The Case of the Cracked Mirror

Every October, the old school gym becomes a haunted house, and its best room is the mirror maze: a real antique mirror at the far end, framed in carved wood, that the actors swear is haunted. I volunteer at the door, so I was there on closing night, when the maze was supposed to be empty.

Four actors were still in costume at ten o’clock. Felix Hart, six foot one, played the mummy, wrapped in long white gauze bandages. Nora Quinn, five foot five, played the zombie, with a dragging left foot and grey face paint. Ruth Marsh, five foot ten, played the demon, with wide red horns and red face paint. Owen Pike, five foot six, played the pirate, with a wooden peg leg that clicked on the gym floor with every step.

At ten o’clock the caretaker went to lock the mirror room and found the antique mirror cracked from corner to corner. A moment earlier, he had seen a tall figure in a black cloak slip out of the maze’s back door and vanish down the corridor. The cloak could have hidden any costume, and the figure had left the maze floor dusty behind it.

The dust told the first part of the story. It held even, matching footprints all the way to the back door, with no dragged line beside them. Nora’s zombie foot drags wherever she walks, so a dragging line should have scored the dust if she had crossed that floor. There was none — and the caretaker had heard no clicking on the wooden corridor either, which ruled out Owen’s peg leg just as cleanly.

That left the two tall actors, Felix and Ruth. Above the mirror hung a cobweb, strung at six foot one, and it had been torn in a single smooth arc. Ruth’s wide horns would have snagged it in two places, one for each horn, and left a double tear. The tear was single and smooth, the shape of a bare head passing at exactly Felix’s height.

One clue pointed the wrong way, and I nearly followed it. A smear of red face paint marked the mirror’s frame, and Ruth’s face is painted red. But Ruth had painted that very frame red herself that afternoon, dressing the room for the night. Her paint was already on the frame, and on every other prop in the maze, long before closing. It proved nothing at all.

Caught on the mirror’s cracked edge was a single thread of white gauze. Only one costume in the maze is wrapped in gauze: Felix’s mummy bandages. The thread was fresh, and it had snagged exactly where a hand would have to grip to steady itself against the mirror.

Felix told me he had been in the makeup room for the whole evening. But the makeup artist shook her head. Felix had left the makeup room at twenty to ten to fetch a prop from storage, she said, and he came back at five past ten — without any prop. The storage room is at the far end of the gym, and the only route back from it passes the mirror room. The caretaker’s tall cloaked figure had slipped out at ten o’clock, right in the middle of that gap.

So I lined the facts up: the even footprints with no drag, the corridor with no clicking, the cobweb torn in a single smooth arc at six foot one, the paint that proved nothing, the fresh gauze on the cracked edge, and the prop that never came. Only one person fits them all. Who cracked the mirror?