Mr. Osborne, our high-school principal, claims that feeding time at the zoo is a quiet and peaceful occasion compared with lunchtime in the Borgville High cafeteria. He says he could shoot a cannon off and it wouldn’t even be noticed if no one smelled the smoke. He may be right, because once when Mrs. Patousel slipped behind the counter and broke her leg no one heard her yelling for help until half the students had left for class.
It only goes to show that discovering a murder isn’t anything like getting a leg broken. Everyone in the cafeteria heard Sue Byers scream.
What happened was that Dianne Storrow was excavating in her purse for a letter she wanted to pass around, and something came to the top that she’d forgot she had. She said, “Oh, that old bone,” and tossed it onto the table. No one paid any attention.
Two minutes later Sue Byers, who was sitting across the table, looked up and saw the bone.
You should know this about Sue Byers. She lives with her uncle, who is Borgville’s only doctor, and her ambition is to be a doctor herself. She spends all her spare time studying her uncle’s medical books, and she already knows so much about anatomy that the boys are afraid to go out with her.
She took one good look at that bone and screamed, and one second later the cafeteria was so quiet that Fatty Fasuli later claimed he was able to hear the ice cream melting on his pie a la mode.
Sue stood up and motioned to Mr. Sadler, the biology teacher. He came and looked at the bone, then he looked at Sue, and finally he said, “I think so.”
“I know so,” Sue said.
“Where did it come from?” Mr. Sadler asked.
“That old bone?” Dianne said. “I’ve had it in my purse since last summer. You see, I had this job—” Then she understood, and she screamed.
A lot of lunches didn’t get finished that day. Mr. Sadler picked up the bone and whisked both girls off to Mr. Osborne’s office, and everyone else left off eating and tried to figure out what had happened. It wasn’t until after school that we finally found out: since the middle of the summer Dianne had been carrying a human finger bone around in her purse.
My Grandfather Rastin already knew about it when I got home. Doc Byers had told him. Doc was plenty irked at Sheriff Pilkins, because the Sheriff thought a doctor should be able to take one look at that little hunk of bone and tell him the initials of the person whose body it had come from. All Doc was willing to say was that it was human and had probably belonged to an adult with small fingers.
“Male or female?” the Sheriff wanted to know.
“Adult,” Doc said.
“Small stature, you say?”
“Small fingers,” Doc said.
“Well, if the fingers were small, then the hands must have been small, and if the hands were small—”
“I’ve seen smaller fingers than that on hands that were bigger than yours,” Doc said.
“Women have small fingers. Could it have been a woman?”
“There’s no way I know of to determine sex from one finger bone,” Doc said. And walked out, slamming the door.
Grandfather said meditatively, “Women’s purses being what they are, I suppose something like this was bound to happen sooner or later.”
“Dianne’s purse isn’t exactly a purse,” I told him. “It’s more like an oversized feedbag with drawstrings. It wouldn’t surprise me if she had a skull or two rattling around at the bottom.”
“It would surprise me,” Grandfather said. “The word I got was that she gave the whole shebang to the custodian to burn, even including what v/as left of this week’s allowance.”
“Has anyone admitted losing a finger bone?” I asked.
Grandfather didn’t answer.
“For that matter, where did Dianne get it?” I asked.
Grandfather sighed. “I guess we’d better go over to Wiston.”
I got out my jalopy.
Along the way he told me what had happened. “Fellow named Daille,” he said. “Jim Daille. I knew his grandfather. He has some kind of construction job, and from early spring until late fall he travels around the state working on highways and bridges. He’s a widower, and he hires a housekeeper to look after his daughter Betsy, who is three.
“Last summer his housekeeper had to quit suddenly and she persuaded Dianne Storrow to take the job until Daille could find a replacement. Dianne’s parents weren’t enthusiastic about the situation, but the pay was good and Daille wasn’t at home — he didn’t come home all the time she was there — and after a couple of weeks he sent a woman down from the upper peninsula to take over.”
“How does the bone come into it?” I asked.
“The child had it. Every night Betsy picked out a bedtime story she wanted to hear, and one night it was the one about the wee little woman who found a wee little bone. Remember it? She put the bone in her wee little cupboard, then she crept into her wee little bed and blew out her wee little candle, and suddenly, in the dark, she heard a wee little voice say, ‘Give me my bone!’ ”
“I remember,” I said.
“And the voice kept asking until the wee little woman sat up in bed and said, ‘TAKE IT!’ The story almost frightened Betsy into a fit. She jumped out of bed and got the bone from her toy box and gave it to Dianne, and then she hid under the covers and cried herself to sleep. Dianne put the bone in her purse, meaning to dispose of it when the child wasn’t around, and of course she forgot about it.”
“Then the main question is where the kid got it.”
“Right. And if Sheriff Pilkins doesn’t handle it just right, Betsy will be too scared to tell him anything.” He thought for a moment and added, “As long as I’ve known Pilkins he’s never handled anything right.”
We turned onto Shady Lane, which was a little dirt street leading off Highway 29 a couple of miles north of Wiston. There was plenty of shade but only four houses, set far apart on the north side of the street, and just beyond the fourth house the street dead-ended up against an eight-foot, woven-wire fence topped with four strands of barbed wire and plastered with NO TRESPASSING signs. That is, it was supposed to dead-end there, but some idiot had mistaken Shady Lane for the Indianapolis Speedway and crashed through the fence and into the pines.
We drove the length of the street, pursued by two barking mongrels, and we found five Sheriff and State Police cars parked near the last house. I managed to pull in between two of them without picking up any fresh scratches.
Grandfather was looking at the hole in the fence. “That’s very interesting.”
“What’s in there?” I asked.
“The old Forsythe estate.”
“You’ve got to be kidding!”
He didn’t answer. He thinks slang is vulgar if anyone else uses it.
Sheriff Pilkins came to meet us with two dogs frisking at his heels. He said, “You heard what happened?”
Grandfather nodded.
“Daille’s wife disappeared over a year ago. At first Daille said she was visiting relatives, and then he said she took sick suddenly and died.”
“That shouldn’t be hard to prove one way or the other,” Grandfather observed.
“Yeah, once we get our hands on Daille. No one knows where he’s working, not even his housekeeper. Or so she says. If she tips him off that we’re looking for him we may have a long look.”
Grandfather jerked a thumb at the hole in the fence. “Looking in there?”
“Later, maybe. That happened last spring, which was a long time after Daille’s wife disappeared. With all the wide-open spaces available around here I can’t see him climbing a fence to dispose of a body.”