Eight Ghosts Named Bob

That was one strange case. I was called in because the Chinese teacher had been hit on the head with a pen. This teacher, Mrs. Xu, was known in her classes for accusing the wrong student whenever something happened. The evidence of the teacher’s accuracy in accusations was bad, and I mean really bad. Tristan reported that he had been given a detention for not paying attention when he had in fact been taking notes. No one disagreed with his story. When Dan started talking to Marina and Marina ignored him, Marina was the one who got in trouble for talking. Mrs. Xu never managed to accuse the right person of anything.
When I got the call from Mrs. Xu, I had thought there might have been a serious case here. A student had just thrown a pen at her and hit her in the head. Of course, everything was left as it was and the classroom was declared a crime scene. All the students and the teacher had to remain where they had been when the pen was thrown. After a physics analysis based upon where the pen landed, how hard it hit Mrs. Xu, and where on her head the pen hit we found where the pen was thrown from. No student was within 10 feet of the throws location, and our margin of error was 3 feet. Also, she had accused every student at one point or another, and she never managed to accuse the right person. Combining these two facts, I came to the rather obvious conclusion that no student had thrown the pen.
Now there was a problem. Someone had to have thrown the pen, no one in the room could have. When all impossibilities have been ruled out, what remains must be the truth. That meant the supernatural. A ghost must have thrown the pen, so of course I had a psychic brought in. As a police officer trained in the law, I had no idea what ghosts could have been there. That wasn’t my job; the supernatural was a job for the psychic.
Our police psychic, Melinda Trella, walked into the room and announced the presence of about twenty ghosts that inhabited the area. George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and William Shakespeare all haunted the spot from time to time. We also had Joel Morse, Samuel Morse, Deborah Sampson, and a couple other known former residents of Sharon. Then we had eight ghosts who all went by the name Bob.
So, who threw the pen? Of the eight Bobs, all of them were asleep, except for one who had gone to visit the other room in the school that he liked to haunt, the cafeteria. That Bob liked to cook. The Morse’s supported education, so they wouldn’t attack a teacher. Deborah had no motive we could come up with. Melinda thought that Deborah haunted the classroom because it was also a history classroom. The same reasoning and lack of motive was found for Lincoln and Washington. Shakespeare was another matter. He had not been to the classroom at all since the room stopped being used for English, except for one five minute period, the same period in which the pen was thrown.
Shakespeare seemed most likely, but we still didn’t know his motive. This wasn’t too hard to find. All the students could report the mauling of the English language that Mrs. Xu did regularly. On the board, she wrote “Wowk on Diglogue” instead of “Work on Dialogue”, which we all found funny. Mrs. Xu also had atrocious grammar. “You not respect! You need go out of door!” was a common shout. Just before the pen was thrown, she had shouted, “No need talk! Need do work! Multilevel class is hard for teacher. Need not interrupt teach Chinese three!” With that mauling of English, who can be surprised that Shakespeare took offence and threw the pen?
Well that was the conclusion. Sharon Police concluded officially that Shakespeare’s ghost threw a pen at Mrs. Xu. What else can be said? That was one strange case.