"Domestic Science,"
h
er insistent whisper ran on.
"Manual training for boys, domestic science for girls; just as in any school built forty-odd years ago. But" what did you mean by saying that staircase 'isn't all'?"
"Follow me; walk softly;
I’ll
show you."
As though trying to make both of them invisible to Captain Ashcroft and R. Fell, who were now mounting the stairs, he led her half a dozen steps beyond. At the angle of the wall where central corridor met transverse corridor, Alan set his shoulder against tall wooden swing-doors and pushed one of them open.
It was the gallery round the deep well of a gymnasium below. Distorted moonlight, struggling past blinds imperfectly drawn, touched a polished floor some fifteen or twenty feet down. From that floor, through all the confines of the gallery, breathed up a palpable atmosphere of past basketball games and muscular exertion from long ago.
"This isn't the basement, you know," Alan confided. "If you look back at the stairs, there, you'll see more stairs leading down. There's a floor underneath this one: locker-rooms for the gymnasium, furnace-room, all the mechanics of the place when it was in use."
"I—I suppose so," breathed Camilla. "But there's something oppressive and (what's the word I want?) horribly
sneaky
about it, isn't there? I could have sworn
I
saw
...
I know nothing moved; not really. Still!" Her left arm crept round his neck. "Let's go up and join the others, shall we?"
Upstairs they hurried, letting the door to the gallery swing shut. On the spacious main floor above, with smooth tile underfoot, Captain Ashcroft stood pontifically at the junction of central corridor with transverse corridor, and used the beam of his torch like a pointer.
"We've got to count rooms, that's all," he said. "Must be a good many more'n twenty-six rooms in this place. Only some of 'em haven't got numbers; just names. Like that one there!"
"If you mean the office," Dr. Fell boomed back, following the light as it swept towards the front, "may I suggest we investigate the office without delay?"
"All right! Fair enough, I s'pose. But why the office?"
"My dear sir! Since ele
ctricity and water are both
working, the telephone may be working too. Should the telephone be working . . ."
"Well?"
"Shall we see?"
A smell of chalk and blackboards still haunted these halls. Ahead, north, the building's big front double-doors faced towards Fort Johnson Road above a sweep of stone steps leading down to the yard. Just inside was a broad vestibule; then, in the wall to your right as you faced forwards, the glass-panelled door of the office. Captain Ashcroft lit the way as Dr. Fell lumbered over, pushed the door open, and touched a switch on the wall inside.
It was a fair-sized room, once a secretary's. One light glowed in the ceiling, another in a lamp on the secretary's flat-topped desk, to show austere buff-colored walls lined with filing cabinets. Two windows a dozen feet above ground looked east towards the flower-nursery. On the wall above the secretary's desk hung a framed photograph of Thomas Edison; on the desk itself stood a telephone, with a Charleston phone-book lying beside it In the wall to their right, south, a door of polished brown panels b
ore in gilt letters the legend
J
.
Finley Sooner, Principal.
Dr. Fell, more red-faced than ever, pitched his hat on the secretary's desk, laid his stick beside it, and blinked owlishly at the door to the principal's office.
"A name like J. Finley Sooner, I fancy, must have provided endless delight to the juvenile sense of humor. "There was a young fellow named Sooner, Who set up in life as a crooner." Come, enough of
that."
Wheezing, clearing his throat, he picked up the telephone and held it to his ear. Against night stillness all four of them could make out the hollow humming which indicated an open line. Dr. Fell dropped the phone back on its cradle.
"You hear
and observe," he said triumphantl
y, "that the instrument is in excellent order. If I may enquire, Captain: is any other telephone hereabouts closer to Maynard Hall than this one?"
Captain Ashcroft stared at him.
"No, this is the closest. There's one at the marine research-station, sure; but no outsider could get in to use it
Not many people at this end of the island, remember? The only other phone I know of is at a crossroads store
a
couple of miles down the road in the other direction." He paused, galvanized. "Were you thinking, maybe, of the humorist who's been havin' so much fun with us?" "I was."
"Yesterday afternoon he—or she—phoned
me
with all that guff about a tomahawk! You think the call was made from here?"
"I think it extremely probable."
"All right; but what does it prove?"
"Prove?" exclaimed Dr. Fell, rearing up. "My dear sir, as court-evidence it proves nothing! But then we need to prove nothing regarding the humorist. The identity of the humorist—as opposed to the murderer; they are separate and very different entities—has already been betrayed because a certain person knows too much."
"Yes," snapped Captain Ashcroft, "and that's what sticks in my craw. It'll be a fine thing for me, thanks, to you, if we can clean up this whole business before the coroner's inquest on Monday. We know the murderer, or at least we're pretty sure we know. But who the hell is the joker and why has he been joking? If you won't tell me because you keep saying it's not important, what do we do now?"
"We find 26 and the evidence that awaits us. With your permission, sir, we shall use the school's electricity as little as possible. Will you produce the torch again, please, while I extinguish these lights?"
Camilla drew closer to Alan as Dr. Fell, catching up hat and stick, backed towards the switch on the wall beside the door.
"In this affair (forgive me!) I came close to making a very stupid mistake before chance or luck restored my balance. Having stumbled once, and stumbled badly, I have no wish to stumble again. If in fact someone should be following and watching at this moment . . ."
Dr. Fell's voice trailed away; the wall-switch clicked. Except for a little unsteady moonlight filtering through the windows and brushing the carpet, darkness descended like a palpable hood. And in Alan Grantham's brain stirred the whole realm of nightmare. For they
were
being watched.
