It was a long weekend. Molly went over to Harold’s house on Saturday and they mapped out how they used Sherlock Holmes to approach the case. It was difficult because they had no idea what the others were doing and how they all were going to fit together. In the end, they made a poster board chart similar to what Molly had done in her blue notebook. They decided they would keep it in her locker until club meeting, but Harold would take it to school.
At the bus stop, it was cold. Molly arrived first and pulled her coat tightly around herself. Since she was first, she was able to lean against the street sign and look around in all directions. She watched Bev turn the corner onto the street from where she stood, a block away. Bev was having trouble with a poster as the wind kept catching it. Molly smiled to herself as she thought that her friend looked like a kite having trouble taking off into the sky. She turned her attention back to her street and saw Harold was having the same trouble with the wind that Bev was with their poster. Molly laughed out loud.
“What’s so funny?” Harold said as he joined her.
“Yeah, what’s so funny?” Bev asked from behind Molly.
“Nothing,” Molly said. “Nothing at all.”
The bus ride was quiet. Molly wanted to say so much but knew that if she said one word, they would say too much. They continued in silence to Molly’s locker where they deposited both posters carefully into it.
“You know you will have to be careful opening it,” Harold said.
Molly smiled at him and said, “I do.”
“I won’t be here every time you open it,” Harold said, smiling back to her.
“I know,” Molly sad still smiling at him.
“But I will be,” Bev said, pushing Harold’s arm. “Let’s get to class. It’s going to be long day.”
When the final bell rang, Molly slowly packed her backpack. Mr. Eichenberger was talking to a few students, but the rest of the class rushed out to get to their busses to go home. Today, Molly wished she could go with them. Her day was not over, it seemed like it was just beginning. She pulled the backpack over her shoulder and waved to her choir teacher as she left the room. She slowly hurried her pace as she turned the corner toward her locker. Harold and Bev were already there. She saw June with them, too. She slowed her walk. Harold was leaning against her locker and he looked at her when she arrived.
“You took your time,” he said as he stood away from the locker door.
She didn’t say anything and dialed her combination. When she opened the door, Harold pulled out the two posters and handed one to Bev.
“You guys go on ahead of me,” Molly said. “I need to dump some of these books from my backpack.”
Harold nodded and the three of them walked away from Molly. She pulled out her books, placing them in her locker, leaving only her basics, math, and history. Finally, she made sure that her blue notebook filled with all her notes about Sherlock Holmes was safely inside her backpack and closed her locker door. She pulled it over her shoulder and ran to Hall 01. She came to a halt when she turned the corner and saw Miss Marvel waiting at the door. She smiled at Molly.
“Ready?” Miss Marvel said to her. “It is going to be an interesting club meeting.”
Molly stepped inside and surveyed the room because it was full of people. The club members were seated at a row of student desks in front of the room. To the left of the door, next to an empty chair, sat Principal Marty and Assistant Principal Charles, all decked out in his three-piece suit. Across the back of the room, Detective Tracy sat next to the slide projector that was set up on a student desk. An empty chair was on the other side of the projector. Beneath the windows across from Molly, sitting on chairs, was Mr. and Mrs. Rogers, Miss Heinz, and Miss Chapin. Molly took a deep breath.
“Go ahead and sit down Molly,” Miss Marvel whispered to her and patted her shoulder.
Molly looked back at her and nodded. She walked past Bev, who was opening the red notebook, June, and Harold. She sat at the empty desk next to him and lowered her backpack to the floor. She looked at Ted, who was sitting on the other side of her, then Carol and Jason on the end. They nodded at her and Molly smiled. She reached down, pulled out her blue notebook and set it in front of her on the desk. She looked up at Miss Marvel who was standing in front of the classroom.
Miss Marvel had her hands folded in front of her Kelly green suit with a bright yellow blouse beneath the jacket. Her red hair was pulled back in her familiar ponytail and her green eyes flashed in the spotlight of the slide projector. She looked down at the club members and nodded her head.
“Welcome to the Whodunnit Club meeting. We are waiting for one more guest and we will start our presentation. In the meantime, if you don’t mind, I would like to provide some instructions to the club. First, Beverly, please take a record of everyone who is here with us today.”
“Done,” Bev interrupted her.
“Really? Good job, Bev, and thank you. Remember, we each had an assignment and I will tell you when it is your turn to report what you had put together. I see we have a couple of posters. Jason, would you mind putting up the easel? Thank you, but before you do that, Jason, how are you and Carol going to make your presentation?”
“We were just going to stand up and tell what we did,” Jason replied. “I didn’t know we needed visual aids.”
“That’s fine, Jason. I was wondering if you needed the projector for any prints before the last one?”
“Good idea. Do you have the unidentified print from each of the boxes?”
“They are already in the slide carousel,” Miss Marvel assured him. “Explain everything but the information about the final fingerprint.”
“Easy. We don’t know anything about the final one.”
Miss Marvel smiled at him and said, “Can you put up the easel, please? Ah, I hear our final guest arriving at the door. Harold, will you get the door, please?”
Harold got up to open the door just as Mrs. Young walked up to it. He held it open for her and she stepped into the room. She stood inside and slowly looked around the room. Molly noticed that the brown bag hung from her shoulder.
“I am sorry to be late, but someone called the office,” Mrs. Young said.
