Read Online A Skeleton in the Family by Leigh Perry - Free Book Online Page B

like it.”
    â€œSid, there are two choices. One, forget it ever happened. Two, we try to find out who that woman is.”
    â€œWe?”
    â€œWell you don’t think I’d leave you alone with this, do you?”
    â€œBut you’ve got so much going on. It’s not fair for me to ask you.”
    â€œDid you ask? Unless you don’t want me to—”
    â€œNo! I want you to.”
    â€œOkay, then.”
    â€œSo . . . What do we do first?”
    Never have I been so grateful to be interrupted as I was in the next second—I didn’t have the slightest idea of how to start.
    â€œMom! Mom!” Not only was Madison home, but she was on her way up the stairs.
    â€œShit! I’ve got to go.” I practically ran down the attic stairs, and was grateful I didn’t fall down them. I got the door slammed behind me just in time.
    â€œAnother bug?” Madison asked.
    â€œNo, but I thought I heard a squirrel up there—I may need to get a trap.” Before she could object, I added, “A humane one.”
    â€œGood.”
    â€œWhy are you home from dinner so early? Did you and Aunt Deb have a fight?”
    â€œI never fight with Aunt Deb.”
    â€œRight, that’s me.”
    She rolled her eyes. “Aunt Deb got an emergency call from somebody who’d forgotten the code for his alarm system, so we ate fast and she dropped me off on her way.”
    â€œAnd you came running to find me because you missed me?”
    â€œNo, look! I made Kevin Bolk’s Tumblr!” She waved her phone at me, and I had to take it to hold it still long enough to see the photo of her standing next to Bolk, proudly holding the sketch she’d commissioned from him.
    I thanked the powers that be for Kevin Bolk’s Tumblr—now I had a suggestion for Sid. “I guess there must be a lot of pictures from Mangachusetts on the Web,” I said loudly, assuming that he was eavesdropping.
    â€œOh, sure. I’ve put some up on Facebook myself, and Samantha took a lot of pictures for her blog.”
    â€œI’ll have to go Web surfing and see if I can spot some of the people I saw there.”
    â€œI’ll send you some links,” she promised.
    I didn’t actually get to my computer until after Madison went to bed, but when I logged on, there was an e-mail from her with a dozen links. Many of those led to more, and I soon decided that I was the only attendee who hadn’t taken and posted pictures. My original plan had been to print out any promising photos or group shots, but given the sheer numbers, I gave up that idea—there wasn’t enough toner in the house to print that many. Instead, I tiptoed up to the attic and lent my laptop to Sid.
    Though he’d rarely had reason to use a computer, he picked up the basics of Web surfing surprisingly quickly. As he smugly said, watching all those TV shows and movies of people using their laptops must have paid off. I just hoped he wouldn’t somehow erase my hard drive or start World War III while I was asleep.
    The next day, my laptop was outside my bedroom door with a sad note from Sid that had only two words:
NO LUCK
.

11
    I felt terrible for Sid, so once my morning class was over and I’d spent a few minutes answering student questions, I decided to devote some time to his problem. Since I had a couple of spare hours, I spent it at the adjunct office looking through photos from Mangachusetts until the normal clothing of the adjuncts started to look odd to me.
    There must have been fifty different sites with photos for Mangachusetts, including quite a few shots of Sid as Shinigami. I kept hunting through them for a woman who fit Sid’s description, but as far as I could tell, she was the only person at the convention who didn’t appear in pictures. There were even shots of me at the deli.
    Just when I was about to give up, Fletcher came in, sat down at his desk, then