The Skeleton Stuffs a Stocking

by Leigh Perry

  “I’ve got some more questions about Annabelle, and I wondered if you had time to talk.” When she hesitated, I added, “You did say I could call if I needed to.”

  “Sure, of course. I’m just kind of busy right now.”

  “I’m not surprised. Is the restaurant really going to be ready to open by New Year’s?”

  “That’s the plan,” she said with a laugh. “We’ve got workmen swarming this place like discount day at the fair.”

  “Then I’ll let you get back to it. Can I can call later tonight?”

  “Tomorrow would be better.”

  “Sure thing. I’ll talk to you then.” I hung up and looked at Sid. “Up for a drive to Windsor Locks?”

  “Ready when you are.”

  We had no intention of waiting for Sue to consult the Fentons and come up with a reasonable-sounding story before I confronted her. She likely didn’t remember she hadn’t told us the name of the place when I spoke to her before, but she had mentioned working at a restaurant. So Sid had done an internet search for “carousel restaurant Windsor Locks” and found a local news article about the Carousel Restaurant being refurbished. I’d only called ahead of time to confirm the information and to make sure she was still there.

  It was a short drive over the Massachusetts-Connecticut border to Windsor Locks, and I found the restaurant easily thanks to the neon carousel horse on the sign and the banner that said, “Undergoing Renovation—Reserve Now for New Year’s Eve.” The parking lot was about a third full with pickup trucks and delivery vans, and as Sue had said, there were plenty of workmen wandering around. They took no notice of me as I picked my way around stacks of pipes, wooden beams, and other building supplies, but there was a man with a clipboard and a harried expression at the front door.

  “Can I help you?”

  “I’m looking for Sue Weedon.”

  He turned around to yell, “WEEDON! Visitor!” before hurrying away.

  Sue was kneeling in front of a carved zebra installed in a niche with a table and bench encircling it, and when she saw me, her eyes widened like those of a deer caught in a car’s headlights.

  I walked over without waiting for any more of a greeting than that.

  “Well, this is a surprise,” she said.

  “I was in the neighborhood,” I lied. “I figured you’d need to take a break at some point, so I brought these.” I held up a to-go tray with two cups of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and a box of donut holes.

  “That’s nice of you, but I’ve got to get this done tonight and—”

  “No problem. I can wait until you’re finished.”

  With an air of resignation, she said, “On second thought, I could use a breather. I’ve got a workshop out back where it’s a little quieter.”

  I didn’t need the shove from Sid-in-the-bag to remind me why that was a terrible idea. “I’d rather stay out here, if you don’t mind, so I can admire your work.”

  “Okay.” She pulled a tarp off of the bench and we sat, with me giving her a little more space than I might have otherwise.

  She took one of the cups, blew on the coffee to cool it, and took a swallow. “You said you have some questions?”

  I’d decided not to dance around it, so I pulled out a printout of the photo of the scenic panel depicting the Nichols house and handed it to her. “This is your work, right?”

  “It might be.”

  “It’s on your web site.”

  “Right, of course. Yes, it’s mine.”

  “Can you tell me how you happened to paint the house next to where Annabelle’s body was buried? Please don’t try to convince me it was a coincidence.”

  She sagged a little and put the coffee cup down. “It looks like I owe Treasure Hunt fifty dollars. He bet me that you’d figure it out somehow.”

  “Then Dana and Treasure Hunt did know you were lying to me?” I said, feeling profoundly disappointed. That meant they’d lied to me, too, at least by omission.

  “No. Well, yes, but only because I asked them to. Look, what I told you before was partially true. The two of us really were as close as sisters during college.”

  “But after all that, you quit talking?”

  She nodded sadly. “We had a falling out over the guy I was dating, who talked me into dropping out of college to go out on the road with him. Annabelle told me he was a loser, and she was right.”

  I nodded, remembering Brownie saying that he’d avoided Sue’s boyfriend.

  “The lie was when I said I never talked to her again. The truth is, I spoke to her the day before she died.”

  Since there were plenty of people around, I managed to resist edging further away from her. “How did that happen?”

  “I guess you found out she was a custodian at Bostock College.”

  “Which you could have told me in the first place and saved me some time.”

  “I figured that if I told you too many details, you’d realize that she and I had been in touch.”

  Sue had a point, but I didn’t know that I wanted to agree with her about anything when I was still suspicious of her motives. I settled for a nod.

  “Besides I thought that you might not work as hard to solve the mystery of a dead custodian as you would for a college professor or an administrator, what with you being a professor yourself.”

  “Wow. That’s insulting.”

  “I know, but I hadn’t met you when I decided that. Treasure Hunt told me I was being a chump because you like sticking your nose into mysteries, and you don’t care what kind of mystery it is.”

  That sounded like his brand of backhanded compliment, but I had to admit, “He’s not wrong.”

  She smiled, just for a second. “This is the real story. Ten years ago, Annabelle called me out of the blue, saying she was in trouble and didn’t know who else to ask for help. She’d found out about some thefts at Bostock.”

  “You mean the stuff stolen from the dorm rooms?”

  She cocked her head. “You heard about those?”

