The Skeleton Takes a Bow (A Family Skeleton Mystery) (11 page)

“I’m not buying any of this,” I said.

“You’re just mad because I came up with a theory that explains all the facts and you didn’t.”

“It doesn’t explain anything!”

“It sure explains why Charles won’t talk about the unsavory thing Patty did.”

Sid had a point, though I wasn’t willing to tell him that. “Charles is my friend, and I trust him. Are you that desperate to make progress? Or are you jealous of me spending time with him?”

“Please. Check how many Facebook friends I have and then look at how many you have. If anybody has a reason to be jealous of friendships, it’s you, not me.”

I managed to resist pointing out that Facebook friends weren’t anything like real friends—since Sid couldn’t really have other real friends, that would have been mean. But I didn’t keep myself from saying, “Then you go investigate all your friends, and leave mine to me.”

It was not my proudest moment, and I hope Sid felt as bad about some of his retorts as our conversation devolved to early junior high school levels. He finally stomped over to his computer—at least, he tried to, though all he could really manage was really loud clattering—and I went downstairs to work.

At least I tried to.

I didn’t want to believe Charles was involved in Robert Irwin’s death, and I kept dismantling all of Sid’s theories in my mind. There was just one thing I couldn’t get around. If Patty Craft’s death was connected to Irwin’s disappearance, and I was sure it was, then the only known link between them was my friend.

A
s I’d expected, Madison did venture out of her room at mealtime, but also as expected, none of us were feeling particularly friendly toward one another that night. So we dealt with it in time-honored New England fashion. We acted as if nothing was wrong.

Over dinner, Madison asked me how my first day teaching at PHS had been, and we shared tidbits about her classmates. Sid recounted an amusing story about a student who’d spent fifteen minutes trying to get his locker unlocked only to realize that he was at the wrong locker. Nobody tried to get out of cleaning the kitchen or taking out the garbage, and we agreed on a show to watch on TV without any argument. In contrast to our feelings toward one another, we all lavished Byron with affection. Well, Madison and I did. Sid did go as far as he ever went with the dog, which is to say that he handed him a pizzle stick every time Byron looked like he might possibly be considering the idea of chewing on any part of Sid.

It was perfectly polite and perfectly peaceful, and I hated every minute of it. I was pretty sure that Madison and Sid felt the same way as I did, but nobody knew quite how to thaw out the situation. I was fairly sure that as the head of household, more or less, I should be the one to make the first move, and if it had just been me and Madison, I would have. Had it just been me and Sid, we’d have fussed at each other and then gotten over it, as we had many times in the past. The dynamics of the three of us had me flummoxed.

Fortunately, by Friday morning, things had improved. Nobody came out and apologized, but the tension was definitely loosening up. Our “good mornings” were genuine instead of forced, and Sid joined us for breakfast instead of squeezing in an extra few games on Facebook.

It didn’t hurt that when Madison was stuffing books into her backpack she pulled out what looked like one of Sid’s bones and said, “I almost forgot. I got this at school.”

“Sid, I told you to leave the rest of yourself at home,” I said.

“That’s not mine!” he said.

“It is now,” Madison said, handing it to him. “One of the dads gave this out Wednesday at career day, and I thought you’d like it.”

Now that it was closer, I could see it was a bone-shaped ballpoint pen. “Let me guess. Doctor?”

“Pharmaceutical sales rep,” she said.

“Cool!” Sid said, twirling it around. “Thanks, kiddo!”

“You didn’t tell me it was career day,” I said.

“I forgot.”

“I could have come to talk to you guys.”

She rolled her eyes. “Might I remind you that last time you came to a career day, you spent three-quarters of the time talking about the benefits that adjuncts don’t get?”

“Oh yeah. That was the week I found out I’d been turned down for tenure.” Technically, one of the weeks. “I could have stuck to the positive aspects of my work.”

“They already know what a teacher does, Mom. They spend their whole day with teachers.”

“What about the joys of academic research?”

“We’re in the middle of science fair projects—how many kids do you think would like the idea of doing research forever?”

“Good point. And what could be as exciting as being a pharmaceutical sales rep?”

“I asked Aunt Deborah if she wanted to come, but she had a conflict. I’ll get her next year.”

