The Skeleton Takes a Bow (A Family Skeleton Mystery) (9 page)

B
y the time I asked myself that question, I was in the parking lot and standing next to my car, though I wasn’t quite sure how I’d arrived there. I also wasn’t sure how I could find out if Bert was the same man as Robert Irwin, but Sid might. Deciding it would be as fast to drive home as to call him, I started the car.

But halfway home, I decided against telling him right away. His emotions had been so up and down, and I didn’t want to get him all riled up over nothing. As it turned out, it was a good decision. There was more than enough excitement in the house already.

I heard the raised voices even before I opened the door, and I admit to being tempted to back up, hop in the car, and drive to just about anywhere else. I don’t like arguments.

But since I was the only parent, I stiffened both my upper lip and my spine and went inside. The cacophony was coming from the living room, where I found Sid’s skull on the couch with Madison standing in front of him, hands on her hips. Meanwhile, Byron was sitting a little too close for my comfort. He hadn’t tried to gnaw on Sid in a while, but that didn’t mean he didn’t want to.

“This is none of your business!” Madison said to Sid.

“You knew I was in the bag when you started talking, and you know Georgia will want to hear this.”

“I thought I could trust you!”

“You mean you thought you could sweet-talk me into keeping secrets from your mother.”

“Ahem?” I said before they could continue their verbal blasting. “Can we use our inside voices?”

They stopped talking, but continued to glare at one another. Byron, at least, seemed glad to see me and even wagged his tail, though he had to realize it meant that his plans for a bony snack had been foiled.

“Dare I ask what’s going on?” I said.

“Sid has been eavesdropping. Again. Still!”

“I’m supposed to eavesdrop. That’s why I’m spending every day shut up in your locker!”

“You’re supposed to be trying to find out about a murder, not sticking your nose into my business.”

“I’m not sticking my nose in anywhere—I don’t even have a nose.”

“Let me extrapolate,” I said. “Sid, you overheard Madison talking to somebody about something you think I should know, right?”

“She told Samantha that—”

“Stop. Does what you heard have anything to do with the murder we’re trying to figure out?”

I think he tried to shrug, but since all he had to work with was his skull, he just wobbled a bit. “I thought we decided at the beginning of the investigation that there was no way to tell what facts and information could be useful.”

“Okay, then, using your very best judgment—your honest judgment—what are the chances that what you overheard has anything to do with the murder?”

He mulled it over before finally admitting, “Maybe five out of a hundred.”

“Not even!” Madison said.

I said, “If there’s a ninety-five percent chance that the information has no bearing on the case, then I think you could keep it to yourself until such time as it proves to be important.”

“It is important!” he protested.

“Until such time as it proves to have something to do with the murder. Okay?”

Sid’s skull wiggled some more, but he said, “Okay.”

Madison should have left well enough alone, but she had to add, “Nobody likes a tattletale, Sid.”

“Now, Madison,” I said, “I’m sure that if you have some information that is important to me, you will tell me yourself. Right?”

“It’s no big deal.”

“Glad to hear it. I’m sure I can trust you to tell me everything I need to know. That’s how we work, right?”

The way she wouldn’t meet my eyes told me that it was a bigger deal than she was willing to let on, but I wasn’t going to order her to tell me. After a couple of long minutes, she finally said, “Okay, I blew a biology test.”

“How badly?”

“Pretty badly.”

“How much is it going to affect your grade this quarter?”

“I’ll still get a B. I think.”

“Make sure of it.” I didn’t insist on her getting straight As, but Bs were the minimum I would accept. “If you need extra help, I expect you to stay after school and get it.”

“But Mrs. Hanson’s only time for helping is during rehearsal, and Becca will drop me from
Hamlet
if I miss too many rehearsals!”

“Then you better make sure you learn the material during class.”

“What do I need biology for anyway? I mean, have you used any today? This week? This year?”

“Do you have a career path already lined up?”

She looked blank. “No.”

“Then how can you possibly know what you’re going to need?” I thought it was a reasonable question, but I’m not a teenager and clearly she didn’t follow my logic.

She said, “Whatever.”

“Try that again.”

She visibly swallowed what she wanted to say. “I’ll do better.”

“Okay, then. I trust you to take care of it.”

“I should go get started on my homework.”

“I’ll call you when dinner is ready.”

She took her backpack and dog upstairs, and I know she was working hard to keep from stomping.

“Um, Georgia,” Sid said, “can I have a lift to the armoire?”

“Sure.” I opened up the armoire and got Sid close enough to pull himself together. “So did you hear anything today that might fit into the whole murder plot?”

