Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 26, No. 4. Whole No. 143, October 1955

Miss Riley was very afraid for the first time. The sensation was new to her; she thought back and back and remembered nothing like this. She did a great deal of thinking now, sitting in her lonely, darkened apartment over a cup of coffee and idly scratching on the chrome table-top with a roving finger. Three young-old faces looked up at her from the shining chrome, but when she whirled around to see, they were not there. She had known it. They were nowhere, yet she saw them in every store window, in every passing car, in every low, tight voice. She had read of such things; now, in the table-top, circled by a ring of spilled coffee, was terror, grinning up at her in a merciless death’s smile.

Miss Riley had been born of a wealthy Yankee-Irish father, whom she adored, and in her celibate girlhood, emulated in every way. She learned to do his accounts and she learned to play good golf, and she learned to tell a good stock from a bad one. Her mother was sweet and soft and often lonely, and sometimes she would sit outside her husband’s study and watch the two together, and she would become wistful and perhaps cry a little. They rarely noticed her.

Miss Riley had become a schoolteacher. She never married. While her parents were alive, she lived with them in a giant, old house surrounded by a great expanse of garden and lawn. One night her father died, and her mother, whose every hour without him was pain, hurried after him a few days later. Miss Riley was 46 then; she moved to a small apartment of her own, and sold the great, old house. She was sad, looking at it for the last time, but because her father was a Yankee, she clasped her hands and walked briskly off.

She had no close friends but she was companionable with the teachers and they admired her if they did not like her.

She had stood behind the same desk for 32 years. She had seen so much come and go, and now the-legends had grown around her: stories of how her lover had been killed on the way to their wedding; of how she was afraid of fire because her father and mother had been killed in one. She heard them and laughed and still stood, at 60, behind the desk and taught the history of England and the history of France.

She had seen the tough boys and conquered them, and they adored her for it and called her tough. It was a compliment and it pleased her to hear them say it, so she faced them as they came, cold and straight, gazing out at them through rimless glasses.

Then things changed and the face of fear became known to her... and somehow it was different and terrible.

Three boys sat with a class in September. They sat, one behind the other, and looked up at her, and each one wore a very slight grin, but she noticed it. It was her custom on the first day of school to lay down the law. This day she stood in front of her desk, unbending and stern, outlining the year. The three boys grinned, but it wasn’t really grinning. She noticed that the ends of their mouths turned up in a mirthless way, and it was ugly.

There was the leader, Jeffrey White, a good-looking, slender boy with cold eyes and light, short-clipped hair. His school record had been brilliant up until a few years before, when his mother had died and his father had lost his job. Henry Voking had dark eyes. They were lonely eyes. His mouth was often twisted into a practice grimace of scorn. His father was a drunkard with an uncontrollable temper. His mother worked hard to support the family. Larry Crane lived with his aunt, but he didn’t go there much. “She’s got five kids of her own,” he had once been heard to say, “and she just don’t want me around.” These three had been rejected; and they rejected all. They were not three but one.

One day Miss Riley found Jeffrey and Larry methodically ripping a schoolbook into small pieces. She had them suspended from school. For two weeks, Henry Voking was also absent, and Miss Riley visited his home to find out why. His father, a bearded man in a dirty undershirt, said that Henry had been helping him. It was a lie and they both knew it, but Miss Riley left. She wrinkled up her fine nose at the smell of the place.

One Monday of the third week, the three returned. And then, in a week they were gone. The rumor went that they were hitch-hiking to Florida. Miss Riley shrugged when she heard it.

She rarely thought of them. Until one afternoon in late January when it was dark and cold and she was glad to be home reading.

She did not hear them come in and they stood in the doorway until she noticed them. Larry, with the dark, brooding face, lit a cigarette with one swift motion, before she was able to speak. He smiled at her.

She spat at them in her thin, New England voice: “How dare you come into my home! How dare you! You’re hoodlums, rotten hoodlums, and you’re a disgrace!” Her anger... she trembled with rage. “What kind of parents do you have who let you walk the streets this way?”