“Oh boy,” I said, “Mr. Dahlgren will love it if she teaches all the kids how to pick locks!”

“Maybe she can get lock picks to hand out,” Sid suggested.

Madison rolled her eyes at us, but it was definitely an affectionate roll. Any mother of a teenager would know the difference.

“Come on, Yorick,” she said to Sid. “We’ve got rehearsal this afternoon.”

She held out the bowling bag, and Sid popped off his skull to put it in, dropped in his right hand, and zipped up the bag with the left.

That was no more impossible than most of what Sid did, but then the skull-less, one-handed skeleton started walking up the stairs. From the sound of it, he got all the way to the second floor before the rest of his bones fell apart.

“Hey!” I said. “Since when can you do that?”

“We’ve been practicing,” Sid said from inside the bag.

Madison was grinning. “Cool, huh?”

“Definitely, but Sid, are you sure you want to leave the rest of your bones on the floor with Byron around?”

The dog had just risen from his favorite spot by the back door and was starting in that direction.

“Coccyx!” Sid yelled. “Somebody get me out of here!”

Hilarity ensued, at least for me and Madison, while I grabbed hold of the dog and Madison retrieved Sid’s skull and took it upstairs so he could pull himself back together. Then he ran into the living room, jumped into the armoire, and yelled, “Madison, come get my skull. And keep that fleabag away from me!”

It was, in other words, a normal morning at the Thackery house.

My workday was also on the normal side, though not from my lack of trying to do a little investigating.

First off, I tried to get more out of Sara Weiss, but she had her own fixation. Once my classes were over, I headed to the adjunct office so I could try to ease the subject over toward Irwin, but as soon as I walked in, she said, “Enough is enough! I’m approaching this scientifically.”

“Approaching what scientifically?”

“The Sechrest Foundation!” she said, as if it were painfully obvious. “So yes or no: have you received an invitation from them?”

“No.”

“Okay.” She turned to her laptop and typed something.

“Is that a spreadsheet?” I asked.

She ignored me. “Ray and Esteban told me they were invited, and I saw invites in Andrea’s, Matt’s, and Sunil’s mailboxes. So that’s physics, math, and biology represented. But Audrey was invited, too, and she’s in English, so it’s not limited to the sciences.” She tapped her finger on the desk. “The gender split looks even, and the minority sampling is actually better than McQuaid as a whole. Maybe I should cross-reference with where people got their degrees. Should I tabulate undergraduate, master’s, or doctorates? Or all three?”

“They’re inviting grad students, so advanced degrees couldn’t be the main criteria.” Okay, I was sucking up—a little—but it was for a good cause.

“Good point. I only have to track undergraduate degrees. Where did you get yours?”

I told her, then said, “So, have you heard anything more about that guy you used to know who went missing? Robert something?”

“He’s still missing,” she said shortly. “Could there be some sort of subtle class-system thing happening? Where people were born, or towns of residence . . . ?”

I thought about suggesting eye color or shoe size but was afraid she’d take me up on it. Clearly she wasn’t going to talk about Robert Irwin until she’d figured out why the Sechrest Foundation was snubbing her. Given the choice of waiting her out or helping her get it out of her system, I went for the slightly lesser of two evils. “Can I see the list of people who’ve received the invites?”

“It may not be a complete list,” she said. “Not everybody gets their mail here.”

I ignored the implicit confession that she looked through other adjuncts’ mail—it was no secret that she spent more research hours on the lives of her fellow faculty members than on biology—and took the intricately formatted report she handed me. At first glance, I didn’t see a pattern, either—she’d tabulated all the most obvious factors. I was actually getting intrigued enough by the problem to suggest that she look at research projects, but realized that would also leave out grad students, most of whom hadn’t had a chance to publish much. In fact, of the people listed that I knew personally, none of them had been in academia long enough to amass publications. They were all fairly young. . . .

“Age!” I said.

“What?”

“Age. Everybody on this list is young.”

“Ageism? How could I have missed that? I could sue for ageism!” She grabbed the report out of my hand and started going through it. “No, wait. Marie didn’t get invited, and she’s younger than Audrey, who did.”

