A Skeleton in the Family (19 page)

I
'd read ghost stories about messages from the beyond, but those messages weren't usually as prosaic as “while you were out” slips. Eventually I remembered that the late Dr. Kirkland had two children teaching at JTU, both of whom were academics with the same last name.

Then I had a moment of the heebie-jeebies, thinking that I'd been identified as having found the body of the dead Dr. Kirkland, but if that had been the case, it would have been the police who called, not one of the dead woman's children.

Since staring at the slip wasn't helping, I took it and my things and headed for my parents' office, where I could return the call in private. I dialed the number, and a low-pitched voice answered, “Dr. Donald Kirkland.”

“Hi, this is Dr. Georgia Thackery. I had a message to call you.”

“Yes, Dr. Thackery. I hate to bother you about this, but I'm an archaeologist at JTU, and it's come to my attention that you have a specimen in your possession that may be part of our collection.”

“A specimen?”

“A skeleton? A human skeleton?”

“Oh, that specimen.” My brain wasn't keeping up with the conversation—all I could think of was that I'd been an idiot to yell at Sara, because she must have been the one to tell on me. “I don't think my skeleton belongs to you.”

“The information I have indicates that the numbers correspond with a specimen that's missing from our collection.”

“My skeleton is male, and I was told that the ID number is for a female skeleton.”

Donald must have put his hand over the phone, but I could still hear him. “She says it's male.”

“How would she know? She's an English teacher!” said a woman with obvious disdain. “Tell her to bring it back!”

Back on the phone to me, Donald said, “It can be difficult for a layperson to determine the gender of a skeleton.”

“I had an expert sex it.”

“Can you tell me who?”

I wasn't going to bring Yo into it—I didn't even want to bring myself into it. “A grad student.”

The woman must have been listening in, because she said, “A grad student? Probably wouldn't know the difference between a human hand and a bear paw! Tell her we'll report her to her chancellor!”

Donald said, “I hate to insist, but it would be so much simpler if you'd bring it over so we could examine it for ourselves.”

“You know, I'm really not sure I wrote the ID number down correctly. The lighting wasn't very good.”

Donald relayed my excuse to his cranky companion. “Who does she think she's fooling? Tell her we'll give her twenty-four hours, and then we're calling the police! We'll get her fired
and
arrested!”

I said, “Why don't I check the number again and call you back tomorrow morning?”

Donald sounded relieved as he said, “I would certainly appreciate that. As I'm sure you realize, it doesn't look good for a specimen to just walk off.”

I said something noncommittal before hanging up, but all the while I was thinking about how he'd like it if a specimen just walked in. Of course, I had no intention of taking Sid to JTU. It was too risky, which is what I told Sid that night after Madison was in bed.

“It's too risky. I'll just tell Kirkland Jr. that I wrote the wrong number—he won't be able to prove any differently. Unless Sara looked inside your skull the other day. She didn't, did she?”

“No,” Sid said, “but I want to go see Kirkland.”

“Are you crazy?”

“I'm not the one talking to a skeleton!”

“Then tell me why you want to risk being kidnapped. Or stolen. Whichever word applies.”

“Three reasons,” he said, ticking them off on his finger bones. “One, maybe Yo really did mess up my exam. Two, maybe I'll recognize Donald when I see him in person and I'll remember something else. Three, his reaction to seeing me might tell us something.”

“What if he decides you belong to JTU after all? He could claim there was a clerical error or some such, and it would be awfully hard for me to argue with him. Let alone the woman who kept wanting him to threaten me.”

“Worst-case scenario, I'll sneak out as soon as I can and get back here.”

“What if you can't? Maybe they'll lock you in a safe or something.”

“No safe can hold me.”

“What if you're seen, or caught by dogs, or—”

“And what if you lie to Donald and that woman convinces him to play hardball? It could cost you your job.”

“I'd rather lose my job than lose you!”

“I know,” he said, patting me on the knee, “but I don't want you to lose the job or me.” Before I could outline more possible disasters, he added, “Georgia, it's been over three weeks since I recognized Dr. Kirkland, two weeks since she died, and we're out of ideas. I need to find out more about myself, and this is my best chance.”

I couldn't argue with that—I was out of ideas, too—so the first thing next morning, I called Donald Kirkland and told him that I'd bring Sid to his office that afternoon.

