Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. No. 75, April 1959, British Edition

Lee Sheridan Cox The Male Io Glasses

Remember “A Simple Incident; or, Andy Blair and Willie Perkins, Private Eyes” in EQMM’s June ’55 issue? Well, here is “The Truth About Ronald; or, The Second Case of Blair & Perkins, Boy Sleuths” — and utterly charming!

Ronald Pruitt is the kind of person that if a teacher wants to send a note to another teacher she picks Ronald to deliver it. He is also the type who not only reads the note but looks in everybody’s locker on the way down the hall. What I mean, Ronald Pruitt is a born creep.

I keep telling Willie Perkins how having Ronald to guard against all our lives has toughened us up and prepared us for the detective business. But lately Ronald has been making a certain remark about Willie, and Willie is getting so he can’t see the bright side any more. So he has been urging me to write up our second big case and let everybody know the truth about Ronald.

What has happened, we had an assignment in English last week to write A Simple Incident, and I turned in a story on Willie’s and my first big case as private eyes, which Miss Hawkins, our seventh grade English teacher as everybody knows, praised for three minutes and eight seconds. I know this for a fact because Willie, who is pretty scientific, timed it. It was the longest anyone was praised. Ronald was praised one minute and forty-seven seconds. So Ronald is mad and he has been going around saying about me that the reason I asked Miss Hawkins not to read my paper in class is that I’m the kind of writer who makes it up.

But this certain remark he is making about Willie is even worse.

To explain beforehand, so no one will get the wrong idea about Willie, when we entered Junior High School this year, everything was different from grade school. We didn’t know our way around the building, and we had a whole bunch of teachers’ dispositions to get used to instead of just one. The first day when we got to our last class, which was Health and Safety, the teacher wasn’t there when the bell rang. We were all walking around kind of getting the feel of the room when the teacher appeared in the doorway and yelled in her scary voice, “In your seats!”

Willie, who was up at the pencil sharpener getting his pencils ready, said later he had a chill go clear down his backbone. He made a run for a seat and who should be making a run from a different direction but Jackie Carr. Running into Jackie is just like hitting an inner-spring mattress. Willie bounced off Jackie and shot backwards with his arms waving right into the teacher, which she may have taken as a personal insult. When everything got settled down, she told us that we were to be in our seats when the bell rang or else, but she concentrated the telling most on Willie.

Well, the next day Willie and I got to Health and Safety a couple of minutes early, and Willie asked the teacher if he could go to the rest-room. He got back to his seat just as the bell was ringing. Then at mid-period, when the teacher said we’d have a study period, Willie, who was looking sweaty, asked could he look for the restroom again because he couldn’t find it the first time.

The teacher rushed Willie out and showed him where to go and told him that when he had permission he could ignore her rule about being in his seat when the bell rang. Willie said she acted helpful, but she still scared him so much he hated to think what this class was going to do to his own personal health and safety. Anyway, what Ronald has been saying around is that Willie is the kind of detective that can’t even find a rest-room. Which is a lie since Willie is a good detective, as everyone will see in this true story coming up.

Because when Willie kept urging me to write our second case and let it be read in class, I got to thinking how Ronald might have a stroke if I wrote up a bunch of Willie and my cases and got famous and also how I’d be ready ahead of time for these writing assignments we keep having. I don’t know what the next assignment is to be called yet, but just about any title will fit this story. There’s just one drawback. Willie thinks maybe all this thinking and sitting will stunt my growth, so he’s going to measure my height and muscles before and after each story to keep a scientific check. If I seem to be getting stunted, I will have to drop the whole idea. I’d rather be big than famous.

Well, to go back to the beginning of our detective career, after we got paid three dollars twice right there on the playground in front of everybody for successfully solving our first case (this was two years ago in the fifth grade), we were hired for several minor jobs. We located missing articles: Jackie Carr’s Boy Scout knife, which it turned out his little sister had sold to Freddie Clark for two cents; Jackie Carr’s baseball glove, which it turned out his little sister had sold to Freddie Clark for fifteen cents; Jackie Carr’s bicycle, which it turned out his little sister had sold to Freddie Clark for sixty-three cents; and finally, Jackie Carr’s little sister, which it turned out he was supposed to be taking care of only he forgot about her until time for his mother to get home, and we found her sitting in front of the doctor’s office with dark glasses and a cup and sign saying, Help The Blind. She had seventeen cents in the cup.

