The Skeleton Takes a Bow (A Family Skeleton Mystery) (12 page)

“W
hat? Are you sure? Why didn’t you tell me that before?”

“Irwin worked for the Sechrest Foundation. Yes. And because it was in a cache. Did I miss any?”

“You missed explaining what cash has to do with anything.”

“Cache—c-a-c-h-e. Which in this case means a Web site that doesn’t exist anymore.”

“It’s three in the morning, Sid. My brain doesn’t exist right now.”

“Okay, let me break it down for you. Four years ago, Robert Irwin was puffing up his profile on his college alumni site.”

“As one does.”

“I prefer a bare-bones approach myself.”

“Don’t we have a no-puns-until-dawn rule in this house?”

“No.”

“We do now.”

“Anyway, Irwin put all this fluff into his profile: fancy titles and obviously expanded job descriptions. And he said he was an associate with the Sandra Sechrest Foundation. Two months later, he went back in and deleted all references to the Sechrest Foundation. Everything else was the same.”

“If he deleted it, how do you know about it?”

“This is where the cache comes in. You see, just because you delete something from the Web, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist anymore. The original version is put into a special storage area—the cache—and then the locator IDs—”

“Three in the morning.”

He sighed. “Pretend it’s pieces of paper. He wrote stuff on a piece of paper and put it into a file folder. Then he made a photocopy of that piece of paper, cut out the stuff about the Sechrest Foundation, and put the new piece of paper into a new folder and hid the old folder. But that old folder still exists, if you know where to look for it.”

“And you found the old folder?”

“That’s right. And I added that information to my big stack of papers—”

“I’ve got it now.”

“Okay, then. I added the info to the Irwin dossier, which is why the foundation’s name sounded familiar when you mentioned it earlier.”

“So let me see if I have this right. Irwin said he worked for the Sechrest Foundation, but then took the information off his profile for some reason. When we looked at the Web site for the Sechrest Foundation, it looked suspicious. Irwin got Patty Craft involved in something that Charles thought was unsavory. Which adds up to . . .” I rubbed my eyes. “Add it up for me, Sid.”

“Irwin got his girlfriend to work for the Sechrest Foundation, even though the foundation was—and likely is—doing something immoral and/or illegal. They were both killed within a day of each other. Therefore their deaths likely had something to do with the foundation.”

“But what could the foundation be up to? Wait, do we know how old Irwin was?”

“Thirty next month.”

“Do you have any pictures of him? Especially from when he supposedly worked with the Sechrest Foundation?”

“Sure! Come up to the attic and I’ll show you.”

I just looked at him.

“Or I could go get them and bring them to you.” He hopped off my bed and I tried not to fall back asleep while he was gone. Fortunately, he was swift and came back with a stack of pictures in under a minute. “Okay, these are from his Facebook page, and these are from archives of the schools where he taught.”

I looked through them, realizing that I’d never even thought about what he must look like. In the earlier pictures he was slim, with a full head of blond hair, and looked awfully young for his age. By the time he disappeared, the hair had thinned and his comb-over aged him to the point where he actually looked older than he was.

“He sure used to fit the pattern of the people at McQuaid who’ve been getting letters from them,” I said.

“So what is Sechrest doing? Making a ‘campus guys and girls gone wild’ tape? Full-blown porno? Prostitution? What would require people who looked young?”

“I have no idea.” I yawned again. “Tell you what—let me sleep on it.” I settled back down under my comforter.

“You’re not going to be able to sleep now, are you? Won’t this keep you up?”

“I’ll risk it. Turn the light off on your way out, will you?”

He wasn’t happy about it, but he complied. At least I think he did. I was asleep before the light went out.

The situation seemed just as confusing in the morning. Madison was off for her workday with Deborah, which gave Sid and me plenty of time to discuss the options, but we never did come up with a better theory than pornography or prostitution, but why would anybody recruiting for either of those professions focus on the halls of academe?

“What we need to do,” Sid finally said, “is score an interview with the foundation.”

“How’s that going to work? I don’t look nearly young enough, and, well, you look dead.”

“I prefer to think of myself as well preserved.”

“Still, not quite what they’re looking for.”

Sid and I kept talking while we tackled the weekend chores, but we didn’t get anything out of it but clean laundry, which was of more interest to me than it was to Sid.

When Madison came in, I was dreading Deborah coming in with her to rail at me for taking the job at PHS. But it appeared Madison hadn’t told her, or maybe she had better things to do with her time than criticize me or she’d realized I had good reasons for doing what I was doing. Nope, I knew my sister. The only reasonable explanation was that Madison hadn’t told her.

The rest of the weekend went by without excitement or progress. It wasn’t that we’d forgotten the murders, of course, but there wasn’t anything we could do until Monday.

I did call Charles and invite him over for dinner Saturday, but he said he had other plans. I couldn’t talk him into coming on Sunday, either. Sid, of course, thought this was highly significant. I didn’t want to think that way, but it was hard not to.

I was just hoping something would break on Monday to get us moving again.

