by Ed Ifkovic
Houdini bowed slightly. “Of course it is. But first I would like to walk around the school, if I might.”
He strolled the hallways, peering into classrooms, offices, standing on stairwell landings, though I noticed he did not go upstairs. He did walk into the auditorium and into the dressing rooms, and at one point he stood on the stage, down front, and seemed ready to do his magic act. He’d probably never met a stage he didn’t immediately dominate. I wondered if he’d be followed by a troupe of sword swallowers? Of fire-eaters? Where were the Siamese twins?
He wandered through the small school library, empty of students, and Miss Dunne, surprised as she shelved a book, actually gasped and dropped it to the floor.
“Houdini,” she exclaimed, and he laughed, bowing.
“All right, enough of this.” He turned to me and asked to be directed to the locked storeroom He stood there, contemplating, his eyes focused. Then he took Esther’s hand and leaned in to whisper something to her. Blushing a deep scarlet, Esther nodded and walked out of the building. “My lovely assistant has an assignment.”
What? To amass boughs of lilacs to be strewn at your feet? To hire a brass band?
Houdini faced the offending door, now locked. “You have a key?” he asked the principal. “Can you open it?”
Homer Timm sneered, “You can’t be of help?”
Houdini regarded him with narrow eyes. “I get out of situations, not into them.”
So the door was opened and Houdini peered at the knob, as well as the inside of the door. “Shut me in.” He paused, then seemed to speak to himself. “Ah, it locks when it closes.” He stepped into the dusty, dim space, and Caleb Stone slammed the heavy oak door shut. He jiggled the knob, but the door was locked.
“No key needed to lock it,” the chief said.
Yes, I believe that’s what Houdini just announced.
Everyone waited and my heart pounded. I noticed a sheepish Mr. McCaslin had slipped into the hallway, though he stood away from the rest of us. Obviously he didn’t want to miss this new scene in our play. We waited as three four five six minutes passed. No one said a word, expectant. Every so often there was pounding or scraping from within, and one time Houdini let out a low-throated groan. Good God, was he stumbling around in the dark?
Then, abruptly, the door flew open, and Houdini stepped into the hallway with a flourish.
“So?” Caleb Stone’s voice wavered.
“I’m playing with you,” Houdini said, cavalierly. “Opening this door is no trick.” He pointed to a knob on the inside of the door. “To get out all I had to do is to turn the knob.” He bowed. “This is no challenge.”
I realized that, as with his stage show, he delayed freeing himself for dramatic effect. Yes, I told myself-you build a scene craftily; you need to understand crescendo and climax.
Amos Moss grunted. “Ain’t a question of getting out anyway. It’s a question of how she got in.”
Houdini looked at him, “No, you’re wrong, sir. It is a question of how she got out. But we know she ain’t got out back into this hallway. Again, I’ll lock myself in.”
“Why?” Amos Moss asked.
Matthias Boon was scribbling furiously on his pad, and I wondered how he was going to write up this episode, though I knew my presence would be minimal, if mentioned at all.
Houdini stepped back in, and Caleb Stone closed the door. He looked irritated. This was all tomfoolery.
Again we waited. This time the minutes passed, perhaps ten, maybe fifteen. Everyone in the hallway was getting restless, and I noticed Principal Jones was leaning against the wall, looking drowsy, though Homer Timm stood like a sentry, spine erect, arms folded. One sleeve of his suit jacket was smeared with chalk. Now and then his eyes caught mine, though I couldn’t interpret the look: stony, quizzical, even a little sardonic. Miss Dunne had quietly joined us, abandoning her books for this impromptu theatrical. She kept away from Miss Hepplewhyte, who, of course, avoided Mr. McCaslin. Enemies, all.
We waited and waited.
And waited.
A scraping noise from within, the sound of a board snapped, splintered. Still toying with us?
“Maybe we should check on him,” Homer mumbled, but Caleb Stone’s look said, of course not.
I cleared my throat. “I think we should trust him.”
Silence in the hallway.
I heard the front door open, and I feared Christ Lempke would come lumbering in, filled with accusation and bile; but, surprisingly, Esther came rushing around the corner. “Come with me.” She practically sang the words.
