Molly inserted the slides into the wheel of the family’s slide projector one at a time. She placed the projector on the floor beside her bed and stood up. She walked over and closed the door to her room and turned off the overhead lights. She went back to the projector, picked it up, set it on the desk chair and turned it on. The light beam immediately illuminated the opposite wall. She put a book beneath the projector and the light moved higher up the wall. She grabbed the remote that was hanging from the projector and laid back in her bed against the pillows she had arranged across the back wall. She clicked. The image changed from a bright light to a black smudge.
“Oh no,” Molly said as she hurriedly sat up. She reached over and slowly turned a ring that was on the lens of the projector. Looking back over her shoulder, she watched the image on the wall.
The black smudge slowly changed shape as she turned the lens. In the center of it, small white lines started to appear. In the middle of the image, loops wrapped around each other and the end of each line stretched and thinned toward the outside. She has a photo of a fingerprint! She clicked the remote again and another fingerprint appeared. This one was circular with thin lines rotating around each other. She clicked again and another one appeared. She almost shouted out loud as she clicked through them all and she could clearly see each one. When the wall became nothing but a bright light again, she leaned back. What’s next?
“On Monday,” she started talking to herself. “We will compare these prints to the cards and hopefully be able to identify them. But how do we know which prints came from which box? We marked the original frames, but these slides are not matched to them. Man. Is that a problem? Do we need to know that or is it enough to know whose prints are whose?”
Room 101 was already arranged when Molly, Bev and Harold walked in for their club meeting. A slide projector was set up on a desk in the middle of the room. The screen was pulled down in front of the chalkboard from its mounting above it. Six desks were lined up in front of the screen. Ted, Carol, and Jason were already sitting at three desks allowing the three of them to sit at the ones closest to the door.
“Please close the door and turn off the lights Harold,” Miss Marvel said from a desk next to the projector. “Molly, do you have the slides?”
Molly walked to Miss Marvel, placed her backpack on the desk and unzipped it. She reached into it and handed the slides to her.
“Thank you. How do they look?” Miss Marvel asked her, taking the slides from Molly.
“Great! I am so happy about them,” Molly told her and turned to sit at her seat.
“Jason, will you hand out the fingerprint cards I gave you, please? Hand out two apiece. Thank you.” Miss Marvel said as she slid the slides into the projector’s slide carriage.
Molly looked at the two cards handed to her. She looked at the names across the bottom of the cards. One was Happy’s and the other card belonged to Miss Marvel. She heard the hum of the projector being turned on and she looked at the screen in front of her. Miss Marvel was adjusting the focus of the image on it. A fingerprint popped into view. The scraping of a desk moving and high heels clicking toward her was the only sound that could be heard as she stared at the screen.
Miss Marvel walked to the cabinet in front of the room and removed a small box from it. She walked down the line of students, handing each one a magnifying glass.
“I got these from the Biology department. Jason give me two cards, too. Now, do the best you can to try to match the card to the image up here. If you think you have a match, have someone next to you doublecheck it then set it aside and ask Jason for another one. Hopefully, we can identify them. Good luck.”
Molly looked closely at the image on the screen and noted that it was a loop, the most common fingerprint. It traveled upward, left to right, angling slightly back to the left, in long, thin, loops. She took the magnifying glass and looked at her first card, it wasn’t a loop but a whorl and it was circular. She set it aside and looked at the second one. It was a loop, but it went more to the right than left like the image on the screen.
“Any matches?” Miss Marvel asked from behind them as she had returned to her seat next to the projector. No one answered and the screen changed to the next slide.
Molly studied the image. It was another loop.
“I think I have a match,” Harold spoke up. Molly looked over at him and saw Bev looking at the card with her magnifying glass.
“I think so, too,” she confirmed.
“Okay. Harold put it aside,” Miss Marvel instructed. “I am going to remove it from the carousel so give me a second.”
The image in front went dark and Molly listened as Miss Marvel removed the slide. Jason had risen from his seat and handed Harold another card. The projector clicked on and the screen became bright with white light. A click resounded and another fingerprint appeared on the screen. Another loop. Molly stared at her card through the magnifying glass. She looked up at the screen to doublecheck. It went toward the left like the one on her card. She went back and looked at the card.
“I think I have a match,” Molly announced. “Teddy, will you check this out?”
Teddy took the card from her and stared at it through his glass. He looked at the screen and back to the card and said, “I think we are on a roll. Two down!”
Molly grinned to herself and placed the card to her right. She looked at the name on the card. It was Happy Hamilton. She looked up as Jason handed her another card. He smiled at her and nodded his head.
A short while later, Miss Marvel was standing in front of them holding two slides in front of her.
“We have two prints that are unidentified. Jason and Carol have just confirmed that this one I marked with a P for photo booth and this one from the Cookie Club box, are from the same person. These prints could possibly be from our thief. We need to discover another way to narrow down who the thief might be and how to verify who these prints belong to. Any ideas?”
To be continued…
My First Stories 