B
y the time I got home from work on Monday, I was thinking that nothing was ever going to break. I didn’t see Charles all day, and, despite consulting Sara’s database of people who’d received a letter from the Sechrest Foundation, I couldn’t find a single adjunct who’d actually gone in for an interview with them. We adjuncts might be a little bit desperate, but apparently we’re even more paranoid. Though I admired my fellow adjuncts’ caution, I wished one of them could have been more like Sara, who would apparently have had a face-lift if she could have gotten an invite.

Added to that, so many students showed for office hours to discuss their grades on the essays I’d just handed back that I ended up staying at McQuaid for an extra hour.

So by the time I got home, I wasn’t in a happy mood.

Sid and Madison were waiting for me in the living room.

“Just in time!” Madison said. “I think we’ve got it now, Mom.”

“Got what?”

“Show her, Sid.”

“Stay here,” he said and clattered upstairs. I heard the attic door shut. Then I heard him coming down again, but clumsily. A second later, I saw why. Sid, on the other hand, saw nothing. He’d left his skull upstairs.

“Wow,” I said. “I’m trying to decide if this is amazing or deeply disturbing.”

“I know, right?” Madison said, clearly delighted.

From the attic, Sid yelled, “Aim me back in this direction, would you?”

“Sure!” Madison called back. She took the skeleton by the hand, turned him around, and guided him toward the first step. Haltingly, the skeleton climbed up. “Isn’t that great?” she said.

“I guess. It’s just that . . . Sweetie, I’m not sure you should push Sid so hard.”

“How else is he going to know how much he can do? You always taught me to try to exceed expectations or I’d never know what I was capable of.”

“I know, but that’s because you make sense. Sid doesn’t. The only thing—the
only
thing—keeping him alive is his will to be alive. I’m afraid that if he starts thinking too hard about how he’s able to do what he does, he won’t be able to do anything. He’ll just go away.”

“Huh?”

“You know who Descartes was, right?”

“Sure. ‘I think, therefore I am.’”

“There’s an old joke about him. Descartes walks into a bar, and the bartender says, ‘Can I get you a beer?’ Descartes says, ‘I think not,’ and disappears in a puff of logic.”

“And you’re afraid Sid will disappear in a puff of logic?”

“Yeah, kind of.” I heard Sid coming back down, so I left it at that.

As soon as he was in the room, Sid said, “Madison, are you going to do your homework down here?”

“I was planning to. Why?”

He looked distinctly uncomfortable. “This is awkward, but I need to talk to your mother.”

“I’m listening,” I said.

“I mean, alone. Just the two of us.”

“Excuse me?” Madison said. “Is this about our investigation? Because I know I haven’t been all that active this past week or so, but I am still involved, aren’t I?”

“Of course you are. Maybe Sid wants to talk about something else.” I looked at him questioningly.

But he shook his head. “It’s murder related, but I really think this is best left to adults.”

“Mom!” Madison said, turning to me.

The joy of having only one child was never having to worry about sibling rivalry, just as the joy of being a single parent meant nobody to second-guess my decisions. So how had I managed to find myself in a situation where I was dealing with both? There was no way that both would be happy.

I carefully said, “Madison, let’s assume that Sid has a good reason for wanting to talk to me without you around. I can fill you in later if it’s appropriate.”

“Fine! I guess I’ll go take Byron for a walk if that’s
appropriate
for a child like me.” Her footsteps as she got the leash and called Byron may have been louder than was strictly necessary, and the manner in which she closed the door behind them definitely was, but I didn’t really blame her.

“Thanks bunches, Sid,” I said. “Now Madison is mad at me, and I’m not sure if I deserve it or not.”

“You don’t,” he said emphatically. “This is definitely not for her to hear.” He pulled me over to the couch. “You know today was the day that theater troupe came and performed
Great Expectations
at PHS, right?”

“No, but okay.”

“So just about everybody in the school was in the auditorium all morning long, and I was getting pretty bored.”

“I can imagine.” Actually, I couldn’t imagine being a disembodied skull sitting on a locker shelf all day, but I thought it sounded nicer to say that I could.

“About an hour after the show started, I heard footsteps. A minute later, there was a second set. Somebody said, ‘Just where do you think you’re going?’ It was a male voice.” He looked at me significantly, but I didn’t see any significance yet. He went on. “The other one was a girl. She said, ‘Oh, I just need to get something.’ He goes, ‘You know you’re supposed to be in the auditorium with the other students,’ and he sounds really mad. She apologizes and says it’ll never happen again, but he says, ‘I think we’re just going to have to make sure it doesn’t. You’ve been a very bad girl, and bad girls need to be punished. Isn’t that right?’ And she starts telling him she’ll be good, that he doesn’t have to punish her—and get this—that he doesn’t have to punish her ‘again’! But he says he wants her to come to his room that afternoon after school. She says she can’t because she has cheerleader practice, so he says she can come tomorrow, but she better be there on time. Because she knows what happens to girls who don’t obey!”

“Oh, my gosh! Did you see who it was?”

“I couldn’t see the girl. She had this real babyish kind of voice, but I didn’t recognize it. But I saw the man through the vents in the locker. It was Madison’s algebra teacher.”

I felt sick. “Mr. Neal?”