Everyone trailed her outside, down the steps, alongside the building where I expected to see Houdini. But Esther kept moving, away from the building, beyond a copse of shrubbery, off a pathway into a bank of blue hemlock scrub. There, standing with arms folded, his hair all out of place, his clothing dusty and crumpled, was a beaming Houdini.
“Well, well, well,” Caleb Stone said. “I’ll be darned.”
I breathed a sigh of relief.
“It’s very simple,” Houdini announced as Esther moved beside him, taking her role as stage assistant a little too seriously.
Back inside the high school, standing outside the storeroom, Houdini described what he said was obvious to him. “I told myself there had to be another way out. If she ain’t come out one way, she comes out another.” In walking around the building, he’d noticed the proximity of the storeroom to the auditorium wing. In the back wall of the locked room was a panel, perhaps five feet high and two feet wide, hinged but latched on the other side. It opened to another storeroom on the other side.
“A little pressure on the panel,” he informed us, “undoes a latch that, once sprung, lets the panel door swing open.”
Everyone stared at the small opening. Why was it there?
Houdini explained how it worked. The panel opened to the other room, which opened onto a small landing leading down into the auditorium. From there, he said, it was easy to walk along the side of the stage to the back of the building, a route that led to a back door. Then he was outside.
“Is easy,” he explained. “Once I saw how close the auditorium was to this wing of the school, I knew there was a way.” He sighed. “That young girl simply walked out of the school through a door. Simple. No mystery.”
“Yes, but how did she know it was there?” I asked. “I mean, how did she even get into the storeroom?”
“That’s the question,” Caleb Stone agreed. “Someone helped her.”
“Impossible.” From Miss Hepplewhyte.
The chief went on, “Someone had to tell her-or somehow entice her into this room.”
My mind was racing. “Interestingly, Frana seems to have walked the other way first, past Mr. McCaslin’s classroom, waving to a friend. Then she scurried back to the end of the hallway to this storeroom. She planned it.”
Mr. McCaslin spoke up. “I did see her walk by.” He looked rattled.
Caleb Stone noted, “If you stand in the storeroom, you can’t tell the panel’s there. The latch is on the other side.”
Houdini nodded. “It was easy for me to undo it. But someone else…”
“Someone would have to have opened it from the other side.” A pause. “Someone was waiting for her.” My voice was rising.
“Who knew about this passageway?” Caleb Stone asked.
Both principal and vice-principal shook their heads because there was no reason for anyone to know of it. Homer Timm grumbled, “We have enough to do policing wandering students. We hardly have time to explore the catacombs that wend their way through this building.”
“But someone did,” Caleb Stone insisted. “And it warn’t Frana who discovered it. That’s for certain.” He wanted to see what was on the other side, and the group moved around the corner and into the auditorium. The chief walked up three steps to the landing and into what was clearly the janitor’s storeroom-shelves filled with mops and brooms and pails, as well as hammers and saws and planes
. The cluttered paraphernalia of school housekeeping.
“This is where August Schmidt keeps his tools,” Homer Timm told us. “This is his space.”
“Is he back at work?” Caleb asked.
The principal shook his head. “No, he’s too frightened to return. And we can’t allow it. The students would be alarmed.”
That was news to me. I imagined the timid German at home, awaiting arrest for murder. Worse, this storeroom yawned before us, one man’s domain, and its contents seemed to suggest guilt.
Caleb Stone peered into the room. “Who goes in here beside Mr. Schmidt?”
“No one.” From Homer Timm.
But I interrupted. “Well, students rehearsing our plays would sometimes run up for hammers…”
Mr. McCaslin added, “And, you know, nails and…” He shrugged his shoulders.
“Show me how the panel works,” Caleb Stone demanded.
