The Hayloft: a 1950s Mystery Read online

  But when she saw the car I was driving, she exclaimed, “That’s Ralph’s car.”

  I had forgotten about that. Major error. She shrunk away from me, as though I were a car thief. Or worse.

  “I’m Ralph’s cousin,” I blurted out. “I should have told you before. I’m staying with his parents and they let me use the car.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  She looked as if she might fly away. “I should have. I thought…you might not want to talk to me. I’m sorry.”

  Ruth was still on the verge of bugging out. I opened her door and then went around to the driver’s side, trying to exude confidence I didn’t feel. I climbed in and waited. Finally, she got into the car, but she didn’t look happy about it. I started the engine, shifted into first gear, and drove out to Main Street. I stopped, not knowing which way to turn.

  “Turn left,” she said after a few seconds. That was opposite from the direction to the farm.

  Ruth smoothed her cheerleader skirt down over her knees as I tried to figure out what to say next. She finally said, “Ralph steered with the spinner.”

  I didn’t use the spinner knob that Ralph had installed on the steering wheel.

  She said, “You aren’t really writing a story for the Carter Press, are you?”

  “No,” I admitted. “But I am interested in Ralph.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “I understand you and Ralph were going together.”

  “We were going steady.”

  “Uh, how were you getting along?” That was awkward, but I couldn’t think of any better way of phrasing it. She was silent as I shoved the gearshift on the steering post into second while pulling away from one of the few traffic lights in the area. I hoped I hadn’t spooked her.

  “We were…we were going steady. We were getting along fine.”

  I thought she might have been going to say that they were in love, but that was too intimate an admission to a stranger—especially a male stranger. I tried one more time. “Were you having any problems with your relationship?”

  “No. No problems. We were getting along fine.”

  I decided to let that rest. I said, “I saw Ralph several times a year, mostly during the summer. Sometimes our families would go up into Canada and stay at a lodge on a lake for a week. I got the impression that Ralph was kind of wild.”

  “He was a little wild, but I helped to calm him down.”

  Or maybe put him to sleep. She must have exhibited more personality with Ralph than she was showing with me. Or did he just like her for her body? I preferred witty chatterboxes, myself. “How long had you two been going together?”

  “Since the start of the year.”

  “The calendar year?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you had been going together almost three months when he…”

  “Yes.”

  She would have been a sophomore and Ralph would have been a junior.

  “Did you see him on the day he…died?”

  “Yes. We sat together at an assembly that took place just before…”

  Her voice trailed off. Usually, classes sat together at assemblies, but sometimes students were able to break away and sit with their friends.

  “Where were you sitting?”

  “In the balcony.”

  “Did you ever see him…do anything unusual or daring in the balcony?”

  “One time he took me there and showed me how he could stand on his hands on the edge. It scared me half to death.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I told him never to do it again.”

  “What happened after the assembly was over?”

  Ruth was silent. I glanced over and saw a tear rolling down her cheek. Maybe I was asking too many questions. I wouldn’t press her any more.

  She wiped the tear away with her finger and said, “I had to go to class. He had a class near mine and ordinarily he would have walked me to my class, but he said he needed to talk to someone. So I went on alone.”

  “Did he say who he needed to talk to?”

  “No.”

  I had one more question. “Did you see him again?”

  She choked as she said, “No.”

  I couldn’t bear to ask her any more questions about Ralph, but I also couldn’t leave her in this condition. I waited while she blew her nose into a tissue she extracted from her purse and then changed the subject. “So you work with Ed.”

  “Yes.” Her face lit up with a wan smile for the first time. She said, “Ed is a riot. He’s fun to work with. And I love his accent.”

  “Do you write stories for the paper?” If she wrote stories, she must interview people, and if she interviewed people, she must talk.

  “Yes, I write stories, and I type the stories up on stencils, so we can make copies of the paper for distribution. Ed’s not a very good typist.” She actually giggled.

  I knew stencils well since I had typed many of them while putting the school paper together at Atherton. They were difficult to work with, required great accuracy on the typewriter, and could be messy while making reproductions.

