The Hayloft: a 1950s Mystery

by Alan Cook

  “Mr. White, as in the janitor who found Ralph?”

  “Yes.”

  “Dr. Graves used to be an English teacher. This looks like a threat to me. Gary, he doesn’t want you nosing around into how Ralph died.”

  “But why not?”

  “Because if Ralph has been murdered, that would be bad publicity for the school. Or, in the worst case—”

  “Dr. Graves murdered Ralph, himself.”

  We looked at each other for a while, not talking. Finally, I said, “What should I do?”

  “Take it to the police.”

  I shook my head. “I can’t. Everything we’ve said just now is pure speculation. If I start accusing Dr. Graves, what is for sure is that he would kick me out of Carter faster than you can walk.”

  “There might be fingerprints…”

  “I can’t take a chance. Whether or not his prints are on here, the result is the same for me. I’m out.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “Hang on to this. Place it in a folder and not touch it, anymore, in case there are prints on it. See if I can prove that Dr. Graves wrote it.”

  “And watch your ass.”

  “And watch my ass.”

  Sylvia stood up from the bed and said, “I need a hug.”

  CHAPTER 14

  I drove Sylvia to school early, before the crowds arrived, and walked her to her homeroom. Nobody was there. She said she had work to do to make up for yesterday and that it was all right for me to leave her by herself. I think she was still trying to protect my reputation, what was left of it. She said she could handle Natalie and the others.

  The route to my homeroom in the cafeteria went past the administration area. As I walked by, I glanced through the glass door to see if anybody was in there. The place looked empty. I couldn’t see into the office of Dr. Graves from the corridor. I tentatively tried the door. It was locked. What I wanted to do was to type something on the typewriter in his office and compare it to the type of the limerick. I would have to try another time.

  As I turned away from the door, I saw Carol, the administrative secretary, coming down the corridor. She smiled at me and said, “Hi, Gary. Are you looking for Dr. Graves?”

  I smiled back. “Hi, Carol. Yes. But I can come back later.”

  “He won’t be in this morning. He’s got a meeting offsite.” She took a key out of her purse, unlocked the door, and opened it. “Would you like to leave him a message?”

  I had an idea. “It’s a little bit complicated. May I type it on his typewriter?”

  If she thought that was an odd request, she didn’t show it. I was glad I had been nice to her before.

  “Sure, go ahead,” she said. She unlocked his office, turned on the light, and waved me inside.

  The manual typewriter was big and black and sitting on a small table with rollers on the legs. Bond paper was stacked neatly on a shelf below the typewriter. I was glad Dr. Graves was so organized. I pulled the table close to his chair and sat down. I inserted a sheet of paper and rolled it around the platen. I typed, “A nosy young fellow named Gary.”

  That should be enough. I pulled the paper out of the machine, got up, and went out of the principal’s office. Carol was unlocking filing cabinets, getting read for a day’s work.

  I said to her, “I changed my mind. The message is too complicated. I’ll talk to Dr. Graves later.”

  “I’ll tell him you came by.”

  I wanted to say not to bother, but that wouldn’t sound right. I waved to Carol and went to the cafeteria.

  I worried about Sylvia all morning. At lunchtime, I carried my tray into the cafeteria and looked for her. At first I didn’t see her and thought she hadn’t arrived yet. Then I spotted her at the far end of the room, in the corner underneath the raised section reserved for teachers. She was sitting alone.

  I ran the gauntlet past a noisy sea of faces. It was easy to imagine that they were all looking at me to see if I was going to sit with Sylvia, although, of course, this wasn’t the case. Very few of them even knew who I was. Or cared. I climbed over the bench on the opposite side of the table from Sylvia and sat down. She looked very solemn, a far cry from her usual cheerful self. But she also looked very determined.

  I tried to think of something pleasant to say and failed. “How was your morning?”

  “Don’t ask.”

  “That bad, eh? And Natalie?”

  “Natalie ignored me, which is fine by me. Most people did. I suddenly feel like a new student in a strange school where I don’t know anybody.”

