Miss Dimple Disappears (4 page)

“She be too busy helping the po-lice hunt for Miss Dimple.” Odessa snatched up the near-empty bread basket and started to the kitchen for more. “Been like a crazy house here all morning. Don’t know what that woman be thinkin’ goin’ off like that without so much as a by-your-leave!”

The cook’s angry muttering didn’t fool Charlie for a minute as she knew Miss Dimple was Odessa’s favorite among all the teachers and she was as worried as the rest of them.

Geneva tasted her tea and made a face. “It’s not like her to do a thing like this.”

“Not like her at all,” Elwin echoed as he began scooping all the green peas from his soup and transferring them to a small bowl provided for that purpose.

“Surely she has relatives,” Annie suggested. “Hasn’t anyone tried to contact them?”

“She seems to be close to her brother,” Lily said. “Remember, Velma? He sent that huge crate of fruit last Christmas.”

Velma made little catlike dabs with her napkin. “Such delicious oranges! And those tiny little sour things—kumcubers, I think they’re called.”

“Kumquats,” Elwin whispered under his breath, and Charlie smiled behind her napkin and tried not to meet Annie’s eyes.

“Does anyone know how to get in touch with him?” Annie looked about as she spoke, but no one had an answer.

Charlie had seen Miss Dimple walking to the post office with letters to mail but she had no idea who they were for. The older teacher was not in the custom of engaging in personal chitchat. “I don’t guess any of you have noticed who she writes,” she said, but this was met with only blank stares.

“I suppose we could look in her address book,” Geneva suggested.

“
If
we can find it,” Annie said, “but wouldn’t you think the police have already thought to look there?”

Charlie bit her lip. Knowing the police in Elderberry, she wasn’t so sure about that.

Charlie didn’t know how Odessa accomplished it, but she usually managed to come up with delectable desserts in spite of rationing and shortages. Today it was gingerbread made with molasses, orange peel, and 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 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 billy goat!”

“They’re trying to locate her brother to see if he knows anything, but Miss Phoebe can’t find her address book and nobody remembers his name. You know how private Miss Dimple was—
is.
”

“Well, it all sounds mighty peculiar to me,” Jo said, “but Miss Dimple always had her own way of doing things, getting up at the crack of dawn to walk all over town! Lord, her poor feet must be worn out by now, not to mention her shoes—and they don’t grow on trees these days. And you know she won’t wear any color but purple.”

Charlie nodded. It was rumored that Miss Dimple wore that color for a long-ago beau who was killed in the Spanish American War, but she thought it was probably because she just liked purple.

The fragrance of cinnamon and nutmeg wafted from the kitchen and Charlie was heading there to check her muffins when the phone rang. Her mother, who was nearer to the telephone, gave her a questioning look, but Charlie shook her head. If Hugh was calling, it wouldn’t hurt him to wait. In fact, the way Charlie felt about Hugh … well … she wasn’t exactly sure just how she felt about Hugh Brumlow. There were times when she was
almost
certain he was the one, but she couldn’t be sure what his feelings were.

But it was her aunt Louise on the phone, and she could tell by the one-sided conversation Louise had heard about Miss Dimple’s disappearance.

“No, she didn’t show up for school … as far as I know, they don’t have any idea where … left a note, right, but her clothes are still there … no, she doesn’t know, either.…” Jo smiled and rolled her eyes at Charlie. “Yes, you’ll know when we know, Lou. I promise.”

“Faster than a speeding bullet,” she said, following Charlie down the long cold hall and into the warm kitchen. “Your aunt should be the one working for a newspaper the way she noses out the news—and speaking of, I have to write up Linda Harkins’s wedding if I want to get it in on time for next week’s
Eagle.
Do you mind stirring up something for supper?”

Charlie, who was usually the one who “stirred up something for supper,” said she didn’t mind at all. She would much rather throw sweet potatoes in the oven to bake and warm up leftover chicken and green beans from the day before than write the lengthy, saccharine descriptions of social events her mother turned out weekly in her position as society editor of the local paper.

Although Jo Carr still owned a small share of the drugstore her husband, Charles, had left her when he died several years before, she had been forced to sell most of the family-owned farmland in order to send Charlie and her brother to college, and the money she earned at the ordnance plant and the newspaper supplemented Charlie’s small salary to help with expenses.

Jo was quiet as she helped with the dishes after supper and Charlie knew her mother was thinking of Fain. Charlie’s older brother, a brand-new second lieutenant in the infantry, was somewhere in Algeria with General Eisenhower as part of the Allied forces that had landed earlier in the month, and except for what they read in the newspapers or heard over the radio, they knew little else. Charlie came to dread seeing the Western Union boy delivering messages on his bicycle because it usually meant someone’s son, brother, or husband was either killed or wounded.

If only she could be a part of it—do something to help further the war effort! Once, Charlie had even considered joining the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, or WAAC, or its navy counterpart, the WAVES, and would have if it hadn’t been for Delia. She and her sister had been drying dishes together two years ago when Delia announced she intended to marry Ned Varnadore. Charlie, home for Christmas break during her junior year in college, pointed out that Ned was only in his sophomore year at the University of Georgia; that she, Delia, was to begin at Shorter College in September after she graduated from high school, and what could she possibly be thinking?

Delia dumped the dried silverware in the drawer with a clatter and, arms folded, turned to face her older sister. “I love him,” she said, “and he loves me.”

There was a finality in her statement as shocking as a dash of cold water, and Charlie knew that in the long run her sister would have her way.

When the country went to war a few months after they married, Ned enlisted with most of his fraternity brothers. Now, far away in Texas where she lived in cramped quarters on her husband’s army base, Delia was lonely, homesick, and pregnant. Well, it served her right! If her sister had stayed at home where she belonged, Charlie thought, she herself could be contributing more than used cooking fat and scrap metal while also seeing a whole new part of the world.