Tess & Sam

Tess arrived back in class just prior to the finishing bell.

“Everything all right?” asked the venerable and bespectacled Mr. Bradford, her mathematics teacher, when she returned.

Tess smiled wanly and nodded, patting her midriff, “Girl issues,” she said.

All the girls in the class if not the school were well aware of how any mention of feminine parts or any anatomical function attached to a vagina made the aged teacher extremely uncomfortable.

“Cramps,” she added, making a face and grimacing slightly.

“Take your seat,” he said, pointing and clearing his throat as he broke eye contact, face crimson. There was a susurrus of titters from the students.

Sam looked to Tess, brow arched in askance.

Tess looked up at the clock on the wall then back to Sam who understood and nodded. When the bell signaling the end of class sounded, the two girls met up outside the room.

“I was sensing something not right, so I went back to check on Tom and found Janine in our room and Tom missing,” Tess said, trying to keep her voice low.

Sam shook her head, “Missing? Did she take him?” she asked, spying the tall l blonde further up the hall.

“I thought so at first, but I patted her down,” Tess explained. “Thoroughly,” she added.

“I bet he snuck out to go spy on Tatiana,” offered Sam, frowning and looking back to Tess.

Tess’s eyes blazed, “If that little bastard snuck out after I expressly told him not to,” she said, wringing her hands together, teeth clenched.

“He’ll probably be back at lunch, you told him we were coming back then,” she offered. “You know?”

“I’m going to wrap him up in scotch tape or duct tape him to my ass or something,” Tess fumed, shaking her head from side to side.

Sam giggled, “That would make an awesome profile pic,” she offered.

The next hour seemed to drag forever, Tess found herself checking the clock every few minutes. When finally the buzzer rang for lunch, Tess bolted like a cheetah after a gazelle toward the dormitory, Sam in tow.

Searching the room exhaustively proved fruitless, turning up no Tom, or any indication of where he might have gone.

Tess plopped down on her bed, shaking her head.

“I think we need to put our heads together and puzzle this thing through,” Sam suggested, crossing the room to seat beside Tess. “For instance, there is no way he could possibly have gotten under the door to the hallway, either in our room or Tatiana’s. The bathroom, sure, but the front door gap is too narrow to squeeze under,” she stated.

“I peeked into Tatiana’s room. I’m pretty sure that’s how Janine got into our room,” Tess replied.

Sam locked over at the slide bolt on the bathroom door, the one they never used. “We should’ve locked it,” she opined.

Tess shrugged. After a moment of silence, she looked back in the box and picked up Tom’s Samsung. Hitting the button, the screen came to life. Punching in his code, she called up his task manager and examined his history. No texts. No indications of any type of communication. Porn. YouTube. She frowned. Calling up his last YouTube entry, the insults started spewing from the phone.

“Pretty loud,” Sam commented, frown on her face.

Tess paused the screen and looked at her, brow furled. “Step out into the hall and tell me if you can hear it from the other side of the door,” she instructed.

Sam looked puzzled, but nodded and exited the door while Tess turned the phone back on, putting it in the box and covering it with the lid.

The door opened and Sam returned, nodding slowly. “Faint but you can definitely hear it out there,” she stated.

Getting up, Tess walked over to the door and opened it partway and examined the locked, finding no evidence of tampering. “If he’s not here, or in Tatiana’s room and he couldn’t have gotten under the door, phone blaring, maybe somebody in the hall heard it, somebody with a key,” she concluded.

“Dorm matron? No chance, she is stone deaf,” Sam supplied. “A student maybe?”

“Or a teacher,” posited Tess. Together the girls began systematically eliminating possibilities, making a list of educators that could not be accounted for during the time between when Tess last saw him and the time she discovered him gone. At the end, there was a list of six potential teachers or administrators who possessed not only the ability to move freely about the school, but also possessed possible access but whose whereabouts were unknown, including the Headmistress, Deputy Headmaster, Miss Harwood, Mr. Ellsworth, Miss Addison, and Mrs. Thompson.

