AN: Next weekend is a long weekend in Canada, and I'm not sure if I'm going to have time to post. So here's a nice long chapter to maybe tide you over just in case ;). Thank you for reading! Anything familiar belongs to J.E.
For the next few weeks, there was a routine to our days. I would get up at around eight, have breakfast, go downstairs to Ranger's office, where I'd find him sitting at his desk, reading documents written in foreign languages, and their corresponding translations. JigSaw would come in, and he'd take them, and any of Ranger's notes about them, in exchange for what looked like a book of crossword puzzles, but in reality was a notebook. Ranger would read it, and give me a list of things to research, and then I'd spend my days doing the research. It was really random stuff. Once it was a four-hundred-year-old Russian poet, another time it was an architect from Madrid in the 60's.
"Why am I doing this?" I asked. When he asked me to start researching 18th-century millinery. "Aside from the newfound ability to kill it at trivia nights at the bar, what is the point of this?"
"We're helping Interpol track a serial killer," Ranger said.
"By knowing obscure Russian Poets?"
"Yep," Ranger said.
"How?"
Ranger was sitting on his sofa, next to the door, reading through one of JigSaw's notebooks, and I could have sworn his shoulders dropped minutely. He took a second to think about his response, and it looked like he was mentally gearing himself up for the conversation.
"He has exceptionally controlled crime scenes where he stages the bodies, and he's been leaving letters. Some of the letters are in code, some of them are poems or riddles. We've been looking for a connection between the victims and we think we've found one, thanks to your research."
"What's the connection?"
"A company called MTW Inc."
"No," I said. "You're joking."
"No," he said. My eyes grew wide, and I was doing some deep breathing of my own.
"I know who the killer is," I said, and bit the inside of my cheek.
"Babe, no," Ranger said.
"I do! Seriously! It's a guy named Edward Nigma."
"No."
"MTW, Martha and Thomas Wayne? Nigma used to work for them. He operates under an alias now. It's the Riddler. You have to catch him, Batman!"
"Are you finished?"
"No! Because I just realized that Batman is using research I've gathered for him to track the Riddler, which must mean that I'm the Oracle. I've always suspected I had it in me."
"You're not paralyzed," he said. "And I'd prefer it if you stayed that way."
"Have you got a suspect list? You really should look for…"
"MTW Stands for Merryel, Throstick, and Watts," Mr. No Fun said. "It's not a charitable organization like the Martha and Thomas Wayne Foundation. It's a company that manufactures cheap textiles."
"Why the hell was that classified information?"
"It wasn't," Ranger said. "I was just happy to let you believe it was."
"Why?"
"I was trying to avoid this conversation."
"Well it was kind of inevitable wasn't it?" I teased.
"Yeah," he said. "I was considering opening a book on it. I'd have made a killing."
Ranger put his feet up on the coffee table and grinned. "I was expecting you to take it further."
"Well you sprung it on me; I need time to process so I can make the appropriate ridiculous jokes."
"It's a good thing I didn't let you make the connection on your own," he said. "You could have stewed on it for days."
There was a knock on the door, and Ranger reached over to unlock it and admit whoever it was. It turned out to be Lester. I was surprised to see him, he'd been taking a lot of personal time lately.
"What?" Ranger asked.
"Nothing new," Lester said. "I'm going to New York again. I might have a lead."
"Okay," Ranger said. "What did you need?"
"Nothing, Minnie said that you wanted me to go over this," Lester said, he held up a file folder and used his free hand to scratch the back of his head.
"And?" Ranger asked.
"I mean he's going to have some problems. I checked it out with Hector, and the computer is completely off network, so we're going to have to go in to do things manually. But based on this woman's profile her password is not going to be her birthday or a pet's name. Hector and I are thinking we'll go in and plant a keystroke log onto the computer, let it sit for a couple of days and then go back and use that to get around her passwords."
"And how long is that going to take?"
"Well planting the log will take a few minutes, and it'll be easy to do, but depending on how much she uses the computer we're going to need a lot of time to sift through the entries to find possible passwords. We're going to go in after hours, and we're looking into the security right now. It doesn't look like it's going to be light B&E either. They just did a complete security overhaul after some recent thefts."
"There isn't an easier way?" Ranger asked.
"I've been through everything Minnie gave me, and I don't think there is."
"Don't act without showing me the final plan," Ranger said.
"Got it, boss," Lester said.
"When do you go back to New York?"
"As soon as I'm done with Minnie."
"Keep me updated," Ranger said. Lester nodded and left.
"What's Minnie up to?" I asked.
"I gave him a job to do, and somehow the men got hold of the problem, and they are all really over-thinking it."
"Is it urgent?"