  I nodded, feeling a bit smug.

  “Actually, that part came later. I’m talking about stuff being stolen from the museum.”

  I went from smug to confused in seconds. “You mean the museum on campus? The one with all the odds and ends?”

  “It shouldn’t have been odds and ends. At least, that’s what Annabelle thought.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “She said nobody paid much attention to the museum’s collection. It was a mess, and a lot of the stuff in it was worthless. She figured that if somebody realized that items that were labeled as antiques or historical artifacts were actually nothing of the kind, they just thought it was another eccentric alum or a former student playing games with tax deductions. You know, claiming they’d donated something worth a thousand dollars when it was only worth ten. Illegal, of course, but not worth causing trouble over.

  “Only she was at that hoarder house when it was cleared out and knew some of the things from there were really valuable because she’d been an art history major in college. After everything from the house was supposedly added to the museum’s collection, she went to see them again.

  “That’s when she realized that some of the objects weren’t what she’d seen at the house. Instead they’d been replaced with junk. She said she’d seen some Japanese ink block prints, but that’s not was hanging in the museum.”

  “Were they replaced by paint-by-number pictures?” I said, remembering the ones I’d seen.

  She nodded. “Some of the other items had just disappeared, with no mention of them in the museum’s records at all. Annabelle realized something was going on, but she wasn’t sure who to tell. She started documenting the pieces she knew had been stolen while she tried to figure out where to go next, but somebody must have realized what she was up to. The next thing she knew, a coworker called to warn her that students were claiming that she stole from their dorm rooms, and som
e of the missing stuff had been found in her locker. The only reason she hadn’t already been arrested is because she had the day off when it happened. Annabelle panicked. You see, she’d made some mistakes when she was younger and had done some things she regretted.”

  “So I heard.”

  Sue looked surprised again, but went on. “She got caught for shoplifting a couple of times and drinking while underage, but the worst incident wasn’t even her fault. A so-called friend took her for a joy ride, not telling her the car was stolen, and since Annabelle was driving when the police found them, they thought she was the thief.”

  “You were the friend, weren’t you?”

  “Close enough—it was my jerk boyfriend. Annabelle only took the fall for my sake. Even though she got a suspended sentence because it was a first offense, she had a record, and she was afraid that she’d be put in jail or, at the very least, lose her job. Still, I don’t think she’d have run if somebody hadn’t tried to kill her.”

  “Someone did what?” I felt Sid vibrate with excitement from inside the bag, and I nearly did the same. That hadn’t showed up in any of Sid’s spreadsheets.

  “After her friend called, Annabelle decided to talk to a lawyer. She called a guy who’d been a student at Bostock, and he said to come to his office right away. She didn’t have a car, so she started walking, and was on her way there when a car came up from behind, hopped the curb, and drove right at her. She realized it at the last minute and was able to throw herself into somebody’s yard. She started to pull herself together and saw that the car had turned, and she thought the driver wanted to check on her. Then she realized he was coming toward her again. She ran and got a tree between her and the car, and the guy raced away.”

  “Was she hurt?”

  “No, but she didn’t know what to do. Call the cops? They’d arrest her. Call her friend from work or the lawyer? Maybe they were in on it.”

  “No wonder she panicked,” I said.

  “She got back to her place and packed a couple of things, but she didn’t know where to go or who to trust. That’s when she remembered that house in Pennycross.”

  “The Nichols house.”

  “Right. She knew it was empty, so she figured she could squat there for a while until she decided what to do next. She took the bus to Pennycross and walked the rest of the way. Then she got to the house, found a room to sleep in, and woke up in the middle of the night with a man standing over her.”

  “A man?” I said, as if I didn’t know who’d been there with Annabelle. “Was he part of what was going on?”

  “No, he was another squatter. Annabelle didn’t tell me much about him, only that they shared the place for a while and then things got more…romantic.”

  “Wow,” I said, hoping that was neutral enough.

  “She said he was wonderful, and being there with him was like a dream, but when they found out the house was due to be demolished, she knew she was going to have to run again. She still didn’t know who the thief was or who’d tried to kill her. She hadn’t even been able to find out who accused her of theft.

  “That’s when she called me. I was working at a carnival in Florida, so I couldn’t get to Massachusetts, but I found out that Fenton’s was in Pennycross. I trusted Dana and Treasure Hunt and told Annabelle to go to them. Then I called them, and they promised they’d help her hide out. They would have gone to get her, but she couldn’t just leave without saying goodbye to her fellow. She asked them to wait until after the carnival shut down that night. They were supposed to pick her up outside the house, but she never showed. They waited for her for a good while, but a cop car cruised by a couple of times and they got nervous. Carnies and cops don’t always mix, you know. So they went back to the lot, hoping she’d show up. She never did.”

  “You’re still not telling me everything. When did you see the Nichols house?”

  “About a week later, I finally made it to Massachusetts. It took me a while to talk my boss into giving me the time off, and then I got stuck in a snowstorm along the way, and—basically, everything that could go wrong did. I arrived in Pennycross right before the demolition team showed, and I watched them working all day long, thinking that if Annabelle was in there, they’d find her. I guess that’s why the place was so vivid in my mind when I was painting that panel.”

