But neither Pascal nor I ventured a guess out loud. In fact, no one made a move.
“How can ...” I managed to squeeze some words out, “... how can we be sure?”
“Once again, penmanship,” Merrilee said matter-of-factly.
“Penmanship?” I repeated.
“Remember how we described the writing of the secret codes in the mystery novels?” she asked.
I jumped in to answer.
“Tidy. Cramped. Makes the letter a with a hood on top.”
“We need to compare that description to Loyola’s writing,” Merrilee said.
“Where are we going to get a sample of Loyola’s writing?” I asked.
“We already have it,” Merrilee said, studying me to see if I could connect the dots.
“She’s right,” I said to Pascal. “We have the labels on the tables downstairs that we’ve been sorting Creelman’s books by.”
It was all we could do not to bolt down the stairs to the research area and snatch a label to study. Instead, we formed a line, single file, and with great restraint stiffly returned to the main floor where we had been sorting books, eyes darting in every direction. We halted in front of the sales table with one book on it. My t-shirt was sticking to my back.
The word Sales was written tidily but the letters were jammed together in the center of the paper, with all kinds of white space around them. Sure enough, the letter a had a hood on it. Pascal silently pointed out the dead giveaway with his finger.
My mouth went dry and my next words were hoarse.
“What now?”
“We confront her,” Merrilee said with deadly aim. “We find out what’s behind all this.”
“What? Now?” I asked, both hoarse and alarmed.
I looked at Pascal and even his eyes were wide, wide open.
“Yes, now,” Merrilee said as she pushed her glasses up higher on her nose.
Merrilee didn’t wait for us. She spun on her heels and strode down the main aisle toward the front desk where Loyola sat rearranging her bulletin board.
Pascal and I turned to each other.
“Do we wait here, or what?” he asked.
We peered past the stacks to see that Merrilee had almost made her entire way to the front desk. She did not look back or slow her stride.
“No, we’d better join her,” I said, without much bravery.
“I’ll follow you,” Pascal said, taking a step behind me.
I made my way down the aisle, straining to hear sounds of an interrogation. I was surprised to reach the front desk without hearing anything of the sort.
At least, not yet.
Instead, Merrilee seemed to be having a pleasant chat with Loyola about not much.
“Loyola was just rearranging her lost-and-found bulletin board,” Merrilee explained in a friendly tone as soon as we arrived. But as she spoke, she kept her eyes trained on Loyola. She was plotting something. I was dead certain of that.
“I see you’ve kept your favorite teacher’s comment up.”
I followed her lead and looked at Loyola’s bulletin board. There, still folded and pinned, was the front cover of Loyola’s essay about how she had not spent her summer vacation.
“What did your teacher write on the cover?” Merrilee asked sweetly.
She leaned across the desk to unpin the paper. She turned it around to face her, flattened out the folds and cleared her throat.
“Loyola, you are a gifted storyteller. Promise me that you’ll keep writing.”
She looked up at Loyola. “Speaking of writing,” Merrilee continued with alarming cheeriness, “we recently came across an interesting book.”
“You did?” Loyola asked, easing into the trap.
She looked past Merrilee to me and Pascal. We just stood like wordless lumps.
Like Wooster and Preeble.
“And you wouldn’t believe where we found it,” Merrilee said like silk.
“Where?” Loyola asked.
“A locker,” Merrilee said.
“That’s not unusual, is it?” Loyola said. “Isn’t that the kind of thing you would find in a locker? School supplies, books, gym clothes ... ”
Her voice drifted off because she began to busy herself by processing a pile of returned books.
“Not just any locker,” Merrilee continued. Her voice was no longer as friendly. It had hardened on the edges. She started to pound on every word, like Creelman had done with his fist on the table. “Trevor Tower’s locker.”
“Trevor Tower? My old grade-six classmate?” Loyola asked, still processing returned books.
“None other,” Merrilee said.
“What were you doing in Trevor’s locker? That’s a time capsule. You’re not supposed to open it for fifty years,” she said, not looking Merrilee in the eye.
“You know why!”
Merrilee’s bold accusation felt like a deadly blow. It swept across the entire first floor of the library, smashing against each and every stack all the way to the back where we had been sorting Creelman’s books. When I looked around, I half expected to see the stacks toppling this away and that, just like the gravestones back at the cemetery.
“What do you mean?” Loyola asked casually, but she stopped processing books.
Merrilee leaned toward Loyola, their faces barely apart.
“It was you. You wrote the secret codes in the mystery novels.”
“Secret codes?” Loyola repeated, but even I could see that she was pretending. She was just too calm.
“Don’t deny it,” Merrilee demanded.
Loyola opened her mouth as if to say something, but then paused. She studied Merrilee, then Pascal, then me.
“What gave me away?” she asked us, smiling as she said it.
Eleven
_____
Mystery Book Club
LOYOLA’S SMILE did not unnerve Merrilee one bit as she extracted her confession. I had never seen her so dead serious. Not in the cemetery. Not at the church. Not even while breaking into the locker.