"Not in the slightest," Ranger said. "It's a good distraction, and I'm letting them roll with it for a while."
"Do you have the solution already?"
"I do," Ranger said.
"How long did it take you?"
"Less than a minute," he said.
"Are you going to tell me what it is?" I asked.
"No," he said, "Because when they come back with whatever heist they've got planned, I'm going to give you the same problem, and you're going to make them all feel like idiots."
"I like when I get to do that," I said, "Are you sure it's in my skillset?"
"Yes," he said.
An email notification showed up in the top corner of my screen, and it was frankly surprising. It was from my mother. I set mom up with an email a long time ago so she could get her bills emailed to her, but never, ever had she sent me an email. The subject line read URGENT
I clicked it open.
Dear Stephanie,
I have been trying to reach you all morning, and you have either been ignoring my calls, or you are away from your phone. I have decided not to take it personally, because I understand that you are busy, but there is a situation here at the house, in the form of a wedding gift. It is blocking the driveway, and your father isn't able to take his cab out. It's entirely possible that he will execute your grandmother with a tube sock if you don't do something about it.
Hope you are well.
Love,
Your mother, Helen Plum
"Umm Ranger," I said, "I think we need the truck."
"You're afraid to drive your new car," he said.
"No," I said. And yes absolutely I was. It was a Boxter with the same paint job as my last Porsche, and it was even prettier than the 9-11 and a convertible. "Read this email."
He read it over my shoulder, "I take it the 'we' in your suggestion about the truck, wasn't a royal we?"
"That would be correct."
"Let's go," Ranger said.
Ten minutes later we were in front of my mother's house, and I was starting to wonder if 'What the Fuck?' Could be classified as an emotion, because I really couldn't pin down a word that accurately described how I felt. I was a little afraid, a little curious, a little resigned, a lot confused, pissed off, and incredulous.
There were six dogs of varying pedigree straining against leashes held by their bewildered owners, as a crowd had gathered to look at the six-foot tall wedding gift, parked in the middle of my mother's driveway. It wasn't a big box or anything. It looked like someone had taken several rolls of cheap silver and white wedding paper and wrapped it around whatever it was under the paper. And they hadn't done a particularly good job. There were tears in the gift wrap near the bottom where a couple of dogs had gotten at it, and in places, the paper appeared to be grease stained.
"We're not keeping it," Ranger said.
"You don't think it's a body, do you?" I asked.
"Standing up?" He said. "Unless he was stuffed, I don't think it's likely."
"The dogs are really interested in it," I said.
"Would you like me to get a cadaver dog?"
"That depends. If the guy has been stuffed will the cadaver dog actually be able to figure it out?"
"Depends on the dog, but it might be easier to unwrap it."
"In front of the crowd?"
"I could shoot someone," Ranger said, "That would clear them out pretty quick."
"Okay Lula," I said, "No shooting."
Ranger parked the car a bit up the street, and we walked back to my mom's place. Ranger handed me a hair tie and a pair of rubber gloves. He had garbage bags from the back of the truck, and together we got to work. It turned out that on closer inspection the silver and white paper wasn't wedding paper, but very inexpensive Christmas paper. Instead of wedding bells, I was looking at white wreaths, silver bells, and holly. It was the sort of mistake I would make while shopping for gift wrap.
The smell coming from under the paper was unmistakable. It was not dead body either, peanut butter, which was why the dogs were going absolutely bananas. When we finished unwrapping, we found ourselves staring at David, somehow sculpted out of peanut butter.
"You don't think Fat Stan sent this, do you?" I asked. Stanley Mallory was hands down the scariest dude I've ever met. He was a villain for hire, that made James Moriarty look mild mannered and well adjusted. Fat Stan had a thing for Ranger and me, and according to Ranger, he once killed a guy, by encasing him in clay, keeping him alive on feeding tubes and oxygen, while he was sculpted into a perfect replica of David. When Fat Stan finished, he cut off the food and oxygen and gave the statue to the guy's wife. She didn't find her husband until the sculpture got broken a long time later.
"Stan doesn't like to repeat himself, and he'd be offended at the comparison."
The statue wasn't great. It sort of looked like the sort of thing a preschooler would make. My mother screamed from her kitchen and came running out of the house holding an apron that she quickly fastened around David's waist. Did I mention David was sporting an impressive boner? It was sort of okay when it was just a mass of peanut butter, and you could only sort of make out what it was, but now that he had a tent to pitch, it the statue was pornographic.
"Maybe we should give him a textbook or something to hold in front of it," I said to Ranger.
"Or I can just borrow a refrigerator truck and take David away in that. I'm surprised it's lasted this long in the heat without melting."
