The Skeleton Takes a Bow (A Family Skeleton Mystery) (19 page)

W
ith the bowing over, the curtain went down and the audience started moving slowly toward the exit. I just sat in my seat, stunned, staring at nothing. I’d accused the man of murder—in public—and he’d reacted less than if a mosquito had bitten him. There was nothing we could do to him, and he obviously knew it.

Deborah came back after a few minutes. “He didn’t crack, did he?”

“You were watching from backstage?”

“Yup. Any other ideas?”

“Stay on red alert for the rest of the school year, then move out of town and transfer Madison to another school.”

She thumped me on the skull as if I’d been Sid.

“Hey!”

“Stop talking that way or I’ll do it again. So we had a dumb idea.”

“It should have worked.”

“Yeah, it should have, but it didn’t. We’ll try something else.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. You and bone boy will come up with something.”

“Why are you so sure?”

“It’s family dynamics. You’re the smart one. I’m the practical one.”

“Want to switch places?”

“Hell, no.”

“You’re smart.”

“Of course I am, but you suck at being practical.”

By now I was seeing cast members joining their friends and family in the auditorium. Several were accepting congratulatory bouquets.

“Coccyx,” I said. “I should have brought Madison some flowers. Where is she anyway? She’s got to be as upset as we are.”

“As you are. I’m not upset—this thing isn’t over. Wait here, and I’ll go find her.”

Deborah was gone for what seemed like a long time, as other families chatted and the theater emptied out. When she did show up again, she looked worried. “Did Madison come out this way?”

“No, I’ve been sitting here the whole time.”

“Well, she’s not backstage.” Deborah spotted the show’s director on the stage, hugging the actress who’d played Ophelia. “Becca, have you seen Madison?”

“No, ma’am, not since the curtain calls.”

“I can’t find her.”

“Hang on.” She opened the curtains enough to stick her head through. “Anybody see Madison back there?” We heard garbled voices, then Becca turned back to us. “Jo said she saw her out in the parking lot.”

“By herself?”

She went back through the curtain and repeated my question.

“No, Jo says she was with some guy. And could you ask her to bring back her costume? Jo needs to Febreze them all for tomorrow night’s show.”

“I’ll check outside!” Deborah said and took off out the side exit. I pulled out my phone and entered Madison’s number. It went to voice mail. I tried again. The same thing. Then I texted Sid. There was no response.

Deborah charged back in, accompanied by Officer Raymond. “Louis was out directing traffic, so I grabbed him. Have you seen her?”

“No! I tried calling but she didn’t answer.”

“You’re sure she didn’t go off with her boyfriend?” Officer Raymond said.

“Louis, if you ask me that one more time, you’re going to have to arrest me for assaulting an officer,” Deborah said. “Madison would not go off without telling us.”

“Let’s check backstage again.”

This time I went with them. Most of the cast was long gone, but Becca was still basking in the glow of a successful directorial debut while Jo hung up costumes on their labeled hangers.

“Jo saw her outside,” I said.

“Excuse me—Jo, is it?” Officer Raymond said. “I understand you saw Madison Thackery leaving.”

“I don’t know if she was leaving, but I saw her in the parking lot when I went out to my car to get my bottle of Febreze.”

“Was she alone?”

“No, she was with somebody. I think it was a guy, but he had on a hoodie and I didn’t see his face. He was holding something up over her head, and she was grabbing for it. You know, messing around. Does she have a new boyfriend?”

Officer Raymond looked at me.

I said, “Was it Tristan?”

“I don’t think so—this guy looked taller than Tristan. Wait, I know it wasn’t him. I saw Tristan a few minutes after that, when he brought me his costume.”

While Raymond started asking about the guy’s height and the color of the hoodie, I tried Madison’s number again. This time, before it went to voice mail I heard a buzzing. Not over the phone, but close to where I was.

“Everybody be quiet!” I snapped. “Where’s that noise coming from?” I dialed the number again and tracked the sound to a set of shelves along one wall. “That’s Madison’s bag!”