“Penmanship gave you away,” she said. “Your writing on the labels that we’re sorting Creelman’s books by matches the writing used for the secret codes in the mystery novels.”
“Very clever,” Loyola said.
“Also,” she continued, “we discovered you in a yearbook photograph of the Queensview Mystery Book Club. You, Trevor and Mr. Easton.”
Loyola nodded along.
“And I’m guessing that it was Mr. Easton who wrote you the note you’ve got pinned to your bulletin board. In fact — ” Merrilee held up the paper to have a closer look at the writing on Loyola’s essay cover — “I’m sure this is the same handwriting as in the book we found in Trevor Tower’s locker. Tell the Club that Buster’s doing fine. Same loopy backward-slanted penmanship. Was Mr. Easton left-handed?”
My stomach gave a guilty lurch at the mention of Murray Easton’s book, which was actually still lying on my night table, not in Trevor’s locker.
“He was,” Loyola confirmed.
“And there’s one more thing I’m sure of,” Merrilee declared. “It was you who put Murray Easton’s book inside Trevor Tower’s time capsule. You probably put all those letters written to him in there, too.”
“No,” Loyola said, shaking her head. “You’re wrong about the letters.”
Merrilee stepped back and crossed her arms.
Pascal and I still stood behind Merrilee, taking it all in.
Loyola took the prized paper from Merrilee and folded it to pin to her bulletin board. When she turned back to face us, she sighed.
“Okay,” she said. “Time to explain.”
“Start with the Queensview Mystery Book Club,” Merrilee demanded, uncrossing her arms.
“That’s a good place to start,” Loy
ola agreed, clearing her throat. “As I told you, Mr. Easton was the best teacher I ever had. He came to Queensview Elementary when I started grade six, just the age you are now.”
“Why was he so great?” Merrilee asked.
“I don’t know,” Loyola said. “Maybe it was how he held so many of his classes outside. Maybe it was how he got us to really think about novels. Maybe it was the famous authors and interesting guest speakers he brought in to read to us. Maybe it was how he made writing fun and exciting. We were so proud to share our work out loud with each other. I guess it was all of those things.”
Loyola was describing the teacher I had already met in Murray Easton’s book.
“And he started a mystery book club?” Merrilee asked.
“Yes, he did. I can’t tell you the number of books we all read and discussed, but it was a lot.”
“Trevor Tower was a member,” Merrilee said.
“That’s right. And here’s where it gets interesting. For our community service duty, Trevor and I served on the Senior Citizens’ Pet Patrol.”
“The what?” Merrilee asked.
“The Senior Citizens’ Pet Patrol. We were able to sign up with the animal shelter. The shelter used to have a program where volunteers helped senior citizens by walking their dogs.”
“What does this have to do with Trevor Tower’s time capsule?” Merrilee asked.
“I’m getting to that,” Loyola said. “Every Wednesday, we used to pick up the dogs from the seniors in the program, and Trevor and I would walk their dogs in the park. But one of the seniors who signed up lived alone and had no dog. He claimed that he had lost his dog and that he wanted us to keep a lookout for it.”
“A lost dog?” Merrilee repeated.
“Yes. A lost dog with spots.”
I sucked in my breath. A spotted dog? There it was again! The name of Murray Easton’s novel. The epitaph in the book Creelman loaned me. And now this!
“Did you help him look for the dog?” I jumped in and asked.
“At first we did. But then we thought that maybe he was a bit senile. We thought he was making things up. And then one day when we dropped by the animal shelter, we learned that his son had moved him away to live nearer to the son’s family.”
Loyola paused. She took a sip from her water bottle.
“Go on,” Merrilee prodded.
“Later, Trevor saw it. A spotted dog. He rushed into the school to tell me. I ran outside with him to check it out.”
“Where was it?” I asked.
“Trevor said that he had last seen it by the school fence. So that’s where we headed.”
The Spotted Dog Last Seen, I silently repeated. The Spotted Dog Last Seen.
“And then?” Merrilee asked.
“We both saw it. A scruffy little thing with spots on its legs and face. And it sunk in. The senior citizen had been telling us the truth all along.”
“Did you track down the senior citizen? Tell him you saw his dog?” I asked.
“Yes, but he couldn’t take the dog where he was living. No dogs allowed. So he begged us to find the dog a new home.”
Loyola paused for another sip of water.
“The spotted dog was hard to catch. Eventually, it started hanging around the outdoor classes that Mr. Easton held.”
I shivered. It felt like I was back in the cemetery on that first day, waiting in the rain for the Brigade to arrive.
Loyola continued.
“It was about then that Mr. Easton decided to move back to Ferndale, to teach in his hometown. We were very sad. And Trevor, who had been assigned a time capsule at the end of grade six, offered to donate the space to the Queensview Mystery Book Club so that members could deposit their final projects for Mr. Easton inside.”
“What happened to the spotted dog?” I asked.
“Mr. Creelman finally caught it. And Mr. Easton adopted the dog to take back with him to Ferndale.”