“Probably not,” he said. “Just gossip, and some really raunchy jokes that are in terribly bad taste.” He shared one, and I was appalled for a microsecond before we started laughing.

We were still laughing as we headed to Sid’s attic, and in retrospect, I wish we hadn’t been, because the dirty look we got from Madison as we passed her door meant that she probably thought we were laughing about her.

I was thinking of that look when I sat down on Sid’s couch and said, “Sid, you can’t keep listening in on Madison’s private conversations.”

“I didn’t do it on purpose—she was holding my bag when she told Samantha about that test.”

“Yeah, okay, maybe this time you didn’t mean to. What about the other times you’ve snuck around the house hearing things?”

He gave a full skeleton shrug this time. “It’s an old habit. Besides, I kind of thought I could finally do something useful by letting you know.”

“But I don’t need you to keep tabs on Madison. She’s extremely trustworthy. Besides which, you’re not an employee, and you don’t have to
do
anything. You’re family. Okay?”

“Okay,” he said.

Of course I could tell from his tone of voice and the precariously loose connections between his bones that it wasn’t okay, but I patted his femur and went on downstairs. Sid closed the attic door firmly behind me, and Madison had her bedroom door closed, too. She’d even taken the dog with her, which left me by my lonesome.

I’d thought I’d had Sid and Madison all squared away the night before, but the peace hadn’t even lasted a whole day. I would have loved to have somebody to talk to about the situation, but there wasn’t anyone I could call to grouse with. The only ones who knew about Sid were my parents, who weren’t in the right time zone, and Deborah, who I didn’t think would be sympathetic or supportive. There is no Facebook group for blended families like mine.

A
s soon as my eight o’clock class was over the next day, I headed for the adjunct office. I didn’t have to be at PHS until noon, and I wanted to talk to Charles first. When I didn’t see him around, I went to my mother’s office and tapped on the adjoining door to my father’s office. A minute later, Charles answered.

“Good morning, my dear,” he said cheerily. “I’ve just brewed some fresh coffee, if you’d care to join me.”

“Coffee sounds great.”

I waited for him to stop fussing with the cups and a selection of honest-to-God digestive biscuits before I said, “I have an odd question for you.”

“I would be honored to answer if I can.”

“At Patty Craft’s funeral, somebody mentioned her ex-boyfriend. A man named Bert something?”

“Yes, Robert Irwin.”

I managed not to spill my coffee, but it was a close thing. Just to make sure I’d heard it right, I said, “Patty Craft used to date Robert Irwin?”

“For some time, actually. I didn’t realize you knew him.”

“I don’t—I’ve just heard the name.”

“Ah. I thought perhaps you had worked with him.”

“Isn’t he a high school teacher?”

“He is currently, but he started out as adjunct faculty. That’s how I met him, actually. Patty, Robert, and I were all together at Tufts for a fall and spring semester.”

I was so going to have to smack Sid for having missed that when he was compiling his Irwin dossier. “Have you heard about what happened to him?”

“Has he finally turned up? I really was surprised he didn’t attend the services for Patty.”

“According to the paper, he’s missing, Charles, and has been since right around the time Patty died.”

“Really? That’s rather shocking, isn’t it?” He took a swallow of coffee.

I waited for him to express sympathy for the man, but there was nothing. “Do you know him well?”

“I’m acquainted with him,” he said shortly.

“You don’t like him, do you?” Charles was so scrupulously polite that for him to say no more than he had almost certainly meant that he hadn’t approved of the man.

“I’m afraid I never warmed to him—I felt he’d led Patty down an unsavory path, and my feelings about him were forever cemented after she was diagnosed with cancer and he immediately cut her from his life. He said he couldn’t handle it.”

“What a selfish sleaze! I know it’s hard to be with somebody going through cancer treatment, but how could he live with himself knowing that he’d abandoned her?”

“Frankly, had he shown up at the funeral I would have been forced to cut him dead.” That was about as strong a measure as I’d ever seen Charles take against somebody.

I took a bite of biscuit. “Him disappearing around the time of her death is an odd coincidence, don’t you think?”

“I suppose it is,” he said, but went no further.

“Do you suppose that ‘unsavory path’ you mentioned had anything to do with his disappearance?”

“If it did, then he has only himself to blame.”

“Was it something dangerous?”

He actually shrugged—Charles never shrugs. Then, with an air of finality, he said, “I am sorry if Robert has come to a bad end. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some tasks I must attend do.”

