A Skeleton in the Family (24 page)

T
echnically, it was more correct to say that Sid had been Allen Reece, and while I was convinced of it, I wasn't sure Sid would be. I needed more than the bare facts from the newspaper articles and police reports Fletcher's friend had sent me.

One of the people interviewed had been Allen's roommate Edward Vinton. I realized that name sounded familiar, so I checked Sid's database of possibilities and, sure enough, Edward was on the list. Even better, there was contact information for him, including a phone number. He'd become a Realtor and had an office just outside San Francisco. It was after five by that point, but not in California. Maybe I could catch him at work.

First I called Deborah and asked if she'd pick up Madison from the house and feed her dinner. I wasn't sure how long the call would take, and I didn't want Madison worried after last week's scare. If I thought she'd have done it, I'd have asked Deborah to tell Sid what was going on, too, but I knew that would never happen.

Before dialing, I spent a few minutes devising a cover story, hoping that at last I had a convincing one.

“Hello, Vinton Realty.”

“May I speak to Edward Vinton, please?”

“Speaking.”

“Hi. This is Grace Taylor. I'm a student at McQuaid University.”

“Always glad to hear from the alma mater. Unless you're asking for money, that is.” He chuckled.

I chuckled back. “Actually, I'm working on an assignment for my journalism class. My teacher, Mr. Fletcher, dug up some old news stories, and told us to cover them as if they had just happened. I ended up with one about Allen Reece's disappearance.”

“Wow. Allen Reece. That's a name I haven't heard in a long time. That goes back to, what, nineteen seventy-nine?”

“Nineteen eighty,” I corrected him. “That's the last time anybody saw him, anyway. Most of my classmates are just using the previously published accounts and police reports for their source material, but I thought I'd get a better story—and a better grade—if I dug deeper. That's why I'm calling you.”

“There isn't any new information about Allen, is there?”

“Not that I've been able to find.” That was a lie, but it was considerably more believable than the truth. “Do you mind if I ask you some questions about the case?”

“Sure, why not? I had some crazy homework assignments back in the day, too.”

“Great. According to the information I have, Allen was a junior in computer science, and he disappeared over Christmas break, but the investigation didn't start until January.”

“That's right.”

“Why didn't his family report him missing?”

“He didn't have a family—his parents and his baby sister had died in a fire the year before. Allen was away at school at the time.”

“That's awful.”

“Yeah. The sister was only six years old.”

Six years old. The same age I'd been when I'd found Sid.

I went on. “So he'd been planning to go home for Christmas with his girlfriend, only they had a fight the week before, and he decided not to go.”

“What happened is, he caught her with another guy. I asked him to come home with me instead, but he said he needed some time alone. He was thinking of going skiing or something. I left a couple of days before the end of term and told Allen to call if he changed his mind, but he never did.”

“The last day of the term, Allen attended all of his classes, but that was the last anybody saw of him.”

“Yeah. When I got back to school after the first of the year, there was no sign of him. I thought he might still be licking his wounds, so I didn't tell anybody at first, but after a week, I told our RA, and he called the cops.”

“I understand that his suitcase and some of his clothes were gone from your room.”

“Right. The cops figured he'd taken off and would show up again eventually. When he didn't, they looked at the whole picture: unfaithful girlfriend, Christmas alone, still mourning his family. It looked like suicide.”

According to what I'd read, the cops had fully expected to find a dead body out in the woods, probably during the next hunting season. When no body was ever found, the assumption was that Allen had killed himself elsewhere. With no family around to push the case, the disappearance had eventually been forgotten.

“Do you think it was suicide?” I asked.

“I don't know. I guess you never really know what's in another guy's head, but I wouldn't have expected Allen to kill himself. I knew he'd lost his family, but he was seeing a counselor down at Student Services to help him deal. He was keeping his grades up, and he wasn't worried about money because of insurance, and he had an internship to help with tuition. I thought he was doing okay, or as okay as anybody could be in that situation. I swear I would never have left him alone if I'd thought that would happen.”

