Houdini bowed slightly. “Of course it is. But first I would like to walk around the school, if I might.”
He strolled the hallways, peering into classrooms, offices, standing on stairwell landings, though I noticed he did not go upstairs. He did walk into the auditorium and into the dressing rooms, and at one point he stood on the stage, down front, and seemed ready to do his magic act. He’d probably never met a stage he didn’t immediately dominate. I wondered if he’d be followed by a troupe of sword swallowers? Of fire-eaters? Where were the Siamese twins?
He wandered through the small school library, empty of students, and Miss Dunne, surprised as she shelved a book, actually gasped and dropped it to the floor.
“Houdini,” she exclaimed, and he laughed, bowing.
“All right, enough of this.” He turned to me and asked to be directed to the locked storeroom He stood there, contemplating, his eyes focused. Then he took Esther’s hand and leaned in to whisper something to her. Blushing a deep scarlet, Esther nodded and walked out of the building. “My lovely assistant has an assignment.”
What? To amass boughs of lilacs to be strewn at your feet? To hire a brass band?
Houdini faced the offending door, now locked. “You have a key?” he asked the principal. “Can you open it?”
Homer Timm sneered, “You can’t be of help?”
Houdini regarded him with narrow eyes. “I get out of situations, not into them.”
So the door was opened and Houdini peered at the knob, as well as the inside of the door. “Shut me in.” He paused, then seemed to speak to himself. “Ah, it locks when it closes.” He stepped into the dusty, dim space, and Caleb Stone slammed the heavy oak door shut. He jiggled the knob, but the door was locked.
“No key needed to lock it,” the chief said.
Yes, I believe that’s what Houdini just announced.
Everyone waited and my heart pounded. I noticed a sheepish Mr. McCaslin had slipped into the hallway, though he stood away from the rest of us. Obviously he didn’t want to miss this new scene in our play. We waited as three four five six minutes passed. No one said a word, expectant. Every so often there was pounding or scraping from within, and one time Houdini let out a low-throated groan. Good God, was he stumbling around in the dark?
Then, abruptly, the door flew open, and Houdini stepped into the hallway with a flourish.
“So?” Caleb Stone’s voice wavered.
“I’m playing with you,” Houdini said, cavalierly. “Opening this door is no trick.” He pointed to a knob on the inside of the door. “To get out all I had to do is to turn the knob.” He bowed. “This is no challenge.”
I realized that, as with his stage show, he delayed freeing himself for dramatic effect. Yes, I told myself-you build a scene craftily; you need to understand crescendo and climax.
Amos Moss grunted. “Ain’t a question of getting out anyway. It’s a question of how she got in.”
Houdini looked at him, “No, you’re wrong, sir. It is a question of how she got out. But we know she ain’t got out back into this hallway. Again, I’ll lock myself in.”
“Why?” Amos Moss asked.
Matthias Boon was scribbling furiously on his pad, and I wondered how he was going to write up this episode, though I knew my presence would be minimal, if mentioned at all.
Houdini stepped back in, and Caleb Stone closed the door. He looked irritated. This was all tomfoolery.
Again we waited. This time the minutes passed, perhaps ten, maybe fifteen. Everyone in the hallway was getting restless, and I noticed Principal Jones was leaning against the wall, looking drowsy, though Homer Timm stood like a sentry, spine erect, arms folded. One sleeve of his suit jacket was smeared with chalk. Now and then his eyes caught mine, though I couldn’t interpret the look: stony, quizzical, even a little sardonic. Miss Dunne had quietly joined us, abandoning her books for this impromptu theatrical. She kept away from Miss Hepplewhyte, who, of course, avoided Mr. McCaslin. Enemies, all.
We waited and waited.
And waited.
A scraping noise from within, the sound of a board snapped, splintered. Still toying with us?
“Maybe we should check on him,” Homer mumbled, but Caleb Stone’s look said, of course not.
I cleared my throat. “I think we should trust him.”
Silence in the hallway.
I heard the front door open, and I feared Christ Lempke would come lumbering in, filled with accusation and bile; but, surprisingly, Esther came rushing around the corner. “Come with me.” She practically sang the words.
Everyone trailed her outside, down the steps, alongside the building where I expected to see Houdini. But Esther kept moving, away from the building, beyond a copse of shrubbery, off a pathway into a bank of blue hemlock scrub. There, standing with arms folded, his hair all out of place, his clothing dusty and crumpled, was a beaming Houdini.
“Well, well, well,” Caleb Stone said. “I’ll be darned.”
I breathed a sigh of relief.
“It’s very simple,” Houdini announced as Esther moved beside him, taking her role as stage assistant a little too seriously.
Back inside the high school, standing outside the storeroom, Houdini described what he said was obvious to him. “I told myself there had to be another way out. If she ain’t come out one way, she comes out another.” In walking around the building, he’d noticed the proximity of the storeroom to the auditorium wing. In the back wall of the locked room was a panel, perhaps five feet high and two feet wide, hinged but latched on the other side. It opened to another storeroom on the other side.
“A little pressure on the panel,” he informed us, “undoes a latch that, once sprung, lets the panel door swing open.”
Everyone stared at the small opening. Why was it there?
Houdini explained how it worked. The panel opened to the other room, which opened onto a small landing leading down into the auditorium. From there, he said, it was easy to walk along the side of the stage to the back of the building, a route that led to a back door. Then he was outside.
“Is easy,” he explained. “Once I saw how close the auditorium was to this wing of the school, I knew there was a way.” He sighed. “That young girl simply walked out of the school through a door. Simple. No mystery.”
“Yes, but how did she know it was there?” I asked. “I mean, how did she even get into the storeroom?”
“That’s the question,” Caleb Stone agreed. “Someone helped her.”
“Impossible.” From Miss Hepplewhyte.
The chief went on, “Someone had to tell her-or somehow entice her into this room.”
My mind was racing. “Interestingly, Frana seems to have walked the other way first, past Mr. McCaslin’s classroom, waving to a friend. Then she scurried back to the end of the hallway to this storeroom. She planned it.”
Mr. McCaslin spoke up. “I did see her walk by.” He looked rattled.
Caleb Stone noted, “If you stand in the storeroom, you can’t tell the panel’s there. The latch is on the other side.”
Houdini nodded. “It was easy for me to undo it. But someone else…”
“Someone would have to have opened it from the other side.” A pause. “Someone was waiting for her.” My voice was rising.
“Who knew about this passageway?” Caleb Stone asked.
Both principal and vice-principal shook their heads because there was no reason for anyone to know of it. Homer Timm grumbled, “We have enough to do policing wandering students. We hardly have time to explore the catacombs that wend their way through this building.”
“But someone did,” Caleb Stone insisted. “And it warn’t Frana who discovered it. That’s for certain.” He wanted to see what was on the other side, and the group moved around the corner and into the auditorium. The chief walked up three steps to the landing and into what was clearly the janitor’s storeroom-shelves filled with mops and brooms and pails, as well as hammers and saws and planes. The cluttered paraphernalia of school housekeeping.