“Really? I thought Marie was older. Must be her clothes.” Marie’s style was a lot like Sara’s, come to think of it. “Audrey wears—” I was about to say that she dressed like most of the rest of the faculty but thought Sara might take that amiss. “Then maybe it’s looks. Which is obnoxious, and probably illegal as well.”

But Sara shook her head. “They sent a letter to Matt.”

“Ah.” Matt was a nice guy, and a solid scholar, but I could imagine no world in which he would be considered pretty. “Still, all the ones they picked look young, even Matt. That was true with the grad students, too.” Yo’s goth style would have blended in with some of my students at PHS.

“You may have something there.” She looked me up and down. “That certainly explains why you weren’t invited. Even if you weren’t past their target age, having a teenager adds years to a woman’s age.”

“Thanks for the self-esteem boost, Sara.”

“Don’t blame me! I’m not the one who’s only inviting the young-looking ones. Charles’s girlfriend would have fit right in.”

Great, we were back to Charles’s hypothetical—and probably fictional—relationship with Patty Craft. “I don’t think they were—”

But before I could finish the sentence, there was an alarm from her computer. She said, “Time to get to class. We can’t all spend the day lounging around the office.” And off she went.

Since I wasn’t in a lounging mood, I went to my mother’s office to work and also to try to buttonhole Charles to see if I could persuade him to tell me more about Robert Irwin and his nefarious dealings, but he didn’t answer my knocks on his door. Either he was really busy or he was avoiding me. Given Sid’s suspicions, I was really hoping it was the former.

After a couple of hours of reading freshman papers about the cultural influence of comic books, and not hearing Charles, I packed up to head home. I didn’t get a lot more done there than I had at McQuaid, but it was so much more comfortable to grade homework while sitting on my couch, and nobody was going to catch me when I dozed off over my work. Well, Byron, of course, but since he was curled up next to me, I figured he wouldn’t rat me out.

I
woke up when the front door opened, and tried to rearrange myself so it wasn’t completely obvious I’d been sawing logs. I was just checking for drool when Madison walked in. With a boy.

Byron greeted the former with his usual enthusiasm, and the latter with a touch of suspicion. Akitas are protective by nature.

“Hi, Byron,” Madison said. “This is Tristan. Tristan, this is my dog, Byron.”

Tristan held out a hand for Byron to sniff and apparently passed inspection.

“Mom, this is Tristan McDaniel. Tristan, this is my mom.”

“We’ve already met,” I said, remembering him from my SAT class.

“Hi, Ms. Thackery.”

“Hi, Tristan. You’re playing Rosencrantz, right?”

He nodded awkwardly. He was kind of awkward all over, really. He hadn’t quite grown into his height and had a cowlick that he hadn’t figured out how to disguise with the right haircut, plus bigger feet than any normal person should need. But his eyes were a pretty blue, his smile was nice, and I suspected Madison would have described him to her friends as “totes adorb,” which translated to “totally adorable.”

“Rehearsal ended early, so we thought we’d practice our lines here, and then work on a biology project,” Madison said. “Didn’t you get my text?”

“I must have missed it.” I really had been out if the phone’s “you have a text” tone hadn’t woken me. “Why don’t you fix yourselves a snack before you get started? I’ll move upstairs and get out of your way.”

“Cool,” they said in unison and then beamed at one another.

They were both totes adorb.

Madison had casually left Sid’s bowling bag on the floor by the front door, and I just as casually picked it up on my way up the stairs. I was pretty sure Sid realized we had company, but still, I waited until we were all the way up in the attic before unzipping the bag and pulling out his skull.

“What did you bring me up here for?” he said as I put his skull and hand onto the couch. “You should have put me into the armoire with the rest of me. Don’t you want me to listen in to make sure those two aren’t up to anything?”

“No, Sid, I do not want you to eavesdrop. Madison and Tristan both know I’m in the house—do you really think they’re going to try anything radical?”

“Didn’t you hear them? A biology project? Boy, you don’t remember what it’s like being a kid, do you? Like that time you and Reggie—”

“Don’t go there, Sid. And besides, I need to talk to you about something a little more serious than some innocent necking.”

“So you think they’re going to neck?”

“Sid! I trust Madison!”

“But what do we know about Tristan?”