Thump.
David's wood fell off and rolled down the driveway into the waiting mouth of a very excited Jack Russel Terrier. A big yellow lab attached to a jogging leash that was around the waist of a woman who weighed approximately ten pounds decided that he wanted it, and took off after the Jack Russel, dragging his helpless owner across the driveway.
And with that, the dogs collectively lost their minds. It was chaos for about thirty seconds while Ranger jogged to the side of the house and uncoiled a hose, to take to the dogs, but it was a thirty seconds that would live in infamy.
The woman who was dragged found herself under a pile of dogs all trying to go for the peanut butter wiener while a couple of border collies said fuck it and decided to go for the rest of David. A couple of other dogs were apparently turned on by the nature of their chew toy and decided it would be a great time to make love, on the poor woman curled up in the fetal position, protecting her head. And me? I'm not stupid. I made a beeline for the truck and hid there until all hell stopped breaking loose. I'd already been under a pile of dogs, and I still had nightmares about it.
When Ranger came back with the hose, I waited until the dogs had scattered before I got out of the car to survey the damage. Somehow David's apron had been turned around, and he was wearing it like a frilly holster on his hip. I untied it, and draped it over the nut free magenta dong and picked it up.
Then I went to the woman, who was still curled up in the fetal position, protecting her head.
"You can get up now," I said. I leaned down to help her up, and she waved me off.
"I don't think you want to touch me," she said.
"I'm wearing gloves," I said.
"Right," she said. I took her hand and hauled her to her feet. Her dog was the only dog who hadn't bolted, because he was still attached to her, and he was currently sporting an expression that pretty much said he knew he'd fucked up big time.
"I don't want to know what's in my hair, or on my clothes. Do you think the man with the hose could just…" the woman looked at Ranger and I stepped back while he hosed her down. When he shut off the hose, mom materialized beside the woman with a towel.
"You should probably go to the hospital," Ranger said. "And you should take your dog to the vet. We don't know what was in that peanut butter. Have them bill me."
One of mom's neighbors offered to take her, and she left.
After that, the crowd dispersed, and we were left alone with my mother, in the driveway, watching David slowly ooze onto the pavement.
"How the hell do you even sculpt things with peanut butter?" I asked.
"Val's girls do it all the time," Mom said. "Do you think that woman will bring the towel back?"
"No," I said, "I think we'll be lucky if she doesn't sue. Now how do you sculpt with peanut butter? Do you freeze it and go at it with a chisel a la Michelangelo?"
"No, you make play dough out of it."
What I asked next was, "Why are you making peanut butter playdough?" What I really wanted to know was why the fuck I'd never been given peanut butter play dough as a child. I mean was it like regular play dough that you couldn't eat, only play with? And if so, isn't that just a colossal waste of peanut butter? And if not, and you could eat it, of all of the things to deprive me of as a child, I felt truly offended that I didn't rate peanut butter play dough.
"The baby kept eating the regular playdough, and we were worried about her salt intake, so your grandmother was looking for alternative recipes online, and found one for peanut butter play dough. It's meant to be eaten as you play with it."
"How much salt is in regular play dough?"
"About a cup per batch if you're making the homemade stuff," mom said.
"Wow," I said. "That's a lot."
Mom nodded.
"What's in the peanut butter dough, Mrs. Plum?" Ranger asked.
"Helen, please," mom said. "And I think it's honey, peanut butter, and powdered sugar. I have the recipe inside; would you like it?"
"Thank you," Ranger said.
Mom got her surface and brought it outside and showed the recipe to Ranger. There were three cups of powdered sugar, one cup of peanut butter and a quarter cup of honey. Okay so the baby's salt intake was less, but if she ate this by the pound, she was going to get diabetes.
I looked up, and one of David's nipples dropped off, and I walked over to pick it up. It had been made by half an olive with the pimento removed. I looked at mom. "Does this feel like the stuff grandma makes?"
Mom came over to the statue and peeled a bit of the dough off of David's butt. "No," she said, "This has more sugar in it, to make it firmer."
I looked at the section she'd peeled off and saw a mannequin's bum underneath it. "Well, I guess we know what Leitrim was using my peanut butter for," I said. "But like, why?"
Ranger shrugged and walked over as the second nipple hit the ground after sliding off of David's chest. This one was a Swedish Berry.
He put both the olive and the berry into evidence bags. And gave me a large one to put the schlong into. Tank pulled up a few minutes later with a Freezer truck and big rolls of plastic wrap. Tank hesitated slightly when he saw the statue, and then between he and Ranger they wrapped up David and put him on the truck.
"Have you had lunch?" Mom asked.
"Not yet," I said brightly.
