Miss Dimple Disappears (3 page)

Annie marked the last of the papers she’d been grading and returned them to the folder. “Poor Christmas! I feel awful for having doubted him,” she said aside to Charlie. “Just think, all this time he’s been trying to tell us he wasn’t well …‘but what’s gone and what’s past help should be past grief,’ I suppose,” she added mournfully.

Geneva, who had been wandering the aisles, plopped on the desk in front of hers. “That must be why we heard the bell,” she said, speaking so that everyone could hear.

“What bell?” Lily asked.

“Didn’t you hear it? The school bell rang early this morning before we even had breakfast, but I knew it wasn’t time for school to begin.” With one finger Geneva traced a carved initial in the desktop and lowered her voice. “I’ll bet it was Christmas Malone. They found him in that upstairs storage room, you know. That’s right above the principal’s office and the bell rope comes down through the ceiling in there.”

“Dear God!” Annie propped her head in her hands. “The poor man must’ve been making one last effort to summon help.”

“Or to warn us.” Miss Dimple spoke softly. She didn’t look up.

Now, what does she mean by that?
Charlie wondered, but she didn’t have a chance to ask because “Froggie” Faulkenberry came in just then to announce in solemn tones that the janitor’s body had been taken by ambulance to the hospital in Milledgeville where they would determine the cause of death, and that he was on his way to notify Wilson’s family.

Charlie didn’t envy him that unhappy job. She stayed in her seat as one by one the other teachers left silently. Only a few minutes ago she would have been eager to join them, but now she would rather sit and let numbness overcome her. If she moved she would have to think of the questions that plagued her. If Christmas needed to summon help, why didn’t he use the phone, or even ring the bell, in the principal’s office on the main floor? And earlier she’d overheard the speech teacher confiding to Kate Ashcroft, who taught music, that she’d found Ebenezer with a broken wing. The school’s mascot, a heavy, carved wooden eagle, sat on a stand directly across the hall from the storage room where the janitor died. “I know it wasn’t broken yesterday,” she said, “because it was facing in full view. It looks like whoever broke it turned it sideways, probably hoping no one would notice the missing wing.”

And then she would have to think about Christmas Malone’s two teenaged children and his wife, Madge, who always brought pinwheel cookies to the faculty during the holidays. And she would have to think about Christmas himself, a round, red-cheeked man who could sing all the lyrics to “Froggie Went A-Courtin,’ ” and at barely over forty, was much too young to die.

C
HAPTER
T
HREE

“You hush up, now, Rags! You ain’t supposed to be in here and if Mama finds out, we’ll both be in trouble.” Willie Elrod dragged the reluctant terrier from underneath his snug quilt and tiptoed down the dark stairs. “Go on, now, and get in your box,” he said, letting the small dog onto the side screen porch, “and she won’t never know the difference.” But why was that car stopping out there with no lights? What if it was a spy? You never knew where one might be lurking, and Willie was always on the lookout. He held his breath and prayed the puppy wouldn’t bark. For a minute it looked like Miss Dimple from next door standing there in the pre-dawn gloom. But then she was gone. And so was the car.

*   *   *

It was colder than she thought, and Miss Dimple had almost reached the corner before she decided to turn back for a heavier wrap. Except for a light in the Sullivans’ house across the street, the sleeping neighborhood stared at her with dark windows, but the Sullivans had just welcomed a lively baby boy. Miss Dimple smiled and hoped she would still be around to teach him when he started first grade. Surely this dreadful war would be over by then. With sadness she remembered the Hopkins child, her student fourteen years before, who had been killed somewhere in the Marshall Islands. Peyton. He could read faster than anybody in his class and insisted on writing with his left hand.

The Sullivans’ light went out and it comforted her to think about this small new life and all its possibilities. This business with Wilson Malone had upset her more than she liked to admit. First the frightening experience with the car two mornings ago, and then Wilson dying in that upstairs storeroom. What had he been doing up there? And several people said they’d heard the school bell ring earlier. No, something wasn’t right.

A truck rumbled past in the street below, and maybe it was because her mind was on other things, or perhaps the noise of the truck distracted her, but Dimple Kilpatrick didn’t hear the car pull up quietly behind her.