I grabbed the purple and black bowling bag Madison used to transport Sid’s skull and looked inside. “Here’s her phone. Her regular clothes and wallet are in here, too. And—” I’d started to say that Sid’s hand and his phone were in there as well, but stopped myself in time. “All her stuff is in here.”

Deborah said, “Call it in, Louis. Now.”

Raymond stepped a few feet away to use his radio, but I didn’t need to hear him to know what he was reporting.

My daughter was missing.

J
o and Becca must have realized something was really wrong, because they came over and asked what they could do.

My mind had gone blank, but fortunately Officer Raymond’s had not. He asked them for a list of cast members along with home and cell phone numbers. More police arrived while they were gathering the information, and once they had it, Raymond put the other officers to work calling the cast to find out if anybody knew where Madison was or if they’d seen who she’d left with.

“The man you need to be speaking to is Adam McDaniel,” I told Raymond.

“Why him?”

“Because he’s a murderer.”

“Excuse me?”

“What my sister means to say,” Deborah said, “is that somebody accused McDaniel of being a murderer at the end of the play tonight.” She described what had happened, though of course not mentioning her own supporting role. “So if that guy really had something to do with a murder, you should talk to him first.”

“It was our skull that was doing the talking,” I put in. “Maybe McDaniel thinks Madison had something to do with it.” I knew it sounded crazy, but trying to explain how I knew about the murders would have sounded even crazier. “Please, just send somebody to his house.”

“Okay,” he said in a patient voice, “we can do that. But in the meantime, I want you to put together a list of Madison’s other friends so we can check with them. Okay?” It was make-work, and I knew it was make-work, but it couldn’t hurt, so I sat down in the auditorium to pull the names from Madison’s and my phones. Once I handed the list over, the police started calling those people.

At some point, Mr. Dahlgren showed up.

“Dr. Thackery, Georgia, I am so very sorry. Is there anything I can do, anything at all?”

I thanked him, but all I wanted was Madison, and she was gone.

Dahlgren took Raymond to check the security tapes, but it was the same lousy system—there hadn’t been time to replace it since I was attacked—so the tapes showed a lot of nothing.

After a while, Raymond came to talk to me. “Okay, we’ve caught up with most of Madison’s friends and fellow cast members, but nobody has anything for us. We’re putting out an alert, and we need a description.”

“Green eyes, strawberry blonde hair,” I said. “Dressed in an Elizabethan courtier’s costume. I took a picture with my phone when she was onstage.” I e-mailed both that one and a recent picture of her in normal clothes. “Did you talk to McDaniel?”

“Yes, we did, but he didn’t know anything about your daughter’s disappearance.”

“Did you search his house?”

“McDaniel gave us complete access. She’s not there.”

“What about his son?”

“Tristan was there with him.”

“Not Tristan. Adam, the jerky one. Madison hates him.”

“Mr. McDaniel said Adam was on his way back to his dorm in Springfield. We reached him on his cell phone, and he said he hadn’t seen your daughter tonight other than onstage.”

“He’s lying!” I said in a too-loud voice, and though everybody in the auditorium looked at me with sympathy, I could tell nobody believed me. And why should they? What could I say that wouldn’t make me sound more like a distraught mother than I did already?

Raymond pulled Deborah aside, and after a few minutes where he spoke softly and calmly while she got angrier and angrier, she came back and said, “Let’s go home, Georgia. We can’t do anything here.”

I wanted to argue with her, but she was right—we couldn’t do anything there, not when nobody believed me. “I want her things.”

“Louis,” she called, “give me my niece’s bag.”

“Sure, Deborah, I can do that.” He brought it over and said, “We will call you the second we hear anything, okay? Just stay home, get some rest, and if you think of anything else that will help us, you can call me.” He started to hand me a business card, but Deborah grabbed it.

“We told you who took her, and you won’t believe us. Remember that so-called crank call you got? Wasn’t it about a murder here? Right when that guy disappeared? And now McDaniel—who had access and who knew the man—is accused of murder. But you won’t do anything.”