"I'm making soup," she said. Ranger declined and left with Tank to dispose of David. It wasn't until I got to the kitchen table, that I realized I was still holding David's piece. I went to put it down, but mom stopped me, and got a Disney Princess paper plate from the cupboard, and put it down on the center of the table. I stood the thing up, on it, and she covered it with a tea towel, and then a doily. Then she arranged flowers in bud vases around it.
Satisfied, she served me some soup, and we both pretended that it didn't look like her table was super excited about lunch.
"Oh I meant to thank Carlos for intervening last week, and I completely forgot," mom said.
"Intervening?" I asked.
"Yes," she said, "I wanted to go pay Bernadette a visit in the hospital now that she's awake again, but they weren't letting me in. I wasn't on the authorized guest list. Carlos got me through. I feel so badly for her. Waldo is still missing, and nobody knows where he is, and the police are drawing a complete blank as to what could possibly have motivated this."
"Really?" I said.
"Yes," she said, "They said the case is too cold now."
"Did they go out to Steveston or Asbury Park?" I asked.
"I don't know," mom said. "At least thanks to you, she knows he wasn't having an affair."
"There's that," I said.
"Of course the police aren't allowed to question her; she's not healthy enough for it yet. Any mention of Waldo and all of her machines start making noises. You don't know anything about where he is hiding do you?"
"Mom," I said, "I'm fairly certain Mr. Dickerson isn't going to be found alive."
"Oh dear," mom said. "So sad. He was such a nice boy too. He babysat you guys when you were little."
"Really? I don't remember that."
"You wouldn't," she said, "You were just a baby, but you loved him, and he played so well with both of you. That man just understood children you know?"
I heard the dryer buzz in the basement, and mom excused herself to go get the laundry. Dad immediately snuck into the kitchen behind her and went to the cupboard above the fridge. My father's behavior was odd for oh so many reasons. The first being that my father doesn't cook unless absolutely forced to, and second, that was the cupboard where cooking implements went to die. It was where mom had put all of the wedding gifts she couldn't throw out, for fear of being rude, but had never used. Dad grabbed a fondue pot, from this cupboard and produced from within it, a bag of instant espresso grounds.
He motioned for me to watch the door, and then grabbed a mug from the drain rack by the sink. Looking furtively over his shoulder, he dumped a bunch of the grounds into the cup, and then quickly lobbed the bag back into the fondue pot and tossed everything back above the fridge.
He closed the cupboard door, and as my mother came into the kitchen, he innocently poured a cup of coffee from the coffee maker, over the instant coffee in the mug.
He very pointedly measured a single teaspoon of sugar into his cup, a drip of milk to lighten it, and stirred it. He took a sip of it and grimaced. I was trying my damnedest to keep the look of utter horror off of my face as I watched this bit of self-inflicted abuse.
"Oh stop that," mom said. "The doctor told you that you had to cut back on your caffeine intake. You get one regular pot a day, everything after that is decaf. I can't even tell the difference, and you wouldn't be able to either if I hadn't told you it was decaf."
Dad was in the doghouse. She must be pissed at him for not telling him that Ranger and I were going to get married for real. Her retribution towards me had been the reception. Dad was paying for it in terrible coffee.
Mom got the ironing board out of the closet and unfolded it, and went to get her spray starch and realized it was empty. "Oh shoot. I'll be back," she said, "I have another bottle downstairs."
Mom left, and I looked at dad, "Just how bad does that taste?"
"You really don't want to know."
Once mom was gone he poured about a quarter of a cup of sugar into his coffee-like substance. He took a sip, grimaced and added cream to the mix. "Normally I just wait until she goes to the store and I dump the decaff grounds out into the garden and replace them with regular, but she just opened this can and hasn't left the house today thanks to your present."
"I'm so sorry," I said.
"What were you talking about earlier?"
"Mr. Dickerson," I said.
"Shame about him," dad said. "Your mother said you were investigating him? What for?"
"His wife thought he was having an affair."
"Not him," dad said. "His dad was like Rocco Morelli. Slept with anything in a skirt, and Dickerson used to come over here to get away from the fighting. He told me when he was a kid that he wasn't going to get married until he found a woman like I had in your mother, and wouldn't be tempted to cheat. He screwed around a lot before he got married, but once that ring was on his finger, he never looked at another woman."
"I figured out the affair wasn't happening," I said. "He came here a lot?"
"All the time. Started just after Val was born, I think. He started helping out with yard work since your mom was so busy with the baby and couldn't tend to her gardens. I taught him to throw a baseball because his father was useless. I Signed him up for little league and used to take him to all of his games. He played centerfield and had an arm like a canon and the aim of a sniper. His On Base Percentage, his batting average, and slugging average were all insane. He ended up getting a full-ride baseball scholarship."