  “That’s how I felt a week ago. Until I met you. If it hadn’t been for you, I’d still feel that way.”

  “And now the tables are turned. Thanks for sticking by me.”

  I saw Barney Weiss coming in our direction and remembered that he had been scornful of the standard reaction to the news about Mr. Doran, but I was still surprised when he worked his way along the narrow aisle between benches, placed his tray on the table beside Sylvia’s, and sat down. He was an independent thinker, but he and Sylvia had appeared to be enemies, at least during the nim incident with Natalie.

  After the three of us said hello, Barney said to Sylvia, “I’m glad to see you back. Don’t let the mob dictate what you can and can’t do.”

  “You certainly don’t,” Sylvia said.

  “No, I don’t. And I always thought you didn’t either. Stick it out. Things will get better.”

  “They couldn’t get much worse.”

  Ed Drucquer appeared on my side of the table and sat down next to me. I assumed he did it because I was there, but the first words out of his mouth were directed at Sylvia.

  “You’re a brave girl. But I just want you to know that you have friends. I learned about your Tom Jefferson in England, and I always thought he had guaranteed that this sort of thing wouldn’t happen.”

  “Don’t get too close to me,” Sylvia said. “You might catch the black plague.”

  As if to emphasize that, a chant of “commie, commie” started on the other side of the center aisle of the cafeteria. The teachers had left; nobody would have dared to do this sort of thing while they were here. None of us even bothered to look in that direction, and the chant soon died down, perhaps because the chanters didn’t get the attention they sought.

  “I’m a newspaper reporter,” Ed said to Sylvia. “I’m immune to diseases. I go everywhere and talk to everyone. Sometimes I test the first amendment. Gary knows about that.” He looked at me. “Or wasn’t I supposed to say that?”

  “That’s all right,” I said. “Sylvia knows what happened. Barney might as well, too. To make a long story very short, I was expelled from Atherton for publishing a scandal sheet that was also critical of the school administration.”

  “Join the crowd,” Barney said. “I think the four of us have all crossed the line that society has drawn in the sand from time to time.”

  “We’re freedom fighters,” Ed said. “I’ve got a lot of respect for your father, Sylvia. He realizes that society has to change. Everybody should be treated equally. He has had the guts to act on his convictions.”

  “He quit the Communist party years ago,” Sylvia said.

  “Of course he had to appear to bow to the dictates of society. Although society sometimes has a long memory. But the idea of ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his need’ makes sense. And it’s fair.”

  “Coerced giving isn’t freedom,” Barney said.

  “Under socialism, I’d goof off,” I said, partly as a joke. I hadn’t won any medals for hard work.

  “It isn’t fair for some people to be rich and others poor,” Ed said.

  “My father figured out that communism doesn’t work,” Sylvia said. “And not just because of the murders of millions of people. An ideal state of socialism, which is what communism claims to be, can’t exist. Some people will always be more equal than others. My father understands the value of a free society. One without
unnecessary wars or restrictions.”

  “Cheer up,” Barney said to Ed. “In the United States, everybody has the opportunity to get rich, which is more than you can say about the USSR. At least we will if the government doesn’t arrest us all for being communists.”

  “Given the circumstances, getting rich is exactly what I intend to do,” Ed said, with a bite in his voice.

  “Let’s not fight,” Sylvia said. “I want to thank you guys for your support. I notice that no girls have rushed to my defense.”

  I had noticed it, too. Were they all under the sway of Natalie and the cheerleader mentality? Suddenly Natalie was no longer the most beautiful girl in the world. In fact, she had become rather ugly.

  “We need some humor,” Sylvia said. “Gary, write a limerick about Barney.”

  “A what?” Barney asked. “A limerick? Oh no, anything but that.”

  He put up his hands to shield himself from me.

  That was enough of a provocation to get me going. I came up with this:

  “There is a young fellow named Barney,

  Who certainly is full of the blarney.