All of us pushed closer, peering. Houdini walked up the stairs and into the janitor’s storeroom, and I moved next to him. “There really is nothing hidden here,” he pointed out. “Look.” He showed us a panel built into a wall. “It looks like one of the series of panels that make up the back wall. Very basic. With a simple latch to close it. Another storeroom. Whoever built it probably figured there might be a need for moving from one space to the other. A place to put unused furniture.” I noticed that a small table was set against the panel, covering part of it. Closed and latched, the panel became part of the wall. Examining it, I realized it was easy to not see the latch. Would August Schmidt have known this? Houdini undid the latch, and suddenly there was the other secret room. I stepped closer to examine it, then I backed out as others moved up the steps to look. I stood on the small landing that led out of the janitor’s room and down to the auditorium. If I craned my neck, I could glimpse the back of the stage. From the landing I spotted the work smocks and caps hanging on hooks, aprons lying on a table, even boots placed along the wall-all the possessions of August Schmidt.
Caleb Stone and Amos Moss nodded at each other. I sensed what they were thinking-Here it is. It has to be August Schmidt. That unassuming man, that sad soul who played his role well, masking his true murderous intent, a man who hatched some nefarious plot, discovering the unused storeroom, opening that latched panel. Somehow, he seduced the innocent Frana, confusing her, enticing her, promising wonders.
That struck me as nonsense. Wouldn’t someone have seen him? Who knew there’d be no one watching? But these men wanted to believe Frana planned an escape, slipping into that room at two o’clock to meet an anxious Schmidt, the two running out the back into the woods, laughing as they escaped.
The scenario was impossible. Someone waited for Frana. But not the meek Schmidt. What life in New York could he offer her? Absurd! No Sherman House drummer was familiar with the school building. But it could be anyone in town, some old-timer who knew the school, maybe even a former student or teacher who long ago discovered the locked storeroom when visiting the janitor’s room for a pail or a broom, and, years later, now an “older” man, suddenly found a use for such information.
I turned to Houdini, who was now standing apart from the others. He looked tired, drawn; these exercises carried a heavy toll for the man. Concentration and imagination, indeed.
“Thank you,” I said. He was waiting for someone to acknowledge him.
Caleb Stone gave his thanks, and Houdini bowed. He turned to go. “My work here is done.” He smiled at me. “This was not really an escape, Miss Ferber. This was just a discovery I made. You could have done this. This is just a door in a wall. A panel. That’s all. No one bothered to look.”
Chief Stone interrupted, sheepish. “It was common sense, really. But it never occurred to me. We never came back to look.” He scratched his head. “I’m feeling a little foolish.”
Houdini interrupted him. “Why should you think that way?”
“Well, it was right in front of our eyes.” The chief’s head twisted around. “For Heaven’s sake, a storeroom door. I never thought…”
“No, it wasn’t.” Houdini was kind. “There was no latch visible from the inside, sir. You see, I’m always looking for means to escape. That’s the way my mind works.”
“But, my God, a doorway…”
Quietly Houdini assured him, “Once you’d reexamined the room, you’d have found it. Surely.”
The chief started to say something, but Houdini held up his hand. “It’s just that I got here first. And, you know, I do like to put on a show.”
“But…”
“No trickery, really. You didn’t need the great Houdini for this. You needed to open your eyes.”
I shook my head. “What was obvious was obviously not obvious.”
Boon frowned at me.
Houdini’s look took us all in. “Isn’t it strange, then? With all my elaborate escapes and tricks and illusions, I find a door in a wall…and, well…you may remember this one day as my finest performance.”
Chapter Thirteen
I headed home from the Crescent office late in the afternoon to take my father for his walk. I passed in front of the fountain near City Park, where Hosea Thigpen or Mad Otto was declaring perdition and wrongdoing and the wages of unrepented sin. No one was around to hear him and I doubted whether he knew I was there. Usually I paid him little mind, but today I paused and watched him gesturing and posturing, eyes wide and teary. I wondered what drove a man to become so monomaniacal, so maddened, so removed from reason and common sense?
A man like Houdini practiced deliberation, logic, order, discipline…and a spirit of freewheeling fancy. His geography was always the world out there. Somehow Houdini had realized that life was magic-not just the pyrotechnics he enacted on stage but the wonder of his days. He saw everything as adventure, as thrill. Though he dressed like an out-of-town drummer, when he moved through the streets he became an explorer searching for uncharted continents.