  I said, “I really do write. I wrote for the school paper at Atherton.”

  “Oh.”

  We chatted about the newspaper business the rest of the way to her house.

  ***

  Dinner at my aunt’s house was a somber affair. Aunt Dorothy and Uncle Jeff had not gotten over Ralph’s death. Ralph was an only child, so the house would have been completely quiet if it weren’t for me. I think that’s why they agreed so readily to let me come and live with them. They saw me as a replacement for Ralph. But so far, I had been a failure in that regard because they rarely smiled.

  Uncle Jeff had a job with an aircraft company near the Buffalo Airport. He used his mathematical background to calculate reliability. If an airplane part had one chance in a thousand of failing over a certain period of time, then adding another part to back it up would mean that the chances of both parts failing in the same time frame was one in a million. That sort of thing.

  Aunt Dorothy was a substitute teacher at Atherton, although she was also available to teach at Carter. It was a good thing that she was usually called to teach several days a week, because she needed something to keep her busy.

  She was a good cook. We sat down to eat in the dining room of the old farmhouse. Through the window we could look up the lane that went between the fields, which had been harvested by the neighbor who farmed it and were bare at the moment. Uncle Jeff was a gentleman farmer; he liked the ambiance of the farm, but he didn’t want to do farm work.

  Tonight’s meal featured locally grown corn on the cob, which I loved. As I buttered and salted an ear and chowed down on it, I realized that my noisy chewing reverberated through the room like a million termites. I needed to talk. I had moved in last Sunday. This was my fifth dinner here. I didn’t know whether I could stand nine months of silent meals without becoming a stark, raving lunatic.

  I swallowed a mouthful of corn and said, “I met Ruth Allen today.”

  Uncle Jeff and Aunt Dorothy looked at me. Uncle Jeff still wore his white shirt from work, but he had taken off his tie. He had a kindly face and laughed easily. At least, he used to. Aunt Dorothy was wearing a print housedress and had her graying hair in a bun, the way she wore it for teaching.

  At first they remained silent, and I thought I had said the wrong thing. Then Aunt Dorothy said, “How’s she doing? She’s such a sweet girl.”

  Relieved, I said, “She’s doing all right, considering everything. She’s a cheerleader and she’s working on the school paper.”

  Uncle Jeff actually smiled and said, “She’s got a great figure. Ralph had good taste in women.” Aunt Dorothy frowned at him, but he ignored her and said, “So, Gary, are you thinking about working on the school paper?”

  “Dr. Graves made me promise not to.”

  “Trying to stifle your creativity, eh? Well, it’s only for a few more
months. Then you’ll be in college where I trust you’ll have more freedom.”

  Uncle Jeff hadn’t bought into the line of reasoning that accused me of committing a heinous crime. Perhaps that’s why he was willing to take me in.

  “Would you like to play a game of chess after dinner? That is, if you aren’t overburdened with homework.”

  I had enjoyed playing chess with him in the past, but this was the first time he had mentioned the game since I had arrived.

  “Sure.” I wasn’t one to let homework get in the way of fun. I was emboldened to try another topic. “I-I took a look at the auditorium balcony where Ralph fell. It isn’t that long a drop. And Ralph was so athletic, I would think…” here I swallowed, “…that if he had fallen he would have been able to not land on his back.”

  It was an awkward sentence, but I had gotten it out. I took another bite of corn while I waited for a reaction. Aunt Dorothy looked at her food, stone-faced. Uncle Jeff looked thoughtful.

  Uncle Jeff said, slowly, “You’re a smart boy, Gary. Do you have a theory about what might have happened?”

  Ed had sworn me to secrecy, but mostly to keep his name out of it, I assumed. And Ruth had just told me about Ralph standing on his hands on the balcony, and she hadn’t sworn me to secrecy. I didn’t see why Ralph’s parents shouldn’t know what might have happened.

  “Not really, but I learned that Ralph had done a handstand on the edge of the balcony before.”

