A Skeleton in the Family (7 page)

I
felt terrible for Sid, so once my morning class was over and I'd spent a few minutes answering student questions, I decided to devote some time to his problem. Since I had a couple of spare hours, I spent it at the adjunct office looking through photos from Mangachusetts until the normal clothing of the adjuncts started to look odd to me.

There must have been fifty different sites with photos for Mangachusetts, including quite a few shots of Sid as Shinigami. I kept hunting through them for a woman who fit Sid's description, but as far as I could tell, she was the only person at the convention who didn't appear in pictures. There were even shots of me at the deli.

Just when I was about to give up, Fletcher came in, sat down at his desk, then swiveled his chair toward me.

He said, “Hey, I really owe you one! I told my class I was looking for people to cover the soccer tourney for extra credit, and I got enough volunteers to cover every single one of the playoff games. All I'm going to have to do is take pictures.”

“That's great,” I said. Then one word he'd said sank in:
pictures
. “I read your article about Mangachusetts in Sunday's paper. Nice job.”

“Thanks. I think I captured some of the experience.”

“Definitely.” Of course, Madison had turned her nose up at his obvious unfamiliarity with manga and anime, but I'd thought he'd done a decent—and most importantly, respectful—job. “Good pictures, too, but I was expecting more, given what you said Saturday.”

“Oh, I had far more than I could use.”

“I'd love to see them,” I said, trying to put just the right touch of admiration into it.

“All of them?”

“I was hoping to find some photos of my daughter and her friends to send to my parents. They're dying to see how she's settling in. So I've been checking the Web, but I haven't had any luck.” Other than that extremely good shot of Madison on Kevin Bolk's Tumblr, but my legs were crossed, so it didn't count as a fib. “Unless there's a rule about showing them.”

“No, it's just that there are a
lot
of them. The best way to get publishable photos is to take a bucket load of shots. I filled up most of a memory card.”

“I have a gadget I can plug into my laptop to look at memory cards,” I said. A former boyfriend who'd been a fan of computer gadgetry had given it to me after watching me spend half an hour hunting for the right cord to transfer photos from my camera to my computer.

“Yeah, okay, then.” He rummaged around in his leather backpack to find the memory card while I dug around in my satchel to find the gadget. We emerged victorious at about the same time, and Fletcher rolled his chair over to my desk so we could look at the photos together.

“I'm really not that great a photographer,” Fletcher warned me as we started, and I had to admit he was being honest. A lot of the pictures were no better than what I took with my phone, and many were far worse. There were more images of his thumb than of the Sailor Scouts.

Still, it was kind of cozy to flip through them together, and I liked the way Fletcher was willing to laugh at his own photography skills. I liked it even more when Sara came by and gave us a remarkably dirty look—if I'd had a camera handy, it would have made a terrific photo.

About two thirds through the directory of files, I finally found what I was looking for. At least, I thought I had. There were four shots of an older woman without a Mangachusetts name badge who looked like the woman Sid had described.

“Who's that?” I asked, hoping I sounded nonchalant. “That's not a costume I recognize.”

“Oh, I remember her. She's dressed as Eminent Scholar, but it's not a costume.”

“Okay, now you've got me curious.”

“She was there to meet somebody and got caught up in the festivities.”

“Her face does have that ‘what an interesting specimen' expression, with just a hint of ‘I hope they don't bite,'” I said.

“When I realized she knew even less about manga than I did, I figured I didn't need the picture for my story.”

“It's a nice shot, though. What's her name? Now that I look at her, she looks kind of familiar. Maybe she's a friend of my parents.”

“I'd have to check my notes.” He rummaged some more, pulled out a notebook, and flipped through it. While all that was going on, I surreptitiously copied the photos of the woman to my hard drive.

“Here we go. Dr. Jocasta Kirkland. Is that the one you're thinking of?”

“I'm not sure. What is she a doctor of?”

“No idea.”

“Does she teach here?”

“I don't know.”

“Isn't finding stuff out your job?”

He shrugged. “Once I found out I couldn't use her for the story, I lost interest. Call it journalistic tunnel vision.”