Jackie was our best customer. Only it got so he was calling us all the time to locate something, and then he always charged it. The only job he paid for was when we found James, his dog, who had been missing two days. This was a minor case, but it proves how fast Willie developed as a detective. James wasn’t the kind of dog you wanted to find, but Jackie swore he would not charge it to his account with Blair & Perkins, Private Eyes. He swore in blood. We had to cut Jackie’s little sister’s finger because Jackie was afraid to cut his, and it had to be his family’s blood to be legal. And Jackie’s little sister likes to be in on everything.

We started the investigation in our usual methodical way. Willie went over to Freddie Clark’s to look around, while I started questioning Jackie. I didn’t have much luck because Jackie’s mind wanders around so much, until I asked if James had seemed upset lately. Jackie said James had been steady as a rock, and then he gave us — Willie had come back — our first clue. He said that twice when Mrs. Dewey had come calling on his mother, James was lying in the driveway and instead of moving when old Mrs. Dewey drove her car right up to his nose, he just sort of bunched himself up growling, and Mrs. Dewey finally had to back out instead of going on around the drive.

I said I thought this was a clue. I said we had to get into James’s mind.

Willie said if he was a dog that had just bluffed a car, he would try a train next. Which just shows the kind of detective Willie is. Because, sure enough, there was James pretty dead down on the railroad tracks. Jackie said he could just see old James standing in the middle of the track not giving an inch, and he was so pleased that he borrowed some money from his little sister and paid us in banana splits.

We were getting a lot of practice with Jackie but no cash, so we went to see Willie’s Aunt Gertrude, who needed a detective more than anyone else we could think of, and she gave us the job of finding her glasses which she had mislaid and couldn’t see to find. Willie located them right away. He sat down on a table to think over where they might be and there they were — under him.

You find out a lot about human nature in the detective business. Aunt Gertrude didn’t even offer to pay us after we had found the glasses. Willie said the way she carried on about a little crack you could hardly notice in one lens you’d have thought he sat on her eyeball.

We had counted on a lot of business after our first case was so successful, so you can see how disappointing it was to have bankrupts like Jackie Carr and welshers like Aunt Gertrude for our only clients. And the worst thing was that we live in a town where I can’t remember anybody ever getting even close to being murdered, except maybe Willie and me by our fathers that time we found the keys in Willie’s father’s car and drove halfway around the block before Aunt Gertrude came along taking our side of the road.

And then, right when everything was blackest, Homer XVIII, Willie’s frog, got loose and started our second big case. Willie almost always has a frog on him. He kept Homer in his desk at school, and at recess time on this particular day when he was taking Homer out for a breath of fresh air, Homer got away behind a table and a filing cabinet in the back of the room.

Willie told me about it later. He was under the table trying to reach Homer when Miss Easter, our geography and history teacher, and Miss Crockett, another teacher, came back into the room. They didn’t see Willie, and naturally he kept quiet because the day he had lifted the lid on his desk and Homer had unexpectedly jumped on Betsy Miller, Miss Easter had taken Betsy’s part, which was really a surprise. I mean, here Miss Easter wore eyeglasses that had a sort of butterfly thing in jewels on one corner of the frame. Willie had checked up on the name of it in a scientific book, and as Willie said, you’d think anybody who would go around all the time with a male Io up over one eye would be fond of wild life. But she had told Willie very definitely to leave Homer at home, which was impossible. Willie’s mother is against frogs.

So Willie kept quiet waiting for them to leave and he couldn’t help hearing this conversation about Mr. Barrie. As everybody knows, Mr. Barrie was always talking to Miss Easter in the hall and coming into her room on errands. He got his own class taught and spent a lot of time in our room too, which shows how much the tax payers were getting for their money out of Mr. Barrie. Also, he’s a teacher who tells you about important things. For instance, one day he brought in a praying mantis, which he said ate flies, and Freddie Clark happened to have some dead ones wrapped up in paper in his desk. Freddie is very saving. But Miss Easter, instead of being pleased, made Freddie clean out his desk, and then as an afterthought made Willie clean his, too.

That’s the kind of person Miss Easter is. She is all right. She looks kind of like Marilyn Monroe with glasses, only not so plump. But she was always having desk inspection. Mr. Barrie didn’t care what you kept in your desk. And he was nicer to Miss Easter than she was to him, which was funny since he was my pick of the two.

