People always rushed by him, a little nervous. But I filled my reporter’s pad with descriptions of the crazed man. I once suggested I interview him for the Crescent. Sam had grimaced. “Really now, Miss Ferber. The Crescent a soapbox for a madman?”
On Tuesday morning I fielded calls from out-of-town papers, talking with the Milwaukee Journal, even the Chicago Tribune. I told the same practiced story, rote now, succinct; but the calls kept coming. Sharp-eyed journalists, spotting my name in the telegraphed stories, asked for in-person interviews with me and Esther, but Esther’s father, bothered by the attention, had made it clear his daughter was to be left alone.
Yet once her initial squeamishness passed, Esther was eager to talk to anyone. At one point, late in the morning, she unexpectedly appeared at the Crescent office where she had never visited before. She stood at the bottom of those five cement steps, looking around the room as though she’d discovered some new and even lower rung out of Dante’s inferno. “This is where you work?”
“What did you expect?”
“It’s so small. So cluttered.” She squinted. “So dim.”
Sam Ryan grinned. “My theory is that an unpleasant office makes my reporters want to go outside and get the news.”
His sister Ivy laughed. “Except for the bookkeeper, condemned to darkness visible and infernal chicken wire.”
I was happy with their remarks, taken as they were with Esther. Boon was not there, thank God, and Esther conveniently perched herself on the edge of his desk. Earlier, Boon had left on the 7:52 for Milwaukee, one hundred miles away. Through Caleb Stone he’d learned that the Milwaukee police had detained the three drummers who’d left Appleton the afternoon Frana was murdered. Boon, Sam said, was convinced one of these itinerant gentlemen was the killer. All three were seasoned travelers, men in their forties or fifties, each one unmarried and, at least in one case, notorious for idle flirtations with the harried waitresses at the Sherman House dining room. Matthias Boon was convinced one of the three would confess that afternoon, and he wanted to be there. Sam told me it was a wild goose chase.
“What do you think?” I asked Sam when he finished telling Esther about Boon’s hasty trip to Milwaukee.
Sam’s instincts were solid. A reporter’s heart to the core, though a publisher who couldn’t scribe a decent paragraph himself, Sam sighed. “The murderer is still among us.” A twinkle in his eye. “Matthias Boon has a favorite restaurant in Milwaukee, and perhaps a lady friend.”
I mumbled to the rapt Esther, sitting nearby. “Obviously a woman in need of being institutionalized.”
Byron Beveridge walked in and circled around Esther as if she were Eve in the garden, grinning foolishly and bowing. He mentioned that Caleb Stone and Amos Moss were meeting at the high school at noon to “review” the evidence.
“What evidence?” I sat up.
“Well, now that it’s officially a murder, Stone has to go back to the beginning. This isn’t just a runaway girl now.” He waved a copy of yesterday’s Crescent. “The Post is sending a reporter, I hear.”
“Be there.” Sam gestured to me. “You’re already deep into the story. Maybe you’ll see things others won’t.”
Just before noon, I headed to Ryan High School, trailed by an excited Esther. “Do you think they’ll mind if I tag along?”
“I’m assuming the men would demand your presence.”
Once there I learned Caleb Stone had already interviewed the frightened young students who had classes in that hallway and learned nothing he didn’t already know. No student, gazing dreamily through the small glass of the classroom door, bored perhaps with math or Christopher Marlow or a parsed sentence, had spotted Frana Lempke walking past. Then Chief Stone, with the imprimatur of the principal, sent the students home for the afternoon. While Esther and I stood in the hallway, hordes of excited, gabby students rushed out over the lawns, headed away from the school. They buzzed about Frana, the police, the murder. I nodded to Titus Sharpe, the craggy reporter from Appleton’s other paper, the morning Post, slouching in a chair in Miss Hepplewhyte’s office, gazing into the hallway. He’d never said a complete sentence to me. He had a skinny reedy upper torso, with a giraffe neck under a freckled, blotchy face, all resting on an enormous bottom that shook like a bowl of unpleasant aspic when he walked. Like Sam, he was a Civil War veteran, and claimed to have been in Washington D.C. when Lincoln was shot.
“Yes?” he said to me as I walked into Miss Hepplewhyte’s office. It was a dismissive word.
I focused my eyes on his Adam’s apple, the most delicately inoffensive of his many questionable features. “No,” I answered flatly. His eyes grew wide. I shuttled by him, Esther close behind me.
Chief Stone walked into the small room, nodded at me and Titus, but looked askance at the presence of Esther, who, nervous, stood so close to me we kept bumping into each other. Still, he said nothing. When Deputy Amos Moss, clearing his throat and deciding to become officious, pointed at her accusingly, Caleb Stone gave him a look, and the deputy shut up. Chief Stone led everyone into the deserted corridor, a small group of teachers and staff huddling around him, and announced that he wanted to reenact the time sequence, if only, he said brusquely, “to give me a sense of what in tarnation happened that afternoon.”
“I’ve told you…” Miss Hepplewhyte began, but the principal’s stare made her keep still.
Principal Jones looked drained and I felt sorry for the man. When he lifted his chubby hand, it was trembling. Homer Timm stood there with a pad and pencil, his eyes following Caleb’s every turn, and I wondered whether he’d been appointed recording secretary.
Miss Hepplewhyte, severe in a slate-gray smock, her hair drawn into an awesome bun at the back, seemed ready to do battle. Doubtless she felt accused. She was a collector of slights, I realized; of accusations, real or imagined. That important note had been placed on her desk, and she’d informed Miss Hosley of Frana’s intended premature departure. She was a featured player in this tragedy.
Standing as far from her as possible, Mr. McCaslin, an English primer gripped between his fingers, looked miserable, and kept glancing at Miss Hepplewhyte as if she were to blame for everything. Mildred Dunne was absent.
The diplomatic Caleb Stone announced that no one-staff, teachers, even (his quick glance suggested) Esther and me-was to blame. He wanted information. “Frana had to leave the building somehow.” He even mustered a chilly smile. “This is a reconstruction”-he stretched out the word, deliciously-“like, say, Sherlock Holmes would do.”
Homer Timm grumbled and tapped his foot, then regretted the move when heads turned toward him. His sheepish look suggested an apology.
Everyone stood in front of Miss Hosley’s classroom.
Amos Moss, directed by Caleb Stone, played Frana, leaving class at two o’clock and waving to a friend in Mr. McCaslin’s classroom. He started to mimic girlish gestures, but a cutting look from Chief Stone stopped that indelicacy. Everyone trooped into the notoriously unlocked classroom. Caleb pointed out a cloakroom where, he said, Frana could have hidden. Everyone breathed a sigh, as though the answer was in front of us.
“Impossible!” Miss Hepplewhyte preened herself like a peacock. “As I told you before.” When Christ Lempke appeared and did not find Frana waiting, and she knew Frana had not left with other students, she thought Frana might still be in the building. She noticed the unlocked classroom. “And, of course, having dealt with students for many, many years, I immediately opened the cloakroom door. After all, I knew Frana was not happy with her uncle’s guardianship. Frana wasn’t hiding there.”