“You are not late, Mrs. Young,” Miss Marvel said. “We were just starting. Please have a seat next to Principal Marty. Thank you. As I was saying, Welcome to The Whodunnit Club meeting. I don’t know if you know our club members, but you will know them soon enough as we make our presentation today. I do believe you know everyone along the back of the room except for one gentleman, our friend, Mr. Tracy, from our local police department, who so kindly agreed to hear our presentation today.”
Miss Marvel walked toward the door and stopped in front of a chair that was sitting next to it.
“The Whodunnit Club was intended to be a mystery reading club focusing on the writing of Sir Conan Doyle and, in particular, the character of Sherlock Holmes. Then one day, we were approached with a school mystery to solve. We believe we have solved it. If you please, hold all of your questions until the end of our presentation. Bev and Ted, you are our first presenters,” Miss Marvel sat down in the chair. “Be sure to introduce yourselves first.”
Bev stood up and walked to the easel, placing a poster on it. Ted joined her and they stood on either side of it.
“Hello, I am Bev, and this is Ted. Our assignment is to tell you how we got involved in the case. We created a chart to kind of put a timeline to the club’s introduction of the case. But before this,” Bev said as she pointed to the poster. “We were introduced to Detective Tracy by Miss Marvel at one of our first club meetings because we were interested in one of Sherlock Holmes’ skills, fingerprints. Detective Tracy taught us about fingerprints. He explained to us us what they are, how to get them and how to record them.”
“The case started at the dance,” Ted explained. “Miss Marvel gathered us together to talk to Mrs. Rogers who informed us that money had been stolen from the photo booth. It was decided not to go to the police because it happened at school. We were told that it was a school matter, and we were asked to try to solve it. We decided to take it on and use one of Holmes’ skills, observation, and to be observant for the rest of the dance.”
“The following Monday,” Bev took up the story as she pointed to #2 on the poster. “We were informed of a second theft at the dance, the Cooking Club’s admission money to the dance. It was noted by Miss Heinz. We diagramed the floor plan of the dance floor.”
The sound of the slide projector startled Bev as she turned and found the illustration of
map.”
“Perfect,” Bev said as she turned toward the screen. “Here, you can see we tried to account for everyone at the dance and the location of the photo booth, here, the concession stand, here, and all of the exits. That X behind the concession table is where the cooking club’s money box was during the dance. Here is the admission table outside the door in the lobby.”
“Nice drawing,” Detective Tracy said.
“So to summarize,” Ted said. “There were two robberies at the dance from the same room. Number 3,” he pointed at the poster. “We were asked to be involved in a third robbery at the gym, the night of the Drama club’s play, A Comedy of Errors.”
Behind Ted, the screen flashed with another diagram of the gym. Ted turned to look at it.
“Great! “ he said. “Here you can see the gym in a totally different configuration, but the robbery occurred, here, outside at the concession table sometime after intermission and final curtain. It was reported to us by June Jones.”
“An additional observation,” Bev quickly added. “A white sweater was left on the back of a chair. We noticed it when we left for the night.”
“Oh,” Ted jumped in. “The total amount of money missing is $973.00.”
“Excuse me,” Miss Marvel said as she stood up. “I believe you are getting into our next presentation. Thank you Bev and Ted for establishing the case for us. Thank you, Detective Tracy, for adding the diagrams for us to see. Ted, can you pin your poster on that bulletin board for us to see? I wish we had posters of the gym layouts to pin next to it.”
“Oh, I do,” detective Tracy walked from the back of the room with a roll of paper. He stopped next to Ted and unrolled it. He handed one to Ted, who spread it across the bulletin board. Detective Tract pinned the corners, handed Ted the second one and they repeated the process.
“Thank you,” Miss Marvel said to them as they reseated themselves. “Now Jason and Carol will discuss what we did regarding fingerprint analysis.”
Miss Marvel sat at her seat by the door as Jason and Carol stood up and turned to face the audience.
“First,” Carol said. “As Bev and Ted said, we had a visit from Detective Tracy, who, at our request, taught us about fingerprints. We learned that fingerprints are unique to a person and that there are three basic types. Only a few people have Arches, about 5%; Whorls are found in 25 – 35% of us. I am a Whorl. The largest pool of people has Loops, about 60 – 70%. Part of that discussion led us to learn how to gather fingerprints and how to obtain fingerprints. The reason we were interested in fingerprinting is because Sherlock Holmes was interested in it.”
“When we were asked to work on the case,” Ted interrupted Carol. “We asked for the money boxes. Miss Marvel asked me and Carol to finger dust and collect any fingerprints from them. We recovered nine prints, four from the Photo Booth box and five from the Cooking Club’s box. Harold recovered four prints from the Drama Club box. Molly then took photos of the prints that she had made into slides. We still had the issue of what to compare the prints to and that was when the idea of sponsoring the D.A.R.E. event.
“Now we also knew the students who were working the events so when they came to the fingerprint stations that we, the Whodunnit Club, were working, we separated their cards from the rest of the students. Carol, will tell you what happened next?”
“In addition to collecting the student fingerprints,” Carol continued. “We collected all the sponsor’s fingerprints. Molly then took the photos of the prints and had slide made of them. Then we projected the slides images and compared them, as best that we could, to all suspects of our fingerprint cards. All were accounted for except for one fingerprint.”
The slide projector clicked behind Ted and Carol to reveal the one fingerprint on the screen behind them.
To be continued…
My First Stories 