Anyway, in this conversation Miss Easter was criticizing Mr. Barrie and praising Tod Reed, a creep who works in his father’s bank and chases girls, as everybody knows. Willie said it was plain to see that Miss Easter really hated Mr. Barrie, which was funny since everybody else in the world, I guess, liked him. Except for owning a Jaguar, Tod Reed couldn’t hold a candle to Mr. Barrie, who owned a 1949 Chevy. But Willie said Miss Easter couldn’t find anything good to say about Mr. Barrie except that he was insufferable. This is true, because although Mr. Barrie is getting middle-aged, at least twenty-seven by now, he is healthy and has a lot of muscle.

Willie, who can get things pretty mixed-up, said it seemed to him Miss Easter was mad because Mr. Barrie wasn’t mad when she got friendly with Tod Reed. Willie admitted this did not make sense, but he said none of the conversation hung together much, although they kept using the same words over and over, like men and husbands. The only thing that was absolutely clear, Willie said, was that Miss Easter hated Mr. Barrie because he didn’t know his own mind.

Willie said Miss Easter really looked down on men who didn’t know their own minds. And she said the men who got ahead in the world were the ones who made things happen, not those who just waited for something to happen. Willie was relieved when they left the room and he could crawl out from under the table with Homer XVIII and get back in his seat. He said it was a really punk recess, all things considered.

But that afternoon, when we were going home from school, I got to thinking about Miss Easter saying you should make things happen, instead of just waiting for them to happen.

“You know,” I told Willie, “I think she’s got something there. If we could just figure out how to start a case that would get everybody’s attention, then we could solve it and build up our reputation.”

I was remembering something I read once where somebody sent a letter to a lot of people saying, “All is discovered. Get out of town” — and how if we sent that to the most suspicious people in town, then when they left, we could work on why they beat it out of town. I didn’t want to tell Willie about this yet though, because Willie is the type that always wants to get started fast, and I thought it needed some thinking over. But the next morning during recess Willie came up to me looking as if he’d just won the hundred yard dash.

“I got it,” he whispered. “About making things happen. It came to me just like that. C’mon around here.”

We went around to the back of the building where we had found a loose brick we could pull out and there was a little place where we kept things we might need any minute, like water pistols and gum. Willie looked over his shoulder like in “I Led Three Lives,” then jerked out the brick.

I almost died. I’d have recognized that male Io anywhere.

“Miss Easter’s glasses!” I said.

“Boy, was that a good idea of yours,” said Willie.

“My idea?” I said. “I’m for law and order.”

“Sure we are,” said Willie. “And now we can prove it. It came on me like a flash. Just now I was sneaking back in the room to get Homer, and there were Miss Easter’s glasses lying on her desk, and I remembered what a racket Aunt Gertrude made about hers and yet how it wouldn’t be stealing to take them because who would want anyone else’s glasses? So now we find Miss Easter’s glasses for her and build up our reputation just like you said.”

Well, I could see it from Willie’s point of view. But then I got to seeing it from my father’s point of view. Willie said Miss Easter herself would approve because basically it was her own idea. But I said if Willie’s dad ever found out about it, what would his basic idea be, and he was twice as big as Miss Easter. So then Willie got to seeing it from his dad’s point of view, and we decided to put the glasses back.

We didn’t get a chance. I had them in my pocket ready to put them on her desk when we went in from recess, but I couldn’t get near it. Miss Crockett was running around looking on all the book shelves and tables and filing cabinets, and Miss Easter was opening and shutting her desk drawers and looking under and behind everything on her desk.

I was getting so nervous that it was a relief when she gave up the search and started geography recitation. Boy, her eyes are not worth a nickel! She had Freddie Clark point out the Euphrates River on the map, and when he pointed at the Nile River, she said, “Very good.” I think she was afraid we would find out she couldn’t see us because she kept telling Jackie Carr to pay attention, which is always a pretty safe thing to say. But once he was. And Ronald Pruitt looked cross-eyed four times when he recited, and you could tell she didn’t even know it.

