"We don't know, but we'll soon find out. Do you know anything about this school?"
"Not a thing; never been inside the place before."
"For the moment, my lad," Captain Ashcroft said weightily, "we'll suspend judgment on this story of yours. You'd better come with us while we look for the room; at least it'll keep you out of trouble, and you'll hear no voices from behind anything if
we're
present. Ready, Dr. Fell? Ready, everybody?"
For the next fifteen minutes—Yancey going ahead with Captain Ashcroft and Dr. Fell, the other two remaining behind—they explored every cranny of the main floor. The captain's big flashlight directed operations; Yancey, still on a wire of nerves, kept striking match after match.
They found a smallish but gaudy auditorium, taking up the same area here as must be occupied by the gymnasium below. They opened the door of classroom after classroom. From buff-colored walls looked down the same photographs of whiskered nineteenth-century authors ("Powerful lot of Yankees, ain't there?" observed Captain Ashcroft) that might have been found in any school of its vintage throughout the land. But they had marked down no more than twelve numbered classrooms when, in a tumbling rain of echoes, they tramped up another broad staircase to the floor above.
Another intensive search yielded no result. There was a study
-
hall of sturdy tables and chairs. There was a chemistry lecture-room with tiered seats, a chemistry lab stripped of equipment, and a 'commercial course' room whose typewriters sported blank keys. The pictures in a dozen more classrooms were topographical but still familiar: the church at Stratford-upon-Avon, the Roman Colosseum, a view of Venice's Grand Canal.
But of room 26 there was still no sign. With a certain desperation they foregathered in the hall round a drink-ing-fountain vaguely touc
hed by moonlight. Dr. Fell, tow
ering in shadow, lifted his hand for silence.
"We have counted very carefully," he intoned. "This is the top floor, the only othe
r floor, and there is no number
higher than room 24. Unless we have been the victims of a senseless hoax . . ."
"It's not a hoax," Camilla said suddenly. "I think I know what it is!"
She had spoken only to Alan, but four heads were turned in her direction.
"When we came in by the basement entrance—it isn't really the basement, Alan says, but you know what I mean—there were quite a few doors in the corridor we didn't look at. Come to think of it, there was a glass-panelled door on either side of the entrance itself. It'd be just like this case, wouldn't it, if the room we're looking for was the very first room we passed without even noticing it?"
"Camilla honey," Yancey exulted, "this is sheer inspiration! By the beard of the Lord God Almighty, you've hit it on the nose first time! Room 26 is in the basement; it's bound to be, with whatever's there for us. Let's go, shall we?"
And instantly he spun round, poised to clatter downstairs.
"Whoa, now!" said Captain Ashcroft. "This hall's as slippery as a dance-floor; you want to fall and break your skull? go easy, can't you?"
"No, O prophet, definitely no! Ol' Yance can't go easy at anything. I wish I could, but I can't. Besides, if somebody's lurkin' in ambush to spring, I want to nail him before he springs. Let's
go!"
Away went Yancey, through shadow and broken moonlight. Throughout their own more leisurely descent, measured by the tap of Dr. Fell's stick, they heard the bang of footsteps receding as Yancey ran: down to the main floor without trip or stumble, round the post of the staircase, and thence in echoes down more steps to the cellar.
It was a commonplace enough school, Alan told himself; it breathed ominous suggestion only because of the night or their disturbed state of mind. And yet ominous suggestions were piling up to suffocation. Twenty seconds later, when the four of them reached the foot of the stairs to the cellar, they found an interesting tableau.
On their right, westwar
ds, the transverse corridor
stretched in darkness to the side door by which they had entered. Yancey Beale did not seem concerned with that transverse passage. Instead, he had taken half a dozen steps along the central passage which bisected it. Striking a kitchen match by whisking the match across the seat of his trousers, he was holding it up and peering towards the wooden double-doors that led to the gallery of the gymnasium.
First Captain Ashcroft, then Dr. Fell, then Alan and Camilla had instinctively followed him a few steps past the angle of the transverse corridor. For an instant Yancey glanced back at them, the tiny flame shining down the side of his face and into opaque dark eyes. Then his at
tention
returned to the double-doors.
"Yes?" he
suddenly called
.
"Who is it? Who's there?"
And he charged straight at the
doors,
shouldering through and letting them swing shut behind him. If the others could not see him, they could hear him clatter round the gallery in pursuit of God knew whom or what
"Come back!" yelled Captain Ashcroft, directing a beam of light at unresponsive doors. "Come back, you dope! I've told you before . . ."
"It's all right, isn't it?" cried Camilla. "I mean, he's all right? I'd hate to think—"
"Then don't think it," Captain Ashcroft advised her. "Fellow's as crazy as a bedbug! He's chasin' his imagination, that's all; there's nobody here but us. Once Dr. Fell thought there might 'a' been, but there's not. 'Cept for the five of us, there's not another soul within—"
Then they all stood motionless. For they all heard it.
First it was the tinkle of a banjo, then a breezy tenor voice upraised in song. Muffled as though by some intervening obstruction, yet loud against night quiet the noise burst out grotesquely from somewhere on his floor.
"Oh,
I
come from Alabama With my banjo on my knee;
I
'm a-gwine t' Louisiana My Susannah fo' to see.
Oh, Susannah—
!