D
onald Kirkland looked oddly familiar when I met him at his office in JTU's Turner Science Building, and not just because I'd seen him at the funeral. After a minute, I figured it out. His face looked that of fifty-year-old version of Donald O'Connor, the actor. I'd been a big fan of O'Connor's Francis the Talking Mule movies when I was a kid, probably because I'd strongly identified with O'Connor's character. He had a talking mule—I had a talking skeleton. The movies had provided a dandy cautionary tale about what could happen if I ever told anybody about Sid.

He shook my hand. “Dr. Thackery, I really appreciate your coming by so we can straighten this out. You have the specimen?”

“In the suitcase.”

“What a practical solution. May I borrow it long enough to transfer the specimen to my lab?”

“I thought I'd come along,” I said, not letting go of the handle. “I'm curious about the procedure.”

“Certainly.” He picked up a folder from his desk and led the way to the elevator, and on to the basement lab, which was a lot more impressive than McQuaid's facility. It was bigger and brighter, with a bewildering array of equipment that looked like props from the latest version of
Star Trek
. Obviously JTU had put money into their department, and I suspected from what I'd read that the late Dr. Kirkland had been responsible for a lot of that fund-raising. There was nothing like having the leader in a field to help bring in grant money.

I helped Donald remove Sid's bones from the suitcase and place them on a generously sized table, hoping that Sid would behave this time. He seemed to be doing so, other than a tiny twitch of the skull so he could take a better look at Donald, but the archaeologist didn't notice.

Even more quickly than Yo, he put Sid's bones into their proper positions. “Our specimens are typically articulated,” he said when he was done.

“This one was, too, but the wires rusted and broke, so we took them out.” I was ready to repeat the imaginary tale of how my parents had ended up with a skeleton, but he didn't ask, so I saved it. The less said, the less I could be accused of.

Donald started with the skull, using a magnifying lamp to look inside. “This is the ID number all right,” he said, and jotted it down on a pad of paper. Then he looked into the folder, took a look at Sid's pelvis, and frowned. “Hmm . . .” That was all he said for the next half hour as he poked, prodded, measured, and weighed. I found a stool and sat to watch him work, noticing that he was looking more and more concerned.

When he seemed to be done, he said, “If you don't mind, I'd like to call a colleague to verify my findings.”

“That's fine.”

He pulled out a cell phone, but said, “Reception down here is dreadful, so I'll just step into the hall.”

I'd hoped to take a look at that folder of his while he was gone, but he took both it and his notes with him. After making sure we were alone, I whispered, “You okay, Sid?”

“Fine, but what is it with scientists and cold hands?”

“Probably most of their patients don't notice.”

Kirkland stepped back into the room, and said, “She'll just be a minute.” It was more like five, and he spent the whole time looking through the papers in his folder as if he expected them to change.

Finally a woman came bustling in, and I recognized yet another Dr. Kirkland: Dr. Mary Kirkland, who I'd also seen at the memorial service. When she spoke, I realized she'd been the one who'd wanted Donald to bully me the previous night. “What do you mean it's not our skeleton?” she demanded.

“See for yourself,” Donald said.

Ignoring me, she pushed past her brother and grabbed Sid's pelvis. She went on to repeat Donald's examination from start to finish, only faster and with more slamming of bones. When she was done, she compared her notes with her brother's. “You mismeasured the right femur.”

“Or perhaps you did,” he said calmly.

She snorted, remeasured, and wrinkled her nose as she erased her original figure. Then she spent a good ten minutes rereading the information in the file folder, which I was dying to see. Finally she turned and acknowledged my existence with a glare. “This isn't our skeleton.”

“I suspected as much,” I said.

“Our skeleton was a sixty-year-old Asian woman, and she was nearly a foot shorter than this skeleton.” She waved at Sid. “This is a Caucasoid man in his twenties. Our skeleton was missing several teeth that are present in this specimen. Ours had a fibula that had been broken postmortem and expertly repaired—this one had a broken rib that was glued together by an amateur and a healed broken wrist. Ours showed signs of poor nutrition and arthritis, but no apparent cause of death—this one had a skull fracture and a knife injury.”

“That sounds pretty definitive,” I said. So much for her comments about grad students—Yo had hit every nail on the head.

“Then where is our specimen? And why does this skeleton have the same ID number?”

“I have no idea,” I said. “We just had the one in our attic.” I gave her a shortened version of the fiction—parents bought it at an auction, thought it was fake at first, and so on. “Since this isn't your skeleton, I'll just get it out of your way.”

I stepped toward the table, but she got in front of me. “What do you want it for, anyway?”

I could have told her it had sentimental value or explained that it was my parents' and I was honor-bound to protect it, but I just didn't like her. So I told her the truth. “I like to watch movies with him, and sometimes we dance.”

