“What did you do after the meeting Friday before you went home?”
Billy thought. “I threw my coat over a bench while I straightened up the drawer and locked, and then went to the lavatory to wash my hands. A lot of kids were there, joshing, and I may have been gone ten or fifteen minutes.”
“Whom did you see, coming or going?”
“Gee! I can’t tell, fifty, I guess.”
“And you were the last to leave the library?”
“Yes, before it was locked.”
“It’s a mystery surely. But I must go. See you later.”
The loss troubled Billy sorely, and the morning wore on dully, his books a burden, his recitations poor. At noon he waited again for Erminie. When he did not see her go out of the building as usual, he went upstairs, and watching his opportunity at a telephone when no one was near, called her up at her home.
Her mother answered. Erminie was gone, Billy could not learn where. Indeed the tremulous voice at the other end of the wire sounded as if the mother herself did not know. Above her words and his own he heard her husband’s voice swearing, and the curses were coupled with Erminie’s name. But of the scraps he heard, the one that electrified him was this: “Al Short showed me that paper—”
Instantly Billy divined that he meant the circular. He was speaking with a third person in the next room. “Don’t you have an idea where Erminie—”