Miss Marvel stood with her back to the door and softly said to them, “This conversation has definitely got to stay inside this room, understand? And I need a yes response from each of you.”
Each voice quietly responded with a quiet, yes.
“Good,” Miss Marvel said. “Molly, no, Bev, go sit in my chair and get out the club’s book. Jason, behind you on that bookshelf, do you see my Sherlock Holmes book there. Good. There is an index card with a cookie recipe on it. Carefully take it out and place it on my desk. Molly get your history book out of your backpack and set it beside the index card.”
“What’s going on?” Carol anxiously asked.
“These two items may have our missing fingerprint on them,” Miss Marvel said as she slowly walked away from the door and stopped next to Molly.
“Really?” Molly whispered. “I didn’t know if you were thinking…”
“Quiet, Molly, please,” Miss Marvel rolled her eyes toward the door. “Bev has told me everything.”
“What did she tell you?” Ted asked. “I think we all need to know.”
“We do and we will,” Miss Marvel explained. “But I want us to be prepared because tomorrow at lunch, we will have to decide what to do. If our missing fingerprint matches to one of those, we may know who our prime suspect is.”
Silence fell upon them like falling snow, quiet and hushed. Molly shivered.
“Jason,” Miss Marvel broke the silent moment. “Can you take the items and make fingerprint slides from them, please? Molly, that means you left your book at home. Okay, now for your exit. Everyone but Bev and Jason go, quietly, like you got disciplined. Jason, you go next but act mad like you got the worst of it and, Bev, if you can, cry a little like you got in trouble, too. Okay, everyone, do not talk of anything, what did or did not happen in here, to anyone. Got it?”
Molly looked at everyone in the room and when she looked at Bev, she was already crying. Wow, she could be an actress someday. Miss Marvel walked to the door and quietly opened it and stood there. One by one they exited the room and into the hall. Molly slowed as the others hurried away returning to their classrooms. Bev slowed to match her footsteps as they walked back to their English class.
“What do we tell Mrs. Chesterfield?” Bev whispered to her.
“Why,” Molly answered. “Nothing at all.”
Molly had a restless night, and when she woke up, she dressed accordingly, blue jeans and a dark gray sweater. She went slowly down the stairs to the kitchen carrying her backpack in her arms. She dropped it by her chair and walked into the kitchen. As always, her mother was there already, standing at the stove in a floral dress, humming some happy tune. She turned to face Molly.
“Well, hello there, daughter of mine, eggs?”
“Sure,” Molly said as she opened the fridge she was standing next to and withdrew a pitcher of orange juice. She walked to the counter and reached into a cabinet above it for a glass.
“Why don’t you grab two glasses and I will join you at the table?”
“Okay,” Molly said and took everything to the table and sat down.
Her mom followed and gave her a plate filled with scrambled eggs and a few slices of bacon and sat down. They each ate in silence for a few seconds.
“I like this time of the morning,” Mom said after sipping from her glass. “Your Dad is gone. The sun is just beginning to lighten things up and it is quiet. I listen for you kids to start moving around and I try to gauge who is awake and moving and who is not. You, Molly, get up and go but your brother, now that is a different story.”
Molly smiled and sat back and looked at her mom. She is pretty and is one of those people who always will be. She always seemed so with it, above the rest of everybody. Not a know-it-all but someone who does know it all and keeps quiet about it. Molly realized that she was being looked at in the same way she was looking at her Mom.
“What is on your mind?” Mom asked, squinting at her. “Are you okay?”
“Yes, I am just tired,” Molly answered her. “And I have a quiz today in history. Mr. Dalton enjoys quizzes too much. I think he is crazy.”
“Is he the drummer?” Mom asked as she bit into a slice of bacon.
“Yes!”
“Then he is crazy.”
During her fourth hour class, Molly recalled that she had told her mom a story about a history quiz, but it was a self-fulfilled prophecy. Mr. Dalton sprang a pop quiz on the class. Thank goodness, it was an open book quiz, Molly thought to herself. She was busy reading through the paragraph about the Gettysburg address when Mr. Dalton interrupted them.
“Time for lunch. Place your pencils down and turn your books over and you can continue when you get back. You can even talk about the quiz at lunch to each other and share answers if you want so I expect each one of you to have the same answers. The right ones. Now go!”
Molly rolled her eyes and got up from her seat.
“I saw that Molly Bennett!”
She rolled her eyes again and waved at Mr. Dalton, who smiled and waved back.
Molly found the rest of the club in the far corner of the cafeteria at their own table. She placed her tray next to Bev, stepped over the bench and sat down.
“Jason is waiting to share what happened with the fingerprints,” Bev whispered to her.
Molly looked across the table at Carol, Harold, and finally, Jason. He hesitated and leaned toward them and stopped.
“Miss Marvel is coming,” he said and sat up.
Molly turned and watched their assistant principal walk toward them. She took a deep breath. Miss Marvel stood at the end of the table next to Jason. She folded her arms in front of her and smiled at them.
“What’s wrong?” Miss Marvel said to them. “Are you scared of me? You are definitely my favorite students and there isn’t anything to be afraid of. In fact, I think you are very brave. Jason, what do you have for me?”
Jason reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a folded envelope and handed it to her.
“What do you think?” Miss Marvel asked him, taking the envelope from him.
“I think they match.”
“Okay. We will talk about this Monday at club meeting. I have a plan, but it is going to require us to get prepared not knowing what my idea is. Can you do that?”
Molly nodded yes along with everyone else.
“We are going to work in three teams. Since Jason and Carol worked a lot on the fingerprinting, you prepare a report on what you did, include how we learned about fingerprinting. Bev, you, and Carol write a report about how we got involved with the case and the steps we took to look into it. Finally, Harold and Molly, you make a report on how Sherlock Holmes was used to approach the case. I will work out the details. Now, we do not talk about it to anyone else . People are going to ask you because I am standing here in the cafeteria and they are going to want to know what we are talking about. It is about our club, nothing more and nothing less. Good work everybody. See you around,” Miss Marvel said and looked at the envelope then added, “Thanks Jason.”
She smiled again and walked away. Molly watched her walk through the cafeteria, stopping at a few tables to say hi to a few students. When she reached the doorway, she turned and looked directly at Molly, raised the envelope again and nodded at her.
Molly nodded back.
To be continued…
My First Stories 