Murder on the Blackboard by Stuart Palmer Page A

better half of Mr. Macfarland.
    She wore a loose cotton coolie-coat ornamented with brilliant dragons biting their tails, and her hair was thin and curly. Her bare feet were displayed through woven sandals of some sort of yellow grass, and in one hand she carried a sickly peony.
    “I’m so very happy!” said Mrs. Macfarland. Her voice was very throaty and full. She moved the peony to her left hand and offered her right to Miss Withers, who found it very like a dead fish in texture and temperature.
    Chrystal Macfarland—she preferred to be known as “Madame Chrysanthemum” since a venture into Numerology—was the result of a lifetime spent in pursuing the bypaths, the isms and the ologies of this world. She had begun as a choir singer in a little Methodist church in Minnesota, had studied Brahmanism, become a convert to Sister Aimee, Prince Rhadipore, Margery the Medium, Mrs. Eddy, and Nicholas Roerich in the order named, and now was enjoying a peaceful existence halfway between hypochondria and New Thought, combining, Miss Withers thought, the worst features of both. She was also a determined Orientalist, and her fingers bore multitudinous rings of Nevada jade and Fourteenth Street scarabs.
    She sank languorously upon a long couch which stood beside a teakwood coffee table. “There is something tremendous in the rite of pouring tea,” she contributed to the conversation. “I vibrate strangely to tea.”
    Miss Withers thought to herself that no one should laugh at the Principal’s interminable essays and the other queer quirks of his personality without at least imagining what his life with this dim-witted semi-invalid must have been.
    With a can of Sterno blazing merrily beneath the copper pot, Macfarland looked up at the guest. He held a lemon in his hand.
    “You like your tea Russian fashion, of course?”
    She hesitated the fraction of a second. “If it isn’t too much trouble, I’d like cream, please….”
    He put the lemon down. “It’s in the ice-box downstairs. No trouble at all.” He disappeared.
    Madame Chrysanthemum dabbled at the air with the peony. “Ah, tea!” she murmured. “What should I do without its blessing? Waldo has always left me much alone, you see, but while I have flowers and tea …”
    “Alone?” Miss Withers prompted.
    “Ah, yes! In the summers, when he goes to our place in Connecticut. Do you know, all this afternoon, while my Waldo was out gathering atmosphere for his essay on ‘Sidewalks,’ I lay on my couch here absorbing the fragrance, even the very soul, of a bowl of peonies!”
    “Um,” said Hildegarde Withers. She rose from her chair and moved idly toward the desk. Madame Chrysanthemum, deep in the soul of her peony, was oblivious to everything else. Deftly the schoolteacher leaned against the oak desk and extended her hand toward the ledger, drawing it closer. She flipped it open … to today’s date. “November fifteenth” was written in Macfarland’s fine hand. Beneath it, scrolled and rescrolled, was the title “Sidewalks.” The rest of the page was blank.
    “Um,” said Miss Withers again. She returned to her chair, and after a few moments of tea seasoned with Macfarland’s long sentences and his wife’s moonings, she took her departure.
    The Principal walked with her to the door. “I am happy that you consent to serve Jefferson School and of course the cause of justice and right by taking this case upon your own shoulders,” he concluded. “I shall arrange for a substitute to assume your third grade tomorrow.”
    Miss Withers shook her head. “I don’t think that will be necessary, Mr. Macfarland. I’ll be able to learn more if I keep to the usual routine, and don’t give the murderer any warning that I’m on his trail. Don’t you think so?”
    Mr. Macfarland hemmed and hawed a moment. “My thought was this,” he finally told her. “In your investigation it will quite possibly be necessary for you to leave the city. In fact, I was going