A Skeleton in the Family (14 page)

I told them my story, and they just smiled indulgently, figuring that my skeleton was nothing more than a skinny carny. When they called Fenton's to let them know that one of their employees had gone above and beyond the call of duty, Fenton denied having anybody named Sid working for him. Since my parents couldn't offer a better description than my insistence that Sid was incredibly pale and really, really skinny, they let it drop.

Two weeks later, Sid showed up at our back door.

I
was so caught up in remembering my previous trip to the carnival that I didn't notice the man speaking to me until he repeated himself.

“It's really not that scary,” he said again.

“What?” I responded brilliantly.

“I'm just saying that the ride isn't that bad. Or were you admiring the artwork?”

Standing beside me was a man with reddish brown hair, deep blue eyes, and just the hint of a cleft in his chin. He was wearing jeans and a purple polo shirt with
Fenton's Family Festival
embroidered on it. He looked a few years older than I was, and was much less taken aback.

“I was wondering how often you changed the theme on a haunted house,” I said. “It looks like some of the zombies on this one snuck in from
The Walking Dead
.”

“We try to stay current,” he said. “This particular ride has had incarnations ranging from atomic horrors to witch's dungeon to werewolf's lair. I think there was a wax-museum thing when I was younger.”

“Interesting.” So it probably was the same ride I remembered, and this guy had been with the carnival for a long time, which might be helpful.

“It was a vampire's castle most recently, but then vampires got sexy, so we switched to zombies. Nobody has tried to make movie zombies sexy yet.”

“Thank goodness for that. How about skeletons? Have they ever made an appearance?”

“Usually in more of a supporting role. There are none inside, if that's what you're afraid of. Just zombies, rats, and some mild dismemberment.”

“I'm not scared of going in,” I said indignantly.

He was grinning at me mockingly, or perhaps mocking me with a grin. In either case, I was pretty sure I'd lost control of the conversation.

“Let me start over,” I said. “My name is Dr. Georgia Thackery, and I'm from McQuaid University.” Okay, I was hardly there in an official capacity, but it sounded impressive. “I'm trying to establish the provenance of a human skeleton that was recently donated to our collection.”

“Huh. I've been on the show since I was born, and I would have bet that there was no townie story I hadn't heard before, but you have indeed come up with a new one.”

“Here's the situation,” I said, starting my lie. “A man in Pennycross recently passed away, and in cleaning his house, his family found a human skeleton. They said he used it to decorate for Halloween, and they'd assumed it was fake, but one of the man's grandchildren realized that it was real. Since nobody in the family wanted an actual skeleton around, they donated it to the university.”

“How does that get you here?”

“When the skeleton was examined, they found identifying marks on him . . . on
it
. The kind of markings that would have been on a skeleton in a museum or university collection, but they aren't from McQuaid.”

“So? Finders keepers, right? Just put your own marks on it and nobody will know the difference.”

Had the scenario I was describing actually taken place, that's probably what would have happened, especially after what Yo had told me about skeleton prices, but for the sake of my fiction, I pretended we had more integrity. “The chancellor is a real stickler for establishing rightful ownership. She insists that we find out where the skeleton came from and if it was obtained legally.”

“Still wondering where we come in.”

“The man who had it told his kids he bought it from a haunted house operator at a carnival. This carnival.”

“We sell many things, but we do draw the line at human remains.”

“This would have been about thirty years ago.”

“Who would care after thirty years?”

“The chancellor is a Roman historian. To her, thirty years is recent.”

“Wow.” He scratched his head, showing a small tattoo of a carousel horse on his forearm. “Okay, that makes it about what, nineteen eighty-three?”

“Plus or minus a couple of years.” I knew the exact date, of course, but that would be too much detail to explain away.

“I would have been eleven or twelve, so if anybody was selling skeletons, I wouldn't have known. We better talk to the boss.”

“Is he around?”