  He beats us at nim,

  With vigor and vim.

  Perhaps he should work at a carney.”

  Ed laughed and said, “I haven’t seen you playing nim recently, Barney my boy. What’s the matter? Can’t take getting beaten by a cheerleader?”

  Barney didn’t smile. He said, “It’s Ed’s turn in the barrel. Gary, what have you got for him?”

  Inspiration didn’t shine down on me. But Ed was the only overweight member of our little group. I struggled for a couple of minutes and said:

  “There was a young fellow named Ed,

  Who dreamt he was eating some bread,

  And pickles and ham,

  And ice cream and jam,

  And when he woke up he was dead.”

  Ed grimaced. “Since we’re being skewered,” he said, “what about Sylvia?”

  “Gary’s already done me,” Sylvia said, quickly standing up and lifting her lunch tray. “And it’s time to go to class.”

  ***

  I wanted to do something more to show support for Sylvia, so I camped outside Mr. Plover’s room near the end of sixth period, using a hall pass I had obtained with tactics learned from her.

  When the bell rang at the end of the period, I collared the first two boys who came out of the room and started asking them questions about Mr. Plover’s teaching techniques. They were surprisingly open and told me the same things Sylvia had. He worked from an old outline of the textbook that was fill-in-the-blanks stuff, very dry, and bare-bones teaching at its most extreme. They appeared to be royally bored with the class and questioned whether they were learning very much.

  As I was finishing up with them, a hand tapped me on the shoulder. Turning, I saw Willie Rice, the sophomore who had been drunk at the sock hop. Sober, he looked quite handsome, his long hair neatly combed and wearing a clean shirt with the top few buttons unbuttoned.

  “Howzit going?” he asked.

  “Good,” I said, ungrammatically. “How are things with you?”

  “Super. Glad to see you survived the dance.”

  I decided it probably wasn’t a good idea to bring up what he had done to me. Let bygones be bygones. We chatted about inconsequential things for a minute, and then he said, “There’s going to be a party at my house Friday evening. Why don’t you come?”

  Willie was fairly low on my list of people I expected to be invited to a party by, so I must have showed some surprise.

  “Actually, it’s my brother’s party. Dennis.”

  Dennis was a senior. I hadn’t officially met him and didn’t have any classes with him, but I knew him by sight. At least he was in my age range. Still, I wasn’t sure I wanted to go. I hemmed and hawed. Willie said it was a casual party and I could just drop in any time. He gave me the address.

  ***

  When I got home from school, I went to my room and pulled the folder containing the mysterious limerick out of a drawer in my small desk. I compared the first line of the limerick to the line I had typed on Dr. Graves’s typewriter, using a small magnifying glass.

  At first, I didn’t see any differences. But on closer inspection, it became clear that the “s” in nosy was darker at the bottom than the top on the sheet containing the limerick. This wasn’t true of the “s” from Dr. Graves’s typewriter. I noticed several other differences, including smudging of a few letters in the limerick. The differences were more pronounced than those that might be caused just by cleaning the typewriter. Clearly, the samples had been typed on different machines.

  I felt immediate relief. Dr. Graves wasn’t threatening me. At least, not directly. But if he didn’t write the limerick, who did? I had no idea. Or, perhaps, Dr. Graves had typed it on another typewriter. Not likely, but possible. I could worry myself to death. I decided to try to forget the whole thing.

  ***

  The rest of the week was hard, but bearable. Sylvia was still isolated, except for several of us boys and one or two girls who apparently didn’t care what Natalie and her ilk thought. I drove her to school and home afterward. On Thursday, she conducted a student council meeting without incident. The teachers didn’t speak out publicly either for or against her. At least, they tolerated her.

  Friday evening, I ate dinner with Aunt Dorothy and Uncle Jeff. I casually mentioned that I might drop by a party that evening, not quite asking permission. When Aunt Dorothy asked whose party it was, I told her, but she didn’t know the Rice family. It was probably just as well. I had behaved myself for two weeks, and I had an urge to get out and let off steam before my teenage hormones exploded. They were okay with me going. Uncle Jeff told me not to drink and drive.