I didn’t get a chance to put the glasses back in the afternoon either, and having them in my pocket was hard on my nerves. After lunch Miss Easter asked the class if anyone knew where they might be, and I almost died when Willie held his hand up. But he just suggested maybe she had laid them on the window sill and they had fallen out into the bushes. Miss Easter was trying everything, so she sent Willie out to look, and he looked all through history lesson. Willie hates history because it’s all over. Besides, he wasn’t as worried as I was, since the glasses weren’t making a bulge in his pocket.

But I had heard there was going to be a teachers’ meeting after school, so just as soon as they marched us out that afternoon, Willie and I hung around for about fifteen minutes, then sneaked back into the building. We could hear the Principal up in the room where they hold meetings to talk about us, but we peeped around Miss Easter’s door just to be sure the coast was clear, and who should be cleaning the blackboard but that creep Ronald Pruitt. He is always doing this to get in with the teacher. He has probably washed more blackboards than the average janitor.

So Willie and I slipped into Mr. Barrie’s room next door to talk things over. And then I remembered that right after lunch, when some of the teachers were hunting for the glasses again, Mr. Barrie had offered, if they did not turn up before evening, to drive Miss Easter home from school and take care of getting her car home, since she could not see good enough to drive. Miss Easter had said in an unfriendly tone that she would ride with Miss Crockett, but Miss Crockett said that unfortunately she had to stay and grade papers after the teacher’s meeting. For some reason Miss Crockett winked at Mr. Barrie. So Miss Easter said perhaps she’d better just call a taxi anyway. So Mr. Barrie laughed and said after she got her glasses back, he was willing to remember that a state of war — and at that point Miss Easter looked hard at us kids who were standing around interested and told us to go to our seats and the bell hadn’t even rung.

Anyway, I decided since Mr. Barrie was the one stuck with driving her home, I would put the glasses on his desk. That way he could find them, and it would save him the trip. After we got outside again, Willie complained because he said the whole thing had caused even more excitement than he had hoped, and we were losing the chance of a lifetime. But, personally, I was glad it was all over.

You can imagine how I felt next morning when there was Miss Easter still bumping into things. Willie and I could hardly believe our own eyes! There was a regular search going on all over the building with even the janitors looking, because Miss Easter said that at first she had thought she laid them on her desk but now the more she tried to remember, the less she was sure where she had taken them off.

“What’s going on anyway?” said Willie when we got together at recess. “Do you suppose Mr. Barrie found out Miss Easter hates him, so he’s paying her back by keeping her glasses?”

“That’s impossible,” I said, “because he’s stuck with driving her home. Somebody took those glasses before he got back in his room.”

“Then there is a thief in school,” said Willie very pleased, “an honest-to-goodness, lowdown thief.”

“And we got a case,” I said. “We’re responsible for those glasses.”

“I don’t feel responsible,” said Willie. “We put them back.”

“I mean because we’re the only private-eye detectives in school,” I said.

“What I mostly feel responsible for,” said Willie, “is Ronald making all that money.”

What he meant, Ronald had brought a bunch of comic books to school and was renting them at two cents a magazine. The day before, when Ronald was looking cross-eyed, he had been checking on just how near-sighted Miss Easter was in case the information would ever come in handy. I mean, most people like to look cross-eyed just for fun. But Ronald is the kind of person who always has a purpose, a deep purpose. And sure enough, he’d been able to pass the comic books around the room and collect all morning, and Miss Easter hadn’t noticed a thing except to compliment us on how quiet we were. I will admit they were good comic books, all pretty gory.

Anyway, Willie and I decided to get together later and work on our theories. That is, Willie already had a theory that the jewels on the male Io were real and that an international gang of jewel thieves had heard about it. I didn’t have any theory yet, but I figured I’d have one by noon.

But I thought all day, and the only person I could think of who would have a reason for taking Miss Easter’s glasses was Willie. Which shows what a tough case this really was. That evening Willie and I were sitting on the curb in front of my house thinking some more, when Miss Easter and Mr. Barrie drove by with Ronald Pruitt. They all waved to us. We watched as they drove up Ronald’s driveway.

“Look at that,” said Willie. “That’s what you get when you wash the blackboard. He wouldn’t be such a teacher’s pet if she knew he made forty-six cents today renting comic books.”

Mr. Barrie turned the car around after letting Ronald out and they drove past and waved again, looking very smiley.

“Look at that,” said Willie. “I don’t get it. Driving to school with him and to lunch and home in the afternoon after everything she said! Somebody ought to tell Mr. Barrie how she hates him. Maybe she stole those glasses herself to save on gas.”

