The Farmhouse, Part 12

Late one night, state police and narcotics agents quietly crept up the long driveway toward the lighted farmhouse on the hill. They surrounded it, then knocked on the door. The sole occupant of the house on that night put aside his textbook and warily cracked the door. The narcs burst in, handed him a warrant and began turning the house upside down. After two hours, the search ended. All that was found was a partially-smoked joint and a few seeds inside a shoe in the closet. Nevertheless, the student was cuffed and hauled off to the pokey.

The bust was very much a bust. Everyone in the fraternity knew that the narcs must have been after Ted, who had become quite big in the drug business. But Ted wasn’t at the farmhouse that night; the nabbed student unlucky enough to be using the quiet house for study could barely be described as a social smoker; in fact, he was the son of a judge in a neighboring county.

The unfortunate student would get off lightly, but the bust was the end of the farmhouse, as far as the Skull House was concerned. The Skulls had been careful to be sure that the house was rented in the names of several individual students, and not the fraternity, but the college administrators weren’t stupid, and holding onto the farm could jeopardize the fraternity’s existence on campus.

Ted, meanwhile, continued to do business, and although the narcs could not catch him, something else would: a bullet in the abdomen. In a drug deal gone bad, Ted was shot through his side, the bullet somehow missing vital organs.

To our amazement, Ted was able to march with us at graduation. It wasn’t his physical condition that surprised us, but his academic achievement. Ted’s grade-point average was even lower than mine, and he had hardly attended any of his classes the whole semester. We imagined that the college, faced with having to deal with him for yet another semester, decided it was best he be graduated and be done with forever.

Whatever became of the farmhouse and the characters who frequented it in those years? There’s both mystery and tragedy in that answer, which you’ll have to read about tomorrow.