“What about the breakup with his girlfriend?”

“If everybody who'd ever been cheated on committed suicide, there'd be nobody left. I don't think Allen was that serious about Corrie anyway—obviously she wasn't serious about him.”

“Corrie?” The name hadn't been in the
Times
.

“Corrie Melville was the girl. They'd only been dating a few months, and I could have told him it wouldn't last. She had her eye on another guy and only started dating Allen to make him jealous. It worked—she just forgot to tell Allen about it. I hear she even married the second guy, so I guess she really was serious about him.”

“Was Corrie upset about Allen's disappearance? Did she blame herself?”

“Not so you'd notice. Mostly she was mad because everybody on campus found out about how she'd treated Allen, but the next week there was something else to gossip about.”

“If Allen didn't kill himself, what do you think happened?”

“I kind of hoped he just ran off, maybe joined a circus or hitchhiked around Europe, and he'd show up someday with great stories, but I never heard from him again. Of course, I transferred schools the next year myself, but as far as I know, he never came back. So I guess he's dead after all.” He paused, and had to clear his throat before saying, “Is there anything else I can tell you?”

“I was wondering . . . What was Allen like?”

His voice warmed, and I could tell he was smiling. “He was a great guy. Funny, too. It didn't show all the time because of what he'd been through, but you could see the real him now and then. Liked to watch Monty Python and the Marx Brothers, stuff like that. He didn't have a lot of friends—he'd just transferred to McQuaid after the fire—but he was the kind of guy who'd do anything for you. I'd only been rooming with him since September, but I didn't hesitate to ask him to spend the holidays with the family.”

After that, I was completely convinced, and that was before what came next. “One other thing: You mentioned Allen's internship. Was that through the computer science department?”

“I think so, but he wasn't actually working with anybody in computer science. He was doing something for an archaeologist or paleontologist, something like that.”

“The police reports mentioned a Dr. Jocasta Kirkland,” I said, which was a flat-out lie—Kirkland's name hadn't shown up at all.

“That sounds right,” Vinton said.

I'd have cheered if Vinton hadn't still been on the phone. After all the time and effort, I'd finally linked Sid to Dr. Kirkland. I restrained myself long enough for the requisite amount of politeness, then hung up.

I was about to shut down and zoom home to share the news with Sid when I remembered one thing that had rung a bell as I spoke to Vinton, something about Allen's unfaithful girlfriend. I went to the online yearbook and found her picture. Corrie was pretty enough. Maybe her hair was a little over-sprayed, but not too bad. It was just that she looked familiar. Where had I seen her before?

I found the JTU alumni site, and searched for her name. “Here we go,” I said to myself. “Maiden name: Corrina Melville. Married name: Corrina Melville Kirkland.”

Corrie was Corrina, Dr. Kirkland's daughter-in-law, the woman who'd snubbed me at the memorial service. She'd dumped Allen for Dr. Kirkland's son Rich.

A
fter that I shut down my laptop and packed it away, then locked up and headed for my van, but I did so purely on autopilot. Too many ideas were running through my head for me to pay any attention to what I was doing. I'd set out to find out who Sid was—had I found out who'd killed him as well? Or at least why?

The killer could have been Rich, getting rid of a romantic rival. Or maybe Allen had confronted Corrina about her infidelity, things got out of hand, and she accidentally killed him. In either case, once Allen was dead, Rich could have gotten rid of the body. Making it into a skeleton would have been easy with his access to his mother's lab. Then he could have sold it to the carnival to muddy the waters still further.

Or maybe one or both of the twins had taken on the gory job to protect their little brother. That would explain why they'd been so intent on getting Sid back. Unless one of the twins had been the killer instead—I didn't have a motive, but that didn't mean there hadn't been one. Maybe Mary had a crush on Allen and become angry when rebuffed. Ditto for Donald—neither of them were married, so I had no idea what their orientations were.

