Cornell Woolrich
Murder at Mother’s Knee
Chapter One
Teacher Learns a Lesson
Miss Prince knew all the signs that meant homework hadn’t been done. The hangdog look, the guiltily-lowered head. She stood there by the Gaines boy’s desk, one hand extended. “Well, I’m waiting, Johnny.”
The culprit squirmed uncomfortably to his feet. “I... I couldn’t do it teacher.”
“Why not?”
“I... I didn’t know what to write about.”
“That’s no excuse,” Miss Prince said firmly. “I gave the class the simplest kind of a theme this time. I said to write about something you know about, something that really happened, either at home or else where, it doesn’t matter. If the others were able to, why weren’t you?”
“I couldn’t think of anything that happened.”
Miss Prince turned away. “Well, you’ll stay in after the rest and sit there until you do. When I give out homework I expect it to be done!” She returned to her desk, stacked the collected creative efforts to one side of her, and took up the day’s lesson.
Three o’clock struck and the seats before her emptied like magic in one headlong, scampering rush for the door. All but the second one back on the outside aisle.
“You can begin now, Johnny,” said Miss Prince relentlessly. “Take a clean sheet of paper and quit staring out the window.”
Although the victim probably wouldn’t have believed it, she didn’t enjoy this any more than he did. He was keeping her in just as much as she was keeping him. But discipline had to be maintained.
The would-be compositor seemed to be suffering from an acute lack of inspiration. He chewed the rubber of his pencil, fidgeted, stared at the blackboard, and nothing happened.
“You’re not trying, Johnny!” she said severely, at last.
“I can’t think of anything,” he lamented.
“Yes, you can, too. Stop saying that. Write about your dog or cat, if you can’t think of anything else.”
“I haven’t any.”
She went back to her papers. He raised his hand finally, to gain her attention. “Is it all right to write about a dream?”
“I suppose so, if that’s the best you can do,” she acquiesced. It seemed to be the only way out of the dilemma. “But I wanted you to write something that really happened. This was to test your powers of observation and description, as well as your grammar and composition.”
“This was part-true and only part a dream,” he assured her.
He bent diligently to the desk, to make up for time lost. At the end of fifteen minutes he stood before her with the effort completed. “All right, you can go home now,” she consented wearily. “And the next time you come to school without your homework—” But the door had already closed obliviously behind him.
She smiled slightly to herself, with a sympathetic understanding he wouldn’t have given her credit for, and placed the latest masterpiece on top of the others, to take home with her. As she did so, her eye, glancing idly along the opening sentences, was caught by something. She lingered on reading, forgetting her original intention of rising from her desk and going out to the cloakroom to get her hat.
The epistle before her, in laborious, straight up and down, childish handwriting, read:
Johnny Gaines,
English Comp. 2 Something that happened at our house.
One night I wasn’t sleeping so good on account of something I eat, and I dreamed I was out in a boat and the water was rough and rocking me up and down a lot. So then I woke up and the floor in my room was really shaking kind of and so was my bed and everything. And I even heard a table and chair fall down, downstairs. So I got kind of scared and I sneaked downstairs to see what was the matter. But by that time it stopped again and everything was quiet.
My mother was in the kitchen straitening things up again, and she didn’t want me to come near there when she first saw me. But I looked in anyway. Then she closed the outside door and she told me some kind of a varmint got in the house from outside, and my pa had a hard time getting it and killing it, and that was why everything fell over. It sure must have been a bad kind of one. because it scared her a lot. she was still shaking all the time. She was standing still, but she was all out of breath. I asked her where it was and she said he carried it outside with him to get rid of it far away from the house.
Then I saw where his hat got to when he was having all that trouble catching it, and he never even missed it. It fell through the stove onto the ashis. So she picked it up out of there when I showed her, and the ashis made it look even cleaner than before when he had it on. Almost like new Then she got some water and a brush and started to scrub the kitchen floor where she said the varmint got it dirtied up. But I couldn’t see where it was because she got in the way. And she wouldn’t let me stay and watch, she made me go upstairs again.
So that was all that happened.
When she had finished it, Miss Prince turned her head abruptly toward the door, as if to recall the composition’s author. Needless to say, he had escaped by now into freedom, was no longer within reach.
She sat on there for awhile, tapping her pencil thoughtfully against the edge of her teeth.
Miss Prince settled herself uneasily on one of the straight-backed chairs against the wall that the desk-sergeant had indicated to her, and waited, fiddling with her handbag.
She felt out of place in a police-station anteroom, and wondered what had made her come like this. Back in the schoolroom it had seemed like a sensible impulse, and she had promptly acted upon it. Now that she was here, for some reason it seemed more impulsive than sensible. Maybe she should have just taken it up with the principal and let him decide—
A pair of thick-soled brogues came walloping out, stopped short before her, and she looked up. She’d never been face to face with a professional detective before. This one didn’t look like one at all. He looked more like a business man who had dropped into the police station to report his car stolen, or something.
“Anything I can do for you?” he asked.
“It’s... it’s just something that I felt I ought to bring to your attention,” she faltered. “I’m Emily Prince, of the English Department, over at the Benjamin Harrison Public School.” She fumbled for the composition, extended it toward him. “One of my pupils handed this in to me yesterday afternoon.”
He read it over, handed it back to her. “I don’t get it,” he grinned. “You want me to pinch the kid that wrote this, for murdering the King’s English?”
She flashed him an impatient look. “I think it’s obvious that this child witnessed an act of violence, a crime of some sort, without realizing its full implication,” she said coldly. “You can read between the lines. I believe that a murder has taken place in that house, and gone undiscovered. I think the matter should be investigated.”
She stopped short. He had begun to act in a most unaccountable manner. The lower part of his face began to twitch in various unrelated places, and a dull red flush overspread it. “Excuse me a minute,” he said in a choked voice, stood up abruptly, and walked away from her. She noticed him holding his hand against the side of his face, as if to shield it from view. He stopped a minute at the other end of the room, stood there with his shoulders shaking, then turned and came back. He coughed a couple of times on the way over.
“If there’s anything funny about this, I fail to see it!”
“I’m sorry,” he said contritely, sitting down again. “It hit me so sudden, I couldn’t help it. A kid writes a composition, the first thing that comes into his head, just so he can get it over and go out and play, and you come here on the strength of it and ask us to investigate. Aw, now listen, lady—”