“Is time I went home.” He attempted to stand.
“Not yet.” Caleb Stone eyed him. From the way he spoke, I sensed he’d been using those words over and over with the impatient man.
“I need get home.” A thick German accent, almost impossible.
Chief Stone ignored him.
Scratching the back of his neck, Amos Moss glanced at Lempke, using one of his two practiced stares: accusation and vacuity.
Caleb Stone cleared his throat. “I asked to meet now to review some facts. I know some of you teachers had arrived home and had to travel back here. I’m sorry to inconvenience you. Now we’ve been hearing around town that Frana was seen getting on the 3:01 with”-he looked down at his notes-“a chubby drummer, but I ain’t got no idea where that rumor started.”
Kathe Schmidt, that’s where, I was certain of it. The spiteful Kathe bustling over town with accounts of Frana eloping to New York and to Broadway footlights. Odds are, Kathe created that rumor. But why? Frana and Kathe, two sparring friends, often together but often at war with each other. Kathe was the problem here. She had to be connected to this ugly scene. If Frana did run off, perhaps Kathe was part of the story.
Caleb Stone was going on. “Far as I’m concerned, frankly, the last time Frana was seen was in the hallways of this school.” Suddenly, peering over the heads of the faculty, he addressed Esther and me. “I gather you two were friends of the young lady?” He waited.
Well, I never liked her, fatuous beauty that she was, but…“Yes.” I sounded lame. “Somewhat.”
“Somewhat?”
“From our high-school days, last year,” Esther offered in a hurry. “Sometimes she would visit with me and, well, Kathe Schmidt…and…and sometimes Edna here.”
Caleb Stone raised his eyebrows. Edna here. Frana, the local beauty; Kathe, the pretty; Esther, the stunning Semite. Edna-here. Girl reporter. Here.
“So what do you two know?”
Once begun, Esther chattered about the rumor she’d heard of Frana seeing an older man-“I heard really older, I mean, twenty-five or even thirty”-to which one of the younger male teachers twittered, then gulped, apologetic. Esther talked of Frana’s family’s horrid wardenship, her being locked up in her room at night, and she glanced nervously at the scowling Christ Lempke. Dramatically, she ended with an account of Frana’s desire to be an actress in New York and marriage and…
Caleb Stone cut her off. “I suspect it’s Kathe telling the stories of the train departure. You ain’t the first to tell me that.” Nearby Amos grunted, and I fully expected and welcomed the sight of Kathe being led away in leg irons.
“You don’t believe she left with a drummer?” I asked him, surprising myself.
“Well, anything’s possible. Ain’t saying yes, ain’t saying no.” He scratched his chin. “You know the name of this older fellow?”
Esther and I shook our heads. He turned away, through with us.
“What kind school is this?” Christ Lempke struggled to his feet in a spurt of hot anger. “Hands young girl over to lecher. Hopping train ride to hell.” He shook his fist in the air.
The room got silent. Caleb Stone deliberated, nodding his head. Esther giggled, nervous. “Hopping train ride to hell,” she whispered. Caleb Stone kept his eyes squinted at Christ Lempke, who finally dropped back into his seat.
Amos Moss gurgled with the wad of tobacco in his cheek.
“Way I see it,” Caleb Stone began, “Mr. Lempke here arrived his usual time to retrieve his niece, only to learn she’d left the building an hour earlier.”
Miss Hepplewhyte, the guardian secretary, was livid. “She had a note. There was a note.” The last word screeched, hysterical.
Caleb Stone was, in fact, holding the note.
“Is fake,” muttered Christ Lempke.
Chief Stone looked as if he had no idea what to do. He watched the redoubtable Miss Hepplewhyte bristle. Skinny as a twig, wrenlike, Miss Holly Hepplewhyte claimed she’d been working in education back to the days of Reconstruction. That was probably true. Nothing got by her, and she prided herself on vigilance. Which, sad to say, she now considered under attack.
Miss Hepplewhyte worked in a small anteroom just off the front entrance, at angles to the first floor main corridor, and thus had a bird’s eye view of the universe. The past four days, she insisted shrilly, glaring at Christ Lempke, Frana’s uncle walked Frana to the front entrance and stood there “like Cotton Mather,” never saying a word except for something muttered to Frana in German, and then he’d be off. Miss Hepplewhyte had been told via the principal that Frana’s father, who worked at the Appleton Paper and Pulp Works and was gone early morning to late night, had given orders that Frana be discharged to her uncle each afternoon. She was only seventeen.
Miss Hepplewhyte gathered-here she smacked her lips, judgmental-there was a dire problem with the girl’s behavior, some frivolous conduct, some disobedience at home. Frankly, she wasn’t surprised, given Frana’s brazen flirtations in the hallways, which she herself had admonished more than once. Glancing again to the gaunt, bitter man on the bench, Miss Hepplewhyte insisted her one attempt to greet Christ Lempke civilly was met with an icy, unresponsive stare. Each afternoon he was there like clockwork, dragging home the young girl.
“Is time I leave. Foolish, this,” Lempke muttered.
Caleb Stone ignored him. “And today?”
“Nothing different,” the secretary said. “I only glimpsed him in the doorway this morning. I was about to say something but I was called away for a few minutes”-she turned to Vice-Principal Timm-“as Mr. Timm had a question about one student’s tardiness, Markham Tellin, who’s always late. But then I prepared my tea and biscuit.” She breathed in. “I was next door, an eye on the hallway. When I got back to my desk, the note was there in an envelope, staring right up at me. I assumed Mr. Lempke had planted it on my desk, not wanting to speak to a human being…”
“I no leave note.” Furious.
She didn’t look at him. “I know that now, sir.” She spoke to the wall behind him. “I thought it odd, but…” Another shrug, suggesting she expected odd things from the likes of Christ Lempke. “The outside read, simply, ‘School,’ one word, and inside a penciled, scribbled note, saying…”
Here Caleb Stone opened the note and read it aloud: “‘To school. Her uncle comes for Frana Lempke at two this afternoon. Is family trouble.’” He paused. “Trouble is spelled truble.” I wondered why he shared that last bit, but no matter. Oddly, it did sound like Christ Lempke talking, but perhaps it was the chief’s voice, the addition of a slight thick-voweled accent to his words.
“I no write such thing.” The fist in the air.
“So,” Miss Hepplewhyte continued, clearing her throat, “I duly informed Mr. Timm, who let Miss Hosley, Frana’s teacher, know.” A dramatic pause. “We do have policies about early leave-taking, you know. But”-now her voice got strange-“Frana never left the building at two, nor of course did I see her before that. I thought it curious, but then I assumed plans had shifted, and he’d be arriving at the end of day. I paid it no mind.”
Christ Lempke grunted. He struggled to his feet. “I go now.”
Caleb Stone motioned for him to sit down.
It turned out that Frana had made a point of telling Miss Hosley that she had to meet her uncle at two, and, according to Miss Hosley, Frana used the same words-“family trouble.” Family trouble. Frana’s concoction, clearly. Some ruse to flee-to meet that mysterious lover.
Miss Hosley swallowed and spoke in an uncertain tone. I could tell she didn’t like this public spectacle. Her eyes darted from Caleb Stone to, of all people, Amos Moss, who was off in his own world, dreaming, chewing his tobacco like a cow with its cud. Miss Hosley looked as if she were on a witness stand, deliberating slowly before each calculated response. She’d taught me Latin IV with fierce assaults on Cicero and ablative cases, rapping the front of her desk with a pointer as each student misfired when declining a noun on the chalkboard.