Murder on the Blackboard (14 page)

Willis disappeared into the janitor’s room under the stairs, but came out after a few minutes. “There’s some four-leaf clovers over the door, but no straw in there,” he called out. Then he squatted down again along the wall near the corner, alongside the shelves marked “Stores.”

Georgie Swarthout moved swiftly enough along the west wall until he disappeared among the piles of heaped furniture and scenery, now and then calling out to announce a distinct lack of results.

There was a long silence as the three of them moved along their separate courses. Then Sunshine Willis announced that he had found a rat-hole.

“Do you know enough to pound sand in it?” called out Georgie cheerfully, across the room.

“I ain’t got any sand,” Willis retorted. “Will dirt do?” The sound of his thumping came clearly, and then died away. Miss Withers repressed a smile.

In spite of her pains she discovered nothing more interesting than some burned match stubs and the fragments of a label engraved in green and reading “United States Bonded Wareh—” The rest was missing. She tossed away her match and moved on.

Willis called out again. “I’m at the first coal bin,” he announced. “Do I got to shovel the coal around?”

Miss Withers shouted to him that she didn’t think it necessary. “You might try and see if you can reach the coal-hole from the inside,” she suggested. “I think it’s too high, but the murderer might have pulled himself through and into the street that way.”

There was a roar of falling coal, and a subdued crash, followed by some very forceful language from Sunshine Willis.

“You’re blank blank right it’s too high,” he shouted out. “Beg your pardon, ma’am, but I’ve got an egg on my forehead. I’ll swear to it nobody tried this and made it.”

And the chase went on. Willis made a great rattling around the furnace, and then the roar of falling coal signified that he had reached the second coal bin. Now and then Miss Withers caught glimpses of Swarthout against the farther wall, between the thick arches which supported the first floor. She had moved on in advance of the others, and was already at the end of the floored portion of the basement. Ahead of her stretched the black dirt floor of the unfinished portion, with a narrow board walk in the middle of it. She moved slowly along the walk, her eyes peeled for signs of a bit of straw. The light was bad, and she found herself at the bottom of her box of matches.

She paused beside one of the stone pillars, and felt for the last match. At that moment the lights in the basement of Jefferson School flickered once, and went out.

Hildegarde Withers gasped, and dropped the match.

“What’s the matter?” she called out. “Who turned out the lights? Where are you?”

“Just a moment,” Swarthout’s familiar voice answered her, from a long distance. She saw the faint light of his flash against a wall.

Willis still rattled among the coal. Miss Withers stood still for what seemed an interminable period. She could hear her heart beating in her ears.

“The lights, somebody! Bring me a match!”

She heard the creak of a board on the walk behind her. She whirled around. “Is it you, Georgie? Who’s there?”

There was no answer. Miss Withers drew back against the stone pillar, wishing with all her heart for the cotton umbrella that she had left at the foot of the stairs.

There was another creak of the board walk, and Miss Withers knew with a sickening intensity that this was not Georgie Swarthout. If only she had not let that last match slip from her hand! She bent swiftly, fingers outstretched, hoping to touch it where it had fallen. At that moment there was a crashing impact above her head, and a shower of sparks and stone particles. She crouched quietly, too weak at the knees to move, as she heard the walk creak again. There was the sound of muffled, running footsteps toward the stairs, and then the flashlight in Swarthout’s hand fell upon her.

“Miss Withers! What’s the trouble? What happened?”

“Nothing happened,” she replied testily as she rose to her feet. Something brushed her hair, and she looked up in astonishment to see a hatchet embedded in the mortar between two stones of the pillar. It was where her head had been before she leaned over searching for the match.

“Well, for the love of God!” Georgie reached for it, and then drew back. “There may be fingerprints! Somebody missed you by inches, lady!”

He turned away. “Willis! Quick, to the door! Somebody’s in here!”

But Miss Withers caught his arm. “You stay here, you and your flashlight,” she ordered. “Let Willis go to the door. He’ll be too late anyway. Whoever did that is out of the building by now.”

It was only too true. Willis returned empty handed. “I heard somebody running down the hall when I was at the foot of the stairs,” he announced. “But when I got to the main door there wasn’t a soul in sight.”

