A Skeleton in the Family (11 page)

A
s soon as we got home, I sent Sid to the attic and heard his door shut just as Madison was dropped off. Somehow I managed to pay attention as she told me about the awesome anime videos she and Samantha had watched, the awesome manga collection her friend had, and the awesome chicken dish Samantha's mother had made for dinner. Apparently she'd had an awesome day.

We watched something on TV that wasn't awesome enough to make me remember what it was five minutes after the credits, then headed for our respective bedrooms. I took a quick spin around the Internet to see if anything about Kirkland had shown up or if an APB had been issued for me, but there was nothing.

I did sleep that night, but I'd probably have been better off if I hadn't. Every time I drifted off, I found myself in another nightmare. Twice I was arrested for breaking into Kirkland's house, once I was arrested for killing her myself, and in the horror-movie version, Dr. Kirkland came knocking at my door, much as Sid had all those years ago, but instead of being a nice, clean skeleton, she was decayed and awful.

The worst was the dream in which Kirkland was still breathing when I found her, and I was able to get her to the hospital in time to save her. I cried when I woke from that one because I so wished that had really happened.

As soon as I was out of bed the next morning, I got back on the Web and checked the site for the TV station in Springfield, which was the closest city. All I found was a tiny paragraph about a woman being found dead in her Pennycross home. The police were investigating, but details were being withheld until the family was notified. I printed a copy of the report and slid it under the attic door for Sid.

For the rest of the day, I alternated between my usual weekend chores of laundry/bills/housework, going online to gather more and more details about Dr. Kirkland, and waiting for the police to come knocking at my door. Fortunately Madison was busy with a social studies project and didn't notice that I was distracted.

The TV station in Springfield gave the story a fair amount of play—Kirkland was moderately well known, albeit in a specialized field, and murders were fortunately rare in Pennycross. Early accounts said that she'd been found dead, with the hint that the circumstances were suspicious. Our anonymous tip wasn't mentioned. The dog, which I learned was an Akita, got the credit for alerting the authorities with his barking.

It was later announced that the death was murder, and it was tentatively linked to the rash of break-ins that had been keeping Deborah so busy. They thought the burglars had broken in thinking that nobody was home, but things got out of hand when they found Dr. Kirkland there. One of Kirkland's adult sons confirmed in an interview that his mother had a tendency to concentrate so thoroughly on her work that she could easily have missed it if the burglar had rung the doorbell or knocked before breaking in, even if the dog had barked.

There was no mention of a second break-in by a single mother with a really skinny cohort. By dinnertime I was ready to believe that I hadn't been seen at Dr. Kirkland's house, or if I had been, I hadn't been identified.

Once I was sure Madison was asleep that night, I snuck up to the attic to catch Sid up on the news, finishing with, “It looks like we dodged the bullet. Can you imagine what would have happened if we'd been caught?” The loss of my job, jail time for the break-in, possibly suspicion of murder. That was just for being in the same room as Dr. Kirkland's body. Once Sid was brought into the picture . . . it would have been a real-life nightmare to rival mine from the previous night.

“Now I feel guilty for suspecting her of murdering me,” Sid said.

“She's not necessarily in the clear for your murder. Her murder was just a break-in gone wrong—it had nothing to do with you.”

“Do you really think that's what happened?” he said skeptically.

“I guess. Honestly, I've been pretty much focused on ‘Please, please, please don't let the cops catch us.'”

“I get that. It just didn't seem as if anything was stolen.”

“We didn't look at her bedroom that closely—they could have taken jewelry from there. And I didn't see a purse.”

“Her computer was still in the office.”

“I saw drops of blood on the keyboard. I don't think anybody would be able to fence it. If they had sold it and the police found it, blood evidence would make it easy to track back to the killers.” I was proud of myself for that line of reasoning. All those hours watching various incarnations of
CSI
and
Law & Order
had not gone to waste.

“I guess that makes sense,” Sid said. “And I guess that's it for trying to find out about me. About what happened to me, I mean. We've hit a—”

“Sid, please don't say dead end.”

“Yeah, too soon. We've run out of gas.”

I could have nodded, clapped him on the scapula, and gone to bed, but if I had I wouldn't have been able to sleep. I'd been furious when I first found out Sid had been murdered, and that was just with murder as a theoretical construct. Now I'd seen a woman just after she'd been murdered, and it wasn't theoretical anymore. Moreover, Dr. Kirkland would have the police hunting for her killer, with her family and the press watching them to make sure they did their job. All Sid had was me. I couldn't let him down.

I said, “Not on your life. So to speak.”

“I won't think any less of you if you want to stop.”

“Well, I'd think a lot less of myself. So, next steps . . . Our only link is still Dr. Kirkland.”

“I don't want you being linked to a murder victim.”

“I'm not—we're not. Your interaction with the woman, whatever it was, predates her death by three decades.”

