out back into
“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
“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
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.
“This is where August Schmidt keeps his tools,” Homer Timm told us. “This is his space.”
“Is he back at work?” Caleb asked.
The principal shook his head. “No, he’s too frightened to return. And we can’t allow it. The students would be alarmed.”
That was news to me. I imagined the timid German at home, awaiting arrest for murder. Worse, this storeroom yawned before us, one man’s domain, and its contents seemed to suggest guilt.
Caleb Stone peered into the room. “Who goes in here beside Mr. Schmidt?”
“No one.” From Homer Timm.
But I interrupted. “Well, students rehearsing our plays would sometimes run up for hammers…”
Mr. McCaslin added, “And, you know, nails and…” He shrugged his shoulders.
“Show me how the panel works,” Caleb Stone demanded.
All of us pushed closer, peering. Houdini walked up the stairs and into the janitor’s storeroom, and I moved next to him. “There really is nothing hidden here,” he pointed out. “Look.” He showed us a panel built into a wall. “It looks like one of the series of panels that make up the back wall. Very basic. With a simple latch to close it. Another storeroom. Whoever built it probably figured there might be a need for moving from one space to the other. A place to put unused furniture.” I noticed that a small table was set against the panel, covering part of it. Closed and latched, the panel became part of the wall. Examining it, I realized it was easy to not see the latch. Would August Schmidt have known this? Houdini undid the latch, and suddenly there was the other secret room. I stepped closer to examine it, then I backed out as others moved up the steps to look. I stood on the small landing that led out of the janitor’s room and down to the auditorium. If I craned my neck, I could glimpse the back of the stage. From the landing I spotted the work smocks and caps hanging on hooks, aprons lying on a table, even boots placed along the wall-all the possessions of August Schmidt.
Caleb Stone and Amos Moss nodded at each other. I sensed what they were thinking-Here it is. It has to be August Schmidt. That unassuming man, that sad soul who played his role well, masking his true murderous intent, a man who hatched some nefarious plot, discovering the unused storeroom, opening that latched panel. Somehow, he seduced the innocent Frana, confusing her, enticing her, promising wonders.
That struck me as nonsense. Wouldn’t someone have seen him? Who knew there’d be no one watching? But these men wanted to believe Frana planned an escape, slipping into that room at two o’clock to meet an anxious Schmidt, the two running out the back into the woods, laughing as they escaped.
The scenario was impossible. Someone waited for Frana. But not the meek Schmidt. What life in New York could he offer her? Absurd! No Sherman House drummer was familiar with the school building. But it could be anyone in town, some old-timer who knew the school, maybe even a former student or teacher who long ago discovered the locked storeroom when visiting the janitor’s room for a pail or a broom, and, years later, now an “older” man, suddenly found a use for such information.
I turned to Houdini, who was now standing apart from the others. He looked tired, drawn; these exercises