“She's always around. Come with me.” Then, almost as an afterthought, he added, “I'm Brownie Mannix, by the way.”

“Pleased to meet you,” I said. He led me across the midway, cutting between the merry-go-round and the giant slide. A trailer marked
OFFICE
was parked behind the rides, where the wires were exposed and the engines cranking. Brownie knocked on the door before opening it, then waved me inside.

An older couple—man and woman—were sitting at matching desks. The man was counting money while the woman worked at a laptop computer.

“Hey, boss,” Brownie said to the woman. “I got a new one. This towner—”

“Brownie!” the woman snapped. “You know better than that.”

“Excuse me, this patron wants to know about a skeleton.”

The woman gave me the kind of searching look that made me glad I'd worn clean underwear and brushed my teeth that morning. “I'm Dana Fenton, and this is my show. What's this about a skeleton?”

I repeated my story, hoping it sounded more plausible to her than it did to me. If she could tell I was lying through my teeth, she was at least polite enough to hide it until I'd finished.

Then she said, “I'm sorry, ma'am, but I don't know anything about any skeletons being sold from this show. My father was still in charge then, but I'm sure I would have known.”

“That just goes to show that your father didn't tell you everything,” the man counting money said. “Don't you remember that chester who used to run the dark show? He had a skeleton hanging outside that was rigged to move to scare the townies.”

Ms. Fenton sighed, but didn't bother to correct him. “This is my husband—”

“Call me Treasure Hunt,” he said.

“Dad is big on nicknames,” Brownie explained.

“What good is a carny without a nickname?” Treasure Hunt asked. He put a rubber band around a stack of twenty-dollar bills and made a note on a piece of paper before going on. “It was back in eighty-two. The dark ride was a wax show then, plenty creepy, and the ride operator had himself a skeleton to hang out in a cage outside. There was a motor to make it wriggle and build up a tip.”

I nodded. I could only understand about two thirds of his words, but he was talking about Sid, all right.

“I was working as outside man for him that week—his usual guy got DQed for being overly friendly with a couple of townie girls, and we hadn't found him a new one. So I was there when he hung up the skeleton. Only he said it was a cast, because he knew Brownie—”

“He means my grandfather,” the current Brownie said.

“Well, even a clem would know I didn't mean you, college boy.”

Brownie rolled his eyes while I tried to figure out if I'd been insulted. Actually, I was sure I had been, I just wasn't sure how badly. I was starting to think that the man was using carny lingo just to bug me, and I was determined not to ask for annotation.

“Anyway, the operator knew Brownie wouldn't have let him put out a real skeleton. It wouldn't have been respectful.”

I said, “Excuse me, but didn't carnivals back then have tents with ‘alien babies' and ‘the missing link' in jars?”

“Sure we did, but the devil babies and pickled punks were all gaffed. Brownie had standards—he always ran a Sunday-school show.”

“So it wouldn't have been okay to show the real thing, but it was okay to fake people out?”

He just grinned, and I knew where Brownie—the younger Brownie—had gotten his grin. “I didn't figure out it was genuine until it had been hanging there a couple of weeks. That's when he started to get funny about it.”

“Funny?” I said, wondering if this was another instance of carny lingo.

“He acted like he was scared of the thing, said it was going to come after him. We put it down to the drinking of course—we'd known he was a drinker, but he'd started hitting the bottle pretty hard about that time, and Brownie was thinking about DQing him because of it. Then one day I was looking at that skeleton, and damned if it didn't look real to me. So I waited until there wasn't anybody around, and I licked it.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“If you lick a bone, your tongue sticks to it.”

Yo had neglected to mention that bit of trivia to me, and as much as I adored Sid, I'd never had a reason to lick him. “I didn't know that.”