A rough hand covered her mouth before she could scream and something unpleasant was crammed over her face. Miss Dimple swung her purse, heavy with a worn copy of
Winnie-the-Pooh,
a storybook about the Indian chief Tomochichi, who had been a friend to the early settlers of Georgia, a Thermos of tea, and two vitamin-enriched Victory Muffins. The purse grazed the bare branches of the crape myrtle next to the street and landed with a muffled thump on a solid surface she hoped was her abductor. But Dimple Kilpatrick remembered the sweetish sickening smell from having her tonsils removed several years before, and although she kicked and struggled, she knew it wasn’t going to do any good.

*   *   *

“Any news about Christmas yet?” Annie popped her head in Charlie’s doorway as they waited for the bell to ring.

“Haven’t heard a word since yesterday, but I just can’t get his family off my mind. I thought I might stir up some of those applesauce muffins this afternoon—if we have enough sugar, that is. I can take them over there tonight.”

“I’ll go with you,” Annie said. “I’m sure I can talk Phoebe out of a jar of her bread and butter pickles.

“Froggie must’ve found somebody to wrestle with the furnace or else he took care of it himself,” she added. “It’s practically toasty in here.”

Charlie took the spelling sentences she had graded the day before from her desk drawer in preparation of returning them, smiling again at Marshall Dodd’s use of the word
behind.

My mama seys if I don’t do beter in school shes gone whip my
behind.

“How are we going to explain to the children about what happened to Christmas Malone?” Annie asked.

Charlie hadn’t thought of that. “I don’t know, but we’d better think fast. It’s almost time for the second bell. Miss Dimple will know how to handle it. She must be in her room.”

She followed Annie down the wide hall to the classroom on the right, but the door was closed and the room, dark.

“Where could she be?” Annie asked. “She’s always here before everybody else. You don’t suppose she’s sick, do you?”

Charlie thought immediately of Christmas Malone. Was some sort of deadly disease going around? Soon the bell would summon the children to file into their classrooms. The two older classes lined up in back, while grades one and two marched in the front way with teachers maintaining order at the head of the lines. She glanced outside to see if the older teacher was taking care of a problem on the playground as they were often called upon to administer first aid or put an end to occasional fights, but Miss Dimple was nowhere in sight.

“Maybe she’s in the teachers’ lounge.” Charlie hurried to the small narrow room at the end of the hallway and opened the door. If Miss Dimple were inside, it would be impossible to miss her.

The toilet flushed and Geneva Odom darted from the cubicle, tugging at her undergarments as she scurried. “Blasted girdle! I must’ve put on ten pounds since I bought it, but try and get another one!”

Charlie resisted the impulse to laugh. She hadn’t worn a girdle since she bought that slinky gown for a college dance, but knew they were next to impossible to find since rubber was being used in the war effort.

“Have you seen Miss Dimple?” Annie asked. “She’s not in her room and the children are getting ready to line up outside.”

“What?”
Geneva couldn’t have looked more startled if she’d been told the war was over and they had lost. For the venerable teacher not to be at her post when expected was unheard of.

“I can’t imagine where she’d be, but if she doesn’t show up soon, we’ll have to ask Froggie to call in a sub,” Charlie said.

The three huddled in the hallway as the bell tolled above them. “Did you see her this morning at Phoebe’s?” Geneva asked Annie, who lived in the same rooming house with Miss Dimple and several other teachers.

Annie frowned. “She wasn’t at breakfast, but you know how she goes for those early-morning walks. And it’s not unusual for her to skip breakfast and come straight here—makes do with some of her muffins, I guess.”

Charlie made a face. “I hope she hasn’t had an accident,” she said, thinking of Miss Dimple walking alone in the early-morning gloom. But in a town as small as Elderberry, surely they would know by now if anything like that had happened.

The voices of the children grew to a swell as they clamored around the entrances without supervision, and the remaining teachers quickly agreed to take time about watching Miss Dimple’s classroom for a while until it became apparent she wasn’t going to show up. Fortunately, Geneva had exchanged classroom keys with the missing teacher and was able to unlock her door and see the children to their seats. When Charlie looked in a few minutes later, one of Annie’s fourth graders was reading a fairy story to the class while the smaller children, apparently enjoying the break from their usual routine, happily colored stenciled drawings of Thanksgiving turkeys with their fat, broken crayons in anticipation of the holiday ahead.