  “Did you know she was dead?”

  She looked down at her coffee cup. “I must have, though I didn’t want to admit it. The Fentons thought the same thing. But we didn’t know who had done it or where the body was. I wanted to go to the cops, but Dana and Treasure Hunt talked me out of it.”

  “I know, carnies and cops.”

  “It wasn’t just that. Annabelle said the cops were after her for thefts she hadn’t committed, so who’s to say they weren’t involved in stealing from the museum or her death?”

  It sounded paranoid to me, but since Sid’s death took place before I met him, I’d never experienced the murder of my best friend. “So why all the ‘I haven’t heard from Annabelle since college’ rigmarole?”

  She looked embarrassed. “I don’t trust easy. I was afraid you were looking for Annabelle for some other reason.”

  “And I just happened to have found a body that fits Annabelle’s description?”

  “I know it doesn’t sound reasonable, but I really don’t trust easy.”

  “Then why tell me anything at all? If you hadn’t shown up at Fenton’s, I doubt I’d ever have found you.”

  She sighed. “Once I heard that my friend’s body had been found after all this time, I had to know what happened to her. I failed Annabelle all those years ago, and I can’t ever make it right, but at least she’ll be laid to rest properly. I wasn’t going to go to the cops—I’m a carney, too—but the Fentons seemed to think that you could find out for me. They trust you.”

  “Yeah, they sure trusted me,” I said, not bothering to hide the bitterness.

  “I mean it, Georgia. Dana said all along that you were okay for a towner, which she doesn’t say about many people, and like I said, Treasure Hunt bet me you’d figure out on your own that there were things I hadn’t told you.”

  “What about Brownie?”

  “He liked it even less than his parents did, and he’s not real happy with me right now. I’m sorry, Georgia. I should have given you a chance. If you wanted to call it quits, I wouldn’t blame you.”

  What I really wanted was to consult Sid, but Sue was watching me, looking like nothing so much as Byron when he knows he’s in trouble for chewing something up.

  Finally I said, “I guess I can see why you acted the way you did, but if I’m going to figure this out, I need to know what you know. Did Annabelle have any idea of who might have stolen the stuff from the museum or from the dorms? Did she know who tried to kill her?”

  “She said she didn’t have a clue.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure, but if I can think of anything that could help, I swear I’ll tell you. If you’re going to keep investigating, that is.”

  I felt a resounding knock from inside the sugar skull bag, which was Sid’s and my code for Yes!

  “Yeah, I’m going to keep going. Treasure Hunt has me pegged.”

  “It would mean a lot to me to know what really happened. Is there anything else you want to ask?”

  She’d given me so much new information that my head was already spinning, but I said, “Did Annabelle mention the name of the friend who warned her about the cops?”

  “Let me think.” She took a swallow of her rapidly-cooling coffee. “Samuel, Sean…Sebastian, that’s it. Not sure about the last name. Do you think he was involved?”

  “Even if he wasn’t involved, I’d like to know how he found out Annabelle had been framed and if he knows who accused her of the dorm thefts.” I made a show of typing the name onto my phone, which gave me a chance to see if Sid had texted with anything he wanted me to check on. He hadn�
�t, so I said, “I’d better let you get back to work.”

  We both stood, and Sue said, “I’m sorry I didn’t trust you before.”

  “If a stranger showed up and started asking me questions about a horrible time in my life, I’d probably be suspicious too.”

  “That’s good of you to say. I really appreciate what you’re doing on my friend’s behalf. She deserved so much better than what she got.”

  “I’m going to do my best to bring her killer to justice.” It sounded very pretentious, even to me, but Sue was right. Annabelle had deserved better. Nobody deserved to be murdered, buried, and nearly forgotten.

  Chapter Thirty

  Once we were in my car, Sid was free to talk again, and that’s what he did. “Hurray! At last we have a good murder motive. Well, not good, but you know what I mean. Annabelle’s death had nothing to do with the stuff stolen from the dorms—that was just a distraction. The real reason was to keep her from telling anybody about the stuff stolen from the museum. Coccyx, I wish I had both of my hands here so I could rub them together with glee.”

  “So you don’t suspect Sue after all?”

  “No, not really. I don’t know that I’d want you meeting her alone at midnight in a deserted house, but I think she told us the truth this time.”

  “As much as anybody does, anyway,” I said.

  “Don’t you believe her?”

  “I do. I just have a hunch that there might be something more to what happened between her and Annabelle than she’s saying. That doesn’t mean it’s relevant, of course.”

  “I’ll see if I can dig up anything on that when I get a chance, but my Number One priority is finding out who was at the Nichols house during the cleanup.”

  “The people other than Deborah?”

  “That’s right! Deborah was there. Let’s invite her to dinner and talk to her afterward.”

  “I have to check with Phil, first. This late in the day, he might already have the meal planned out.”

  As it turned out, Phil was putting together a vat of beef stew and was happy to throw in more ingredients to accommodate Deborah. Knowing him, he’d already had plenty, but he’s big on freezing leftovers. He also agreed to call her and ask her to join us.