn’t lunge at him, stepped around him to get to the living room. Then he opened the armoire door and sat down in the chair closest to it, ready to make a strategic escape.

  Byron kept gnawing on the rawhide, but just in case, I took the squirt gun and more chew sticks with me into the living room.

  “Just one big happy family,” I said brightly. “Imagine the fun you two can have while Madison and I are gone during the day.”

  “Can I have a squirt gun? One of those Super Soaker ones?”

  “Not a chance.” To change the subject, I said, “So, you made progress last night?”

  “I was working my fingers to the bone.”

  “Very humerus,” I said dryly.

  He grinned. “Anyway, I did some more today on your parents’ dinosaur while the Hound of the Baskervilles was locked up, but your laptop is a lot faster.”

  “Educational discounts—it’s the only way to go with computer equipment.” Then I thought of something. “Hey, wait a minute! How did you get into my computer? I never gave you the password.”

  “Oh, please. It only took me two tries to figure it out. Seriously, Georgia, using Madison as a password? You couldn’t at least substitute 1 for the i?”

  “Fine, I’ll change it.” Then I stopped. “How did you know how to guess a password?”

  “I saw it in a movie or something. It’s common knowledge.”

  “It’s not that common.”

  “Just because you didn’t know—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m a Luddite. But tell me something: Did you think about how to guess my password, or did you remember it from a particular movie or book?”

  “No, not really. I just . . . did it.”

  “Then maybe that’s something you knew from before you died. Like how to talk, and cultural stuff, like movie quotes and Shakespeare.”

  “Why is this a big deal?”

  “Because while it’s possible I am in fact the only person in the world who is dumb enough to use my daughter’s name as a password now, I’ll bet that bit of common knowledge wasn’t that common back when you were alive.”

  He was still looking blank—which he was well equipped for.

  “Don’t you see? This is another clue about who you were—you knew about computers in the early eighties when not everybody had a home computer or even one at work. If you knew that much while you were still in college, maybe you were a computer science major.”

  “Did they have a computer science department at JTU then?”

  “Easy enough to find out.” I got out my laptop for some quick hunting. “JTU added computer science as a concentration in seventy-four, with a full-fledged major program instated five years later.”

  “Maybe you’re right. I’d never really done much on a computer before these past few days, but it does seem to come naturally to me.”

  “Of course, that begs the question of why you were associated with Dr. Kirkland. Why would a renowned zooarchaeologist have anything to do with a computer geek?”

  “Who are you calling a geek?”

  “Please. Anybody who majored in computer science that long ago was almost certainly a geek.”

  “Of course, many of those geeks are filthy rich now.”

  “True enough.”

  Sid yipped, and I saw Byron walking into the room.

  “Why didn’t Madison take the mutt with her, anyway?”

  “Her friend has allergies. He’s not going to bother you.” As if to contradict me, the way everybody else in the household did, Byron picked that moment to look at Sid and lick his chops. Sid hastily tossed over another rawhide stick while I wondered if there was another treat we could use if we ran out. Byron accepted the bribe readily enough, but he kept watching Sid as he lay down to work on it.

  Sid and I got to work on his list of possibilities and got it down to sixty names in fairly short order. He was willing to keep going all night, but I talked him into a movie break instead. We finished watching Harvey just in time for me to go get Madison, and Sid took my laptop to his room before Byron could get any ideas involving teeth.

  42

  The next morning started out well, especially since I got to sleep in. Madison, on the other hand, had to be up early to walk Byron, a fact I couldn’t resist rubbing in when I came down and found her slouching on the couch with what we usually referred to as her grumpy face, watching reruns of Gravity Falls.

  “You’re up bright and early,” I said.

  She looked at Byron with no great affection. “He woke me up at eight. On a Saturday!”

  “Dogs aren’t big on clocks or calendars.”

  “Then he kept sniffing and scratching around the attic door. Did you do anything about that squirrel up there?”

  “I checked thoroughly, and there’s no squirrel,” I said. “I don’t know what he smells.” I really didn’t. Sid didn’t smell. Well, he could smell, but he didn’t have an odor I’d ever noticed. Though he didn’t bathe, he did give himself regular wipes with hydrogen peroxide to keep himself clean.

  Madison, still disgruntled, turned back to her cartoon, and I figured it wouldn’t hurt to treat her to eggs and bacon, heavy on the bacon. The siren scent soon attracted both her interest and the do
g’s, and they came to watch me put the meal together. Mom always said that the scent of bacon wafting through the house would wake a dead man, and though I didn’t think it had had anything to do with Sid’s revival, he did admit that it was the one food he missed most. I thought about telling him to cross any kosher Jews off of his database.

  Madison cheered up enough to offer to wash the dishes, and the phone rang while she was at it. It was Fletcher.

  “Hey,” he said a bit diffidently.

  “Hey.”

  “I thought you might want to know that I’ve found an editor who’s interested in my adjunct story.”

  “That’s great.”

  “Without the stuff about Charles.”

  I smiled, even though he couldn’t see it. “Thank you.”

  “No, thank you. I get carried away sometimes—thinking about the story and not the people. You reminded me, and I appreciate that.”

  “Just call me Jiminy Cricket.”

  “I know it’s short notice again, but I was wondering if you’d like to go to dinner tonight.”

  I was tempted, but Madison had already told me she didn’t have plans for the night, and I didn’t think she was ready to be left at home alone so soon after the break-in, even with the alarm and the dog. And I was sure I wasn’t ready to leave her by herself. “I’ve got a better idea. Do you like chili? Hot chili?”

  “Love it.”

  “Then come to my house for dinner, and I’ll fix you my specialty: Enamel Chili.”

  “Enamel Chili?”

  “It’s so hot it’ll melt the enamel off of your teeth.”

  “I’m there!”

  When Fletcher offered to bring dessert, I made sure he knew where Arturo’s Ice Cream Shoppe was and what our favorite flavors were. This was going to be his first meal with Madison, and I wanted him to make a good impression.

  That meant the rest of the day was less relaxing, as we made a quick trip to the store to pick up the ingredients, then cleaned the public areas of the house. Plus we had to fix ourselves up a little, too—Madison and I even painted each other’s nails.