“No,” I said. “You got to admit that even though she doesn’t like Homer and Mr. Barrie, you can’t figure her as a thief. But there are a lot of queer things about this case. I keep having the funny feeling something is going to happen. To us, I mean. It keeps me from concentrating. I don’t like Ronald’s look. Did you notice his expression when he went by just now?”

“Yeah,” said Willie. “He looked that way at Freddie’s birthday party when Homer VII turned up in the bottom of the pitcher of lemonade, and I got spanked just because Homer was my frog.”

“And the time someone let the air out of my uncle’s front tires and left my tool kit by the wheel,” I said.

“He had that same expression that time at Children’s Day Exercises,” said Willie, “when you and Betsy Miller were singing a duet and a garter snake somebody put in your pocket crawled on Betsy right in the middle of a high note.”

Willie and I know Ronald, all right. Whenever he gets a certain look, it means something unpleasant is sure to happen to an innocent bystander, namely Willie or me.

“He would be thinking up something right now when we have to keep our mind on the case,” said Willie. “Do you suppose he is planning to find the glasses himself and muscle us out of the detective business?”

“He doesn’t want them found,” I said. “His comic book business is too good.” And that’s when the idea hit me. “Willie!” I said.

“Don’t bust my eardrum,” said Willie in a sort of depressed way. Ronald is a depressing subject.

“When we go swimming,” I said, “does Ronald ever go in the water first?”

“Of course not,” said Willie. “He waits until someone else sees how cold it is. Everybody knows that.”

“At scout camp when Jackie Carr is cook, does Ronald ever take the first bite?”

“You know he doesn’t,” said Willie. “He never takes a chance. What are you getting at?” he asked me.

“Well, he brought those comic books to school this morning!” I said. “How’d he know Miss Easter wouldn’t find her glasses all of a sudden and catch him in the act?”

This was really funny. I mean, Ronald is real careful. Willie got the point right away, but he didn’t get the answer. He stared at me with his mouth open. This was the time we looked the most like two detectives.

“He was cleaning blackboards yesterday afternoon,” I said. “He probably went snooping around the rooms during teachers’ meeting.”

Willie slapped himself so hard that accidentally, as he discovered later, he killed Homer XVIII. None of Willie’s frogs live very long. “Andy,” he said, “as a detective, you are a natural-born. Boy, what a brain! We got it. Ronald is the thief.”

“But how are we going to prove it?” I said.

“You could wrestle him down tomorrow at recess and go through his pockets. I’ll watch for teachers.”

“Ronald wouldn’t have the evidence on him. He wouldn’t take a chance. What we got to do is get into his mind. He’s planning something.”

“Well, I ain’t getting into no mind like that,” said Willie. “Imagine him stealing those glasses! How lowdown can you get? Besides, I get into James’s mind and now it’s your turn.”

So we agreed that next day in school I would take the dirty job and concentrate on the inside of Ronald’s head and Willie would keep an eye on his hands and feet. But twenty-four hours later we had to admit we were not any closer to figuring out what Ronald had done with the glasses or just what he was planning. All day he had tended to his comic book business and when he wasn’t making change, he was making a good impression. Ronald is the type who likes to wave his hand in the air and recite. But all the time he had this look I mentioned that he gets when something is going to happen to Willie or me. It would have made anybody but us nervous.

We were talking about this on the way home from school that day when suddenly Willie slapped his pockets. “Jeepers,” he said, “I was so busy keeping an eye on Ronald that I forgot and left Homer XIX in my desk. I’ve got to go back for him. He hates school so far.”

As it turned out for us, it was a good thing Willie was absent-minded that day. We decided it would be more interesting to go back through the window. Our classroom was on the ground floor, but when we’d worked our way around to it behind the shrubbery we found that the windows were too high up for Willie. But I could make it easy if Willie got on his back.

I climbed up and looked in the room. There was Ronald Pruitt washing the blackboard and Miss Easter grading papers. Everything was quiet except the sound of Ronald swishing the sponge across the board. It was funny. Ronald kept looking over his shoulder at Miss Easter and washing the same piece of blackboard over and over again.

“My back’s breaking,” Willie whispered. “What’s keeping you?”