“We know Madison likes him and that she’s a pretty good judge of character.”

“You’re not going to let me spy, are you?”

“Nope.”

“You used to let me spy on Deborah.”

“I was in little-sister mode then—annoying Deborah was part of my job description. In fact, you could spy on Deborah now if you wanted to. But when it comes to Madison, I’m in parental mode, which means I’m supposed to be mature.”

“Parental mode sucks.”

“I kind of like it. So what did you hear at school today? Anything useful?”

“Bubkes. Though a kid from one of your SAT classes said he thinks you’re hot.”

“You’re making that up.”

“No, seriously.”

“Huh. I don’t know if I should be flattered or disturbed.”

“What you should be doing is telling me that you got some good dirt at McQuaid. Did you manage to get anything else out of Charles?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I never even saw him.”

“Interesting,” he said.

“Not interesting. He’s just busy.”

Sid didn’t say anything, but I knew, sure as sacrum, that if he’d had eyebrows, he’d have been lifting one of them significantly.

“Anyway, for once I couldn’t get any gossip out of Sara Weiss. At least, I couldn’t get the right flavor of gossip. She’s got her panties in a twist about the Sechrest Foundation.”

“The Sechrest Foundation?”

“Didn’t I tell you about that?” I explained the letters offering grants. “I wouldn’t mind something like that myself so I could hit a conference or two, but I definitely don’t have the look they seem to be going for. I wonder if they can be sued for age discrimination.”

“Maybe somebody did,” Sid said. “That name is ringing a bell for some reason. Something I read on the Web.”

He booted up his computer and went online, but after a few minutes he said, “Not finding anything but a bare-bones Web site.”

I thumped his skull.

“Sorry. Anyway, it looks like they took a stock layout and just added their contact info. I mean, is that a lame logo or what?”

“Big talk for somebody who only discovered the Web six months ago.”

“You learn quickly when sleep is not an issue.”

I yawned, demonstrating that I didn’t have that particular advantage. “Is it just the one page?” There was a brief, vague paragraph about the aims of the foundation, which were apparently to help academics reach their goals, and an e-mail address. No street address, and no names or pictures of the people involved. “I think I was right to tell Yo to run from this group. And if Sara were smart, she wouldn’t be bothering to chase them down, either.”

“I admit I’ve only encountered the woman briefly, but has she ever shown any sign of being smart?”

“I don’t know about her work as a biologist, but she is an excellent snoop—that should count for something. I just wish I could get her back on the subject of Robert Irwin.”

“I don’t think I ever added what she told you before to the Irwin dossier.”

“Is it even worth adding?”

He shrugged noisily. “Maybe not. I hate to say this, Georgia, but I’m getting kind of discouraged.”

“Hey, I’ve only taught the two classes at PHS so far, and I still haven’t had a good chance to snoop around. We’re not beaten yet.”

“Are you sure?”

“If it was easy, the cops could handle it,” I said in as lighthearted a tone as I could muster.

After that, Sid caught up with Facebook while I went back to grading homework. Eventually, I figured I’d better go downstairs and see what Madison and Tristan were up to. In deference to their privacy, and my own sensibilities, I made as much noise as possible walking down the stairs. If they were sharing any unauthorized smooches, I didn’t want to know about it.

As it turned out, they were seated decorously, with Madison on the couch in the living room and Tristan on the easy chair. Books were open, papers were spread far and wide, and, if the empty plates, bowls, and potato chip bags were any indication, half the food from my kitchen had been consumed. I didn’t think they’d have had time for making out.

“How’s it going?” I asked.

“Mom, tell me I’m never going to need to know about cell mitosis to succeed in this world!” Madison pleaded.

“You’ll need it long enough to get through this year of biology,” I said heartlessly. “Tristan, I was thinking about getting dinner started, and I wanted to see if you could join us.” Assuming that there was enough food left in the house.

“No, thanks, Ms. Thackery. My dad is going to pick me up any minute. I better start packing up.”

I’m always impressed by just how much stuff teenagers manage to fit into a backpack without it coming apart at the seams. It reminded me of the time I’d made too much stuffing at Thanksgiving but insisted that I could get it all into the turkey. It had been a poor choice.

