Through the Hidden Door Read Online Free PDF Page A

Mrs. Glickman, in science class. She told me to go to the library and find out what it was. I haven’t found it yet, but at least I’m safe here from Sader and Damascus. They’re after me too, you know. I keep looking. This is my two-hundredth skeleton. The bone doesn’t match with anything.”
    “How do you know it’s a leg bone?”
    “It’s just a guess. It looks just like the femur, the upper leg bone in the human skeleton.”
    I shrugged. “Then it’s got to be a monkey of some kind.”
    “Yes, but all the monkey leg bones are curved and thin.” He pointed to one of the drawings in the book. “This is a straight bone, and thick.”
    Again I shrugged. “How old do you think it is?”
    “I don’t know.”
    I picked the bone up off his desk. From what I’d seen of museums of natural history and a few science books, it did look like a leg bone. It had scratches and grooves up the shaft to the knob, which was cracked and half gone. “Can’t be very old. There were never great apes or missing links a zillion years ago in Massachusetts, I don’t think. It must be from a monkey.” I ransacked my feeble store of knowledge. “But this wasn’t ever, you know, a jungle or anything. I’m sure no monkeys ever lived here. It must have come from somewhere else. But how could a monkey get here? In the middle of Greenfield, Massachusetts?”
    “Could have been a pet,” said Snowy. “Mr. Finney says it might have been brought by a sailor who got it in Africa in the old days. It might have been an organ-grinder’s monkey.”
    “Mr. Finney! Where is Mr. Finney?”
    “In town. I visit them nearly every night after supper.”
    “But I thought ... They said he was sick!”
    “He’s not sick. He resigned in a big huff. There was a meeting with the school trustees after he expelled Rudy and Danny and the gang. At the end of the meeting Mr. Finney ripped off his necktie, the one with the school crest, and threw it on the floor in front of all the trustees and stamped out of the room. I heard the whole thing.”
    “How? Where?” I asked.
    “You know the boys’ lavatory in the old building, next to the common room?”
    “Yes.”
    “The north wall of the boys’ room backs up on the wall of the common room. First they made me come and talk to the trustees. Bunch of old men in pinstripe suits. They asked me questions for a while. About what I saw when the dog was attacked. Then they told me to leave. I went out and stood on a john in the boys’ room and listened to the whole rest of the meeting right through the wall with a water glass over my ear.”
    “Well ... go on.”
    “When I was in the meeting, before I listened through the wall, I told the trustees what happened, same as I told Mr. Finney before. I told them five boys I could not see well enough to recognize were torturing the dog to death. I told them a sixth boy with a lisp was trying to stop the others. That’s all. Silks said that there were no boys here at Winchester who lisped. The men decided it was five words against one. Mine. They also said throwing a few stones at a dog was a boyish prank and not worth two cents compared to selling dope or something serious. Finney protested that he ran the school. He was headmaster and the boys had been expelled and that was that. The trustees said Finney was going to wreck Winchester’s chances of winning a conference championship in football, hockey, and baseball if Rudy and his friends weren’t on the teams. They also said that Mr. Damascus had just made the kind offer of an indoor swimming pool for Winchester. They’ve been trying to raise money for the pool for a long time. That’s when Finney stamped out of the meeting.
    “When it was over, I went back in the common room. I found Finney’s tie on the floor. I know it was his because his Navy tie clip was still on it.”
    I didn’t see Snowy for a week after that, although I waited for him every afternoon and evening in the library. My interest