Miss Dimple Disappears Read Online Free PDF

spices, and she was relishing the last bite when Phoebe Chadwick appeared looking like she’d been plowing the north forty with a blind mule.
    “I know you’re all wanting news of Miss Dimple,” she told them, pouring herself coffee from the sideboard, “so I’ll tell you what I know: She had made her bed this morning as usual, and I couldn’t find a thing missing from her closet, but Bobby Tinsley noticed a small piece of paper under the console table in the front hall. I suppose it must’ve blown there when somebody opened the door because we didn’t see it earlier.”
    Bobby Tinsley was Elderberry’s chief of police, and his daughter, Bobbie Ann, was in Annie’s fourth-grade class. As well as Charlie could remember, the most recent “crime” the chief had to deal with was when several members of the local football team got carried away with some bootleg liquor one night and turned a pig loose in the sacred halls of Elderberry High.
    Phoebe paused while she stirred cream into her coffee and everybody leaned forward to hear what she had to say. The spoon clinked as she set it on her saucer and turned to face the diners at the table. “It seems,” she told them, “that there’s been a family emergency and Miss Dimple has gone to look after an older sister who has fallen ill.”
    Charlie couldn’t imagine the longtime teacher having a sister—especially one who was older than Miss Dimple herself. In fact, she had always thought of the woman as arriving in this world fully grown, handbag in hand. “Is that all she said?” she asked.
    “Surely she gave an address where she could be reached,” Velma reasoned, but Phoebe shook her head.
    Noticing the time, Annie pushed back her chair. “She might not have slept in her bed last night at all,” she said. “And why would she leave in the middle of the night without saying anything? Are you sure that note’s in Miss Dimple’s handwriting?”
    Odessa, lingering in the kitchen doorway, put down her tray with a rattle. “Ain’t no way Miss Dimple could’a wrote that note,” she said, looking stormier by the second.
    “What do you mean, Odessa?” Phoebe grasped the back of a ladder-back chair until it seemed it might break in two.
    “ ’Cause she done told me back when I first come here the only sister she had died when she was just a little old thing, so I don’t see how she could’ve gone to see ’bout her …’lesson, of course, dead folks be coming back to life.”
    And with that, Odessa Kirby made her exit.

C HAPTER F OUR
    Something was terribly wrong! She knew Dimple Kilpatrick as well as … well … as well as anyone did, and better than most, and Virginia Balliew was absolutely certain that something had happened to her friend. Something horrible. She was so upset with worry she almost dropped an armful of books she was shelving when Emma Elrod came into the library to return Willie’s books, two of the orange-backed series based on the semifictional childhood of historical figures. “And which of these did Willie like better? Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Edison?” Virginia asked, hiding a smile because she knew the child had read neither.
    Willie’s mother, however, was a determined woman and immediately selected two more. “He didn’t say, but probably the one about Edison. Our Willie has an inventive mind, you know. Such an imagination! Says he saw poor Miss Dimple being kidnapped by spies! Spies, now! Can you believe it?”
    Virginia frowned. “And where was this, Emma?”
    “Why, right out there in front of our house. Says she got into a car.”
    “What kind of car?”
    Emma shrugged. “Willie claimed it was too dark to tell, but of course it wasn’t true. Just like all those other wild stories he tells. Worries me nearly to death—the child doesn’t seem to know fact from fiction.” She patted the selections on the desk in front of her. “That’s why I want him to read about real people.”
    Virginia stamped the