"Why didn't he continue with baseball?" I asked.
"Got into a bad car accident in his senior year of college. He ended up having his shoulder and elbow replaced. It ruined his career."
"So he decided to become a teacher?"
"Yeah," Dad said. "I mean he was taking applied math at school, so it wasn't really a stretch. He took money from the insurance payout, and went to teacher's college."
"Sorry," I said, "Did you say insurance payout?"
"I did," dad said.
That was three times now that I'd heard about Dickerson receiving a hefty insurance payout. Maybe he was involved in some kind of scam with them? Our searches didn't pick it up, but if it were 26 years ago, the records might not even be online. The phone rang in the kitchen and mom came hurrying in to answer it. "Hello dear," mom said. "Is she any better yet?"
Mom carried the portable out of the kitchen and into the living room. "What's up with that?" I asked my dad.
"Angie has been watching a lot of forensics documentaries for a project at school, and now she's convinced the fiberglass skeleton in her science classroom is real."
Uh-oh.
Dad squinted at the table as if just noticing that the flowers weren't part of the usual arrangement. "Does the table have a hard-on?" dad asked.
"Yep," I said.
"Why?"
"Wedding present," I said.
"From your grandmother?"
That was an excellent question. It was probably grandma's recipe that made the playdough, and that would be something she might think of. Then again she's seen Ranger naked, she knows I don't really need a toy like the present under the tea towel.
"Where is grandma? Mom said you were going to kill her."
"She left. Don't care with who, or where the fuck she went."
I left mom and dad's and drove the few blocks to Val's house, and knocked on the door, and braced myself for chaos. Usually, when you walked into Val's place you were faced with the sound of screaming children, one of the kids always had a runny nose, and the middle child thought she was a horse, so there was a lot of thundering hoof beets upstairs.
Val came to the door, and surprisingly there was quiet. "Did I come at a good time?" I asked.
"Yep," Val said. "Albert has the little one at the park, Mary-Alice is playing some online game with grandma, and Angie is in her room, refusing to talk to anyone."
"What's up with her? That's why I'm here."
"Well remember how Mr. Dickerson bought that fake skeletons that basically got vandalized every year?"
"Yes," I said.
"Well she's convinced it's real," Val said. "It's all her history teacher's fault."
"How?" I asked.
"Well, she's decided that for Halloween everyone gets to research a famous ghost story. They got to choose ghosts out of a hat, and their job is to research them and find out about the real people and circumstances behind the story."
"Okay," I said, "That's a really cool assignment. I'd be all over that."
"And Angie is. She's decided she's going to solve an unsolved murder, and she's been taking a lot of forensic's books out of the library. So yesterday in science class, her teacher pulled the skeleton out of the closet, and Angie went to look at it, and she said she's convinced it's not fiberglass. But it's the same skeleton that's been there since we were kids. It's fiberglass which I told her, and now she's not speaking to me."
"Can I talk to her?" I asked.
"You can talk at her if you want," Val said. Val's house was almost identical in construction to my mom's or Joe's house. She had three bedrooms upstairs, making it a little bigger than Joe's two bedroom, but not by much. The kitchen was at the back, overlooking the garden, there was a family room, a dining room, and the basement was partially finished with the laundry room and rumpus room. The older girl's shared one bedroom, and the baby had the other.
This would never, ever have worked for Valerie and I. Val, was the perfect daughter, whose room was always immaculate, her posters were framed, and never taped on the walls, and her dust ruffle and comforter were always perfect. I was less concerned with perfection, didn't have the patience for framing posters, and the only reason my room was tidy was that my mother would have killed me if it wasn't.
Angie and Mary-Alice were next-generation Val and me, and there were a lot of fights because of the shared room situation. I made for the stairs, and Val stopped me. "We moved Angie to the basement. She's in middle school now, and she needs some privacy."
"That's new," I said.
"She's wearing bras now, and Mary Alice keeps stealing them to pretend they are saddles," Val said. "It was getting to be a problem."
I opened the door to the basement and went down into a pretty cool bedroom. Yes, it was girly, but it was girly scientist. She had an American Girl Doll corner with a lab table set up for her doll, who was wearing a NASA t-shirt. Angie had set up a lab table for herself, with a pink microscope, various plants under pretend grow lights, and she had a shelf of books dedicated to botany, chemistry, and physics.
Currently, the lab table housed books on anatomy and the human skeleton. Angie was on the bed reading a copy of The American Journal of Forensic Science.
"Hey," I said.