During her usual morning ritual Charlie listened for Miss Dimple’s rapid footsteps in the hallway and checked frequently to see if she had finally arrived. From her doorway across the hall, Geneva shook her head and frowned. It was becoming obvious that something had happened to Miss Dimple Kilpatrick.

*   *   *

Wouldn’t the demure Miss Dimple be mortified to know she was the central subject during the noon meal that day at the boardinghouse? Charlie thought.

“She couldn’t just disappear into thin air,” Geneva said as she helped herself to the cornbread. “There has to be a logical explanation.” She paused as if considering whether or not to continue. “And that’s not all that piques my curiosity. One of my second graders found Ebenezer’s broken wing in that drainage ditch behind the toolshed during recess this morning.”

“What on earth was it doing there?” Charlie asked.

“What I want to know is
who put
it there,” Geneva answered. “It has to have something to do with what happened to Chri— uh, Mr. Malone. Froggie locked it away in that cabinet in his office and I saw Bobby Tinsley from the police in there a little while ago. I’ll bet anything he took it with him.”

“But why?” Lily Moss looked about. “I assumed Mr. Malone knocked the eagle from its stand when his poor heart gave out on him, just before he rang the bell.”

Geneva eyed her silently. “Then what was the wing doing in the ditch?” she asked with a barely audible sigh.

“But surely that has nothing to do with Miss Dimple’s curious absence.” Noticeably flustered, Lily seemed near to tears.

“Perhaps she has a reason.” Elwin Vickery pounded the salt shaker on the table before shaking some into his hand.

“Then I wish somebody would explain it to me,” Annie said. “None of us saw her leave the house this morning, and as far as I know, nobody’s reported an accident. Frog—I mean, Mr. Faulkenberry telephoned the hospital
and
the police when she didn’t show up today. He even checked with her friend Virginia Balliew at the library to see if she’d heard anything. Poor man! He’s had his hands full with this on top of what happened to Christmas Malone. Anyway, they don’t seem to know any more than we do.” She sighed. “ ‘Something’s rotten in the state of Denmark!’ ”

“What a shame about Mr. Malone!” Lily Moss spoke in a quaking voice. “His heart must’ve just given out on him, and I understand he probably hit his head on that old metal filing cabinet when he fell. And now Miss Dimple’s disappeared! It’s most upsetting with all this happening right before the holidays.

“I just hope they find her soon,” she added. “Why, the poor soul might be lying in a ditch somewhere. Or worse, some fiendish person has carried her off and—” Lily covered her mouth with a napkin as if the notion were just too indelicate to mention.

As, of course, it was, Charlie thought. It seemed unlikely, though, that the prim spinsterish Miss Dimple would be the victim of such an attack. After all, there were few men left in Elderberry who were young enough to be that lustful.

Elwin Vickery cleared his throat. “I should think Miss Phoebe would’ve been informed if Miss Dimple intended to leave,” he said, referring to the owner of the rooming house. A fastidious bachelor and relative newcomer to Elderberry, he was Phoebe Chadwick’s one male roomer and the only person who had accommodations downstairs. Annie sometimes referred to him as “Aunt Mildred,” claiming he was every bit as stuffy as her maiden aunt.

“Well, if she was, you couldn’t prove it by me!” Odessa Kirby, the Chadwick’s cook, bumped through the swinging door into the dining room fanny-first with a steaming tureen of vegetable soup.

Charlie’s stomach growled in anticipation. Using home-canned vegetables from the Victory garden and only a few bones for stock, Odessa could make soup fit for President Roosevelt himself.

Now Odessa set the tureen at the end of the table where Phoebe Chadwick usually sat. “She say for Miss Velma to serve today,” she announced, nodding to Velma Anderson, the senior member at the table and, with the exception of Miss Dimple, the one who had been there the longest. Miss Velma taught secretarial science at the high school and, besides Elwin and his sleek new Nash, was the only roomer who owned her own vehicle, a 1932 Ford V-8 that looked every bit as good as the day she bought it.

Geneva dropped saccharine into her glass of iced tea and stirred vigorously. Now that sugar was in short supply, they had to make do, although few cared for the peculiar taste. “Where is Phoebe?” she asked, frowning. “Don’t tell me she’s sick, too.”