“We’re doing all we can,” he said in an even tone, but I could tell it cost him.

“It’s not enough,” she snapped, and she brushed past him.

I should have felt badly for him—I knew it wasn’t his fault—but I brushed by him, too.

Deborah and I had driven separately, but she led me to her truck. “We’ll get your minivan later. After we get Madison back.” As we drove out, I saw police officers with flashlights searching the school grounds. It felt wrong to leave them there hunting, but I knew Madison wasn’t there.

Byron seemed to be able to tell that something was wrong as soon as we came in the door—he kept looking for Madison and making unhappy sounds. I patted him absently then went to check the answering machine. There were no messages waiting.

“I need coffee,” Deborah said.

I nodded, and though I didn’t really want any, when she put some in front of me a little while later, I drank it. We didn’t talk, but I knew what she was thinking. I was thinking it, too. Not only had our ludicrous attempt to catch a murderer failed, but it had backfired so horribly that Madison was gone. Maybe she was already—

I stopped the thought, refused to think it.

Deborah tried to get me to go to bed, but I couldn’t. The most I would do was wrap myself up in an afghan and put my feet up while I waited for the phone to ring. Byron got onto the couch with me and laid his head in my lap. I’m not sure which of us was comforting the other, but it helped. A little.

Deborah couldn’t settle at all. She made more coffee; she brought me a sandwich I didn’t want; she put out food for Byron; she washed my dishes. She turned the TV on and off a dozen times and checked e-mail on her phone every few minutes. Finally she threw herself into the armchair and tapped her foot against the floor over and over again.

After forever, I pleaded, “Deborah, please stop making that noise!”

“Fine,” she snapped. “I’m sorry!” She held herself perfectly still. “Is that better?”

“Yes, thank you,” I said.

There was still a noise. Not tapping, though. More like scratching, and it was coming from the bowling bag. “Is that Madison’s phone again?”

“No,” she said, and I could tell she’d heard it, too. “Her phone is there on the coffee table.”

“Then what—?” I shoved Byron out of the way so I could get up, pick up the bag, and look inside. “Oh, my sacrum,” I breathed.

It was Sid’s hand. It was moving.

“D
eborah! Look at this.” I gingerly reached inside, took the hand, and pulled it out, still wriggling. The bones shouldn’t have been staying together, either, but they were. “It’s Sid’s hand.”

“What in the hell? That means his skull is here in the house, doesn’t it?”

“Apparently not. He’s controlling it from wherever he is.” I briefly explained the experiments he and Madison had been trying. Meanwhile the hand tightened around my own, not painfully, but as if Sid were there to hold on to me. “He’s got to be trying to tell us something.”

“I don’t suppose he knows sign language.”

“Maybe he does, but I don’t. Find something he can write with.”

She grabbed the pad and pen we use for grocery lists from the kitchen. “Now what?”

“Put them on the table.” I pulled at Sid’s hand, trying to tell him that I wanted him to let go, and he relaxed his grip. Then I put it on the table, on top of the pad, and tried to wrap his fingers around the pen. It took a minute, but he got the message. As I held the pad steady for him, he printed letters slowly, as if it were a great strain.

Madison ok with me

“But where are you?” Deborah demanded.

“He can’t hear you!” I said. “Only his skull can hear.”

“Please don’t try to pretend that there are rules for this.”

“Of course there are rules. Sid’s just changing them.” The way he had before when I was in trouble.

in a cabin no ashfield

“North Ashfield,” I translated. I waited for an address or something more to identify the location, but there was nothing. “Come on, Sid. We need more.”

Finally, he wrote another sentence.

junior has us

Then he stopped. The hand was still hanging together, but so loosely I was almost afraid to touch it for fear of breaking the connection completely.

“I knew it!” Deborah said. “That SOB McDaniel must know exactly where they are. I’m calling Louis right now and—”

“And telling him what? That a disembodied skeletal hand told us that Madison is in North Ashfield? He already thinks we’re losing it, Deborah, and you know that McDaniel was doing his best to encourage that. Even if Louis did believe us, he wouldn’t be able to arrest anybody on the basis of a mysterious note.”