I must have been suffering from a bit of tunnel vision myself. I was thinking so hard about getting the picture to Sid so he could verify if that was the right person that I almost missed Fletcher's next words, which were an invitation to dinner and a movie on Friday night. Fortunately I realized what he was saying quickly enough to enthusiastically accept.

I had to leave for my afternoon classes after that, and went straight home afterward. Madison was there, which made it awkward to go up to the attic, so I printed the best picture of Dr. Kirkland, slid the printout and a note under the attic door, and tapped a couple of times to get Sid's attention. A few minutes later, I got a note back:
THAT'S HER!

S
id and I really needed to talk that night, so I had to come up with a way to manage it without arousing Madison's suspicions. Though I admit my method was inelegant, I categorically denied his subsequent accusation that I was going out of my way to annoy him so he'd let me tell Madison about him. As I reminded him, I'd been annoying him for years without a hidden agenda.

What I did was put the laundry basket inside the attic door. It was empty except for a blanket and a note telling Sid to climb in and pull the blanket around him. Then he was to tap on the door for me so I'd know to come carry him into my room. He weighed about twenty-five pounds, which was heavier than the average load of laundry, but well within my carrying capacity.

As it turned out, when we made our move, Madison was downstairs watching TV and texting while playing Minecraft on her laptop. He could have walked past in slow motion with a dramatic soundtrack and she wouldn't have noticed. Once I had him in my room, I yelled down, “I'm working—emergency interruptions only!” and locked the door. She may even have heard me.

Sid untangled himself from the blanket with the picture of Dr. Kirkland in his hand. “That's her, that's her, that's her!”

“Do you remember anything else?”

He stared at the picture unblinkingly. Well, he never blinked, but he looked at it intently enough that, even if he'd been a blinking kind of guy, he still wouldn't have blinked. “Not really.”

“Well, we've got a name: Dr. Jocasta Kirkland. That's a start.” I went to the McQuaid Web site but didn't find her listed as faculty or staff. “I suppose it would have been too easy if she worked someplace handy. Let's try Google.” I entered in her name. “Okay, she's a zooarchaeologist, whatever that is.”

“A zooarchaeologist studies animals that lived at the same time as early peoples,” Sid said.

“How did you know that?”

“Hey, I read.”

“I read, too, and I've spent my whole life around academics, and I didn't know that one. Maybe you remember more about Kirkland than you thought.” Since I didn't know anything about zooarchaeology, I opened another window to search for more information. “According to this, she studies faunal remains like antlers, teeth, shells—”

“And bones.”

“Which may or may not be a coincidence. She's apparently a grand dame of her field and a winner of the prestigious Mejia Medal for Anthropological Studies.”

“Why anthropology and not archaeology?”

“Archaeology and zooarchaeology are subsets of anthropology,” I explained, and went on, “Kirkland is a professor emeritus at JTU.”

Joshua Tay University, which was two towns over in North Ashfield, was a semi-friendly rival school to McQuaid. Our programs and backgrounds were similar, so we competed for the same students. It was one of the few schools in the area that I'd never taught at.

“She only retired from teaching a few months ago and is now living here in Pennycross.”

“What was she doing at the con?”

“Fletcher said she was on campus to meet somebody, and found herself in otaku country.”

“Fletcher?”

“I told you about Fletcher.”

“No, you didn't.”

“Well, I would have if you hadn't been sulking. You remember seeing that guy sitting with me at Mangachusetts? He's a part-time adjunct in journalism who works at the
Gazette
. He was covering the con for the paper, and took that picture of Dr. Kirkland, but when he found out she wasn't there for the con, he wasn't interested in her anymore.”

“Was he interested in you?”

“Absolutely. After sharing a soda and cookie with me, he swore his undying devotion and pledged his life and fortune to me and me alone. Well, to me and Madison. I don't know how he'll react to you—I thought I'd wait until after the wedding to introduce the two of you.”

“So you like him?”

“He's nice,” I admitted. “We're going out on Friday, as a matter of fact. Now, do you want to talk about my love life or your past life?”