Appleton was filled with vagrant souls whom no one bothered-Mad Otto the Prophet, Minnie the Hatrack, Isaac Solid who drove hay wagons up College Avenue and hurled lumps of horse manure at fleeing matrons. Mary McGregor wandered the lanes with a bundle of toys wrapped in a blanket hugged to her chest as she told passersby of her new-born infant; Barry Knott, one hundred years old, fell asleep in the outhouse every day. They wandered and no one thought ill of them. People here assumed goodness in others, even among the lunatics. No one locked their doors at night because they believed no one would ever think to rob them.
Until now, that is.
Until now.
Frana Lempke’s murder had altered the comfortable landscape. The Ferber household was never locked, nor were our neighbors’ homes. As I walked along busy College Avenue, I noticed something new in town. A well-dressed businessman checked his gold watch, a woman shopping in Voight’s filled baskets with tonic and hairpins, an East End society matron picked over notions for whist prizes at My Store, children pumped hoops across the wooden sidewalks or played leap frog in the park-they had all become worriers now. They started when you approached quickly from behind. They watched you. Or was I just imagining it? Who do you trust when that golden bowl has just been shattered?
In my talks with folks, I sensed panic. Would this murder plague the town, unsolved, throughout the summer? Merchants worried, and I’d overheard one fussy shopkeeper berating Caleb Stone, demanding the murder be solved by the Fourth of July. Appleton’s huge patriotic celebration, barges and fireworks on the Fox River, was in jeopardy. Hordes of out-of-towners crowded the avenues, spending their money, and the specter of heinous murder might prove a damper on the festivities.
Chief Stone had muttered, “Don’t you worry, sir. Appleton will be the same old town by then.”
But at that moment I knew in my heart that Appleton would never be the same town again. The awful blemish of such a crime had stolen some of our soul.
I suspected Houdini’s revelations might have fueled Matthias Boon’s intoxic
ation because, back in the city room, he wrote his copy in a white heat-and hummed as he did it. Somehow he’d convert that prosaic discovery into sensational headline. At my own desk, I had trouble focusing on the nonsense I was typing.
Despite the discovery, Frana Lempke’s murder still remained a mystery.
Suddenly I thought of Jake Smuddie. High school footballers lingered after school in the auditorium, running in the hallways, up and down the stairs. We all did. I sat on those very steps leading up to August Schmidt’s storeroom when I worked on my part in A Scrap of Paper. Students often drifted up there for paintbrushes, for brooms, for…I stopped. Anyone could have spotted that panel, that latched door. But most would pay it no mind. There was no reason to. No one would think it a convenient hiding place. Again, my mind flashed to Jake Smuddie, an image of the brawny, tough boy with his amazing hands around Frana’s neck. God no! I recoiled. Who else? What former student, now grown into a man, inheritor of that secret knowledge of that panel, came back to use it to lure the hapless Frana? Or…a present student. Or…who?
Even before I turned onto North Street, I heard my father’s rich laughter. He was sitting with Gustave Timm who was telling him some anecdote, his hands flapping like wild birds. My father leaned in, enjoying it. I was happy. So many afternoons I dropped back home to check on my father, only to find Gustave Timm and Jacob Ferber sitting next to each other in the parlor or on the porch, the two men huddled together, Gustave puffing on a Golden Night cigarette. He’d met my father last spring when I brought my family to the theater, my desperate attempt to connect him to something. How deeply he’d once loved the theater! But he sat stiffly throughout the evening. Unable to view the actors onstage, baffled by the laughter from the audience, he got rattled. We left at intermission, and Gustave Timm, standing in front of his theater, had offered to escort my father home. The afternoon visits began, the two men yammering on and on about politics and Appleton and even, as I once overheard, the outlandish price of coffee. Gustave confided his dislike-his nagging fear-of Cyrus P. Powell, who owned the Lyceum and was thus his boss. Once I’d heard him say, “I was brought up to respect authority, especially one’s employer, but the man always seems to find fault with me. He’s always checking on me. I turn around and he’s there.” He sounded like a whiny child, freshly reprimanded. “I fear Homer speaks against me.”