Immediately, both the Deputy Headmaster and Mr. Ellsworth were discounted, as men roaming the hall of the female dorm was in violation of school policy and would most certainly have raised a ruckus and caused some serious commotion, narrowing the list of potential candidates to four.

“We may need to do a little investigating and see if we can’t shorten this list,” Tess asserted.

“Think about it a minute, you would think if the Headmistress had found him, she would more than likely called for you,” Sam pointed out.

Tess nodded, “Possibly, or contacted my parents. I’m sure I would have heard something either way. Of the remaining three teachers, I’m torn. My inclination is Miss Addison, she’s a busy body, always on the prowl, but I think if she found him, she would have delivered him directly to the headmistress,” she explained.

Sam nodded in agreement, “She is a snooper that’s for sure.”

“Mrs. Thompson usually doesn’t venture too far from the teachers’ lounge in her off block,” Tess ruminated.

“Miss Harwood?” queried Sam, eyebrow raised.

Tess slowly shook her head. “She is definitely a teacher Tom would go for,” she mused, visualizing the young leggy teacher most male students irreverently referred to as Miss ‘Hardwood’.

“But you don’t think so?”

“I don’t know. How often does she do dorm walkthroughs? Not very often. Like I said before, my intuition is pointing me toward Miss Addison,” she explained. “But even that is a stretch.”

Sam nodded. Noting the time, “We should get back soon,” she said.

Tess looked at the digital display and nodded. “We’ll swing passed the lunchroom on our way back and see if Miss Addison is the monitor,” Tess said, replacing the lid on Tom’s box and returning it under her bed before heading out.

Janine

Sitting in the library during lunch, Janine leaned forward, elbows on the table, face in her hands. She was missing something, some unaccounted for intangible and it was frustrating her. She was so close it was infuriating. Where had he gone? Tess had seemed just as surprised to find Tom gone as she did. When it came to hunting Tom, she knew how clever he could be, what his limitations were. There was no way he could have slipped out into the hall under the door. He wasn’t in Tatiana’s room, he wasn’t in the bathroom, and he wasn’t in Tess’s room, so where was he?

Tatiana sat down across from Janine, smile on her pretty face, “You found your earring?” she inquired, setting her books on the table.

Janine smiled back, and nodded her head, “Yes, thank you,” she replied.

“I heard Milly was going to receive two demerits for being in the dorm this morning during class time,” informed the Russian.

Arching an eyebrow, “Oh?” Janine asked.

“Addison was lurking around the dorm during second block this morning, caught Milly in her room and wrote her up,” Tatiana said, leaning back in her chair.

“Really?” inquired Janine, blue eyes bright, a slow smile creeping across her face. When she was going to collect her little Tom, she had been forced to duck around a corner to avoid being seen by Miss Addison. She possessed a master key. Opportunity and means, but what about motive? How could she possibly know about him?

“Gives her five demerits on the semester, two more she is going to get an educational review,” Tatiana informed.

Janine nodded, only half listening. Could it just be random circumstance, a room inspection? Everyone knew Miss Addison was a very by the book kind of teacher and she found him, surely she would have given him over to the headmistress. But what if she didn’t? What if she was the one who found Tom and was now in possession of him?

“Did you hear me?” Tatiana asked, interrupting Janine’s thought process.

Janine smiled absently, “Sure, educational review,” she replied, looking up as Tatiana rose to her feet and collected her books.

Tatiana smiled, “Later,” she said nodding her head.

“Bye,” mumbled Janine. Miss Addison she thought ruefully, visualizing the woman. She supposed there were some who might find her attractive despite the utter lack of an attempt to make herself presentable. There was no way on earth she was going to let her make off with little Tom. It was bad enough he ingratiated himself on her mother.

She began developing a plan. First, she needed some information about the teacher.