“A carny needs to know the difference between real and gaffed,” he said in a superior tone. “I told the operator that he was going to have to get rid of it before Brownie found out, and he said he'd be glad to. He was still acting afraid of it, and said he was going to grind it or beat it with a baseball bat, and a couple of days later, it was gone. Of course, if it ended up in that townie's attic, he must have sold it to him instead. It would have been just like him to do that and then pretend he was short on money.”

“So he didn't have it long?”

“Maybe two, three weeks.”

“Do you know where he got it?”

“He bought it from some kids. College boys, from the look of 'em.”

“Do you know which college?”

He gave me a look that even a non-carny could interpret.

“I don't suppose there would be any records.”

“Lady, all I know is three townies with their noses stuck in the air came round one night when I was out front and wanted me to get my manager.” He snorted. “The operator went out to the parking lot with them and came back a few minutes later with the skeleton in a sack, laughing because he'd only paid a double for it. I didn't get any names, and I'd be mighty surprised if he did.”

“Can you tell me which town you were set up in?”

He threw up his hands. “It was thirty years ago! Ask me who was with the show then, and I'll you, but don't ask me to try to remember which Podunk town it was.”

“I can look it up in the route book if you know when it was, Treasure Hunt,” Ms. Fenton said.

“It was nineteen eighty-two, like I said. Around the time of the blow-up. You remember, when some damned townies decided it would be funny to mess with the generator? We had to stay in place an extra week waiting for repairs. Don't you remember how much ice and flash we had to give out afterward, and it wasn't even our fault!”

Dana just said, “We were so fortunate nobody was injured.” She went to a file cabinet, pulled out an old binder, and flipped through it. “The blow-up happened in Granville. The previous week we were in Great Barrington, and the week afterward, Brimfield. You sure it was in that window, Treasure Hunt?”

“Around that. A man doesn't forget the first time he licks a skeleton.”

After that mental image, I couldn't think of any more questions, at least not ones that any of them would be able to answer, so I thanked them for their time. Ms. Fenton said she hoped I'd enjoy the carnival, and I said I was sure I would, but I knew I wouldn't. In fact, after I left the three of them in the trailer, I headed for the exit, even though I was dreading getting back to the van.

I was going to have to tell Sid that we'd hit another dead end.

If a trio of college students had had a skeleton in a sack, chances were that they hadn't come by it legally, but had likely liberated it from their school as a prank. So now we could be fairly sure he'd come from a college, but which one? The carnival had been somewhere in Massachusetts when Sid arrived, and Massachusetts was lousy with colleges. The only two we could eliminate were McQuaid and JTU.

I'd nearly made it back to the neon arch that marked the midway entrance when I heard somebody calling, “Dr. Thackery!” I turned and saw Brownie loping toward me.

“I'm glad I caught you. My father just remembered something that might help you. I asked him how he knew that the townies were college students, and he said it was because two of them were wearing sweatshirts that said
OX
on them, like a college mascot. He only remembered because he said the one who wasn't should have been, because he was as big as an ox. Anyway, if it had just been one of them wearing a shirt like that, it might have just been somebody who bought a shirt, but two of them? All you've got to do is find a school that has an ox as its mascot.”

“That's great!” I said. “Offhand I don't know which school it could be, but I can find out. Thanks so much!”

“Let me know how it goes.” He handed me a business card and walked me as far as the arch. Just as I turned to go, he said, “Something else I wanted to tell you. You know Dad was just laying on the carny slang for your benefit, right?”

“I suspected.”

“Not that he doesn't use a fair amount, but this was excessive, even for him. He's got this thing against townies.”

“But you don't?”

“Depends on the townie.” He grinned. “So if you decide to tell me why you're really trying to track down that skeleton, I'd like to know.”

Talk about wasting a good cover story! “Brownie, I can almost guarantee that you wouldn't believe me if I told you.”

Now I couldn't wait to get back to Sid, and back home to the computer to search for collegiate oxen. Finding Sid's origins was still going to be like finding a needle in a haystack, but the haystack had just shrunk substantially.