"Hey," she said, not looking up. She was wearing a pair of faded jean shorts, and a sleeveless turquoise blouse buttoned all of the way up. Her hair was in a perfect ponytail, and she'd managed to subdue the curls she'd inherited from our side of the family, so her ponytail looked like it was in one fat, smooth curl.
"You found a body?"
"Yes," she said. "In science class. The skeleton is real, and he didn't die of natural causes, but nobody will believe me."
"How do you know?" I asked.
She got up and walked over to her desk, and powered up her laptop. It looked relatively new and really fucking cool. It was black, and when she powered it up, an alien face glowed turquoise on it.
"Where did you get that?" I asked.
"Sometimes dad remembers that he has other kids, and feels guilty, so he sends us stuff. MA and I got cool laptops last month, and he's trying to convince us to go see him in California."
"Are you going to go?"
"No," she said. "Mom can't afford that, and we have school."
While she was talking, she was clicking through files. She stopped on a picture of a skull. "Look at all of those fractures that have been glued together, and the shape? According to my book, a hockey stick is responsible for the wound. And if you look on the inside of the skull here, there's staining from blood. And look at this," she said, and clicked to another picture, "This is the right shoulder, and if you look at it, it's whiter than the other bones around it. It's fiberglass, and it's old fiberglass, and it's too small for the frame of the skeleton. Same with his elbow. And there's this. Mr. Dickerson calls the skeleton Wilbur, but he told me last year that someone broke Wilbur's pelvis so he ordered a replacement one, and they sent him a female pelvis. He didn't think anyone in the class would notice though. And look…"
She opened up her web browser and clicked on a link for the Science Fair, and she zoomed in on the skeleton, and then she pulled up a picture of Wilbur that she'd taken on her phone. She zoomed in on the pelvic region on both of them. They did look different. "Huh," I said. "And you told your teacher this?"
"Yes," Angie said. "And she told me my imagination was running away with me. If Mr. Dickerson were here, he'd believe me."
She looked at her clock on her computer and rolled her eyes. "What?" I asked.
"There's a Welcome Back dance at school and mom is making me go."
"You don't want to?"
"I do, but she's all excited because she thinks I have a date to the dance when I don't. There are a bunch of us going, and Stewart Kingston is getting his dad to drive us over to my friend Karina's before we all go to the dance in her mom's van. Mom's all excited because Stewart isn't picking anyone else up, but it's because he lives like four doors down. We're just friends; he's going to the dance with Karina, and her neighbor is the boy who is taking me to the dance."
"Have you told your mom this?"
"No because she'd get all weird," Angie said. "If I deny having a boyfriend, and everything she'll keep her space thinking I want privacy, but if I tell her she'll be all obsessive, and forget that it's not 1955. She'll start telling me how to dress to make him happy and whatever."
"Do I get to know?"
"He's one of the Molnar boys," Angie said, "And that's all I'm telling you, and if you tell Aunt Mary-Lou I'm never, ever talking to you again."
I mimed locking my lips with a key, but I totally crossed my fingers. I was absolutely telling my best friend that my niece had a crush on one of her kids. "Can you email me everything you have about the skeleton?" I asked.
"Even my forensic report?"
"Yes," I said. "What's the deal with this anyway? Your mom said something about a project?"
"Oh yeah, we all have to research a Trenton Ghost Story, and mine is about this woman who was murdered outside of TPD on April 15th, 1912. It didn't get much attention because everyone was so focused on the Titanic sinking that nobody really cared."
"That's pretty gruesome," I said.
"And she was bludgeoned to death, and a lot of people say it looks like it was done with a billy club more similar in design to an espantoon, than the usual truncheon. They figure that since the people who carried these were usually officers, and they were for ceremonial occasions, and the police force was pretty corrupt at the time, it was probable that another reason they didn't look too hard into the woman's murder was because it was someone high up the food chain that did it, and it was being covered up. But I don't think that's true."
"Why?" I said.
"Because if you look at the size of the wound on her skull, it's too big to come from one of those espatoons. It looks more like a baseball bat did it."
"You've seen the skull?" I said.
She nodded enthusiastically, "Someone robbed her grave ten years after her death, and her body was found in the fifties after a cemetery flooded, and she'd been put in the same coffin as the police officer who supposedly killed her."
"Huh," I said. "So you've been studying the head wound, and that's how you knew the skull was a murder victim."
She nodded and got a glossy book from her bookshelf. It was as big as an atlas, and the cover read Famous Skulls.
She turned to a marked page and showed me. There was a picture of the top half of the skull, with measurements, and photographs of the staining inside the skull. I had to admit, it did look like the staining on the inside of the head in Dickerson's old classroom.