“I don't know. . . .”

I didn't know, either, but I was willing to pretend I did. “Anyway, we were kind of distracted at her house, but did anything there spark more memories?”

He shook his head.

“There's going to be more coverage of the case, and probably more stuff about her life and career. We'll keep following the stories online—maybe something else will catch your attention.”

“Like what?”

“Maybe you'll recognize one of her children. Or an associate. I bet there will be coverage of the funeral.”

“Maybe,” Sid said, clearly not convinced.

“Come on, we'll think of something. What's the rush? You're not getting any older!”

That got me a quick grin, but just as I was about to head downstairs, he said, “Georgia, don't you think it's kind of funny that she was killed now? I mean, I recognize the first person from my past in thirty years, and less than a week later she's dead.”

It had been in the back of my mind, too, but I hadn't wanted to say so. “The police think it was part of the break-ins.”

“If I were going to kill somebody around now, I'd make it look like a break-in, too. Not that I would.”

“Sid, I never even thought that. You have a warped sense of humor, but you're not a killer.”

“Maybe I was,” he said sadly.

“Cut that out!”

I got him settled with a stack of manga and hoped it would cheer him up, but I knew from that moment on that I couldn't give up until I found out who Sid had been in life. I was sure he'd been a good guy, but if not, we'd deal with it. Whoever he'd been in life—whatever he'd been—he deserved to know the truth.

A
s soon as I finished with my first class Monday morning, I went to the adjunct office to scour the Web for information on Kirkland's murder. As far as I could tell, there had been nothing of importance found since the last coverage I'd read, but that didn't stop me from reading as carefully as if I were proofing my doctoral dissertation.

I was still at it when a shadow fell on my screen and I noticed Fletcher standing behind me, looking at what I was reading.

I closed my laptop with a snap. “Excuse me,” I said stiffly. “It is considered impolite to read over another adjunct's shoulder.”

“Sorry. Old reporter habits. We stick our noses in everywhere.” He grinned, and it was a great grin, but I could tell he thought it would be enough to win me over.

It wasn't.

I deliberately turned away from him, reopened my laptop, and angled it so he'd really have to get into my personal space to see what I was looking at.

He must have realized I was pointedly ignoring him. “I really am sorry, Georgia.”

I looked at him, and decided that he was looking appropriately sincere. No grin. So I relented. “It's okay this once, but it's hard enough to share space with this many people without having to think about somebody looming behind me.”

“No more looming, I promise.”

He sat down at his desk and turned to face me. “Obviously you heard about that professor being killed.”

Since I'd expressed a fair amount of interest in Dr. Kirkland just the other day, I figured it wasn't a violation of shared-office protocol for him to ask. “I did. Kind of a bizarre coincidence. I ask about her, and then she ends up dead.”

“You also asked if I'd ever covered a murder, and now I'm doing just that.”

“Also bizarre, which means I've probably used up my store of bizarre coincidences. I wish I'd asked you if you'd ever interviewed an English instructor who'd won a multimillion-dollar sweepstakes.”

He laughed.

“Is it creepy for you, covering a murder, asking the kinds of questions you have to ask?”

“The old pros at the paper say I'm lucky it was a relatively clean crime—and not a child. Anecdotes ensued. So I shouldn't complain. I have to admit that I was worried about talking to the dead woman's family, but the son I interviewed was very reserved, so it wasn't too terrible.”

“Old New England reserved?”

“More like cold-fish reserved. But people react to death in very different ways.”

“The stories I read said that it was connected to the break-ins around town.”

“That's what the cops think.”

“Good. I mean, I'm sorry it happened, but glad it had nothing to do with—with her being here at McQuaid the other day.”

He looked at me curiously, but let it go, probably not wanting me to slap him down again. “I tracked down the person she was here to meet, thinking there might be a human-interest angle, but it wasn't that interesting.”

“Don't tell me—meeting the chancellor to discuss a guest lecture: ‘Zooarchaeology for Dummies.'”

“Not even close. She was supposed to be meeting a grad student in the computer science building but got lost. Apparently she had some old data from the stone ages—literally and figuratively. He said she had pages of measurements and numbers and hired him to put it into a database. But get this: part of her data was on an eight-and-a-half-inch disk!”

“Seriously? Is there even a machine on campus that would read it?”

“Apparently there is.”

“I suppose it could have been worse. It could have been punch cards.”

“Wow, those are before my time.”

“Mine, too, I'll have you know, but we used to have a Christmas wreath my mother made out of old punch cards and spray-painted silver. It was surprisingly pretty.”

After that, the conversation wandered toward odd uses for obsolete computer equipment, and I didn't even try to bring it back to Dr. Kirkland. For one, I didn't think he had anything else useful to tell me, and for another, I didn't want him to wonder why I was so curious. The conversation continued over lunch at Hamburger Haven, and though we bought our own meals, I was fairly sure that counted as a second date. Though my week had been so hectic, what with finding dead bodies and such, I had been wondering if he liked me as much as I liked him. Evidence suggested that he did.