I tried to prod a little more while I helped him clean up, but Charles is discreet to a fault. It was the only time I’d ever wished that he, or in fact any living person, were more like Sara Weiss.

I did a little work from the privacy of my mother’s office, then met with the students who wanted advice on the assignment due the next day. Some hadn’t even done the reading about which they were supposed to be writing: one of my favorites, a meaty article about the effect of comic books on modern culture. Still, knowing that some of them were going to have to pull an all-nighter to catch up, I tried to treat them gently. It’s just that being diplomatic was harder than usual because I was still trying to figure out what it meant that my murder victim—probably—was connected—however tenuously—with a recent death—that could have been either suicide or an accident. I was just glad I didn’t have to parse out a sentence that convoluted for any of my students.

After I shooed off the last student, what I really wanted to do was go talk to Sid. Unfortunately, according to my watch it was going to be several more hours before that happened. So I did something desperate—I went looking for Sara Weiss.

L
uckily, Sara was at her desk in the adjunct office—from her active use of a red pen, I assumed she was grading papers. I resisted the impulse to smile when I saw her because she knows she’s not my favorite person and would instantly suspect any direct attempt to engage. Instead I tried to act normal, in that I ignored her presence as I went to my desk and opened up my laptop so I could pretend to Web surf. Then I muttered, “Robert Irwin, Robert Irwin,” as if I were trying to remember something.

“Robert Irwin?” Sara said, turning in my direction. “Did you know Robert?”

“I was just reading an article about a man who went missing,” I said, “and his name is ringing a bell but I’m not sure why. No, wait. The article says he was a high school teacher. That might be it—maybe he taught at a school Madison went to.” I acted as if the matter was settled as far as I was concerned.

But Sara was just warming up. “You could have worked with him. He used to be an adjunct.”

“Really?” I made a show of looking through the article. “It doesn’t say anything about that here.”

Sara said, “He switched to teaching high school. Robert and I were at UMass Lowell for a semester years ago, but I knew he wasn’t cut out for the life.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Didn’t have the brain for it, no real feel for biology. He was one of those who tested well, but couldn’t do the work.”

“The person who created standardized tests has a lot to answer for,” I said. “I wonder what happened to the guy.”

“No idea, but I seem to remember there was something not quite right about him.”

With anybody else, I’d have said something to prompt her further, but I knew I could count on Sara to keep dishing dirt.

After a short pause, she said, “He always had more money than he should have. I mean, it’s not like we didn’t all get paid the same.”

“Maybe he had a side gig.”

“If he did, he never talked about it.” To Sara, that was an automatic indictment—she thought she was supposed to know what everybody was doing. I wondered what she’d think about my part-time work at PHS.

I was waiting for her to come up with more, when the mail cart went past the door and Sara jumped up. “Mail call. I’ll get yours while I’m up!”

She was outside the room before I could object, and was gone an undue amount of time to just grab our mail. She was almost certainly flipping through mine, but since I was still hoping to pick her brain for information about Robert Irwin, I let it slide.

When she came back and slapped mine onto my desk, I said, “Thanks. So, about Irwin . . .”

But she was looking through her own mail. “Damn.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I sent a note to the Sechrest Foundation, and they haven’t even bothered to reply.”

I remembered that that was the group that Yo had been wary of. “A grad student I know got a letter from them, and it sounded suspicious, so maybe you should be grateful.”

“Some of us can’t afford to be picky,” she said. “We don’t all have friends in high places, like you and your parents.”

My parents were a source of irritation to Sara, or at least the fact that they were both tenured faculty rankled. Never mind that they’d been on sabbatical the whole time I’d been at McQuaid, and I’d gained very little benefit from their officially still being on staff. She was incredibly jealous that I got to use my mother’s office, and she was sure I was getting other perks as well, almost certainly to culminate in their handing me a tenure-track position.

I cast around for a subtle way to move the conversation back to Robert Irwin, but the best I could do was, “So, this missing high school teacher—”

Before I could complete my lame gambit, Sara said, “Well, I’ve got no time for idle gossip. I’ve got a class to teach.” She bundled her things together with an insufferable air of superiority and flounced out of the office.

Since I didn’t have anybody else there to talk to, and there were still hours to go before I could talk to Sid, I put the murder and/or missing person case completely out of my head and concentrated on work. Well, I tried to, but I honestly wasn’t at my most productive. I kept trying to guess what terrible things Robert Irwin and Patty Craft could have been involved with.

I grabbed an early lunch at McQuaid’s Campus Deli before heading to PHS for my first SAT prep class.