“So what now? We wait for bone boy to tell us more?”

“Oh no. We get in the car and go to North Ashfield. If we have to drive down every street in that town and knock on every door, we will find Madison and Sid.”

“Now you’re talking.”

It took us about half an hour to gather everything we might need: my laptop for looking up maps, cell phones and chargers, and the baseball bat that was the only weapon I owned. We also packed up the rest of Sid’s bones in his suitcase, even though none of them were showing any sign of animation. The hand wasn’t moving anymore, either, but it was still hanging together, so I put it into the bowling bag on top of a towel.

We thought about bringing Byron along—I didn’t know if he’d be able to track Madison, but I was quite sure he’d be able to bite somebody if the need arose—but we weren’t sure if stealth would be called for, so finally decided to leave him behind.

I asked if we should retrieve my minivan, but Deborah said, “We’re taking my truck. It’s better on rough roads. Plus I’ve got my kit to deal with any locks, and a tire iron for dealing with Adam Jr.”

As Deborah drove, I used Sid’s cell phone to call the Pennycross police tip line. It was the same woman answering the phone—apparently she never left the station.

I said, “This is about Madison Thackery. She’s being held in a cabin in North Ashfield.”

I know the woman recognized my voice, but she was professional. “Can you give me any more information?”

“Talk to Adam McDaniel—he’ll know where.” Then I hung up.

“Did she believe you?” Deborah asked.

“Of course not, but I had to try. Now we know it’s up to us.”

I didn’t look at the speedometer during the drive—the trip seemed to take forever, yet when I later counted up the minutes, I realized it had taken less than half the time it normally did to get to North Ashfield. Of course, traffic at five in the morning is pretty much nonexistent, which helped considerably.

While we drove, I’d called up a map of the town. It’s smaller than Pennycross in terms of population, but considerably more spread out, with some surprisingly isolated spots thanks to the Twin Lakes on the east side of the city limits. I knew there were roads clustered around those lakes that weren’t showing up on the map, and since Sid had written “cabin” I thought that should be our first target.

Sid had other ideas.

We stopped for gas at a self-serve station on the outskirts of town, and when Deborah turned off the truck to fill the tank, I heard movement from the bowling bag. The hand was moving again. By the time Deborah got back in, I’d given it the pad and pen, and the hand had just finished writing another message:

warm

“How does a skull get warm?” Deborah wanted to know. “Did they put him in a fire?”

Fire could destroy bone, but it would have to get a lot hotter than warm for that to happen. “Maybe he’s not finished.”

But though we waited a few minutes, that was it. I even checked for street names in town that began with “warm,” but there was nothing.

“I’m going to get moving,” Deborah said. “He can explain what he meant when we find him and Madison.”

“Good plan.” I left the hand, pad, and pen in my lap in case Sid sent another message.

She pulled out of the service station and drove east, toward the lakes, but a mile down the road, the hand started writing again.

cold

“Turn around! We’re going the wrong way.”

Deborah looked at the message. “Son of a—I will never call Sid boneheaded again.”

She made a U-turn, and after a mile, we got:

warmer

It took a lot of back and forth because apparently the people who’d designed North Ashfield’s streets didn’t believe in straight lines, but after over an hour of tracking and backtracking, we were driving on a road through dense woods that was technically two lanes, but which was more like a lane and a half, when we got:

HOT

“There’s no cabin here,” Deborah protested.

“Turn around.”

She maneuvered the truck through a three-point turn, and we went past that area again.

I said, “Is that a driveway?”

“More like a trail,” she said.

Had it not been approaching dawn, I don’t think I’d have seen it. “Can you get the truck down there?”

“Watch me!”

“No, stop, they might hear us coming.”

“You’re right, you’re right.” She pulled over as far off the road as she could get. I shoved my phone in my blue jeans pocket and I patted Sid’s hand in an effort to let him know we were on the job, but he grabbed the pen again and scribbled two words:

gun

hurry

“Deborah! Sid says there’s a gun.”