The rest of the day was nothing special. I assigned the week's essay to my class, trying not to think of the stack of comparison-contrast papers I'd be dealing with over the weekend, and met a few students after class to help them clarify their ideas without writing the paper for them. By the time I got home, I was happy to go fast and simple for dinner: cheese omelets with fresh fruit on the side.

Madison was as tired as I was—the amount of homework was starting to weigh on her. So after watching a couple of episodes of
The Big Bang Theory
my parents had recorded, we were both more than ready to go to bed.

Unfortunately for me, there was a note waiting on my pillow:

Do you have time to talk?

I sighed, but after my emphatic declaration of the night before, I couldn't very well blow him off. Sid was so glad to see me that, if he'd been a dog, his tail would have been wagging.

“Are we okay?” he asked. “The police didn't show up today, which I assume is good news.”

“As far as I can tell, we're in the clear. I read everything on the Web and even talked to my source in the press, and the police are still saying it was just another break-in. The burglars stole the professor's jewelry box and took the money out of her wallet, which was dropped on the floor next to her pocketbook.” Though I was still sorry the woman was dead, I couldn't help but be relieved that it had nothing to do with Sid.

“What about her being at Mangachusetts?”

“She was meeting with a computer science grad student she'd hired to do some data translation for her. The timing was actually pretty lucky for us—if you hadn't seen her, you wouldn't have started to remember your past life and we wouldn't be as far along as we are.”

“And we wouldn't have found a dead body.”

“Okay, not my favorite moment, but maybe somebody wants us to find out the truth after all these years.”

“Like a higher-power kind of somebody?”

I nodded.

“Call me a skeptic, but I'd rather believe in random chance than anything supernatural.”

“Sid, you're an ambulatory skeleton. I'm pretty sure that counts as supernatural.”

“I get that, but it's just that I've never encountered anything else supernatural. I'm not even sure what I am exactly. I suppose I could be a very skinny zombie.”

“Also supernatural. And in that case, wouldn't you be trying to eat my brains?”

“That's profiling!”

“I've always thought you were a ghost haunting your own skeleton.”

“Don't ghosts normally have a reason to exist? Like a problem to solve or a job to finish? My schedule has been pretty open for the past thirty years.”

“But now it's not. So, next steps?” I looked at him expectantly.

Unfortunately he was looking at me just as expectantly.

Somebody had to blink, and since I was the only one with eyelids, it was me.

“Let's think about this,” I said. “You're a skeleton.”

“I am? OMG!”

I ignored the interruption. “You're a skeleton, and Dr. Kirkland had all kinds of specimens in her house. Maybe you were one of her specimens.”

“Wrong time period and wrong concentration. Zooarchaeology deals with prehistoric animals, not modern man. Besides which, I remember the good doctor from when I was still among the living.”

“Maybe you were one of her students. She would have been in her forties around the time you were in your twenties, so she'd have been teaching already, and you did know what zooarchaeology is.”

“That's common knowledge.”

“Maybe, maybe not. Do you have any more factoids about zooarchaeology floating around in your deceptively empty skull?”

He thought for a minute, then shook his head. “All I'm getting is the word, and that it involves dealing with poop and statistics.”

“Then probably you weren't one of her students, but you could still have been a student at JTU. Or a neighbor, or a friend of the family—”

“This isn't helping.”

“Too many choices.”

“Besides, the fact that Kirkland was the first person I've recognized in thirty years indicates that she was important to me.”

“Maybe you two had a thing.”

“What kind of thing?”

“You know, a
thing
. A bit of Mrs. Robinson.”

“Oh. That would explain the guilt when I saw her. According to her obituary, her husband had only been dead twenty years. Maybe he killed me to get rid of the competition.”

“The obituary said Mr. Kirkland was an actuary. I don't think skeletonizing remains is part of their skill set.”

“Maybe I had a relationship with the actuary, and the professor was the killer. She would have known how to denude a skeleton.”

“Better, but if a student handed in an essay with no more reason for making a conclusion than that, he'd be looking at an F. It's all just speculation without evidence about who you are. Or were.”

“We're short on evidence, Georgia. All we've got is the stuff Yo told us.”

“And the fact that you knew Dr. Kirkland.”

He hesitated. “I know my last plan didn't work out so well—”

“That's putting it mildly.”

“But here's a thought. If I recognized Kirkland, I might recognize somebody else from her circle—family, friends, or coworkers.”

“Yeah?” I said warily.

“Aren't those the kind of people who go to a funeral?”

“The paper said her funeral is going to be private—family only.”

“I saw that, but there's also going to be a memorial service at JTU. Anybody can go to that. Well, anybody but me. And your phone takes pretty good pictures.”