Escape Artist

“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.

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