Miss Dimple Disappears Read Online Free PDF Page B

date on a Hardy Boys Mystery that had just come in and slipped it in with the rest. “When he’s finished those others, he might enjoy this one,” she said. After all, reading was reading.
    *   *   *
    Josephine Carr tossed her blue felt hat on the needlepoint footstool and kicked off her shoes. “What’s all this about Miss Dimple?” she asked, hovering as close to the fireplace as possible. They had been gone all day and the house was cold, although Charlie had lit a small coal fire in the sitting room when she got home from school.
    Wednesday was one of the three days during the week her mother worked at the ordnance plant over in Milledgeville, along with Charlie’s aunt Louise and several others from Elderberry, including their neighbor, Bessie Jenkins, and Odessa’s husband, Bob Robert. At eight every morning, a bus picked up workers in front of Clyde Jefferies Feed and Seed for the forty-five-minute drive, returning them several hours later. Jo and her sister worked in offices in one of the main buildings, and Bessie’s job had something to do with fuses, but Bob Robert, being colored, was assigned to another facility.
    “It’s like she dropped off the face of the earth,” Charlie said. “Didn’t show up for school, or even bother to get a substitute, and you know that’s not like Miss Dimple. Poor old Froggie had a terrible time finding somebody to fill in. Finally, one of the mothers felt sorry for him and volunteered to help—and all this on top of what happened to Christmas yesterday!”
    The principal had done his best to assure the bewildered children that everything would be all right, but his grating voice and authoritative manner overwhelmed some of the smaller ones and little Margaret Bailey had cried until her mama had to come and take her home.
    Charlie’s mother frowned. “I don’t suppose they’ve learned any more about that?”
    Charlie shook her head. “Nothing definite. Everybody seems to think it was a stroke, but I heard he had head injuries as well.”
    “Injuries? You mean he had more than one? How can that be?”
    Charlie shrugged. That had bothered her as well. “I’m just repeating what I’ve heard. I guess he could’ve hit his head on the filing cabinet when he fell, and then again on the floor.”
    “Hmmm …” Jo Carr contemplated that, and having warmed her front, turned her back to the flames. “Poor Madge! Don’t you think we should take something over?”
    Charlie nodded. “Applesauce muffins are in the oven. Annie and I plan to drop by for a few minutes tonight.”
    “And now Dimple Kilpatrick. Do they have any idea where she might be?”
    “She did leave a note, or at least they found one, and Miss Phoebe says it looked a little shaky to her, but she’s fairly sure it’s in her handwriting. She left instructions on where to find her lesson plans for the rest of the week. Bobby Tinsley saw it underneath the hall table, but all her clothes are here, and Miss Phoebe said her luggage is still in the basement with everyone else’s.”
    “That doesn’t make any sense at all,” Jo said, ramming a hairpin into a cascading lock of brown hair. At fifty, she was just beginning to get a few strands of gray. “Is that all she said?”
    “She said there’d been a family emergency and she was leaving to take care of an older sister,” Charlie said, “but Odessa swears up and down Miss Dimple told her once that her only sister died as a child.”
    Jo gave the fire a poke, sending red embers spiraling. “Where does she usually keep her lesson plans?”
    “In her desk at school, but, knowing her, Miss Dimple probably has all her lessons planned through the end of the year, so that wouldn’t necessarily mean she knew she would be away.”
    “Are the police even trying to find her?” Jo shook her head. “I reckon Bobby Tinsley does the best he can, but his daddy was a couple of years ahead of me in school, and he didn’t have the sense God promised a