  The party was at a small farm a few miles away. I didn’t have any trouble finding it, even though it was dark when I arrived. I parked on the front lawn where a number of other cars were scattered. When I got out of my car, I could hear rock and roll music coming from inside, even though the windows were closed. I knew I was at the right place.

  I didn’t think anybody would hear me if I rang the doorbell, and the door was unlocked, so I walked in. The music instantly became much louder. I followed the sound to the living room where cigarette smoke curled lazily toward the ceiling. A fire in an old brick fireplace produced more smoke, most of which went up the chimney.

  Several couples were dancing on a hardwood floor, darkened with age, doing some version of the swing or dirty bop. The music was coming from a phonograph playing 45 RPM records. The girls who were dancing wore skirts with several crinolines underneath, which flashed when they spun. I saw a couple of poodle skirts.

  The boys, who outnumbered the girls, were dressed as their version of juvenile delinquents: blue jeans, T-shirts with rolled-up sleeves and a cigarette pack on one shoulder. A couple of them wore black leather jackets. Most wore their hair long. I immediately felt out of place with my short hair and neat clothes, especially because I didn’t recognize anybody.

  Then Willie materialized from someplace near the table that had been set up as a bar and grabbed me by the arm. He had a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth and had obviously been drinking. He pulled me over to the table where I recognized his brother, Dennis, larger and stockier than Willie, but with the same hair.

  When Dennis spotted me in tow of his brother, I stuck out my hand and said, “Gary Blanchard.”

  He shook my hand and said, “You’re the new kid. Have a beer.”

  He pulled a bottle out of a tub filled with ice, opened it deftly, and handed it to me. I took a sip. It was cold and slid down easily. One beer wouldn’t impair my driving ability.

  Although there were a few older boys and girls there, including Dennis, who had probably flunked a grade or two, I was willing to bet that most of the partygoers were under eighteen. And that included me. There wasn’t a parent in sight. No adults—just booze and broads.

  It reminded
me of a definition I had heard of the difference between a good girl and a nice girl. A good girl goes on a date, goes home, goes to bed. A nice girl goes on a date, goes to bed, goes home. Although the saying was mostly wishful thinking, as was most sex talk at the high school level, it was tempting, if perhaps unfair, to imagine which kind these girls were.

  I had briefly thought about asking Sylvia if she would like to come, thinking that she needed to get out, just as I did. Now I was glad I hadn’t. And what was I doing here? I obviously didn’t fit in. I wouldn’t stay long. Willie was probably the youngest one at the party, and he was sitting by himself. I went over and sat down beside him on a folding chair.

  “Nice party,” I said.

  He smiled at me, a little bleary-eyed.

  “I have a question for you,” I said. Might as well take the opportunity to try and get some information. I continued, speaking loud enough to be heard over the pounding beat of the music, “I…I’m interested in Ralph Harrison. You said there was something funny about the way he died.”

  Willie took a drag on his cigarette and said, “Did I say that?”

  Of course, he had been in a drunken stupor at the time, just as he was now. I tried a different tack. “You said he taught you to walk on your hands.”

  Willie’s face brightened. “Ya wanna see me walk on my hands?”

  “No thanks.” Even if he succeeded, I was afraid he’d leave a trail of destruction in his path. “You must have known Ralph very well. How did you meet him?” Since they were two years apart in school.

  “He was on the varsity baseball team when I went out for JV. We both played catcher.”

  “Who’s the coach?”

  “Mr. Jarvis.”

  One of the gym teachers.

  “Dr. Graves sometimes comes to our practices.”

  “Oh.” I recalled Dr. Graves had said he watched swimming classes too.

  “Yeah, he knows a lot about baseball. He used to play semi-pro. He would give us tips.”

  “It sounds like Dr. Graves takes an interest in sports.”

  “That and he has favorites among the guys. Ralph was one of them. I’m another.”