Miss Withers took her eyes from the hatchet. “Not a soul in sight? You don’t mean that, do you? This isn’t a very busy street, but there must have been somebody?”

Sunshine Willis shook his head. “Nobody that matters. Only that little guy who keeps the candy store across the street. He was just going in his door. I called him and asked him if he seen anybody running, and he said no, why should he?”

Miss Withers looked at Swarthout. But she did not voice the question in her mind.

“This is what we get for my leaving my post at the door,” Willis announced.

“Very well, you get back there quick as ever you can. Turn on these lights on your way,” Miss Withers told him. “You stay at the door, and let nobody in. We’ll finish the search alone.”

Georgie cast his flash on the hatchet. “I’ll get a fingerprint man on it in a little while,” he promised. “One thing, this sure as shooting proves that the janitor is innocent. He couldn’t sling this hatchet from his cell.”

Miss Withers nodded. “But there’s something wrong about this,” she said slowly. “I recognize this hatchet. Notice the red paint on it? This isn’t a real hatchet, it’s a dummy, a model, that belongs in the show-case on the second floor. It’s part of the George Washington exhibit, and it belongs with the cherry-tree!”

“A dummy my eye,” said Georgie Swarthout. “It’s been painted up bright, but that blade is steel if I ever saw it. Besides, carved wood wouldn’t slice into the mortar like that.” Miss Withers touched the blade and found it chill metal instead of the wood she had expected.

“Come on,” she ordered. “I’ve got to know if that model hatchet is still in place. This is a dead ringer for it.”

They climbed swiftly to the second floor, and stopped in front of the case marked “Lives of the Presidents.”

The door hung open, and the cherry tree stump was alone. George Washington’s hatchet was gone.

They returned in silence to the cellar, pausing at the main door long enough to make sure that Willis stood there, a stalwart Gibraltar.

Down in the semi-darkness again, they took up against the wall where Georgie had left off at Miss Withers’ call.

“I’ll hold the flash and you get down there and look,” she told him. “Somebody didn’t want us to finish this search, so that’s just what we’ll go on and do.”

Slowly they worked their way along the west wall, crouched under the narrowing ceiling, until they reached the south corner. Here was nothing more than a maze of cobwebs.

“I’m sure there’s straw here somewhere, and straw we’ve got to find,” Miss Withers insisted. “We’ll keep on keeping on.”

They came along the south wall, covering a path no more than three feet wide along the cement. The dirt beneath their feet was soft and soggy and there was hardly room to stand erect. Miss Withers was sure that the place was inhabited by thick hairy bugs.

“This is a wild goose-chase,” Swarthout told her. “There’s no more sign of straw here than … wait a minute!”

He flung himself down. “Quick—the flashlight!”

Miss Withers sent the white beam where he pointed. They were in a little recess in the wall, beside a pile of boards and near the southwest corner of the basement. There was no sign that anyone had preceded them here since the workmen took away their tools, some eighty years or so ago, and left the half-finished job. But all the same, Georgie Swarthout pointed out two or three wisps of yellow straw.

“We’ve got it!” he announced triumphantly.

“Eureka, so we have.” Miss Withers looked all around. “And just what does it mean, after all?”

“Mean?” Georgie looked at her, his face a grinning mask in the glow of the flash.

“Exactly. I was looking for the straw because I was sure it would point out to us an exit we hadn’t suspected. And this wall looks firm enough.”

Miss Withers patted the rough cement. Georgie came closer, crouching so that his hat would not brush the ceiling above them.

“Say, look here,” he told her. “This wall looks newer than the others.”

“Suppose it is? You don’t mean to insinuate that the janitor, or anybody else, escaped through it and built it up after himself, do you?”

“No, but it’s funny, all the same.” Swarthout poked at the pile of boards. “You don’t suppose there’s a hiding place under these, do you?”

The flashlight disclosed a maze of cobwebs binding together the ancient pieces of lumber.

“We’ve struck another blind alley,” Miss Withers announced, wistfully. “All the same, there was straw here.” She bent over to get a better look at the tiny particles, and carefully picked them up and put them in her handkerchief. “Well, we’ve seen all there is to be seen here …” she began to say. As she spoke, she straightened up to her full height, and banged her head unpleasantly against the ceiling. Her hat was jammed down over her eyes, but Hildegarde Withers forgot even that in the excitement of her discovery.

