Miss Dimple Disappears (31 page)

Charlie nodded. Their neighbor had told her as much. “Miss Bessie said Ollie was always disappointed that he didn’t have a chance to go away to college because they didn’t have the money.”

“I don’t suppose it occurred to him to work for it,” Henry said. Miss Dimple only shook her head, but from the expression on her face you could tell she didn’t think money would have been his major challenge.

Ollie had tried several times to abduct Miss Dimple before he finally succeeded. Once his efforts were thwarted when a former student joined her on her lonely walk in a deserted section of town. The second time she sensed danger and evaded him after he followed her to the park, and the third was when he climbed into her classroom window to wait for her to arrive. Elwin must have been waiting in the car to help lower her through the window. That was when Christmas Malone surprised him there and tried to summon help by ringing the school bell.

“Poor Mr. Malone!” Miss Dimple did the unthinkable and buttered a second yeast roll made of
white
flour. “He didn’t have time to unlock the office and use the telephone there, so he took the stairs, in an effort to reach the bell rope in the storage room.”

Charlie met Annie’s eyes.
The wooden eagle.
“Ollie caught up with him and struck him with Ebenezer, didn’t he?” she said. “From what we’ve learned, he had
two
head wounds—one was in the front from falling on the metal filing cabinet—but
two
? The other must’ve come from a blow from behind.”

“That’s what the medical examiner said,” Henry told them. “The wooden eagle was heavy enough and they found a smear of blood where the wing broke off. In his hurry to get away, Ollie must’ve tossed the broken wing into the ditch.

“They couldn’t let you know this, of course, but the local police were cooperating with the government on this case. They knew a lot more than they let on.”

Phoebe Chadwick snorted. “You mean Bobby Tinsley’s not as big an idiot as I thought? Well, that comes as a surprise!”

“What about Paschall Kiker?” Annie asked. “I heard Ollie buried him somewhere behind the barn.”

Miss Dimple suppressed a shiver and started to speak but Jesse Dean interrupted. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the old fellow didn’t die of natural causes, like Ollie said. Ollie had ordered a small hen for Thanksgiving but never claimed it. If Mr. Kiker died that Wednesday like Ollie said, he’d have to do something with the body, and with Miss Dimple there in the basement, he couldn’t just leave him lying upstairs.”

“And to think, some of the faculty sent him a basket the very day he died,” Annie reminded them. “Poor Mr. Kiker! Ollie said he loved olives so I made sure he had some.”

“I think he’d been more or less confined to the upstairs for almost a year,” Phoebe said. “I took him a basket of tomatoes from the Victory garden last summer and he looked frail even then.”

“But I don’t understand why Ollie stole Geneva’s key to your classroom when he already had his own,” Charlie said, addressing Miss Dimple. “It happened when we were all in the auditorium,” she explained. “Somebody—Ollie, I guess—went through your desk looking for something, I suppose.”

Miss Dimple nodded with understanding. “It
was
Ollie. He was looking for a bottle of pills I convinced him I needed. I didn’t
have
to have them, of course, but Ollie didn’t know that. I told him they were for my heart.” Lovingly, she fingered the familiar pin at her throat. “I had hoped someone would discover him going through my desk.”

Charlie frowned. “But why steal a key?”

“Probably to throw everybody off track,” Jesse Dean suggested. “Why would he steal what he already had? Nobody would suspect him.”

“I remember seeing him in the auditorium at the beginning of the program,” Charlie said. “I guess he ducked out while everybody was all caught up in what was happening on stage. Nobody was paying attention to him.”

“Remember those cigarette butts Willie was so sure about?” Annie said. “He was positive spies had been meeting behind the tool shed at school. Well, we found out yesterday they weren’t spies after all. Delby O’Donnell has switched to smoking Luckies!”

Miss Dimple gave them her fiercest look. “Let’s just keep that our little secret, shall we? Now aren’t we about ready for dessert? It’s almost time for Willie.”

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-EIGHT

December 4, 1942

Dear Fain,

I don’t know where to send this but I’m going to keep writing to you anyway and save them until I do. (I know you’ll hardly be able to contain your excitement in getting all these letters from me!!) Mama is holding up better than I ever thought she would, and so am I because we know you’re alive somewhere and that you have the faith and the stamina to endure so that you can come back home to us one day.

We have all read about the North African campaign and hear a lot about it on the radio. They call it Operation Torch and it sounds like it’s going well over there with General Eisenhower and British Field Marshall Montgomery running things together. Geneva Odom, who teaches with me, said she saw films of the invasion on a newsreel at the picture show the other day but I haven’t seen it. Mama and I plan to go next week to see
Yankee Doodle Dandy
with James Cagney. We both need to get out more and could use some music in our lives.

I wrote earlier about Miss Dimple disappearing. Remember Miss Dimple from first grade? How could you forget? Well, she’s been found, and believe it or not, Annie and I had something to do with it! She was being held captive in the basement of a farmhouse by these horrible people who wanted to ransom her in exchange for her brother’s plans for some kind of special airplane.

Really, it was little Willie Elrod who led us to her—and is he ever going to be impossible to live with from now on! You’ll never believe who actually did the dirty work and snatched Miss Dimple right off the street! It was Miss Bessie’s good-for-nothing boyfriend, Ollie Thigpen, who took Mr. Malone’s place as janitor. (More about that later.) Anyway, Willie became suspicious because he found a grocery list in Miss Dimple’s handwriting in Ollie’s jacket pocket and decided to follow him home. Unfortunately, Willie ended up being captured along with Cornelia Emerson who was filling in for Miss Dimple but is really an agent for the OSS.

