Free The Theban Mysteries by Amanda Cross Page A

being certain he was made for higher things: in short, very few questions are asked. Then there are the delivery men, plumbers, carpenters—well, I needn’t go on endlessly with all the details; we have been damn lucky, actually, that nothing really untoward has happened in the school. Everyone was upset about the gym floor, of course, but it could have been a lot worse.
    “Then,” Miss Tyringham continued, “we acquired, blessed was the day, Mr. O’Hara, late of the United States Army, where he had been a sergeant with years of experience at guard duty. He liked the penthouse apartment we could offer him, and the small salary was no special problem since he has his pension and no one dependent on him. Forgive me if I seem to be going on at unconscionable lengths, but unless you have a picture of the setting, so to speak, you can’t understand what happened.
    “Mr. O’Hara moved in and he did keep a much better eye on things. He locked all the stairway doors, for one thing, and took both elevators up with him at night—he didn’t mind walking down for the second one, he said; it was only up that he began to feel his years—and we seemed to be doing fine until the fire people discovered about the locked stairways and pointed out that, in case of fire, Mr. O’Hara would have no fast way out of the building except by leaping off the roof hopefully into a fireman’s net (I do hope I have used the word ‘hopefully’ correctly, I can’t bear to have it used to mean ‘it is hoped,’ such sloppy syntax) and of course we couldn’t have Mr. O’Hara leaping off roofs, however hopefully, and it was then that he came to me with a proposal which seemed at first startling,but has turned out to be a most workable arrangement. He suggested dogs.”
    “Dogs?” Kate said. It was not what she had expected.
    “Yes, my dear, dogs. Two mighty-vicious-looking Doberman pinschers which, however, Mr. O’Hara assures me, would never attack anyone. Their job, which they do superlatively well—so unusual these days, and, as Mr. O’Hara, who I fear is extremely conservative, pointed out, without demands, demonstrations, or strikes—is simply to make sure that nobody is in the building when it’s closed. Nobody. Naturally, when I first heard the suggestion of dogs I said flatly that the thing was impossible—imagine two vicious dogs, however disinclined to bite, in the midst of a school of five hundred girls, not to mention the faculty, staff, parents, or cleaning people. The idea was ludicrous. But Mr. O’Hara assured me that department stores around the country have been using dogs successfully for years with no danger to customers or anyone else; the dogs are never let out except when there is no one in the building, or no one who has any business to be there, which is just the point.”
    “Where do they stay?”
    “On the roof, my dear, next to Mr. O’Hara’s penthouse. They have most elegant quarters, indoor pens and out, and Mr. O’Hara takes them for a run in the park very early every morning. I’ve been up to see them in their cages—of course, one simply must know everything that goes on in a school of which one is the head—and they stood behind their bars and bared their teeth at me in a quite properly terrifying manner. No one can get up to the roof, since the door off the auditoriumis locked and there’s a trap door at the top of the stairs as well. I expect I was finally won over to the whole idea because it’s so absolutely uncanny—I mean, one could scarcely believe dogs were capable of so complicated an operation—I’ll tell you about it in a minute—though of course one knows of seeing-eye dogs and all those sheep dogs of Hardy’s and Lassie Come Home and all the rest of it.
    “We installed electrified pads, one on the end of each hall, and when the dogs have been through all the rooms on that floor, and made certain there is no one in any of them, they press their paws on the electrified pad