  The color drained out of Aunt Dorothy’s face, and she gasped. “Ralph wouldn’t do a thing like that.”

  Uncle Jeff sighed. “I’m afraid he would have. Go on, Gary.”

  “If he did do a handstand, he was skillful enough so that if he had lost his balance, he would have been able to do a flip and land on his feet. He might have broken a leg, but—”

  “But not his neck. I looked at the balcony. It’s not that big a drop, as you said. I couldn’t understand how he could land on his back. He must have really been off balance. Have you carried your thoughts any further?”

  “Well, what if he wasn’t alone on the balcony. Why would he show off like that if nobody else was there?”

  “And…”

  “And what if the person he was with pushed him—hard enough so that he didn’t have time to rotate his body in midair.”

  Aunt Dorothy gasped again. “Do you think he was murdered?”

  “I don’t think anything,” I said, quickly. “I’m just trying to figure out what happened.”

  “The police weren’t interested in pursuing it,” Uncle Jeff said. “The school administration claimed that nobody was on the balcony with Ralph, and there didn’t seem to be any way to prove it, one way or another.”

  “Attendance isn’t taken at each class,” I said, “so if somebody skipped, it wouldn’t necessarily be noticed. And it’s probably too long ago for anybody to remember whether a specific person attended a class that was in session at the time Ralph died.”

  “Do you suspect someone?” Aunt Dorothy asked.

  “No, no. As I said, I’m just trying to make sense of it.”

  “Well, I want you to stop. Ralph is dead. All this theorizing won’t bring him back. All it will do is open old wounds.”

  Aunt Dorothy snapped her mouth shut. Uncle Jeff and I both looked at her, but we didn’t say anything.

  ***

  “Check,” Uncle Jeff said as he took my rook with his queen.

  He hadn’t lost his touch. “You’ve got me,” I conceded. “I am allowed to join the chess club at school, so I think I’ll do that and brush up on my game. Then maybe I’ll be ready for you.”

  We were playing in the large living room with the grand piano at one end. Aunt Dorothy was doing something upstairs.

  Uncle Jeff smiled. “Good,” he said. “You’ve got a solid basic game. I’m looking forward to playing with you some more.” He leaned toward me and lowered his voice. “Gary, if you have any ideas you can pursue concerning how Ralph died, I’ll back you. Just don’t rile Dorothy. I was stymied when I tried to find out some things. But perhaps you’ll have more luck. From the point of view of a statistician, I would say that the odds are against Ralph dying the way he did without somebody else being involved.”

  “I agree,” I said, “but I don’t know if I can prove it. I’ll see what I can find out.”

  “Thank-you.”

  The first thought that occurred to me was the discrepancy in the stories told by Ed and Ruth. Ed said that Ruth and Ralph were breaking up; Ruth said they were getting along fine. Was it a misunderstanding or was one of them lying?

  I asked, “Do you know how good the relationship between Ralph and Ruth was when he died?”

  “It was fine, as far as I know,” Uncle Jeff said. “But as the father, I’m always the last to find out anything. I don’t know whether Dorothy has any more information. I’ll delicately query her and let you know if I learn anything different.” He smiled and said, “I’m glad you’re here.”

  “Me too.” I spoke before I thought, but if my aunt and uncle smiled more this wouldn’t be a bad place to live.

  CHAPTER 9

  I sat down in the hard, wooden chair in front of Dr. Graves’s desk, as directed by Carol, the administrative secretary. Dr G was reading something while tapping his pencil. He didn’t look up for about thirty seconds, which gave me time to wonder if he were upset with me. Since he could kick me out of Carter for the slightest provocation, this was a real concern.

  What would I do then? I couldn’t go home in disgrace. I had taught myself how to juggle three balls. With practice, I could learn to juggle more exotic items. Like knives. I would run away and join a circus.

  But right now I would rather be backstage with Sylvia and Natalie. We hadn’t met this morning, the first time in four mornings that some combination of us hadn’t gotten together. As far as I knew, Dr. Graves wasn’t aware that I had been meeting with them. Even if he should happen to find out, I could justify my behavior. After all, I was spying on Sylvia, at his request. And a spy had to be granted a certain amount of leeway concerning school rules. This made me feel a little better while I rehearsed what I was going to say.