Jesse Dean Greeson turned out to be the real hero, though. You know Jesse Dean—works at Mr. Cooper’s store. Well, he’d been suspicious of Ollie for some time and teamed up with Annie and me to try and track down Willie, whose parents, by then, were getting frantic. Elwin Vickery, the nasty piece of work in cahoots with Ollie, must’ve heard us outside the house because he caught poor Jesse Dean, and you can’t argue with a gun. Thank goodness Jesse Dean convinced him he was alone! First, though, he thought to drop the key to his car in the grass so Annie and I could go for help, so it all worked out in the long run, but of course we were scared to death!

Bobby Tinsley told us later it was a darn good thing we got word to them when we did because if those two had gotten away with it, they wouldn’t have been inclined to leave anybody alive to tell their tale. I know Elwin wouldn’t, but I’m not so sure about Ollie. Miss Dimple seems to think Elwin would have done away with him, too. And he’s another one I had figured out all wrong. Annie and I did a little spying on Elwin that led us to believe the only thing he was hiding was a sizzling romance with some woman named Leila Mae. Turns out Elwin’s girlfriend and her brother might have been behind the whole plot, and of course the OSS has all that information now, so I guess we’ll never know. At any rate, everything’s okay now. I don’t know what will happen to any of that bunch, but I sure wouldn’t want to be in their shoes.

Mama and I were feeling sort of sorry for our neighbor Miss Bessie as it seems she was an unwitting victim in all this. In fact, Mama even went so far as to bake her some banana bread, poor thing! (You know how that usually turns out.) When we got there, who did we find drinking tea in Bessie Jenkins’s kitchen but Miss Dimple Kilpatrick and Jesse Dean Greeson! They had come to let our neighbor know that Ollie Thigpen, as rotten as he was, had considered her safety above his own. Of course, she pretended not to care and we pretended to believe her. She seems to be holding up well and is even planning to invite Wilson Malone’s widow and daughters to spend the Christmas holidays with her. They don’t have any family here and neither does she, and Bessie says she’s just rattling around in that big old house.

And I’ll just say this: it’s a good thing Elwin Vickery and his accomplices didn’t finish what they started out to do that night, or Miss Bessie, Mama, Aunt Lou, Bob Robert, and a lot of other folks would be out of a job—or worse! I think Miss Dimple’s brother, Henry, filled her in on who tipped them off about that, but all she would tell me was it was “somebody right under my nose,” and I think I have a pretty good idea that it was probably somebody
right next door.
Many of us are called upon to make all kinds of sacrifices for the war effort, some stranger than others.

Guess who’s coming for Christmas? Our little sister, Delia! Well, she’s not so little anymore as her baby’s due in March. Ned’s being shipped out next week so Delia will be living with us for a while and it will be wonderful for all of us to have a baby in the house. Just think, when you come home you’ll have a brand-new little niece or nephew!

Oh, and by the way, I think I might be in love. Not with Hugh, although I do care a lot for him as a friend, but somebody new—probably too new to even go into it as I don’t want to jinx anything, but I’ll try to keep you informed.

I love you and pray for you every day, and every night, too, and promise to write often and keep you posted on the news, but you know how it is. Nothing much ever happens in Elderberry!

With much love from your sister,

Charlie

*   *   *

Galoshes buttoned to the ankles, Miss Dimple Kilpatrick picked her way across a puddle, speared an offending bit of litter, and added it to her paper bag. Wind blew icy daggers of rain into her face and she paused briefly to adjust the purple woolen muffler around her neck.

Elderberry schools would soon be out for Christmas vacation and she planned to join Henry and Hazel for a few days in their rustic mountain retreat, but this morning she would walk.

The town still slept, with only the headlights from an occasional car reflecting bright yellow beams on the dark mirror of the streets. A worn, stuffed Santa Claus, surrounded by cheap plastic toys, smiled from the window of Murphy’s Five and Ten, and a sign at the
Elderberry Eagle
encouraged readers to:
SEND YOUR SERVICEMAN A SUBSCRIPTION!
At the post office on the corner, a poster urged everyone to
BUY WAR BONDS FOR CHRISTMAS!

What a peculiar season it was! Miss Dimple turned and made her way up Peach Orchard Hill, snatching another piece of litter along the way. If her class behaved themselves today, she would read to them from a favorite book,
Pinocchio,
while they glued colored paper chains for the class Christmas tree, a fragrant cedar that sat on a wobbly stand in the corner.

Contentedly, she patted her large handbag, which held two Victory Muffins and a container of her favorite hot beverage, and opening her umbrella, Miss Dimple tugged her lavender felt hat snugly about her ears and plunged forward.

It was a beautiful day!

ALSO BY

Mignon F. Ballard

AUGUSTA GOODNIGHT MYSTERIES

Hark! The Herald Angel Screamed

The Angel and the Jabberwocky Murders

Too Late for Angels

The Angel Whispered Danger

Shadow of an Angel

An Angel to Die For

Angel at Troublesome Creek

*   *   *

The Christmas Cottage

The War in Sallie’s Station

Minerva Cries Murder

Final Curtain

The Widow’s Woods

Deadly Promise

Cry at Dusk

Raven Rock

Aunt Matilda’s Ghost

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

MISS DIMPLE DISAPPEARS
. Copyright © 2010 by Mignon F. Ballard. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.minotaurbooks.com

ISBN 978-0-312-61474-4

First Edition: December 2010

eISBN 978-1-4299-4737-4

First St. Martin’s Press eBook Edition: November 2010