A Skeleton in the Family (8 page)

P
art of the joy of working in colleges and universities is the vast number of knowledgeable people dying for someone to take an interest in their specialty—surely bone experts would be as eager as anybody to show off.

After my morning class the next day, I checked around the adjunct office to see if anybody in there had skeletal skills, but Charles was fairly sure the only one who might was Sara, and as I'd already learned, Sara didn't play well with others. Sid and I were going to have to look elsewhere.

The Anthropology Department seemed like our best bet, so I got the suitcase out of my van to wheel to Easton Hall, easily the largest building on campus. There was a persistent squeak but I knew full well that Sid himself was making the noise, not the wheels of the bag. He really hated riding in the suitcase.

The Anthropology Department was on the third floor, and since I didn't want to lug Sid up the stairs, I was searching through the maze of hallways and doors for the elevator when I saw an office door start to open. Hoping it was nobody I knew so I wouldn't have to explain the bacon bag, I hurried past but heard somebody say, “Georgia?”

I tried to come up with an excuse as I turned, but when I saw who it was, I relaxed. “Hi, Charles. What are you doing—?” I stopped, realizing what he was probably doing, and switched tracks. “How is your week going?”

“Splendidly, and I hope yours is the same.”

“I don't suppose you know where the elevator is.”

“I would be happy to show you.” He took me down a narrow hall and waved me to the left. “Your carriage awaits.”

“Thanks, Charles. See you later.”

He courteously waited until I was in the elevator before giving his usual half bow.

“Who was that?” Sid said from inside the suitcase once the elevator door had slid shut.

“Charles Peyton. Don't worry. He's the one person on campus who will never be nosy about what I'm doing.” I suspect Charles would have been equally discreet about anybody, but he seemed to feel he owed me particular service. He had a secret of his own, one I'd discovered by accident and had never even told Sid, and Charles had never forgotten that.

McQuaid wasn't known for anthropology, and the department was small: only four professors were listed in the directory. The door to the main office was open, and either a secretary or a student was tapping away at a laptop covered with a skeleton-pattern decorative skin. I knew it was either a secretary or a grad student because she didn't look up when I stepped inside—an undergrad would have.

“Excuse me,” I said.

“Yeah?” the girl said, still not looking up.

“I've got a skeleton, and I was wondering if I could get somebody to take a look at it. It's nothing crime-related or anything, it's just that—”

“Fill out a form.” She pointed at a messy stack of badly photocopied pages on top of a bookshelf along one wall.

“Thanks.” I sorted through them before I found one with the heading Skeletal Examination Request
.
Naturally there were no pens in sight, so I pulled one out of my satchel and filled in the blanks: Date, Name, Number of Bones, Condition of Find, and so on. I hesitated over Location Found—I couldn't fit my overly elaborate cover story onto one line—and finally wrote “parents' attic.” Then I started to hand it to the girl.

“Put it in Dr. Ayers's mailbox.”

I would have, but when I looked at the row of mail cubbies, I saw that the one labeled
Ayers
was already stuffed full. Moreover, the papers toward the bottom were curling—they'd been in there awhile.

“Is Dr. Ayers not in residence this semester?” I asked

“Nope. He's in Belize. Along with most of the department.”

“When will he be back?”

“As if he'd tell me anything.”

“Is there anybody else who can work with human bones?”

“Anybody who
can
? Yes. Anybody who
will
? I sincerely doubt it.”

I took a closer look at the girl. Mid to late twenties. Hair died Crayola red, but not recently, so there was an inch-wide line of brown down the part. She was so pale she probably hadn't been out of the basement during daylight hours for the past six months, and her college sweatshirt and plaid pajama pants gave the impression that it was two weeks past laundry day. Her desk was covered in photocopied journal articles, and there was a battered notebook with carefully written numbers in front of her. She still hadn't stopped typing.

“Let me guess,” I said. “You're Dr. Ayers's student, but you didn't get to go out into the field with him because you're approaching the deadline for your dissertation, and you don't have time to waste messing with a skeleton when you've already done your research.”

She finally looked at me. “Now, let
me
guess. New hire, but not in my department or even in this building, or I'd have seen you before. Not tenured, or a formal announcement would have gone out. So unless there's something you can do to help me finish my dissertation, you can leave the form in the prof's mailbox.”

Before she could go back to ignoring me, I said, “One question: How long does it take to examine a skeleton?”

“Depends on what you want to know. A full examination could take a couple of days, plus another two days to write a decent report.”

I knew that wasn't going to happen—I'd never tear her away from her dissertation that long. “What about a quick and dirty exam? Just the basics, and you wouldn't have to write a report about him.”

“Him?”

“If it's male,” I said, ignoring the muffled raspberry from inside the suitcase.

“An hour or two, which is still more time than I care to spend.”

“One more question. How long did it take you to find a parking place this morning?”

“Half a freaking hour,” she snarled, “and that was all the way across campus.”

Parking was the number-one complaint of McQuaid students, and the expensive parking permits were sold in far greater quantities than the actual number of places available. They were derisively referred to as hunting licenses. To add insult to injury, the parking police were ever vigilant and tickets were outrageously high.

“So you lost an hour of work time just today. Whereas even a part-time instructor gets a hang tag for the faculty lots.” Since the university was working hard to attract name professors, faculty lots were plentiful and closer to the school buildings than the student lots—I'd passed several empty faculty spots on the way to Easton. “I even have spares. My parents teach here, too, and admin automatically sent them theirs for the year even though they're on sabbatical.” Knowing the power of a good bribe, I'd tucked one of the tags into my satchel, and I pulled it out to twirl around on my finger. The grad student stared at it like . . . well, like a grad student seeing a convenient parking place. “Still too busy to look at my skeleton?”

“How long do I get to keep the hang tag?”

