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doodling with pencil and pad, but her drawings insisted on taking on ugly, twisted shapes. Something in the room annoyed her, setting her teeth on edge; she finally realized that a story board on the opposite wall was tilted. Automatically she rose to set it level again; nothing bothered her more than an askew picture. But as she touched the board something slipped out from behind it to slither to the floor. It was a brown paper envelope with Larry Reed’s name in red crayon—and also bearing the drawing of a dead penguin. She gasped. So Larry Reed had had his warning after all, even though he’d never found it!
    Without the slightest compunction Miss Withers tore open the envelope, discovering a heart-shaped piece of drawing paper with hastily scrawled printing as follows:
TO THE CARD-CHEAT:
    YOU ARE GOING TO GET THE BIRD,
    DEATH WILL HAVE THE FINAL WORD,
    FANCY BOY, YOU’LL SOON BE MINE,
    MY STONE STONE STONE-COLD VALENTINE
    LUCY
    The schoolteacher put the thing down, and wiped off her fingers with a handkerchief. Murder, as she well knew, was often nasty and distorted, but not this way—not mixed up with valentines and doggerel verse!
    It just didn’t make sense. Why should a murderer take all this trouble of drawing pictures and writing verses and leaving warnings? She pondered this for a while, and came out by the same door she had entered in.
    At precisely two P.M. she showed up at Mr. Cushak’s office. The girl at the desk looked up and smiled. “Miss Withers?”
    “Yes, Joyce. A command performance.”
    The girl smiled wider. “I’m not Joyce; she took off sick a couple of hours ago and I was called from stenographic to take over. I’m Mabel.”
    On second look Miss Withers realized that this one was a little less lush and with a somewhat different hairdo—though they could both have been poured out of the same mold. “Well, Mabel—is he in?”
    Mabel buzzed and spoke briefly into the talk box. A moment later Mr. Cushak popped out of his office.
    He looked for once almost pleased with himself. “I’ve got them all waiting inside,” he said. “I mean, all the people who received those blasted valentines.”
    “Oh, no !” she exploded.
    “Why not?” His face went blank. “After all, it’s only for their own protection. And you said you wanted to meet them.”
    She gave him a withering look and then explained wearily, “Mr. Cushak, I wanted to meet them individually, by seeming happenstance, under innocent auspices. I had hoped that in that manner I might just possibly ferret out some useful information. You have inadvertently tipped our hand.”
    “Huh?” The man looked puzzled and a little hurt.
    “Don’t you know,” she continued testily, “that every authoritative text on criminology says that in poison-pen cases the guilty party has almost invariably later been proved to have sent one to himself and made a great to-do about it? That’s the way their nasty little minds work; they think that it automatically clears them from suspicion. One of the people waiting inside your office is the murderer, or I miss my guess. Of course,” she added frankly, “I have missed some important guesses in my time, but they say that even Homer nodded. Well, we might as well go inside, and start afresh from here.”
    Cushak looked at her rather strangely, and the schoolteacher had a sense that he was now even more out of sympathy with her and her quest than he had been before. He was not, it appeared, used to having his decisions and actions questioned by underlings. But he shrugged, turned, and ushered her silently into his office.
    She sniffed. The smell of fear was in that room. The three people who waited there were as jittery, she thought, as a cat on hot bricks. Miss Withers was introduced to them in strict studio seniority. First there was Jules Karas, music director—a man somewhere in his fifties, stocky and leonine and intensely masculine, who bowed stiffly from the waist and smoked thin