Free Crime is Murder by Helen Nielsen Page A

that’s not what I think, and I’m not going to pursue the matter further because you’ve given me an excellent suggestion. The high school, of course. That’s the place to start laying the ghost of Howard Gleason.”
    Bellville High School was at least twice the size Lisa would have expected to find in the deceiving little community, deceiving because it wasn’t nearly so little as it appeared to the eye. Seeing it for the first time, she remembered Tod’s explanation of the extent of the school township; then, too, Bellville was growing. Tod Graham was on hand to see to that.
    The campus was a scene of great activity. Lisa had restrained a natural impulse to put Johnny’s suggestion into action immediately. A few facts on Howard Gleason were needed first. They came as a result of some surreptitious telephoning to a friend on a New York newspaper. Surreptitious if anything could be surreptitious in Bellville. And so it was several days after that first board meeting when Lisa parked the station wagon in one of the few available spaces alongside the athletic field—parked it painfully after long dependence on Johnny. Too long, she had decided. It was time to act alone.
    Across the field, much activity was in progress. True to his word, Joel Warren had started the bleacher construction job immediately. Several construction trucks and a load of lumber were already on the scene; and as Lisa stepped from her car, she became aware of two familiar figures standing on the grass only a few yards away. Joel blocked the view somewhat with his back—twice as broad, it seemed, in shirt sleeves, but not so completely but that she could glimpse Marta, piquant in bright yellow cotton, poised before him in that too-defiant manner. She wore her anger like a battle flag.
    Lisa hesitated at the edge of the walk. She didn’t want to intrude, and she didn’t want to leave. The voices coming to her across the grass were too interesting.
    “I gave the committee my promise to have this job done, and I intend to keep it!” Joel said. “I always keep my promises!”
    “And I don’t, I suppose!”
    Silence. Sullen silence. Across the field, a line of dark clouds was beginning to rise up slowly along the horizon. It made quite an appropriate backdrop to the scene.
    “I only know what your mother said,” Joel answered.
    “My mother!”
    Marta turned away abruptly, leaving Joel to stare at her poker-straight back. A workman called out from the lumber truck. Joel didn’t answer. The call came again.
    “All right, I’m coming,” he shouted. “Keep your shirt on!’ But the last remark, the lower one, was meant only for Marta’s ears. “I guess I have to keep working even if nobody else does.”
    It was a good time to leave—quickly, before anyone saw her standing there. Lisa felt a bit guilty about her unintentioned eavesdropping. A lover’s quarrel was in a different category from what she’d overheard of that board room squabble from under the museum stairs.
    She crossed the street and made her way toward the front entrance of the school, her stick tapping out the way. This wing seemed newer than the others. A cornerstone bore the date 1953. Boost Bellville. Lisa smiled to herself, wondering if Tod Graham was on the school board, too. Inside, she found an exhilarated senior to direct her. It was after school hours, but with Commencement Week in the offing the building was far from deserted.
    And Miss Oberon was far from at leisure. Miss Oberon seemed incapable of leisure. For her life would be one crisis after another. Had she been Franz Schubert, the “Unfinished Symphony” would have remained unfinished due solely to an attack of last-movement hysteria.
    “It’s the choral group,” she confessed, almost at the verge of tears. “Actually, it’s one of the finest in the state, Miss Bancroft, but at rehearsal today I thought I would go mad!”
    Miss Oberon tried to shove a pencil behind her ear. Another pencil had already