She snorted again. “Why don't you donate it to JTU?”

“If I feel like giving a five-thousand-dollar donation, I'll give it to McQuaid.” After talking to Yo, I'd done some research—Sid was worth at least that much.

“McQuaid! That idiot Ayers wouldn't know what to do with a decent specimen if he had it. Look, you're an adjunct, right? How would you like something better? I've got pull here—I'll get you a real job.”

“Don't you have enough skeletons?” I could see several articulated ones hanging in the storage room next door.

Donald said, “I'm afraid my sister takes the loss of P-A-F-60-1573 personally. She was in charge of inventory when it disappeared.” He sounded a bit smug.

“It wasn't my fault the damned thing went missing! It was left hanging in an undergraduate classroom, as if a bunch of undergraduates would know the difference between a real skeleton and a Halloween decoration. Then somebody walked off with it, and I got the blame.”

“When did that happen?” I asked.

Donald consulted the file. “It was found to be missing during a routine inventory in early nineteen eighty-two.”

“What difference does that make?” Mary said.

“Only that in nineteen eighty-two I was six years old, so I couldn't possibly know what happened to your short Asian woman.” I went around her, and started putting Sid's bones back into the suitcase. I could tell from her face that she wanted to stop me, but we both knew she had no legal leg—or femur—to stand on. Still, I think she'd have tried to argue the point if her brother hadn't pulled her aside. They muttered together while I made sure I'd retrieved all of Sid's parts.

Before I left, Donald was polite enough to say, “Thank you for your time, and please let us know if you change your mind.” I didn't even get a good-bye snort from Mary.

I managed to keep from running out of the building, but I didn't really breathe easily until I had Sid back in my van with the door locked.

“I'm taking you home right now!” I said to the closed suitcase, and for once, he didn't argue with me.

M
adison wasn't home from school yet, so Sid and I sat in the living room. He could jump into the armoire if we were suddenly interrupted. I'd skipped lunch to make the trip to JTU, so I was eating an apple while we talked.

“Did you recognize either of them?” I asked Sid.

He hesitated long enough that I knew the answer before he spoke. “No, not really.”

“Crap. Then that was another waste of time.”

“Not completely. Now we know for sure that I'm definitely not Patty.”

“Who?”

“It's easier to say Patty than to say P-A-F-60-1573.”

“Are we personifying much?”

“Me, personifying a skeleton? Why would I do that?”

“Good point.”

“Anyway, whoever I am—or was—it's not the woman in JTU's records.”

“Agreed. So unless we want to postulate the use of that same code-number format in another collection—only meaning something completely different, or some sort of clerical error—then somebody intentionally gave you the same code number as Patty.”

“Who is missing.”

“Well, yeah. You're here.”

“But where's the original Patty?”

“Maybe she came to life, too?”

“Unlikely. And yes, I know I'm the last one in the world who should be talking about unlikely events.”

“I didn't say anything,” I said, taking another bite of apple. “According to the doctors Kirkland, Patty went missing in nineteen eighty-two, which is around the time you were sold to the carnival.”

“So picture this. Fall nineteen eighty-one, and I'm hanging unnoticed in the back of a classroom. Some exuberant Theta Chi members, perhaps led by Rich Kirkland, run off with me to use as a Halloween decoration. I turn out to be the life of the party.”

“So to speak.”

“In fact, I'm so popular that they decide to keep me. But then the annual inventory takes place, and Rich learns—perhaps through his mother or siblings—that his theft has been detected. He's afraid somebody will find me in the frat house and trace me back to him, so he and his buddies sell me to the carnival.”

“But that doesn't answer the question of where Patty went. Let me take a run at that one. I've got a skeleton I want to conceal, and I decide the best way to do that is by hiding it in plain sight.”

“The purloined-letter approach.”

“Exactly. So I put a fraudulent ID number on my skeleton, and stick it in the back of a classroom where it gathers dust until the frat-boy brigade shows up.”

“And the real Patty?”

I shrugged. “Maybe she ended up in a carnival, too. Maybe she was sold to some other collection somewhere or hidden in an attic. Maybe she was destroyed. As long as there is a Patty, there's a good chance nobody will notice it's the wrong Patty.”

“Which means that I'm the skeleton that somebody wanted to hide.”

“A murdered skeleton,” I reminded him. “Whoever it was wasn't just trying to hide a skeleton—he or she was hiding a body.”

“Which is creepy.”

“No, the creepy part is that it had to have been somebody at JTU who substituted you for Patty.”