The doorbell rang as Tristan was in midstuff, and when I answered it, I found a nice-looking man who looked like a mature version of Tristan. He had the same eyes and smile, but none of the awkwardness, and if he had a cowlick in his blond hair, he’d used just enough product to tame it. “Hi, I’m Adam McDaniel. I’m here to pick up Tristan.”

“I think he’s getting his things now. Come on in.” I pushed Byron aside to make it possible. “I’m Georgia Thackery.”

McDaniel stepped in with his hand stretched out for a handshake. “I’ve been wanting to meet you, Dr. Thackery. I understand you’ve joined the PHS faculty.”

“Only temporarily,” I said.

“That’s what I hear. You see, as part of being PTO president, I’m part of the school search committee, and normally we have to vet all new hires. Naturally Mr. Dahlgren had to move quickly this time, what with Mr. Chedworth’s injury. We’re just lucky that somebody with your background was available, and grateful that you’re willing to fill in.”

“I know how important the SATs are.” I felt marginally guilty that my reason for taking the job had almost nothing to do with the SATs, but only marginally.

“I managed to get my older boy through them, but it took some doing. Bright boy, Adam Jr., but not great with tests. Tristan, here, is a different story. Tristan has this thing down cold, don’t you?”

“I guess we’ll see,” Tristan mumbled.

“You bet we will,” McDaniel said and tousled his son’s hair, making the cowlick even more pronounced. “I’m not worried about you at all.”

Madison, who’d come over to see her guest off, said, “Hi, Mr. McDaniel.”

“Hello, Madison. You making sure Tristan gets his lines right?” To me, he said, “I met your daughter during career day this week.”

“That’s right, she told me. Pharmaceutical sales, isn’t it?”

“That’s me.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a couple of bone pens like the one Madison had given Sid. “Here’s a little thank-you for having Tristan over. Hope he didn’t eat you out of house and home.”

“Well, the house is still here,” I said, taking the pen. McDaniel and I smiled, and the kids rolled their eyes simultaneously. It was a nice bonding moment right until the extended car honk from out on the street.

Tristan made a face, but McDaniel forced a laugh. “Speaking of Adam Jr., I think he’s impatient to get going.”

“It sure sounds like it,” I said loudly so I could be heard over the sound of the horn.

“Thanks again for letting Tristan come over, and for taking over that class.”

Mercifully, Adam Jr. stopped honking as soon as his father opened the door. From the look on the man’s face, I was pretty sure Junior was going to get a well-deserved talking-to as soon as his father got into the car.

“I told you he was a jerk,” Madison said.

“No arguments here.”

“So did I hear you say something about dinner?”

I looked pointedly at the mess in the living room. “It depends on if I find any food left.”

“No problem. We left all the boring stuff,” Madison said and started gathering up snack-related debris. Then she took Byron for a walk while I fixed dinner.

The two-teenager horde had missed the hamburger meat I’d set aside for sloppy joes, and though we no longer had the chips I’d intended to go on the side, I filled in with oven-baked French fries. Once I retrieved Sid’s skull and hand from the attic and got him connected with the rest of his bones, he was happy to keep us company, and even managed to resist interrogating Madison about Tristan’s intentions.

After dinner, Madison texted half of the Western world in order to arrange a trip to the movies for her and a bunch of her friends, and when I learned somebody else was going to drive, I gave her my blessing and the requisite cash. Sid and I divided our evening between watching TV and my letting him thoroughly defeat me in several games of Operation.

By the time Madison got back from the movies, I was yawning, so the breathing members of the family went to bed while the nonbreathing minority headed to his attic.

I woke up with a skull looming over me in the darkness, and even after years of living with a skeleton, I couldn’t hold back the yelp of alarm. “Sid! What’s wrong?”

“Nothing! I found something.”

I sat up and checked the clock. “And you had to tell me at three in the morning?”

“I couldn’t wait.”

“Okay, tell me.”

“I decided I better add that stuff that Charles and Sara Weiss told you to the Irwin dossier, even though I was pretty sure the whole thing was a waste of time.”

“It wasn’t a waste of time—”

“I know that now. Because I found something in there I’d forgotten. Robert Irwin used to work for the Sandra Sechrest Foundation!”