Outside the right-hand window, its sill a dozen feet from the ground, rose up the dark shape of somebody kneeling on the outer sill to peer in. The figure seemed to move its neck curiously; moonlight threw a misshapen shadow across the floor.
Captain Ashcroft, uttering a ringing oath, switched the beam of the big torch full on that window. Nightmare vanished almost with a yell of anticlimax.
The sinister-seeming figure was only Yancey Beale. Yancey, in sports coat and slacks, still knelt on the outer ledge, keeping precarious balance by holding to the edges of the brick wall at either side. He said or called out something when Captain Ashcroft strode towards him, but no words were audible through the glass.
The window did not work as ordinary sash-windows work. When you pulled a metal handle on the lower edge of the frame, the whole lower window swung inwards and upwards at a sharp angle, leaving space for someone outside to worm through.
A simmering Captain Ashcroft yanked it open. By some miracle of contortion Yancey, looking pale and hollow-eyed, swung his legs round and through the aperture. Then he stood up inside the room, leaning back against the window to close it
"Well?" demanded Captain Ashcroft, who had been given a bigger start than he would have admitted. "What do you think
you're
up to? You went home, didn't you?"
"I went home hours ago, yes! But I'm back again!"
"So we see. What you
doin’
back here?"
"Ezekiel, for God's sake have a heart! I had to find out how Madge was, didn't I? I couldn't desert Madge, could I?"
"Well?"
"I started to fret about her," said Yancey, making bothered gestures as the other sent the light into his eyes, "so I drove back barely twenty minutes ago. Your Cerberus was still on guard at the bedroom door; wouldn't even let me talk to her. And if it comes to questions, old son," he burst out, "what are the cops up to? Are you holding Madge incommunicado, or something?"
"No, of course not! Why should we do that?"
"That's what I
want to know, damn it! She's segregated and immunized; she couldn't be more cut off from the world if you'd put her in jail. What's the game, Habak-kuk? Strikes me that girl needs a lawyer a good deal more than she needs a doctor."
"Maybe she does, at that. We know what we're about, young fellow; we've got our reasons! Now are you goin' to tell me . . . ?"
"All right, all right!"
In the gloom of the office Yancey waved a hand towards Dr. Fell, towards Camilla and Alan, by way of greeting. Then he flew off again.
"I met George," he continued, "on his way up to bed. George wasn't lockin' up; nobody ever locks up in that place; see the mess we're in. Well, every damn person lit out for town tonight." He looked at Camilla and Alan. "I knew you two had gone, of course. But it seems Valerie drove Bob Crandall in her car to take her to dinner somewhere. Rip Hillboro left next to catch the last show at the Riviera. Rip's not back; Bob's not back; Valerie would have to show up for a minute or two, if only to drive Bob home, but she hasn't. Nobody's back, and it's nearly eleven o'clock!
"According to George," again his eye sought Alan and Camilla, "you two returned at well past ten, but ducked out again without a word to anybody. It takes no mastermind to see why."
Here Yancey drew himself up and eyed Captain Ashcroft.
"You ask what I'm doin' in this place, do you? The same as everybody else,
I expect. Do I deduce, Jehosha
phat, that two parties of you—you and Dr. Fell in one party, the two almost-but-not-quite lovebirds in the other —came here separately after you'd both interpreted a fourth blackboard message, and bumped into each other on the doorstep?"
"What makes you think we did?"
"Because the same thing happened to me," retorted Yancey. "Burn my britches to a cinder! After I'd talked to George upstairs, I went down through the library to the weapons-room and found a screed that could only have meant Joel Poinsett High School, room 26.
"I was all alone, mind. But I stood there and talked to myself aloud, which is supposed to be a sign you're going crazy. And I think I must be going crazy, at that. Because, after I'd talked to myself (yelled at myself, rather) about the message and what it meant, I went out into the back garden to cool my head before I came over here. And a voice spoke to me from behind a rose trellis, when there wasn't anybody there to speak."
"Yes," said Captain Ashcroft, "you're headed for the bughouse sure enough. Or else," he yelled, "you want us to swallow the silliest damn story that ever landed a man in trouble! Either way . . ."
"Can you get it through your head, Captain, that I'm not foolin'?"
"All right; you're not foolin'. What happened?"
"I've tried to tell you. 'Dark of the moon,' didn't Dr. Fell say once today? There was nobody in that garden and couldn't have been. Madge was upstairs under guard; all the others were nowhere near the house. And yet the voice spoke, a whispery and disembodied kind of voice, as I passed a rose-trellis near one of the glass doors to the lounge."
"Like a voice on the phone, was it?"
"Yes! Only from behind the trellis; not on any phone. 'If you must go to that school, look out' And again, 'If you must go to that school,
look out!'
I ran at the trellis and looked behind it, but there was nobody there."
"If you were all alone, how could anybody have known you meant to come on here?"
"Because I'd been talking to myself; didn't I tell you? I'd been talking to myself in the weapons-room, with the French window wide open before I closed it against the mosquitoes. Anybody within yards could have heard me babblin' about the Poinsett High School and room 26. But who was there to hear?
"Captain, I can't help it if you don't believe me. Maybe I don't expect you to. And yet I've been telling the strict, literal truth! Explain the voice any way you like; it gave me one hell of a turn. But I didn't mean to let it put me off. So I came on here with the idea of burgling a window and investigating for myself. Where is room 26, by the way?"