“Damn it!” Then she drew herself up. “Screw the gun. I’m going in. You stay back here.”

“Are you insane?”

“I’m getting Madison out of there, and if one of us has to get shot to do it, it’s going to be me.” She took off down the track. I was going to go after her, but I had an idea. I took Sid’s hand to the back of the truck, where Deborah had stowed Sid’s suitcase. Once it was open, I put the hand on top of the lifeless stack of bones and waited.

Nothing happened at first, but then the hand wiggled around, as if feeling where it was. Then almost painfully slowly, the bones started pulling themselves together. It took an eternity longer than it ever had before, but finally a nearly whole skeleton climbed out of the back of Deborah’s truck.

And promptly started walking the wrong way.

“Oh no, you don’t,” I said, and I held Sid’s hand so I could lead him down the track. It wasn’t easy going—the way was badly rutted from the past winter and overgrown with the first weeds of spring, but we managed it. The skeleton was moving better and better the farther we went, and soon we caught up with Deborah.

My sister is usually close to unflappable—it comes with being the practical one—but she had a tough time holding in her reaction to Skull-less Sid.

She’d stopped behind a trio of trees that had grown close together, and those of us with eyes ducked behind them to get a look at the cabin. It was small, about the size of a one-bedroom starter house, and though the windows were shuttered, I could see light shining out through the cracks. There were three cars parked in the grassy clearing next to it. Two were out in the open, but the dark blue one closest to the house was mostly covered with a tarp, and I had a hunch that we’d found Robert Irwin’s missing Honda.

Now that Sid’s skeleton was no longer rattling, we could hear raised voices from inside the cabin. Deborah drew herself up, and I could tell she was getting ready to storm in, gun or no gun. I grabbed her sleeve and pulled on the tire iron. When she looked stubborn, I put Sid’s hand around the iron. She hesitated, then nodded and released her grip.

Sid straightened his shoulder blades, made for the front door, and started beating it down with the tire iron. He’d never shown anything but human strength before, so I don’t know if he somehow surpassed that or if the door was just flimsy, but he broke through after only a dozen blows and stepped inside.

That’s when the screaming began. Had it been Madison’s voice, Deborah and I would have started running, but it was Adam Jr. who was screaming. There was a gunshot, another, then silence. We launched ourselves and pushed our way in through the splintered remains of the door.

Sid—all of him, skull included—was standing over an unconscious Adam Jr. There was a rifle on the floor next to him. Sid turned in my direction, and just for a second I saw him as the boy must have—a looming monster of bare bones, armed with a heavy bar of steel. Then he raised his fist triumphantly and said, “The Bone Ranger rides again!” And it was just Sid.

“Did you shoot him?” I asked.

“Of course not. I scared him good, though—he’s fainted.”

“Where’s Madison?”

Before he could answer, I heard her calling from behind a closed door. “Mom?”

It wasn’t locked, but even if it had been, I wouldn’t have needed a tire iron to get through.

Madison and Tristan were on the floor, crouched behind a bed, but in an instant she’d jumped up and was holding on to me. When Deborah poked her head in, Madison grabbed her, too, and the three of us were hugging and crying and saying nothing that made any sense at all. Eventually we calmed down enough to take notice of Tristan, who was staring up at us with an expression made up of equal parts relief and trepidation.

He said, “Adam?”

“He’s alive,” Deborah said in a tone that said how little she cared.

At that moment we heard an amplified voice from outside the cabin. “This is the police. Put down your weapons and come outside with your hands up.”

I looked at Deborah and knew we were thinking the same thing. Sid!

But when we all went back through the main room of the cabin, Sid was nowhere to be seen. The tire iron was on the floor, and Adam’s hands had been tied. Since I wasn’t hearing screams of terror from outside, I decided Sid must have decamped and found a place to hide, which was a very good idea.

“I repeat, this is the police. Put down your weapons and come out with your hands up.”

Deborah, Madison, and I obeyed the weapons part, but Madison kept holding our hands as we went out the door.