Just then Miss Easter left the room. The minute the door swung to, Ronald shot over to Freddie Clark’s desk. He reached down under Freddie’s books and pulled something out. I couldn’t see what it was. Then he went to Willie’s desk and lifted the lid. Right at this point Willie’s back gave way. However, we didn’t make any noise because luckily for us I landed on Willie’s head. Willie’s worst fault as a detective is wanting to talk all the time. So while I was still on his head I whispered to him to be still, because Ronald was in Willie’s desk and we had to find out why. It turned out Willie was too stunned to talk anyway.

Pretty soon Ronald went down the walk carrying the brief case which he had brought the comic books to school in. He had this look so strong now you could practically hear him ticking. We waited until he was out of sight, then Willie got on his hands and knees again and I climbed in through the window.

I had just opened Willie’s desk when I heard Miss Easter’s voice in the hall. I wanted to run, but I didn’t. A detective stays cool, even if he’s wrapped up in cement and thrown into the river. So although Willie’s desk had about everything in it and I wasn’t sure exactly what I was looking for, and although Miss Easter’s voice was getting louder, I kept on investigating. I had to. There had to be some reason for Ronald running from Freddie’s to Willie’s desk so fast.

Miss Easter had almost reached the door when down in the corner of Willie’s desk, under a cheese sandwich, I saw a glasses case. I grabbed it and just made it through the window as Miss Easter came back into the room. It was a close shave. When Willie saw the expression on my face as I came through the window, he naturally left in a hurry, and we ran until we got to the alley behind my house. Then we opened the case — and there were Miss Easter’s glasses.

Well, we had solved the case and found the glasses and proved Ronald was the thief, but we went to school the next morning feeling pretty depressed. We couldn’t inform even on Ronald, even though he was fixing things so that an innocent person like Willie would get blamed. Besides, who would believe us? So it looked as if all we could do was slip the glasses back to Miss Easter, and no one would ever know what good detectives were or the truth about Ronald.

But it turned out different because of Mr. Barrie hanging around Miss Easter’s desk until after the bell rang. I’d have taken a chance on putting the glasses back if only Miss Easter had been there, but Mr. Barrie’s eyes are too good. So class started with me still stuck with the glasses.

In the excitement the evening before we had forgotten all about Homer XIX. We were reminded of him suddenly when Betsy Miller opened her desk just after Miss Easter called the roll, and Homer jumped out. He hit against Betsy’s neck, then fell into her lap, then hit her neck again. Homer XIX was a good jumper. But Willie said later that Homer XIX turned out to be the most nervous frog he ever had, and he thought it was all a result of Betsy Miller’s yelling the way she did. Willie said Betsy gave Homer a shock he never recovered from.

Anyway, the upshot of all this after Willie got bawled out for ten minutes was that Miss Easter said we would have desk inspection. Ronald, with this certain look on his face, went to get the wastebasket. Ronald always carried the wastebasket when we had desk inspection, as a reward for having the neatest desk in the room.

Planting Homer on Betsy Miller was really a pretty neat way for Ronald to arrange for desk inspection. You got to hand it to Ronald — he may be a creep but he’s not a dumb creep. That’s why I was in such a tight spot. Teachers always put Willie and me in the front of the room, so Willie was sitting in the first seat in the first row and I sat right behind him. Miss Easter always started desk inspection with Willie, and I knew when the glasses didn’t turn up in Willie’s desk, Ronald would be looking and would be sure to see the big bulge in my jeans pocket.

I didn’t know what to do and I had to do something fast. Ronald’s desk was right across from me in the second row, so when he was getting the wastebasket, I slipped the glasses case into his desk. Nobody noticed except Freddie Clark because everybody else was busy trying to get his desk clean before inspection except Freddie, who knew he couldn’t. But Freddie never tells on anybody. You could twist Freddie’s arm clear off up to the socket and he wouldn’t talk. What I intended to do after Miss Easter and Ronald had passed me and were at the back of the first row was to get the glasses again.

But it was funny the way it worked out. I mean, I didn’t have any intention of planting those glasses on Ronald, who was guilty, even though he had planted them on Willie, who was innocent. I mean, there are some things you just don’t do, unless you are a creep. But what happened, Willie was emptying his desk and Ronald was pretending to help him and Miss Easter, who was standing between my desk and Ronald’s, was saying, “For goodness’ sake, what is that?” and then getting excited when it turned out to be a collection of chewed bubble gum or a box of beetles. Miss Easter always got so worked up over Willie’s desk that I couldn’t see why she wanted to look.