Any of the Kirkland siblings or Corrina could have broken into my house to try to get the skeletal evidence back. But what about Jocasta Kirkland? What reason would any of them have had for killing her? How could that murder be tied to Allen's death? Could it have been a coincidence?

I realized I was at the house and parked in the driveway despite having no clear memory of making the trip, so I grabbed my stuff and went inside. Then I stopped. The alarm system hadn't beeped when I opened the door. A quick look at the control panel showed that it wasn't armed. I'd have to talk to Madison about that, especially since Byron wasn't on duty either. I'd asked Deborah to take him along, since I hadn't been sure how long I'd be. That was all to the good. I wouldn't have to find some way to distract him while I spoke to Sid—we'd run out of rawhide sticks.

“Sid, it's me!” I called out. There was no response, so I assumed he was still sulking. I tapped on the armoire in case he was in there, but he didn't tap back. Next I checked my parents' office. He wasn't in there, either. “Sid, come on down! I've got something to tell you.”

When he didn't reply, I started for the attic, lugging my laptop. The attic door was unlocked, which I took as an invitation.

Sid wasn't up there. I looked around, but there was nowhere to hide, not even for a skeleton.

“Sid?” I said, going back to the second floor. I went through all the bedrooms, even opening closet doors in an echo of our burglar the previous week. No Sid.

Back downstairs, I went to the armoire and opened it. No Sid. Then I went through every room, even the basement.

“Sid! Where are you?” But I knew he wasn't there. An empty house has a kind of hollow feel, but I'd never expected to feel it there. I don't think I'd been completely alone in that house since I was six years old and Sid came to stay with us.

Sid was gone.

S
id was missing, and I had no idea where he'd gone or how he'd gotten there.

Okay, Sid wouldn't have just walked out. He wouldn't have risked exposing us that way. That gave me an idea, and I went back to the attic. Sid's bacon-patterned rolling bag was missing, too. So somebody had carried him out, somebody who knew about that bag.

I yanked my cell phone out of my pocket and dialed. “Deborah? Sid's gone.”

“Hallelujah! It's about time you got rid of him.”

“I didn't get rid of him! I came home and he was gone.”

“You mean he just left? Do you think anybody saw him? Could he be traced back to you?”

“He wouldn't leave—somebody took him!”

“Why would anybody steal a skeleton?”

“Because he's evidence in a murder.” As briefly as I could, given the many interruptions from Deborah, I explained what Sid and I had been doing since he first recognized Dr. Kirkland.

“You're insane,” Deborah said. “You've been playing games with a murderer. You must be insane.”

“Fine, I'm insane. The point is, I think the murderer has Sid and he's going to kill him.”

“Georgia, it's already dead. How could anybody kill it again?”

“Crush him with a sledgehammer, put him in a garbage disposal, use acid, give him to the dog pound—I don't know what he's planning, and I don't care. All I know is that Sid is in trouble!”

“Sis, I know you're fond of the old . . . You're fond of Sid, but don't you think this is for the best?”

“How could—?” I stopped and thought. “Deborah, did you take Sid?”

“What? No. Why would I—?”

“You have been on me to get rid of him ever since I moved back to town.”

“That doesn't mean I stole him. Somebody else must have—Wait a minute! How could anybody get past the security system?”

“The alarm was turned off when I got here.”

“Say that again.”

“The alarm wasn't on.”

“Georgia, I armed that system myself when I picked up Madison. What does the status screen say?”

I carried the phone over to the system's control board by the front door and followed my sister's instructions until she was satisfied.

She said, “It was disarmed thirty minutes after Madison and I left. So, who have you given the access code to?”

“Nobody.”

“Not even your honey?”

“No, and Fletcher hasn't been here since you installed it, so he couldn't have seen me do it. The only ones who know our code are Madison, you, and me.”

