Yes, Miss Hosley said, at two o’clock she excused Frana from class, admonishing her to complete a homework assignment and, truth to tell, Frana seemed giddy-“Yes, that’s the word, giddy”-as she left. But, Miss Hosley concluded, drawing in her breath and touching her iron-gray curls and then fingering the cameo brooch stuck on her bosom like a postage stamp, Frana was always happy to leave class. “She is not friends with Cicero.” Amos, rousing himself briefly from his stupor, sputtered and mouthed a word: What? Miss Hosley glared at him, and he turned scarlet.
“And so the mystery begins,” Caleb Stone said, more to himself than anyone else. He outlined the layout of the long hallway, which everyone in that room already knew. Frana’s classroom, five more classrooms to the end of the corridor, a quick turn and you were facing Miss Hepplewhyte’s anteroom, and beyond that, the front door. Frana never made it that far.
“But that’s impossible,” Miss Hosley exclaimed, and then seemed to regret her outburst. “I mean-she left my classroom. She had to walk that way.” Because there was no other way out of the corridor.
Mr. McCaslin had the classroom next door to Miss Hosley’s. He was a youngish man, a dandy; spitfire shiny in a Milwaukee-cut suit with glinting watch fob, his goatee so manicured students whispered it was a fake paste-on, stolen from a passing circus act. Not only was he the drama coach-he directed me in A Scrap of Paper-but he taught English grammar and literature, and, while his students gaped in wonder, he would wax eloquent, bellowing out the climactic lines of Shakespeare and Marlowe, then masking his sobbing behind a gigantic floral-patterned handkerchief. The football team called him Cassie Mac, which meant nothing to me, though I’d attempted to analyze it. When I thought of him, the one image that came to mind was his voracious gobbling of apple strudel at the Elm Tree Bakery, crumbs speckling his careful goatee.
Speaking in his best Milwaukee voice, he added one more bit of information. He’d been standing near the doorway when he noticed one of his students waving at someone in the hallway. Through the window of the closed door, he spotted Frana, who was notorious for her flirtations. She waved back, a grin on her face. He turned to admonish the waver, and when he looked back, Frana was gone.
That left four more classrooms. Chief Stone had learned from Principal Jones that two were empty at that hour. The other two teachers had not been gazing into the hallways, so they had no idea if Frana passed by or not. Frana could have skirted by. Yet, Caleb Stone concluded, she never made it to the end of the corridor where, Miss Hepplewhyte petulantly declared, “I was sitting faithfully. Faithfully.”
“That leaves two empty classrooms.”
“Which should have been locked,” Principal Jones added.
“One wasn’t,” Homer Timm admitted. “By mistake.”
“A mistake,” Mr. Jones echoed.
Sitting across the aisle from me, Mildred Dunne grunted, then thought better of it. She sat apart from Miss Hepplewhyte, and Miss Hepplewhyte frowned when Miss Dunne grunted. Also glaring at the secretary was Mr. McCaslin, who drew his lips into a censorious line. Quite a cast of characters, this bunch!
So much had changed since I left high school last year. Back then the town-and my prying eyes-yawned over the familiar sight of our principal, Mr. Hippolyte Jones, arm in arm with his chatty and equally rotund wife Muriel, the two sitting at a baked-bean supper at the Masonic Hall, gabbing with the same three close friends: Miss Holly Hepplewhyte, fearsome school secretary and hall sentry; Miss Mildred Dunne, librarian and Sunday-school moralist; and Mr. Philip McCaslin, English teacher and drama coach, a bachelor who bore an uncanny (and unfortunate) resemblance to Ichabod Crane. The fivesome made cookie-cutter appearances at every civic function. My mother said Mr. Jones, a favorite of hers, was a model of Christian charity for putting up with the imperious Miss Dunne, the strident Miss Hepplewhyte, and the squeaky Mr. McCaslin-and even, lamentably, Mrs. Jones, a woman who never paused to take a breath or to forgive a seeming transgression.
But the picture changed, suddenly, woefully. Muriel Jones died from a heart attack at the end of last summer; and Mr. Jones seemed ready to follow her to the graveyard. Worse, Mildred Dunne, discovered shopping at Pettibone’s by new-to-town Gustave Timm, became his companion and then his betrothed, the two sitting alone at the Masonic Hall dinners and laughing foolishly over nonsense. Miss Dunne seemed transformed from the dour martinet in the library into a fluttering schoolgirl asked to a picnic for a lemon phosphate. She told some folks that her life was ready to start now. Everything up till then-her shopping sprees, her unhappy time as guardian of schoolbooks-was preamble to what she’d always dreamed of…a husband. The extra dollop of happiness came from Gustave’s being so…handsome. My mother, hearing the gossip, remarked, “She’ll learn that marriage is one more hallway without an exit.”
With Mildred Dunne gone from the group, Miss Hepplewhyte and Mr. McCaslin now discovered they didn’t like each other. So by the Christmas dance and supper, Mr. Jones sat with Miss Hepplewhyte and Mr. McCaslin, but no one spoke. My mother said speaking to the principal made her uncomfortable because his loneliness oozed out like sour sap from an aged tree. When the winter carnival supper was held in February, their table was there, but occupied by Mildred Dunne and Gustave Timm, laughing uproariously over a private joke. Gustave’s brother Homer, strolling past with friends, mumbled something to his brother, but Gustave merely laughed louder.
Miss Hepplewhyte, abandoned by her spinster friend Mildred, chose to stay home and, according to some, devote herself to missionary work, though I couldn’t imagine how you can save savage souls by sitting in a small drawing room cluttered with embroidered antimacassars and porcelain Chinese dogs. Worse, she stopped talking to her friend, believing that Mildred Dunne’s betrothal to Gustave was a betrayal. Rather than be happy for her friend, she chose bitterness, fury, silence. They passed each other in the school hallways like women who’d never been introduced. Mildred reached out to her-invitations to the homestead she shared with her parents, invitations to go to Milwaukee for shopping, a proposal to be in her wedding party, but Miss Hepplewhyte refused to reply.
That much had changed in one year at Ryan High School. It was better, I observed to Esther, than the melodramatic histrionics in a Bertha M. Clay romance.
I also watched the interplay of principal and vice-principal. Mr. Jones, a favorite of mine, had been a genial, spirited man whose overflowing girth matched the expansiveness of his personality. Now he seemed to be lost in melancholy. How different he was from Homer Timm, who stood next to him now, a man severe and dark, the moustache on his upper lip twitching, always a little untrimmed; a man comfortable in his broadloom suit but, oddly, uncomfortable among people. You could be telling a story of great sadness and there’d be that smile stuck to his face.
“But,” Mr. Timm went on now, his voice raising, “the door to that classroom was closed. Frana would have had to try it to see whether it was unlatched. She wouldn’t have known.”
“Unless she knew,” Caleb Stone said.
Mr. Timm snapped. “And how would she have known that?”
“I’m only suggesting.”
“But she could have hid in the room until school closed,” said Mr. McCaslin.
“Impossible.” From Miss Hepplewhyte.
“And why is that?” Caleb asked.
Yes, why was that?
Miss Hepplewhyte harrumphed, a very Dickensian sound. “Until when? Classes were over? Sir, Mr. Lempke”-again the furtive glance to the unhappy man against the wall-“showed up before the last bell and was standing on the top step, hat in hand. I thought to myself-well, someone’s plans have indeed changed and no one had the courtesy to inform me. So be it. And I watched as students streamed down that corridor toward the door, as I always do-I feel it my duty to remind a few of after-school obligations-and Frana was not among that crowd. As Mr. Lempke can testify.”