But anyway, all of a sudden, while she was bawling Willie out for the cheese sandwich, she said, “I wish, Willie, that you’d try to follow Ronald’s example. Just see how neat Ronald’s desk is.”

She lifted the lid as she said this. I suppose most of the time Miss Easter wouldn’t have paid much attention to a glasses case on top of Ronald’s books, but she couldn’t quite see what it was, so she picked it up. And then, in an absent-minded sort of way, I suppose having glasses on her mind, she opened the case.

I guess it was probably the biggest shock Ronald ever had. His head was down in Willie’s desk, but he sensed something was wrong and he came out looking as if he had swallowed a wooly-worm. It was a shock to Miss Easter, too. She put the glasses on and then just looked at Ronald like Betsy Miller looking at Homer.

Then she gave the rest of us an assignment and led Ronald into a little room where she takes us to improve our character. They were still there when the recess bell rang. Miss Easter came out and dismissed us. She was looking upset. We caught a glimpse of Ronald. He was looking calm. Ronald never sweats. The door wasn’t quite shut when Miss Easter went back into the room, so Willie and I hung around and listened.

“Now let me see whether I have this story straight,” Miss Easter said. “You found the glasses on Mr. Barrie’s desk. But later you were afraid to give them to me because you thought I wouldn’t believe you had found them there, since Mr. Barrie hadn’t returned them. So after putting them into a case to protect them for me, you didn’t know what to do.”

“That’s it,” said Ronald.

The world sure isn’t safe with people like Ronald Pruitt in it.

I grabbed Willie and we went as fast as we could to find Mr. Barrie. There wasn’t anything else to do but warn him so he could be ready to tell the police the truth. With Ronald framing him and Miss Easter hating him the way she did, Mr. Barrie might be arrested any minute. So we found him in his room and told him the whole story.

At first, Mr. Barrie had trouble realizing the danger he was in, and then he had such a bad cold he kept having coughing spells. But finally he understood the whole thing. Under stress, Willie remembered a whole lot more of the conversation he had overheard that day Homer XVIII got loose, and it certainly showed that Miss Easter was Mr. Barrie’s enemy, all about how conceited he was and how indifferent to other people’s feelings and how he took people for granted. Mr. Barrie said he hadn’t realized how much Miss Easter hated him and he hoped that as reliable private eyes we would regard the matter as confidential, which of course we said we would.

And I told him how Willie taking the glasses was Miss Easter’s own idea since she said men should make things happen, not just wait for them to happen, but how we had decided to put the glasses back because of our fathers’ ideas. Mr. Barrie said our decision to put them back was the right one and though in special circumstances Miss Easter’s idea might be helpful, could he count on us being guided in the future by our fathers’ ideas, and we said he could.

So then Mr. Barrie said if our part in the case were known there might be some people who wouldn’t realize how much we were in favor of law and order, and so if we could do without the publicity of having solved the case, he thought he could give Miss Easter an explanation about her glasses which would not involve us. Willie, who was still afraid Mr. Barrie might be arrested, told him to remember that we would stand by him and be ready to swear in court that Ronald was the real thief. Mr. Barrie really had a bad cold, he was so choked up. But he told us he could handle the situation, now that we had given him some very interesting information he hadn’t had before.

So that’s about all of our second big case, which we never got any publicity for as Mr. Barrie thought it was better to keep it private. I don’t know what he told Miss Easter, but the funny thing was he kept driving her to school even after she got her glasses back and they are now married, as everybody knows. I guess she decided to overlook the fact that Mr. Barrie is not the kind of person who makes things happen.

So that’s all of this story, which I did not make up no matter what Ronald Pruitt will try to tell everybody. And I guess this proves that Willie and I are good detectives to spot a criminal right away, though you don’t have to be a detective to know Ronald Pruitt is a creep.

PS. I checked with Mr. Barrie to see would it be ethical to turn this in for an English assignment and he said he would leave the ethics of the case to you with a plea for leniency for all four culprits. He spelled this out for me but I don’t get it. I mean Ronald is naturally a culprit, and you might stretch a point and call Willie and me culprits, but why blame Homer XVIII? He was dead most of the time anyway.