In less than ten minutes he returned. The envelope, still tightly sealed, was in his hand. The signed paper was nowhere in sight.
“Here,” said the teacher dramatically, “is your envelope, Mr. Guthrey. Will you verify that it has the stamp you drew on it and initialed?”
“Why, yes,” said the principal. “That’s it, all right. But—”
“Now will you open it, please? That penknife should do the trick.”
With the small knife Guthrey hacked his way through the layers of tape. Finally he made an opening clear across the end of the envelope.
“Now remove what’s inside,” said Mr. Strang, leaning forward like a cat about to pounce on its prey.
“Leonard, it’s got to be the blank paper we put in — good lord!” Slowly Guthrey drew the paper from the envelope. On one side were three signatures. Ralph Milleridge’s. Arthur Osgood’s. And Marvin W. Guthrey’s.
“How — how did you—” Guthrey sputtered.
“First, will you agree that within reason I’ve duplicated what went on here last Friday?”
“Of course. But — but how did you unseal that flap?”
“The flap,” said Mr. Strang with the chuckle. “That glued-down, clamped-down, taped-down flap. The one part of the envelope which, with its adhesive trappings, got all our attention. It’s so obviously the only entrance into our miniature locked room. I admit, I was as taken with it as any of you. At least until my landlady, Mrs. Mackey, said something that cleared up the whole thing.”
“What was it?” asked Guthrey. “What did she say?”
“She came in through the back door the other evening after I’d bolted the front one. ‘Twas no trouble coming in the rear way,’ she told me.”
“I still don’t understand, Leonard.”
“When she said that, Mr. Guthrey, it suddenly occurred to me that the envelope has a kind of ‘rear way,’ too.”
“Huh?”
“Yes. You see, it doesn’t have just one flap. It has two.”
“Two?”
“Of course. The one that’s so tightly sealed was what we paid all our attention to. A bit like a magician waving one hand wildly to attract his audience’s attention while he palms a coin with the other.
“But at the other end of the envelope is another, smaller flap. Oh, it’s glued shut, but otherwise unprotected. And with the application of a little water or steam the glue loosens quite easily. Anything can then be removed through the ‘back door’.” Mr. Strang looked sternly at Ralph Milleridge. “And anything else inserted. When the small flap’s glued shut again, there’s no evidence of tampering. Especially if you go over the flap with a hot iron, as I did down in the home economics room.”
“Well, I’ll be—”
“Hey, wait a minute!” Ralph Milleridge rose to his feet. “Okay, Mr. Strang, it could have been done that way. But that isn’t saying it was what happened. I mean, how could I have gotten a look at Artie’s paper in the first place?”
“Simple. He was at your house, wasn’t he? With his books in the living room while he ate a cupcake in the kitchen?”
“Yeah, for maybe five minutes. But I didn’t have time to copy—”
“Oh, stop it, Ralph! You talk about copying as if you were one of the ancient scriveners, writing everything down in longhand. Yet you yourself spoke of your father’s home office. With an ultramodern typewriter, and even a computer.”
“Yeah, but the typewriter and the computer couldn’t—”
“Surely, Ralph, such a place would also have some kind of copying apparatus.”
The look on Ralph Milleridge’s face told Mr. Strang that his shot had struck home. He pressed the advantage.
“In five minutes with such a machine you could have copied fifty to a hundred pages. A mere fourteen would have been nothing. Afterward, your leaving your books at Arthur’s overnight could have been an accident. On the other hand, it might have been a deliberate attempt to throw suspicion on him by giving him ample time to copy your non-existent paper.”
“You — you—” Arthur Osgood glared at Ralph, furious. He started to rise, but Guthrey urged him back into his chair.
“I’ve seen it happen before,” Mr. Strang told Ralph. “A student lets the days turn into weeks and then months with no work done on a major project. Suddenly it’s spring and there are all sorts of interesting things to be done. Yet the research paper looms large. With only a month or so to go, you had to come up with something. So you mailed the envelope three weeks ago with blank sheets in it and then just sat back and waited your chance to get at Arthur’s paper. A little talk around school about the imaginary ‘work’ you were doing on your paper would be enough to impress everyone with your studious ways.”
Ralph Milleridge was shaken but still not ready to admit to Mr. Strang’s charges. “You can’t prove anything,” he whispered.
“Unfortunately, I can, Ralph,” the teacher replied. “There are two things you overlooked. Understandable in something as complicated as this.
“First, there’s the matter of the references you supposedly used. I checked ’em out in the school library. There are seven books in your bibliography. Of those you checked out three last month, according to the book cards. Getting your story in proper form, were you?”
“No, I—”
“The other four were dated just a week ago today — weeks after you’d supposedly completed your paper. And one day after you’d had a chance to copy Arthur’s work. The inference is clear — you’d seen Arthur’s bibliography and you wanted to look at those books in case anybody questioned you about your paper.”
The effect on Ralph Milleridge was shattering. The large boy seemed to shrink visibly. “I–I had to do something,” he almost sobbed. “My folks would have killed me. What am I going to do, Mr. Strang? What am I going to do?”
Mr. Strang walked behind Ralph’s chair and patted the boy gently on the shoulder. “Come and see me tomorrow,” he said. “We’ll talk about it. Maybe we can work something out.”
Later, when the two boys had left the office, Guthrey gazed at Mr. Strang with an awed expression. “Leonard?” he said.
“Yes, Mr. Guthrey?”
“You said there were two things Ralph had overlooked in his plan. One was the library books. But what was the second?”
“I was saving that in case he still maintained his innocence.” Mr. Strang shook his head sadly. “But heaven help me, I broke him. Is the second thing really important now?”
“No, I suppose not. Just curiosity on my part.”
“It was the weight of the envelope,” said Mr. Strang. “Ralph had to send the envelope through the mail before he’d seen Arthur’s paper. So he put in too many blank sheets. First class mail, fifty-four cents — that’s one fifteen-cent stamp and three thirteens — four ounces. But the fourteen pages of the research paper, plus the envelope, came to only something over two ounces, so Ralph should only have had to pay for three — forty-one cents. I checked the weight of the paper this morning. Dewey Langdon weighed it for me.”
“That’s rather weak, Leonard,” chided Guthrey. “Mr. Langdon could have made a mistake.”
Mr. Strang shook his head. “Not Dewey. Even as a student he was meticulous. Of all the kids I’ve taught over the years he’s one of the few I could trust never to make an error like that. Especially where money was involved.”
The teacher jammed his felt hat onto his head. “I really can’t take much pleasure in what I’ve done today,” he said. “Ralph Milleridge’s scheme had to be exposed, of course. But to do it I had to break the boy in the same way a fine wild horse is broken to the saddle. I just hope Ralph’s got enough backbone in him to put the pieces back together again.