Murder on the Blackboard Read Online Free PDF Page B

schoolhouse?”
    “We’re just hunting,” Miss Withers told him. Swiftly she went through the big oaken desk in the middle of the room. There were only the usual papers, pamphlets, and teaching paraphernalia. Everything was unusually neat and tidy.
    “Good for Stevenson,” she observed. “I didn’t think he was the sort who’d keep everything so shipshape.”
    The desk top bore only a large green blotter, a fountain pen set in malachite, and, standing beside a heavy glass inkwell, a small nickel-plated cigarette lighter.
    “I don’t know what he had that for,” Miss Withers told the Sergeant. “Smoking is never permitted inside the schoolhouse during school hours, because it’s a bad example for the older boys.”
    Taylor shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe the assistant principal used to work nights a lot.” He drew a cigarette from a tattered pack in the breast pocket of his coat, and offered another to Miss Withers. “I need one of these, how about you?”
    “Me? Mercy sakes, no. The idea of me smoking one of those nasty things!”
    Taylor grinned, and quoted a current advertisement. “It happens that I don’t smoke, but some of my debutante friends who do tell me that Luckies are parched, not toasted….”
    Idly he picked up the lighter from the desk and snapped it, with no appreciable result. Again, and again….
    “These things never work,” he informed Miss Withers. He replaced it on the desk, and lit his cigarette with a match from his capacious coat pocket.
    Miss Withers was surveying a shelf between the windows, on which stood an assortment of various and sundry bottles. “These look harmless enough,” she observed. “Here’s a can of the lighter fluid that they put in those little jiggers, and it’s nearly empty. I suppose that’s why the lighter won’t work, he’s forgotten to fill it …”
    She stopped short, as a distant metallic booming broke the stillness. “What’s that?”
    The Sergeant relaxed again, with a chuckle. “I’m getting as nervous as you. That’s only a radiator banging.”
    “Oh!” Miss Withers was thoughtful. “A radiator? But …”
    She moved toward the radiator across the room, but stopped short in front of a little wash stand which stood in the corner, behind a screen. It was quite evidently used for the cleaning of scientific apparatus, as the sink was littered with retorts, glasses, and cups.
    Here her sharp eyes caught sight of something. She raised one of the glasses.
    It was of the type sold in ten-cent stores everywhere, and sometimes used by otherwise law-abiding citizens of this great nation in the imbibing of highballs.
    This glass differed from its fellows in one particular. It was inhabited.
    Much to Miss Withers’ surprise, a solitary red ant lay in the bottom of the glass.
    Further examination disclosed the fact that this red ant was a dead red ant. Had he climbed to this dizzy height from the playground outside, Miss Withers wondered, in search of water, only to die of exhaustion on the slippery inside of the glass with a single drop almost within his reach?
    She raised the glass to her nose, but dropped it to shatter on the floor as the silence of the evening was violated by a hideous crescendo of sound.
    Outside in the hall, in every hall of the building, a powerful gong was ringing.
    “Hey,” burst forth the Sergeant. “They’ve found the murderer—or the body!”

IV
Hide and Go Seek
(11/15/32—6:15 P.M.)
    M ISS WITHERS PUT OUT a restraining hand and caught the Sergeant as he was in the doorway.
    “Wait,” she told him. “That’s the school fire alarm.”
    “What? You mean, to top everything else, that the place is burning down?” Sergeant Taylor had to raise his voice to make himself heard above the din.
    Miss Withers shook her head. “I doubt if the building is afire. But I know what’s happened. Come on.”
    She led the way swiftly down the hall, with her palms pressed firmly over her ears.
    “I don’t get you,” the