I stopped to think. What had Murray Easton written by hand in his book?
Tell the Club that Buster’s doing fine!
Buster, the spotted dog!
“Well, at least that part worked out,” I said.
“It did in the end,” Loyola said. “Apparently, the dog was a handful. The senior citizen who owned the dog told us that he would read to it. He said that was the only way to calm the dog down.”
“Movie scripts,” I blurted without thinking.
Loyola looked up at me, eyebrows raised.
“That’s right. He’d read movie scripts to the dog for hours on end. Mr. Easton had to do that, too.”
“But The Spotted Dog Last Seen was published a year later. How did that novel get into the locker?” Merrilee asked.
“I ran into Mr. Easton at a book signing. He gave me a copy, which I read, and that gave me the idea to start a mystery book club of my own. I remembered Trevor’s locker combination, so I added the book.”
“That’s when you started donating books anonymously and writing secret codes in them,” Merrilee said.
Loyola nodded. “I’ve been doing it every year ever since. Quite a few students have now solved the codes,” she said proudly. “And read plenty of mystery books in the process as they found their way to Trevor’s locker.”
“Why’d you pick me?” Merrilee asked.
“Simple. You signed out a book about secret codes for your book report earlier this year, remember? That made you a good candidate.”
“Okay, so you get students to read a bunch of novels just like the Queensview Mystery Book Club, and that leads them to Trevor Tower’s locker, which contains Mr. Easton’s novel. Now, what about the pile of letters inside? Were those the last assignments?”
Good question, I thought. That stack of sealed letters in the locker all written to Mr. Easton. What could they be about?
“Not all of them. Just the earliest ones in the pile. Those ones are on the bottom.”
“Just the ones on the bottom? So the other letters must have been written by those who discovered the locker before us.”
“Correct,” Loyola said.
“Why would they write letters for a time capsule?” Merrilee asked.
“Why?” Loyola asked incredulously. “You haven’t read Mr. Easton’s book? The Spotted Dog Last Seen?”
“No,” Merrilee said, removing her glasses and cleaning the lenses with her shirttail. “Not yet.”
Loyola turned to me.
I gulped. I was about to be caught red-handed. I should not have blurted out, “Movie scripts.”
She knew I knew.
I took the tiniest step back. Loyola started to say something to me, but then returned her attention to Merrilee.
“You need to read the book,” Loyola said. She looked at Pascal and me. “All of you. It explains the last assignment. It explains everything.”
I thought back to the book on my night table. I was about three-quarters of the way through, and it was not explaining anything as far as I could see. Sure, it was about a teacher who was obviously based on Mr. Easton, who liked to teach outdoors, who had a crazy spotted dog that liked to be read to.
Unless ...
Unless something huge happened in the last few chapters. Something that would link everything together, tie everything up perfectly the way mystery novels always do.
I needed to get back to that book. I needed to finish reading it, even if it kept me up all night.
Loyola reached underneath her counter and laid three library copies of The Spotted Dog Last Seen on top.
“I thought all the copies were signed out,” Merrilee accused.
“They are. In your names,” Loyola said with a smile. “I’ve been expecting you.”
It was too much for me.
“Whoa. Look at the time,” I said, pointing at the wall cl
ock above the book returns.
I grabbed my copy and got out of there as fast as I could.
But not before rescuing Creelman’s book from the recycling table, the one with the crayon marks and the missing pages. I stuffed both books into my knapsack.
That night, right after dinner, I holed up in my bedroom and returned to the time capsule’s copy of The Spotted Dog Last Seen. It was hard to concentrate. I kept thinking that a major incident was going to leap out at me with every page turn. Nothing did.
And then, when it was quite late — eight minutes after midnight — I got to the chapter that nearly made me fall off my bed. I went to get a glass of water from the bathroom, then returned to my room and read the chapter all over again, slowly this time, so that I could memorize every detail.
Chapter 11.
In it, the teacher thinks back to a school where he had previously taught. It was in a nearby town. He misses that town and the students in that school very much, but he can never return. He goes on to explain why.
His recollection starts happily enough. He was going on a date. He had met her at the school where they both worked. She was teaching the grade fours. He was teaching the grade threes. They had lunch together in the teachers’ room every day for months and months, an entire school year, in fact. But when school was finally dismissed for the summer, he still had not proved brave enough to ask her out.
Then it was July, and the weather was hot and sticky. He went for an ice cream cone at the town’s only dairy bar and ran into her in the long lineup.
“What a scorcher,” he said, making small talk, his heart thumping madly.
“I’ll say,” she said. “I spent forever in the frozen aisle of the grocery store today.”
“I’m thinking of going to the movies tonight,” said the teacher, playing along, “just for the air conditioning.”
“Great idea! Can I come with you?” she asked.
“Oh,” said the teacher.
“Oh?” she repeated with a smile.
“Yes,” said the teacher, recovering. “I can pick you up. What’s a good time?”
“Eight,” she said. She wrote her address down on a napkin that had her lipstick smudge on the corner. “See you then.”
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