I probably could have offered a month and settled for the rest of the fall semester, but I was willing to be generous. “When is your dissertation due?”

“May.”

“You give me a good consult on the skeleton, and you can keep it until it expires in August.”

“For that you get two hours. I guarantee gender and approximate age, and will take a stab at race. Plus anything else I can find out in that length of time. Nothing written, no liability if I'm wrong.”

“Deal.”

The girl reached for the tag, but I put it back into my satchel and handed her the form I'd filled out instead. “After you look at my skeleton.”

“Have you got the bones with you?”

“In the suitcase.”

“Then let's do this.” She got up, put a battered sign that said
Back soon
on the door and locked it. “Bring it out to the workroom.” There was an open hallway behind the desk, and the student led the way down it. “FYI, if your bones turn out not to be human, you still owe me the hang tag.”

“I'm pretty sure he's human,” I said, ignoring a kick through the side of the suitcase from Sid. “I'm Georgia Thackery, by the way.”

“Yo.”

I tried to keep conversant with high school slang in order to communicate with Madison and college slang for communicating with my students, but I wasn't sure I'd encountered that particular usage before. “Pardon?”

“I'm Yo. Short for Yolanda.”

The door to the workroom was festooned with an articulated Halloween skeleton with its middle finger bones pointed up defiantly. Yo unlocked the door to reveal a room that would have been kind of creepy to anybody who wasn't a physical anthropologist or a woman who'd grown up with a skeleton for a best pal.

A wide variety of bones and skulls filled translucent plastic bins on the metal shelves that lined the walls. Any walls that weren't filled with shelves were decorated—if
decorated
was the right word—with enlarged photos of skeletons, with and without flesh, and anatomical charts. There was also a selection of scales, measuring equipment, and tools I hoped Yo knew how to use. In the middle of the room were two worktables topped with the black, inert laminate typically used in labs.

“Do I have to denude the bones?” Yo asked. “If I do, I'm going to have to leave them soaking overnight. We don't have a beetle colony.”

“Nope, he's clean.” Sid gave himself regular wipes with hydrogen peroxide to make sure he looked his best, which was a lot more pleasant to think about than beetles. I slid down the handle of the rolling bag, then hefted it onto the table.

“A suitcase?”

“It's what he always rides in.”

Yo gave me a look.

“Just kidding,” I said with a fake grin. “I didn't have anything else big enough to carry it in.” I unzipped the bag and reached in to pull out Sid's right hand.

“Okay, it's human,” Yo said. “You'd be surprised how many people bring in bear paws.”

“Are they that similar?”

“Sure, to an amateur,” she said dismissively. “How do you come to have a human skeleton, anyway?”

“It's been in my parents' attic for years,” I said, which was true enough. “They used to use it for inspiration for writing exercises.” That was made up, but it would have been a good idea if Sid hadn't been the skeleton in question. “My sister and I found it while cleaning and got into an argument about it.” Again, there was a grain of truth. Deborah and I had been arguing about Sid for years. “She watches all those crime shows and claimed she could figure out all kinds of things about the skeleton. I bet her that she couldn't.”

I looked at Yo to see if she was buying it, but given the bored look on her face, I could probably have just shrugged.

That's what she did, and with practiced indifference muttered, “Whatever.”

I started to hand her Sid's hand when she said, “How is it articulated?”

“What?” Of course, most “whole” skeletons are in fact wired together—I vaguely remembered that Sid had had wires and hinges when we'd first gotten him, and there were still holes where the wires and screws had been—but since he had his own methods of cohesion, we'd never bothered to replace the fittings as they broke or rusted, which meant that he really shouldn't be holding together.

Sid must have realized the same thing because the bones of his hand suddenly fell apart, with most of them landing back in the suitcase. I tried to look innocent.

Yo shook her head. “Never mind. Let's lay him out. I mean, it.”

I was impressed by the grad student's skills—she placed the bones into their proper locations as fast as I could hand them to her, as if she were putting together a familiar jigsaw puzzle. Not bad, given that Sid had two hundred bones, more or less.

Once the bones were in their relative positions, Yo said, “Okay, it looks mostly complete.”

“Mostly?”

“A couple of the minor toe bones are missing, but that shouldn't affect the analysis. Let's see what we've got. He looks robust, so that means probably male.” Then she picked up Sid's pelvic bone, and stuck her thumb in it. It was a tight fit. “Yep. Male.”

“Told you so,” Sid whispered without moving his jaw.

“Excuse me?” Yo said.

“I said, ‘Is that so?'”

Yo looked suspicious, but even a sleep-deprived graduate student wasn't going to think it had been the skeleton talking. She picked up his skull, opened the jaw, and ran her finger over his teeth. “Twenty-eight. He's missing his wisdom teeth—not sure if they fell out or they were extracted before death.” She pulled over a magnifying lamp, and peered at the teeth more closely. “Huh.”

“What?”

“He has fillings.”

“So?”

“Do you know where most skeletons come from?”

“When a mommy skeleton loves a daddy skeleton very much . . .”

She gave me her best withering glare, but it wasn't nearly as good as Madison's, so I was unfazed. She said, “Most skeletons come from India, but they're from poor areas and they sure don't have dental work like this. These fillings mean that he—that
it
probably came from somewhere in the US.”

Sid had spoken with an American accent from the first, so it had never occurred to me that he could have been from elsewhere.

Yo kept looking at the skull. “I'd be worried that your parents had gotten rid of an annoying student if it weren't for the ID marks.”

“The what?”

“Here, inside the skull.” She held Sid's skull upside down so I could look inside, which seemed oddly rude. There was a series of letters and numbers written in there: P-A-F-60-1573. “Those markings tell me that, at some point, this bad boy was part of some sort of collection.”

“What do they mean?”