“What about bone boy? Did you tell him?”

“No, but I did leave the instruction manual on the kitchen counter.”

“With the code written in it?”

“You told me to write the code in there.”

“Yeah, okay. I did.”

“So, yes, Sid could have read it and unlocked the door. But he didn't wheel his own suitcase down the sidewalk. It doesn't make any sense.”

Deborah gave a kind of barking laugh. “Nothing about that freak has ever made sense, Georgia. Look, I'm sorry you're upset, but I don't know where the skeleton is or how it got there. I'm just glad it's gone.”

“You—you—” I was so mad I couldn't even get the words out. “Just keep Madison for a while longer. Can you do that for me?”

“Of course, but I think—”

I hung up on the rest of the sentence. I didn't care what Deborah thought—I was going to get Sid back.

Okay, I had to assume that Sid had disarmed the system to let somebody in. So he must have found something or figured something out while I was at work. If he'd just had a
eureka
moment or had shaken a memory loose, there was no way I could catch up, but if he'd been working on the computer again, I might have a chance. I'd had mine all day, but there was still my parents' desktop system.

When I got to the den, I found the computer turned on and open to a Web page, so I knew I was on the right track. Only the site he'd been looking at was the JTU Web site, which we'd looked at a dozen times before. I experienced no new revelations from the panorama of smiling students, enthusiastic instructors, and earnest administrators. So what other sites had he visited?

I checked the browser history and saw that he'd been going through the JTU yearbooks. My first thought was that Sid had zeroed in on Allen Reece, too, but the pages he'd visited were faculty pages, not student photos. I found several shots of the late Dr. Kirkland teaching classes, showing bones to students, and working in the lab. Could Sid have been hunting for himself in those photos? I looked at the students shown to see if Allen appeared in any of them, but unless he was that one guy with his back to the camera, he wasn't there.

That's where the trail stopped. The browser didn't show any other Web sites viewed for the day, and I couldn't figure out what else he could have been doing.

Time was ticking away.

I decided to stop worrying about what Sid had found so I could focus on what I'd learned.

I knew Sid was really Allen Reece, who'd been romantically entangled with Kirkland's future daughter-in-law and her son. The problem was, while I could link his murder to either of those two, or even to the twins, I couldn't make that match up with Dr. Kirkland's murder.

What else did I know? Allen had recently lost his family in a fire. Maybe that was the link. What if one of the Kirklands had been behind it? What if Mary was an arsonist, and Allen had tracked her down, and she'd killed him to protect herself. . . . Nope, no good. For one, the article about Allen's family had said it was a lightning strike that had caused the fire, and for another, the Allen family had lived in Wisconsin. Why would a Massachusetts arsonist have struck in a random town in Wisconsin? And I couldn't connect that theory with Dr. Kirkland's murder, either.

What else? Allen was a computer guy who'd done some kind of work for Dr. Kirkland. Computers . . . The day Sid recognized Dr. Kirkland, she'd been at McQuaid to enlist a grad student for some statistics work. I hadn't given it any further thought, but now that I did, why hadn't she tried to get somebody at JTU? Maybe McQuaid was closer to her house, but surely she had more pull at JTU—even retired professors of her stature had juice. Could it be that she hadn't wanted somebody at JTU to know what she was doing?

Maybe whatever that was had something to do with what Allen had been doing for her in 1980.

I flashed on Yo and her insistence that I not badmouth McQuaid for fear of cheapening her degree. She'd been overreacting, but it was true that a grad student's thesis advisor could lend glory to a new career or, if a scandal arose, taint it. What if Allen had found something like that in the work he was doing for Dr. Kirkland, and he'd been killed to keep it hidden? Maybe she'd been killed to bury it, too.

I went back to the page of the JTU yearbook that Sid had been looking at last, and suddenly I saw what Sid had seen. He'd seen his murderer.