The Hayloft: a 1950s Mystery

by

Alan Cook

SMASHWORDS EDITION

“The Hayloft,” a mystery set in the 1950s, is
a wonderful way to spend some time.”

—Cathy Yanda for Reader Views

“Cook has the details in this book just
right. Having grown up in that era, in a small Midwestern town I
felt like I had been transported back to my childhood. I knew
people with bomb shelters and haylofts and spent time playing in
both. The bomb shelters are every bit as creepy feeling as
described in the book and the haylofts every bit as fun, complete
with forts, slides and tunnels built out of the hay bales.”

—Caryn St.Clair for Mystery Morgue

“Alan Cook not only recreated the feeling of
the fifties with his words but also the tone of the time.
Excellent!”

— Cynthia Lea Clark

PUBLISHED BY:

Alan Cook on Smashwords

The Hayloft

Copyright ©
2006 by Alan L. Cook.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the
rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication
may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the
prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above
publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters,
places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the
author's imagination or are used fictitiously. The author
acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various
products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used
without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not
authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark
owners.

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BOOKS BY ALAN COOK

Run into Trouble

Gary Blanchard Mysteries:

Honeymoon for Three

The Hayloft: a 1950s mystery

California Mystery:

Hotline to Murder

Lillian Morgan mysteries:

Catch a Falling Knife

Thirteen Diamonds

Other fiction:

Walking to Denver

Nonfiction:

Walking the World: Memories and
Adventures

History:

Freedom’s Light: Quotations from History’s
Champions of Freedom

Poetry:

The Saga of Bill the Hermit

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many thanks to Dawn Dowdle and my wife,
Bonny, for helping to make this book readable.

DEDICATION

To Matthew and Mason, who will also be going
to high school

CHAPTER 1

Some people must like to be the bearers of
bad news. One of these is my younger brother, Archie. I had been
practicing some preseason tennis on the indoor courts at Atherton
High School and then ridden home on my bike, bucking the March
winds. I had just barely entered our suburban house when he raced
up to me.

“Gary, Ralph’s dead,” he said, his voice
trembling with emotion.

“What?” I asked, unable to believe my ears.
Was this some kind of a joke?

“Ralph’s dead,” he said again. “He fell off
the balcony in the Carter High School auditorium and killed
himself."

This couldn’t be true. Nobody fell off a
balcony in real life. That sort of thing only happened in movies.
Especially not my first cousin, Ralph, who was an all-star athlete
and in complete control of his body at all times. But Archie, who
liked practical jokes, looked pale and deadly serious. He obviously
wasn’t kidding.

I raced into the kitchen where my mother and
my other brother, Tom, were sitting at the table in our breakfast
nook, looking stunned. Nobody sat here at this time of day. Tears
rolled freely down my mother’s cheeks while she dabbed at them
ineffectually with a tissue and sniffed as if she had a cold.
Happy-go-lucky Tom looked as if he had lost his last friend.

“Is it true?” I asked them.

My mother nodded and then said, the words
choking her, “We just got a phone call from Aunt Dorothy. It
happened after an assembly in the auditorium. Apparently Ralph
stayed behind and was there all alone.”

None of this made any sense. “Does Dad know?”
I asked.

“I just called him,” Mother said. “He’s on
his way home.”

My father was the brother of Aunt Dorothy and
the uncle of Ralph. I asked more questions, but my mother had given
me all the information she had. If it were anybody else, I might
have almost believed it—but Ralph. Ralph was indestructible. He
climbed the highest trees, dove off the biggest rocks. We were the
same age, but he did everything a little bit better than I did—and
a lot more flamboyantly.

***

I heard our car pull into the driveway and
turned off the radio. I was tired of hearing about
communist-hunting by the House Un-American Activities Committee,
anyway. And tired of listening to pop songs that had lost their
music and meaning since Ralph died.

I was also tired of itching and not being
able to scratch. Quarantined in the small and darkened corner room
above the garage with measles, I had been unable to attend his
funeral, which had taken place this afternoon in Carter, the second
town east of Buffalo, Atherton being the first.

Part of me felt bad about not attending the
funeral, but part of me was relieved. I had never been to a
funeral, and I felt that I was too young to start attending them.
But Tom and Archie were younger than I was and they had gone. As
the oldest, I should have been there.

Archie was the first person up the stairs. He
stopped in the doorway to my room. Nobody was allowed inside except
my mother. He wore the same dark blue suit he wore to Sunday
School, complete with white shirt and tie. At eleven years old, he
was still on the small side, but he was beginning to grow
vertically. His light brown hair was neatly brushed, which was
unusual.

“You should have been there, Gary,” he said,
echoing my thoughts and breathing hard from running up the stairs.
“There were hundreds of people. Everybody loved Ralph.”

I tried to focus on him through my rheumy
eyes and said, “Were there a lot of students from Carter High
School?”

“Yes, they brought them in buses. The church
was packed. Some of them spoke. They said nice things about
Ralph.”

“We met our cousins at the reception
afterward at the church,” Tom said.