“And that same person probably killed me?”

I nodded. “I'm starting to think that the only way we're going to figure out who you were is to find out who killed you.”

“But how can we find out who killed me without knowing who I was?”

“Catch-twenty-two,” I said. “Not to mention the fact that we don't know what to do next either.”

“What about the Kirklands?”

“What about them?”

“Isn't it suspicious that they were that intent on keeping me?”

“You think one of them was your killer?”

“Either one would have known how to denude my bones and articulate me. Plus they'd have had the best opportunity to put me in that classroom.”

“You're right,” I said. “What about their mother? She could have done it, and they could be trying to cover up her crime.”

“Don't forget their financial-planning brother. They might have been doing his dirty work.”

“Yeah, but he ran off with the skeleton and sold it to a carnival.”

“Great way to disassociate it from JTU, wasn't it? Until I woke up, that is. They probably didn't plan for that.”

“The problem is, anybody who was at JTU back then could be involved, or at least the people in the right departments. That doesn't help us figure out who you were.” I rubbed my forehead as if trying to coax some coherent thought out of it. “Maybe we've been going about this the wrong way.”

“Since we haven't solved anything, I think that's a fair assessment.”

I stuck my tongue out at him because I knew he couldn't return the favor. “We've been trying to figure out why you were murdered, right?”

“Right.”

“Maybe there's no murder to be found.”

“I didn't get this figure from over-dieting.”

“No, you got it because somebody went to an awful lot of trouble to make you into a skeleton. Denuding a skeleton isn't easy, not to mention articulating you the way you used to be.”

“I like to think that I'm still quite articulate.”

“That's true—you do think that.” Before he could parse out the insult, I said, “Given that we're talking about hours of tough, messy work, the question is: Why would somebody do that?”

“To hide a body, obviously,” Sid said.

“And why would somebody want to hide a body?”

“I get it. The killer made me a skeleton to hide me so that nobody would know I was dead. It's not a thirty-year-old murder case we should be trying to solve—it's a thirty-year-old missing-person case!”

We high-fived—gently, because of past experiences—and the warm glow of my brilliant epiphany lasted for about twenty seconds. That's how long it was before Sid said, “How does that help?”

“I'm not sure,” I admitted, “but let's think about it. You were in your twenties when you died, and Dr. Kirkland was a college professor. We've been assuming you were a college student. Shall we stick with that?”

“As a working hypothesis? Sure. I am obviously well educated.”

“Obviously. Going a step further, we can assume you were a college student at JTU, since your skeleton was hanging there. So we need to check out students who went missing from JTU in nineteen eighty-one or eighty-two.”

“But we don't know how long I'd been hanging around in JTU when I was stolen.”

“True. But we know you were modern, and your knowledge of current events didn't seem that far off when you woke up. Let's make the date part of the working hypothesis.”

“I just want to make sure the working hypothesis works.”

I heard Madison at the door, and Sid headed for his armoire. Homework, dinner prep, and laundry filled up the rest of the evening. Figuring Sid wouldn't want to stay cooped up all night, I made sure to give him plenty of chances to get up to the attic unseen, but he didn't take advantage of them. I had a strong suspicion that he wanted to be around my daughter and me, or at least in the same room, and I didn't blame him. I didn't want to be alone that night, either.

The problem was my training in literary criticism. When you read a novel or short story, you assume that there are links between the various elements of the plot and deeper meanings to every event. So I kept seeing connections in everything that had been going on since Sid had recognized Dr. Kirkland: her murder, the break-in at the adjunct office, the attack on Charles, the intruder snooping around Kirkland's office the same night that Sid had tried to do the same.

But did it really make sense to link Sid's death thirty years ago to Dr. Kirkland's murder, when the police seemed satisfied it was a simple break-in? Did the break-in at McQuaid have anything to do with the person searching Dr. Kirkland's office? We couldn't even be sure that it had been an intruder Sid had dodged—it could have been one of the dead woman's kids or somebody in the Anthropology Department.

How could I know which events were coincidence and which were really related to Sid? The only way to know for sure was to keep going and hope that we wouldn't get into trouble.

It took me a long time to get to sleep because I kept trying to make sense of it all, but even then, I slept better than I would the next night.

Between classes, student meetings, and grading papers, I stayed busy all of Wednesday. I barely got a chance to take a breath until I was driving home. That one breath was about all I got, too. I was about a block from home when I felt my phone vibrate to let me know I had a text waiting—I'd forgotten to turn the ringer back on after class. I figured it could wait another minute.

That's when I saw the police cars in front of my house.