Free Miss Dimple Disappears by Mignon F. Ballard

a patient mood. “I saw Aunt Lou in Cooper’s Store,” she said to her mother. “Said to tell you if you supply the sugar, she’ll bake teacakes for your circle meeting.”
    Charlie also told the two women what her aunt had said about Miss Dimple’s frightening experience with the dog.
    “You know you have to take some of the things your aunt tells you with a grain … no, make that a big spoonful of salt,” Jo told her. “She’s always had a wild imagination. Still, if there’s anything to it, I’m sure Ida Ellerby mentioned it to the police.”
    Bessie removed the pins from Charlie’s skirt and stuck them into the pincushion she wore on her arm, groaning as she stood. “Huh! Sounds to me like your aunt Lou’s been listening to too many ghost tales.”

C HAPTER S EVEN
    It wouldn’t be long now. He had done what he was supposed to do. Now, it was up to the others. If only that old woman would cooperate! Why couldn’t she eat like everybody else? He had no idea she would be so hard to please. And now she claimed she was going to die if he didn’t bring her some sort of pills she kept in her desk at school. For her heart, she said. You’d think she’d keep something as important as that in that big old bag she hauled around with her, but they weren’t there. He’d searched every purple crevice, so he reckoned they had to be in her classroom at school, like she said. And hadn’t he made a big snafu the last time he went there?
    *   *   *
    Ninety-eight … ninety-nine … one hundred. Dimple Kilpatrick fanned herself with a page from a 1938 calendar that had hung on the wall and sank gratefully into a chair. At least twice a day she walked the confines of her basement room a hundred times. It wouldn’t do to let herself get out of shape. Her prison was long and rectangular, with brick walls that had at one time been painted yellow. Two small windows higher than her head were covered with grillwork that appeared to be sturdy, but she meant to look into that later. Partially screened on the outside by scraggly evergreens—cedars, she thought—they allowed in little light, and it was difficult to regulate the gas heater at the end of the room to keep the temperature in a comfortable range. She was either too hot or too cold. Most of the time she opted for cold and wore one of the sweaters her captor had brought her. This one was a man’s gray cardigan missing most of its buttons. In addition to the clothing she wore when she was taken, Miss Dimple had been supplied with seven pairs of women’s underpants made of some cheap fabric. Each was a different color that had been embroidered with the name of a day of the week. She found Thursday’s white ones less offensive than the others but rinsed out her own modest teddies in the bathroom sink as often as possible. The rest of her wardrobe consisted of three cotton housedresses that were too large and smelled of mothballs but at least seemed clean, a couple of pairs of inexpensive stockings, and a long flannel gown with robe to match. Except for the undergarments, most of the clothing, she assumed, had at one time belonged to a former tenant of the room—possibly a grandmother or maiden aunt, or perhaps even a maid—and she was grateful for the privacy of the small bathroom at one end with its toilet, lavatory, and an ancient tub that sat on legs.
    The calendar page was for a long-ago month of September and featured an illustration of a little boy in overalls giving an apple to his teacher. How appropriate, she thought wryly. But the picture made her smile and think of her classroom at school, and the boy reminded her of that rascal William Elrod. She knew he kept his puppy in his room most nights before returning it to its box on the porch and it evoked happy memories of her own dog, Bear, who had been her childhood companion. Had William been on the porch on the morning she was taken? And if so, had it been light enough for him to see? She