"Okay," I said, "Why don't you let me and Ranger look into the skull in the closet, and if you want, I can call Joe and maybe he can get you access to the police report on your victim. What's her name?"
"Stephanie Prune. My friend Stacy and I traded when we saw who she got."
"You're joking," I said.
She shook her head. "See?"
She showed me the caption underneath the picture of the Skull. "Okay, that's creepy. Solve this for me, would you?"
"Will do," she said. "I guess I have to get ready now."
I left her to start getting ready for her school dance and went upstairs to see my sister. "Who's her science teacher?"
"Betty MacCrae," Val said.
"Can you let her know that I'm on my way over to see her?" I asked.
"You think it's a real skeleton?" Val said.
"It doesn't hurt to look," I said. "If it's a real skeleton, but it's a donated one, there will be numbers on the bone to identify it. I'll check it against the registry and give Angie some peace of mind."
"You have time for this?" Val asked.
"Yep," I said.
Twenty minutes later I parked in front of Betty MacCrae's house. Betty was to Val, what Mary-Lou was to me. They were really close in school, and when Val moved back to Trenton from California and got her shit back together, she and Betty picked up where they left off.
She was waiting for me in the yard when I got there, and I suddenly felt like I was in the early 90's.
Betty was about five two, a hundred pounds, and she had shoulder length dark hair that she'd crimped, and the sky-high bangs that took five cans of aquanaut to achieve. She was wearing a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt and rolled acid wash jean shorts. I swear she looked EXACTLY the same as she did the last time I saw her.
"Don't be alarmed," she said. "I'm not that resistant to change. I'm going to chaperone a retro dance this afternoon."
"I'm not exactly the sort of person who can be a critic," I said. "The other day I wore Doc Martens and flannel."
"Yeah but you're in style right now," she said, "Can you believe my hair? I was pretty proud of myself for remembering how to do it. But the truth is, once I started muscle memory took over."
She'd had the same hair for four years. I could buy that.
"I take it Val filled you in on Angie?" I asked.
"Yes," she said. "To be honest, I don't use the damn skeleton, so I can't really tell you if its the same one as the one last year, or not."
"I don't suppose you'd be willing to let me in to take a look at it?"
"I can't today, but I can give you my spare keys," she said. "Come inside while I dig them out."
She lived in a Duplex very much like my sister's, but it was devoid of all things kid. She'd replaced the carpet with blonde engineered hardwood, and she had a pretty, French country kitchen. It didn't really fit with the exterior of the house, but it was nice. I sat at the table, while she rooted through a junk drawer.
"I could kill Nora," she said, "She's Angie's history teacher and the one who's come up with these assignments. I told her not to give Angie a murder. I told her that she'd go way overboard, and she'd start having nightmares. She politely told me to stop telling her how to do her job. Now here we are, and Angie is obsessed with forensics and asking all kinds of questions that I have no idea how to answer, and she's dreaming about unsolved murders."
"Why don't you use the skeleton?"
"Because Wally said that it had lost so many bones over the years that he was really best only for fun. Every time Doctor Who Regenerated he'd pull the skeleton out and dress him up like the old Doctor Who as an homage."
Her opinion meant nothing and her judgment couldn't be trusted. It's just The Doctor. The man's name wasn't Doctor Who. It was a question dammit. Just because there was a production error during The War Machines when two characters called him Doctor Who like it was his name, doesn't mean that's really what his name is. His name is a secret, and it's unpronounceable and only really understood by children.
She found her keys and handed them to me. "Thanks," I said.
"It's room 204," she said.
"Thanks," I repeated.
"And the key to the closet is this one, and the closet is blue."
I looked at the key to a Yale lock and stared back at her. If she watched Doctor Who, she'd know why that was funny. I thanked her, tossed the keys into my messenger bag, and fished out my cell phone to call Ranger.
"Yo," Ranger said.
"So want to come with me to look at the dead body my niece found?"
"Where?"
"Waldo Dickerson's old classroom," I said.
"Meet you at the middle school in ten," he said.
"Who was that?" Betty asked.
"Ranger," I said.
"Who's that?"
"My husband," I said, "Val hasn't mentioned him?"
"Val said you married some scary gang banger type dude, who she was pretty sure kills people."
"He's not in a gang anymore, and I'm pretty sure he only kills bad guys."
"Uhh, only pretty sure?"
"Nobody's perfect," I said. "Want a lift to the school?"
"Sure," she said. She found her handbag, and went out the Cayenne and got in.