For the ceiling had moved!

“It lifted slightly when I hit it,” she exclaimed delightedly. “Here, Georgie, help me.”

Together they fumbled at the boards above their heads, finally forcing them up and away. A narrow black square was disclosed, through which came down particles of dust and straw.

“I’m going up!” announced Miss Withers. “We’ve ridden our fox to earth!”

“W
AIT A SECOND,” OBJECTED
the young detective. “Got any idea what’s up there?”

Miss Withers hesitated. “This is the south end of the building,” she figured. “We ought to be coming up somewhere in the first floor hall, or maybe under the stairs. But it’s dark through this opening—maybe there’s a space between the floors.”

Miss Withers made violent efforts to draw herself up so she could see into the dark square above them.

“I’d like to know how anybody made it without a ladder,” she complained.

Georgie’s eyes narrowed. “I got an idea. Let me try.”

The pile of old lumber was very near. As Miss Withers watched, he fumbled and tugged at the boards until one of them slid out several feet, waist high. For all its age, it held his weight without cracking. Georgie, using this as a foothold, drew himself up into the darkness overhead.

Miss Withers heard his thumping about, and then saw the light of his flash. In a moment his face appeared in the opening.

“First floor hall my eye,” he announced. “Say, you ought to get a load of this. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you about it.”

“I’m going to get a load of it, as you call it,” Miss Withers retorted. “If you’ll help me….”

With much grunting and bustling, together with a certain amount of damage to the lady’s serge skirt, Miss Withers clambered to the board and from that eminence managed to squirm through the hole in the ceiling.

She stared, open-mouthed in amazement, at what she saw.

They were in a little cul-de-sac, a cubby-hole, formed by the rearrangement of some of the wooden cases with which the place seemed to be filled. From a nail in the side of one of the cases, which stood in ranks almost to the invisible ceiling, hung a kerosene lantern, now being lighted by Swarthout. Straw littered the floor, together with one or two open cases and a well-worn lounge chair, of the folding canvas type.

“Why—this isn’t the same building at all!” Miss Withers gasped.

“I’ll say it isn’t! Somehow the cellar has been extended under a warehouse—didn’t you say there was a warehouse next door to the school? You didn’t mention that it was a bonded liquor warehouse, did you?”

Swarthout pointed to the legend burned into the sides of every case. “Dewar’s Dew of Kirkintilloch—Prime Scotch Whiskey.”

Miss Withers, still panting, sat down suddenly on an upended case. “Now I know why Officer Tolliver mentioned that he’d rather have been assigned to guard the building next door than the school! But what in heaven’s name was the janitor doing in here?”

“He was building a quiet corner for rest and relaxation,” Swarthout explained. “It must have taken him months to work this out. First he heaped up the dirt floor in this end of the basement—though it must have been uneven when he started. Then he tore a hole in the school foundation wall, cut through until he found a space between the piles of the warehouse foundation, and arranged a little recess in the end of the cellar, with a brand-new wall which he put up himself. He had plenty of time, remember. Nobody would question anything he did in the cellar with tools.

“So far, so good. He arranged that pile of old boards to conceal the unevenness in the cellar wall, smoothed over the places where he’d torn out wall and ceiling, and cut his trap door through. Luckily he came up into a corner of the warehouse far from the corridor where I suppose a guard makes his rounds. He simply took down cases, smashing the wood in the school furnace, until he had a space here. Then he rigged up things for comfort.”

“Comfort is right,” Miss Withers agreed. She was speaking in a whisper, well aware that they had no more right here than the janitor. She noticed a jar of tobacco on a case near the chair, together with three venerable looking corncob pipes and a box of kitchen matches. A tin cup and a corkscrew stood beside them. There were even rude attempts at decoration, in the shape of several photographs of somewhat voluptuous ladies scantily attired, which had been tacked around on the liquor cases. Swarthout scrutinized them, and shook his head. “He goes in for the Billy Watson type of beef burlesque queens,” the young man observed. “A little hefty for my taste.”