"
Backed by full orchestration, many male voices picked up the chorus and carried the song through three more verses. Then, after seeming to brood for a moment, music and voices soared up in honeyed sentiment
"The sun shines bright in the old Kentucky home;
Tis summer, the darkeys are gay . . ."
That was when all four listeners moved. They dodged back from the central corridor into the transverse one. Captain Ashcroft's light swept along it, as did the beam from Alan's small torch.
"She was right!" And Captain Ashcroft indicated Camilla. "It's from one of those two doors down at the end, left or right as you come in. But who's givin' a serenade at this time of night?"
"Serenade, did you say?" wheezed Dr. Fell. "It's too mechanical, surely, to be live voices? And there is a certain scratchiness. I rather think . . ."
Alan and Captain Ashcroft had already plunged down the passage. Alan's light, swinging towards what was now the right-hand door as they approached from this direction, picked up against its ground-glass panel the black numeral 25. Then it swung left to the door opposite, and they had found room 26 at last
The voices, having finished celebrating their old Kentucky home, now made a great din with "The Bonnie Blue Flag." But the room was dark.
"Steady!" said Captain Ashcroft. "No hurry, now!"
Easing the knob round, he pushed the door far enough inwards to grope for and find a switch on the wall to the left. Light sprang up beyond the glass panel. Dropping the extinguished torch into his pocket, Captain Ashcroft set the door wide open and propped it there with a wedge-shaped piece of wood he found on the floor.
They were looking into a good-sized square room, a conventional classroom except that its only blackboard was a portable one on an easel beside the teacher's desk, like the blackboard at Maynard Hall.
Under a ceiling light not too bright, Alan saw four smallish square windows high up in the west wall. A few feet out from this wall the teacher's desk faced east towards rows of conventional students' desks, somewhat scuffed and time-worn, an
d an electric clock on the east
wall. Set eater-cornered in the south-west angle of the room, at one side of the teacher's desk, was a small and antiquated piano on whose top lay a battered saxophone without case or cover. In the north-west angle of the room, at the opposite side of the teacher's desk, stood ah old-fashioned cabinet Victrola of the sort popular when Joel Poinsett High School had been opened. This also showed wear and tear. You wound it up with a crank; its lid was open now; exuberant voices soared into "Dixie."
"Music, eh?" said Captain Ashcroft, looking around him. "They taught music, did they?" He pointed to the Victrola. "And turn that damn thing off!"
Alan did so, stopping the record without lifting the needle from its groove. The old-fashioned record on the turntable was inscribed "Way Down South, A Medley," with other notations he did not stop to read.
Alan looked up. The dim yellow light discouraged curiosity. But Camilla, already at his side, was pointing frantically towards the teacher's desk. And he needed no urging to have his attention caught fast.
On the desk, beside a metronome which obviously belonged in this room, lay something which could never have belonged here. It was a packet of letters, some fifteen or twenty good-quality envelopes fastened together top and sideways in broad pink ribbon tied as though with loving hands.
Alan strode over and took up the packet. The cross-ways ribbon on the top envelope concealed the name of the person to whom these letters had been sent, and all the address except
Goliath, Conn,
in firm, neat handwriting. Th
e postmark provided little help; it was so blurred that he could make out only
Mass.
The date might have been any month of any fairly recent year.
Again Alan looked up. Dr. Gideon Fell, hat and stick under the same arm, now towered above him with the half-witted look of one who has been hit over the head with a club.
"Magister! These letters!" Alan held them out "Are
they
what we're supposed to find?"
Dr. Fell took the letters, turning them over in his fingers.
"My dear fellow,
I
have
no doubt of it. They are not
(if
I
may say so) indigenous to the Joel Poinsett High School. They have been most considerately provided."
Captain Ashcroft bustled forward, staring at the packet without attempting to take it
"That handwriting!—" he said.
"Oh, ah. We know the handwriting," agreed Dr. Fell, "having seen it only too recently. Therefore, with your permission . .
"Yes?"
"Therefore," Dr. Fell slipped the letters into his pocket, "we shall not examine the contents just yet And this for two reasons."
Putting down hat and stick on the teacher's desk, he moved behind it and took up a position like a lecturer, eyeglasses glinting and moustache lifted for impressive speech.
"First," he said, "because the letters are unlikely to contain any information we have not already deduced. Second—"
As though idly he bent forward, took up the metronome, set it in motion, and replaced it on the desk. The thin metal rod began to tick back and forth.
"Second," pursued Dr. Fell, first indicating the four windows above and behind his head and then—as though this were not the real direction he meant—pointing towards the open door of room 26, "second, because we should only suffer an interruption
. Someone is approaching the bui
lding towards the same entrance we used. Unless it is young Mr. Beale returning from the wrong direction, we are about to have another visitor."
Tick
went the metronome,
tick-tick
in measured beats against silence. The big
side
door to the school-yard, wh
ich Captain Ashcroft had left not quite shut, was flung violently open. And into room 26 stalked Valerie Huret
Shoulders back, still all in white with a white handbag clutched, under her arm, she seemed buoyed along by some power outside and beyond herself. Against her pale face the eyes had acquired a blaze of what might have been ungovernable rage or even near-madness.
"Well!" she began through stiff lips. "Well! Camilla's not the only one who heard about that side door, you know."
"Well, ma'am!" retorted Captain Ashcroft, wheeling bull-like to face her. "Should I say this is an unexpected pleasure? You're back from town, are you?"