He had followed Archie up the stairs and was
standing behind him in the doorway, looking over his shoulder at
me. He also wore a dark suit, but he was a full-fledged teenager,
having just turned fifteen. He was challenging me in the height
department, although he was still as skinny as a broomstick. He
wore his hair short, like me, so it always looked neat. When his
acne went away, he would be handsome.

I was confused for a moment. Ralph was our
cousin, but he was dead. He had no brothers or sisters. Then I
remembered. “Oh, you mean the ones who came from England?”

“Right. The Drucquers. They have two kids. Ed
is a sophomore at Carter High and Kate is a freshman.”

So she was Tom’s age. And Ed was between Tom
and me. I had never met the Drucquers. They had apparently come to
Carter from England a couple of years ago, but Aunt Dorothy had
only known about them for a year.

“Do they have English accents?” I asked.

“Mr. and Mrs. Drucquer do,” Archie said. “It
was hard to understand some of the things they said. Ed has an
accent, too, but Kate speaks almost perfect English.”

I didn’t bother to point out that what the
Drucquers spoke had a better claim to being called English than
what we Americans spoke.

“Ed is chubby,” Archie said, “like his
parents. But Kate is thin and has red hair. Compared to the others,
she is very unique.”

“Unique doesn’t take a modifier,” I said,
automatically.

Ignoring me, Archie continued, “But Ed is a
little strange.”

“He asked us if we knew anything about a
diamond necklace that belonged to our family,” Tom said. “It was
apparently brought over from England some time ago. But I’ve never
heard of it.”

I hadn’t either. My father appeared in the
doorway, dressed in a three-piece suit. He still looked handsome
and athletic and had all his hair. Because of the lack of light and
the glop in my eyes, I couldn’t see the blue eyes behind his
wire-rimmed glasses. He asked me how I was feeling. I told him I
was feeling a little better, because that’s what he wanted to hear.
He didn’t like any display of weakness. Better to placate him than
tell the truth. He said the funeral was tastefully done, with
appropriate music and heart-felt eulogies. My father liked rituals,
especially if they were well executed.

He hadn’t learned any more about how Ralph
had fallen off the balcony. The account in the Buffalo Express had
been uninformative on that score. He had also met the Drucquers for
the first time. I asked him how we were related to them.

“We have a common English ancestor from the
early 1800s,” he said. “Although the Drucquers may have originated
someplace else, maybe Holland. I’m a little hazy on the
details.”

Tom asked him about a diamond necklace.

“There is no diamond necklace. That’s a
family legend. It’s fun to talk about, but that’s all it is.”

That night, when my fever was at its highest,
I had nightmares about Ralph falling off the balcony at the Carter
High School auditorium, over and over again. But it never occurred
to me, even in those nightmares, that very soon I would be an
involuntary student at Carter High, myself.

CHAPTER 2

Everybody has bad days occasionally. I had
managed to put together a string of bad days. The longest string I
could remember in my seventeen years, except for some of the times
I was sick. I shouldn’t be here. I should be in my homeroom at
Atherton High School getting ready for the third week of school.
But instead, I was sitting in the office of the principal at Carter
High School, hoping that he wouldn’t throw me out. The way I had
been thrown out of Atherton last week. Had it only been last week?
It seemed like at least a century ago.

Tap tap tap. The sound of the pencil tapping
on the desk sounded like the drumbeat for a particularly mournful
country song about pickup trucks, booze, and wayward women. It
irritated me. And scared me. In fact, everything irritated and
scared me this morning. I had an urge to get up from the
uncomfortable chair in which I was sitting and run from the office.
And from the building. And from the world.

Dr. Graves continued to tap his pencil as he
read a transcript of my grades. The way he wore his glasses down on
the end of his nose led me to believe that he didn’t wear them all
the time. He was tall—taller than I was. I had discovered that fact
when he had stood to shake my hand as I entered his office. It was
the first time I could remember shaking the hand of a principal. He
had a strong grip, and he looked lean and mean.

He wasn’t wearing his suit coat, and the
sleeves of his white shirt were rolled up two folds. His hair, what
there was of it, was all on the sides of his head. The center had
been paved over with skin, still sporting a trace of summer tan.
His eyebrows might have more hair than his head.

He stopped tapping his pencil and looked up
at me over his glasses. His dark eyes drilled holes through me for
several seconds, making me more and more scared. I tried to brace
myself for what was coming.

“Your grades are good,” Dr. Graves said, in a
surprisingly kind voice. “You won’t have any trouble here
academically.”

A wisp of hope. Did that mean he was
accepting me?

“I understand you write limericks.”

His comment disordered my brain cells.
Limericks were not one of the topics I was expecting to discuss
this morning. And how did he know? “Er, I’ve written some.”

“Clean ones I hope. Can you write one about
me?”

“Right now?” Dr. Graves nodded. Maybe this
was an admission test. I had been asked to do stranger things. I
would keep it bland. I thought for a minute while Dr. Graves tapped
his pencil. Then I spoke.

“
Our leader’s a doctor named
Graves.

He sees that each student behaves.

He won’t lose his poise

With the girls and the boys,

And we hope he won’t treat them like
slaves.”

It was a bad limerick, but what did he expect
so early on a Monday morning? Then I saw that Dr. Graves was
laughing.