Chapter Two

If Hazel had to respond to one more party across the river, she was going to...

She'd had this conversation with herself often enough, and there were many answers to that proposition, none of which she would follow through on.

The two hundred some odd students at Cyrus College (and yes, the joke was made and made often) were a complicated group, united mainly by their lack of fear over a lack of accreditation, and mostly by their unwillingness or inability to go through an admissions process at other post-secondary institutions, ones with extras like a grounds department (the students took turns mowing and trimming and not picking up the trash around the lodges), a reliable wifi system, or accreditation.

They also were very close to united around their passion for horticulture, with a practical interest in marijuana. This crop was still illegal in Ohio, and schemes to use the college as the basis for getting permits to grow legally usually sounded scholarly and feasible until running up against the problematic lack of accreditation.

So the students tended to get their weed the way most college students anywhere did, albeit a bit more out in the open. Upper Sharon was unincorporated, and Concord Township was not well-off enough to have their own law enforcement (especially given that so much of their real estate was tax exempt what with Cyrus College, St. Fiacre's, and the Brotherhood of Rustic Pioneers, the Public Library, the Community Theatre, and both churches in town being non-profits). The County Sheriff's office responded to 911 calls, and the volunteer fire department kept busy enough, but there just weren't many reasons for anyone to come through to make a bust for a baggie.

When the more prosperous (and accredited) college to the south had students wanting to obtain some herb for happiness, they just told friends "Goin' up to Cyrus. Need any?" And the rest was understood.

Some of those transactions were drawn out enough that the students would mix, and the mixing might become a party, and when a party got big enough that the resident lodge wardens had to take notice, the usual practice was to cross Auter Creek and duck into the Wyandot Mill. Owned by the state, noted in local history, but secured lightly, the large open spaces within were ideal for college parties. The few windows were, ironically, barely visible within Upper Sharon, but clearly to be seen from the office and apartment of the Master of St. Fiacre's, which is to say, Hazel, who was also president of the college, an arrangement that had been true since 1954.

In all fairness, the students, local and commuting, who partied inside the mill were scrupulous about cleaning up and not doing damage; it was part of the "close to the land" ethos of Cyrus, and even the students from down the road knew that keeping things cool was essential to being able to keep holding their gatherings there. Hazel marveled that, considering how much smoking was going on in and along the porch above the mill run, the aged wooden structure hadn't long ago burned to ashes.

But if Mrs. Finnerty across the creek saw lights on after dark, and more importantly could hear the music from an "event," she would call Hazel. How the angry old woman had gotten her cell number she wasn't sure; she might have given it to her in a moment of weakness, at some community gathering when she'd been buttonholed about "you must do something about your students, Mrs. Doone."

Never mind that she was not and had never been a Mrs., and was generally Dr. something when she wasn't just Hazel (Cyrus being a very egalitarian place, St. Fiacre's just a touch less so), but Mrs. Finnerty had been on a rampage last night, even going out onto her porch to wave her arms at St. Fiacre's across the valley as she vented to Hazel about what was, and what she imagined was going on in the mill.

So, lacking also a security service (fascist, she'd heard one of her handful of faculty say when the subject came up), she put on a coat and marched grimly down the stairs to Cyrus, across The Range (the well trodden path between the two rows of lodges), onto the cast iron bridge across Auter Creek, and down and around a footpath just below the curve of Upper Sharon Road to the side door of the mill, where she stopped, collected herself, stood up a bit straighter, and knocked loudly on the door.