He nodded.

“No wonder you didn’t want to say anything in front of her.”

“I know!”

Neither of us wanted to have to tell Madison that one of her favorite teachers was sexually abusing one of the school’s cheerleaders.

“What do we do?” Sid asked.

“Well, it has to be reported, but I don’t know how. I mean, you’re a witness, but you can’t exactly go to Mr. Dahlgren and tell him. It’s the same problem we had with the murder.”

“Not to mention the fact that the murder might be connected.”

“Did you hear anything—?”

“No, nothing about the killing, but it just seems like a teacher might go a long way to hide that kind of activity. What if Irwin saw something he wasn’t meant to, and Mr. Neal decided to get rid of him? The girl might not even know about it, or what kind of man she’s dealing with.”

“Okay, then the first thing we have to do is find out who she is, and preferably in a way that will be reportable. Did they set a time for their . . . ? For tomorrow?”

We began planning, and though we were fully engaged when Madison came back in with Byron, we stopped immediately before she could hear anything. She was going to find out eventually, but there was still the barest chance that Sid had misconstrued what he’d heard. So it was really for her own good that we stopped talking.

I don’t think she saw it that way. She sniffed disdainfully and said, “Come on, Byron. We’re not wanted here.”

She was still a little distant at dinner, but I didn’t blame her for resenting being kept in the dark. I remembered plenty of times when my parents had kept things from me when I was a kid, and at the time, I’d thought it was rank unfairness. Things looked different from the parent’s side.

Sid had heard Mr. Neal tell his cheerleader victim to be at his room at three, which was forty-five minutes after the end of the school day, meaning the halls would be deserted. Neal’s classroom was on the second floor, the same as mine, but it was down at the far end of the hall, separated from other rooms by a storage room and a stairwell. Fortunately, since that area was out of the way, there were some empty, unused lockers. I got Madison to put Sid, his hand, and his phone in one of them first thing in the morning, and though she was still grumpy about not knowing what was going on, she went along when I promised to tell her the story as soon as I could verify it. She even left the other piece of equipment Sid needed, though she was clearly mystified.

Of course, I still had my morning class at McQuaid to tend to and then I had to teach my SAT prep classes at PHS, but they went by quickly. Finally the bell rang, and we could put our plan into motion.

Sid and I had speculated that the girl might not show if she thought there was still anybody around, so when I was sure nobody was looking, I turned out the lights in my classroom, locked the door, and sat in a chair where I couldn’t be seen from outside the room. I checked my phone and found a text from Sid.

Waiting . . .

I responded in kind and watched the minutes tick by, resisting the impulse to try to catch a glimpse of the girl myself.

At three, my phone vibrated with another text.

She was right on time.

Couldn’t see her face.

Blonde ponytail & jacket over cheerleader outfit.

Ew.

I responded:

We’ll give them 10 minutes.

Nine and a half minutes later, which was as long as I could make myself wait, I texted:

Getting into position now.

Taking a deep breath, I opened the classroom door and faux-casually ambled down to the water fountain near Mr. Neal’s classroom. Then I leaned up against the locker where Sid was hiding and pretended to take a phone call, knowing Sid could hear me. I couldn’t hear anything from the classroom, but my imagination was lurid enough.

Just as I was about to text Sid to get on with it, a voice boomed through the hall.
“Come out of there right away. Leave that girl alone!”

It was so startlingly loud that I didn’t have to pretend my shock. Sid had taken a megaphone with him, and the empty halls, the locker, and Sid yelling as loud as he could combined to create a tumult on the Richter scale.

I heard scrambling from Mr. Neal’s classroom, and a minute later, he came out looking angry and frustrated. I felt smug at having interrupted him until his partner came out.

She was wearing a letter jacket with her hair pulled back into a ponytail with a bright ribbon around it, but it wasn’t a student. Nor even a girl, really. It was a woman, a grown woman. One I knew. It was Ms. Zale, the SAT math teacher.

Sid and I hadn’t interrupted a sexual predator—we’d interrupted a bit of role-play.

Mr. Neal and Ms. Zale looked around furiously, but of course there was nobody to be seen but me and obviously I wasn’t the one who’d spoken.

I quickly stammered, “What in the world was that racket?”

“Did you see anybody near here?” Mr. Neal demanded.

“Not a soul,” I said, which was true. I knew where Sid was, but I couldn’t see him. “Maybe somebody was messing with the intercom. What did they say, anyway? I couldn’t understand it.”

They looked slightly relieved at my pretended ignorance. “I’ve got no idea,” Ms. Zale said. “You’re probably right. Some joker messing with the intercom.”

“Teenagers!” I said ruefully. “You two are brave to deal with them all day long. Well, I better be going. You two have a good rest of the day.”

I walked away as quickly as I could, hoping that I hadn’t betrayed any knowledge of anything they were doing, which I really wished I didn’t know about anyway. I could feel my cell phone vibrating in my hand, but didn’t dare look at it for fear of not being able to keep a straight face. Instead I waited until I was out the door and in my car with the doors firmly locked.

After all that, all Sid had texted was:

Never mind.

That summed it up for me, too.