“I don't have anything else to say about my past life—maybe Dr. Kirkland does. I want to see her again.”

“Sid, assuming that we could arrange that in such a way that does not give the good professor a heart attack, what then? ‘Excuse me, but do you recognize my skeletal friend here?' ‘Are you missing a skeleton?' ‘Did you kill somebody and skeletonize the body?'”

“That's not funny,” Sid snapped.

I couldn't remember the last time Sid had snapped at me.

“I'm sorry,” he said quickly. “I know I used to be human and therefore somehow went from living human to what I am now, but I don't like to think about the process.”

“I'm sorry. As for what you are now, you're my friend. Okay?”

“Okay,” he said. “So what now?”

“Shall we see what else we can dig up on the Web?”

The answer to that was “Not a lot.” There were listings of a career's worth of scholarly papers and awards, mentions of her three grown kids and her dead husband, and notes from appearances at conferences in her field.

Sid looked at every scrap of information and every picture we could find, and still felt nothing other than that same sense of fear and guilt.

It was getting late and Madison was going to be coming up to bed soon, so I needed to get Sid back to his attic. “Tell you what,” I said, “tomorrow I'll work the adjunct network and see if I can find out more about Kirkland, maybe figure out what she was doing on campus Saturday. Okay?”

“Okay,” he said grudgingly. “Or maybe we could snoop around her house—there might be something there that would spark a memory.”

“And we would get in how?” Before he could answer, I said, “Sid, we are not breaking into that woman's house.”

“You wouldn't have to break anything—Deborah could show you how to pick her lock.”

“Even if that were so—and you know Deborah wouldn't help—it would still count as breaking and entering. The ‘breaking' part is metaphorical, as in ‘I'm going to break your head if you don't get into the clothes basket so I can get you to the attic.'”

“If I had a tongue I'd be sticking it out at you!”

“That would be fine as long as you did so from inside the basket.”

Twenty-three hours later, we were back in my room with Sid sitting in the clothes basket.

I'd spent every spare moment that day talking to other adjuncts, starting with Charles because he was always on campus, and eventually found out why Dr. Kirkland was on campus. “Here's the scoop,” I said. “Kirkland was there to meet with a computer science grad student she's hired to do some statistical analysis.”

“Wow, that's really boring.”

“The only thing more boring was the story about one of the computer science adjunct's cats I had to listen to before I could ask him about Kirkland. I'd share it with you, but since I dozed off midway through, I'm missing details.”

“Thanks for that. So, what next?”

“I was hoping you'd come up with something while I was following the trail of boredom.”

“I've tried remembering, and there's just nothing else there.”

“Trauma has a way of messing with memory, and dying is usually pretty traumatic.”

“Maybe I could find a therapist,” Sid said. “A blind one.”

For a moment, that almost made sense.

He went on. “I'm still not remembering anything but Kirkland. You have to go talk to her.”

“And say what? ‘You don't know me, but somebody who used to be alive recognized you, and . . .' I can't even come up with a hypothetical question, Sid.”

“Maybe I could get to know her.” Before I could point out the obvious, he held up one hand and said, “Not in person, but online.”

“You two could trade funny cat pictures and Harry Potter GIFs all day long, and it wouldn't help. It was the guy you used to be who had a connection with Kirkland, and we don't know anything about him. If you were a him—for all we know, you were a woman.”

“Hey!”

“Well, I don't know the difference between a boy skeleton and a girl skeleton.” Despite the many hours I'd spent with a skeleton, I was hardly an expert on bones.

“The guys on
CSI
can tell as soon as they see a skeleton.”

“That's because they're trained forensic scientists. Even if we have any forensics people in the Pennycross Police Department, I don't really want to explain to them why I have an unidentified skeleton.”

“Who said anything about the police? There's a physical anthropology department at McQuaid, isn't there?” Of course he knew the school's departments—he'd been reading my parents' school bulletins for years.

“That's not a bad idea.”

“Don't sound so surprised. I'm a brainy guy, even without the brain.”

“Of course, if I take you to McQuaid, you know how you're going to have to travel.”

“Coccyx! Fine, bring on the ossifying suitcase.”