  Dr. Graves finally glanced up and stopped tapping his pencil. Looking at me over his glasses, he said, “Good morning, Gary. How are you adapting to life here at Carter?”

  “Fine, sir. It’s smaller than Atherton and a little easier to get around.” That was innocuous enough.

  “Yes. Well, what can I do for you?”

  “I want to tell you what I’ve found out about Sylvia and her father.”

  Dr. Graves quickly got up from his chair, walked around the desk, and closed the door. He had a long, athletic stride and was back in his seat in about eight seconds. He took off his glasses and gave me his full attention.

  This intimidated me because it implied that what I was about to say had a lot more importance than what I wished to give it. I swallowed and started talking. “I don’t think Mr. Doran is wholeheartedly behind the Korean War.”

  “The Korean War is over.”

  “I think he believes that it was a bad idea for us to send troops to Korea.”

  This wasn’t based on anything Sylvia had told me. I had been reading the editorials in the Buffalo Express. One of them had been about the Korean War. Although the editorials were unsigned, Sylvia had said that Mr. Doran, as chief editorial writer, assigned the editorials to be written. From that I inferred that they reflected his point of view. Of course, Dr. Graves also had access to the Buffalo Express and could be reading the editorials. This might be old news to him. Because the information was common knowledge, I could rationalize passing it along. It wasn’t as if I had actually dug up any new dirt.

  “That sounds like a commie point of view,” Dr. Graves said. “North Korea is supported by China, the biggest communist country there is. Do you have anything more specific than that?”

  “He thinks that we can’t be the policemen of the world. We shou
ldn’t get militarily involved in any foreign countries unless our freedom is at stake.” I was paraphrasing and generalizing, but I thought I had the gist of it correct. And I still wasn’t saying anything that wasn’t common knowledge.

  “Isolationist. That kind of thinking plays into the hands of the Communists who want to take over the world. Good job, Blanchard. What about Sylvia?”

  “Uh, I’m not sure she shares the same opinion. Her boyfriend enlisted in the Army and apparently wants to go to Korea.”

  “Erskine. Yeah, I know him well. He was on the swimming team. I’d sometimes go to swimming classes just to watch that boy swim. He’s got beautiful form. Graceful as a porpoise. What have you learned about what Sylvia is up to at school? A while back she was trying to get some teachers fired.”

  I stared at Dr. Graves. This had nothing to do with Mr. Doran or the communist conspiracy. And I was supposed to be helping Sylvia gather information on Mr. Plover, although I hadn’t had time to start. I decided to play dumb.

  “She hasn’t said anything about anything like that. Maybe…she’s stopped doing that.” When the truth came out, I wanted to be completely dissociated with it.

  “I don’t believe it. She’s always up to something. Trying to undermine my authority. Well, keep up the good work, Blanchard. Remember: eyes and ears open. Get along to your homeroom now.”

  He dismissed me with a wave of his hand.

  ***

  On Saturday afternoon, Carter played Atherton in football. At Carter. I knew I should be rooting for Carter, but my heart was still with Atherton. However, I decided that I had better sit on the Carter side of the field, since I attended Carter High now. Besides, the visitors’ bleachers faced west, and the spectators had the afternoon sun in their eyes. I was sure the field had been designed that away on purpose.

  It was unseasonably warm—shirtsleeve weather. Perhaps too early to be called Indian summer, since it was officially just barely autumn, but the leaves were starting to turn to their autumn colors. The reds and golds made it the most beautiful season of the year—except for winter when a blanket of white covered the ground. And spring, when new green life appeared. And summer, when yellow grain filled the fields scraped flat by an ancient glacier. It was the kind of day that made me almost forget about my problems and just be happy I was alive. Until I saw some Atherton people I knew across the gridiron. That brought a pang in my heart that I had been trying to quell.