When I parked in front of the school a few minutes later, I could already hear music thumping from inside. I felt old watching the kids pay for the tickets as they went inside. When I was in middle school, I pretty much wore jeans and sweatshirts more like what Betty was wearing. These kids were dressed up like they were going clubbing in the 90's. Babydoll dresses that looked more like lingerie than dresses, tiny shorts, bikini tops, crop tops that barely covered the boobs. Really short metallic skirts. It was a version of the 90's but not one I was well acquainted with.
Betty got out of the car with me, and Ranger pulled up behind me in the 918. He parked, and a dude named Leaf got out of the passenger side and came over to relieve me of the keys to the Cayenne. Betty stared at Ranger as he came over to me, and gave me a brief kiss, hello. "What's with the Batmobile?" I asked.
"Felt like it," he said. Ranger loved this car. This car was worth a fortune, and there wasn't exactly a lot of them floating around Trenton. People knew it was his car now, and while there had been the odd case of guys posing by the car while their friends took pictures of them, most people steered clear of it out of respect for Ranger.
"Betty MacCrae, this is Ranger," I said.
Ranger shook hands with her, but I'm pretty sure she'd forgotten how to blink.
"I don't want to go in through the front door," Ranger said. "Is there another way in?"
"Well it'll be locked," Betty said. "And I don't have a key."
"Not a problem," Ranger said.
"You're not going to break any windows are you?" She asked.
"No," Ranger said.
"Okay then," she said. She walked around to the back of the school, and Ranger looked up at the security camera. Betty followed his look, and waved him off, "It's not real. I think some of the students made them in Art class a few years back."
"Where are the real ones?" Ranger asked.
"Front office," she said.
Ranger bumped the lock and let us into the school. "I'm going to want a word with your principal," Ranger said, once we were inside.
"Okay," she said. "She'll be here in like an hour."
"That's fine," Ranger said.
Betty left us to go to the gym to chaperone the dance, and I showed Ranger the way to the Science Classroom. When we walked into the classroom, I felt like I was in Middle School again. Everything was pretty much exactly the same as it was before, and probably the only thing that had been painted since I was there, was the closet containing the skeleton we were there to look for. I went to one of the lab stations in the classroom and opened the cabinet door, and looked inside. There were twenty years of graffiti on it, but there it was, on the inside of the cabinet, "Joseph Morelli is a dick."
I showed Ranger, and he grinned. "What did he do to deserve that?"
"Mary-Lou was going to ask him to the Sadie Hawkins dance, and he went with someone else."
"Had she asked him?"
"No," she said, "But what does that matter?"
"Where is this body?" He asked. I handed him the key to the cupboard and pointed to the dark blue closet, "Is it bigger on the inside?"
"I love you," I said. Ranger pretends he's not paying attention to the television when I watch it, but he almost always is. "It's the anatomy skeleton. Angie thinks it's real, and she has a really compelling argument. I told her we'd look at it."
"What does Betty think?"
"She thinks it's the same skeleton that's always been there," I said.
Ranger walked to the closet that held the skeleton and unlocked it. It was wearing a replica of Peter Capaldi's red lined jacket, and sunglasses but I was pretty sure Angie was right about him. That looked like real bone.
"Not fiberglass," Ranger said. He examined the long bones of the skeleton and shook his head, "And no ID markers."
He checked out a few other things, and then he touched a dimple in the spine of the skeleton and looked at the rib cage. "You're not going to like this," he said. He pointed to the dimple and a chip out of a rib. "Those are from bullets, and these marks on the rib that look like scratches? Those are from a blade."
"Ranger," I said. "His shoulder, is it real?"
Ranger shook his head, "It looks like his shoulder and elbow are artificial."
He examined them carefully, and pointed to a serial number, "If I had to guess they are probably from the old skeleton."
"I think I can tell you why," I said.
"Yes?"
"Waldo Dickerson had his elbow and shoulder replaced after a car accident when he was in college."
"And you know this how?"
"My dad told me," I said. "He used to play catch with Mr. Dickerson when he was a kid. He told me that before Dickerson was a teacher, and before the accident, there was a pretty good chance that he was looking at the big leagues."
"How did this come up?" He asked.
I recounted the hour, or so we'd been apart, and he put the skeleton back in the closet.
"I'm going to suggest that you call Morelli in the morning," he said.
"Why the morning?"
"Because there's a school dance on," he said. "It'll just be a pain in the ass, and Dickerson isn't going anywhere."
"Ranger," I said, "Remember who you're talking to for a minute. You've said that and now that body is at best, going to get stolen, at worst, the school is going to either catch fire, explode, or it's going to turn out that Psycho Kermit will have arranged for a massive sinkhole to swallow the school up."
"You forgot getting sucked into the Upside-down," he said and pulled out his cell phone.
"What are you doing?" I asked.
"Calling Morelli," Ranger said.
