Chapter 92
On the way back to Bingham, I stopped again in Madison to speak to Roy Colburn, one of the owners of Colburn’s Rib Shack, the restaurant where Mallory Norton was working a couple of shifts a week, mostly weekends, before she disappeared.
The rest of the time, she was helping out at her father’s place of business, the resort at which she’d been waitressing during the summer having closed early after a slow season.
Colburn couldn’t tell me much more than the kid at the Shop ’n Save in Bingham, which was that Mallory was quiet but well liked, and a hard worker.
“Does she have friends among the staff?”
“Mallory hadn’t worked here for long,” he said, “and we never have more than two servers on duty, including weekends when we’re at our busiest. By the time we’ve finished cleaning up, everyone’s usually too tired to do more than head home, even if there was anywhere else to go around here, which there isn’t. ”
Colburn’s wife Bea, who was co-owner and chef, chimed in.
“Mallory sometimes took food home with her instead of eating during her break. I figured she’d have it for lunch the next day. I’m proud of my cooking, but even I wouldn’t be filling up on it last thing before bedtime.”
She returned to the kitchen to continue her prep.
Roy Colburn gave me names and phone numbers for the restaurant’s other servers, but added that he didn’t think Mallory would have been socializing with them since they were all twice her age, with kids.
The ubiquitous picture of Mallory was pinned behind the host’s station, alongside a print of Christ surrounded by adoring children.
“I might reconsider that print,” I told Colburn.
“We’re all praying for her safe return.”
“Which means praying she’s not with Jesus yet.”
He took in the two images.
“I’ll put Jesus in the office,” he said.
Spero’s location was indicated only by a single small sign by its access road.
The sign read: SPERO. PRIVATE. It was easy to miss, which might have been the point.
The access road was itself a tributary of a tributary of the main road through The Plains, all without houses, as far as I could tell.
But then, it wasn’t as though The Plains was overcrowded, and the kind of people who lived there preferred not to be troubled by neighbors, or anyone else.
Spero was not what I’d anticipated, meaning it didn’t resemble Stalag 13 from Hogan’s Heroes.
It was instead a borderline bucolic combination of old and new structures, some made of stone, others wood, surrounded by a shoulder-height white fence, freshly painted.
Two paddock gates, also white, stood open, without a barrier.
Five cars were parked in a stony lot immediately inside the gates, but much of the rest was green lawn, dotted at regular intervals by beds planted with fall-flowering asters and chrysanthemums. Over to the right, and some way distant from the main buildings, was a cottage with a garden of its own.
Two smaller cabins, without yards, stood equidistant to the left.
I could see a couple of security cameras but no staff or students, and the campus was quiet.
I understood how easy it might have been for Scott Theriault to run off, but also why the school did not see—or had not seen, before his death—any pressing reason for higher fences, locked gates, or heavier security.
A boy could leave, but where would he go?
No buses ran out here, and I’d passed no other vehicles once I left The Forks.
If a student had access to a bike, he could cycle, but it was twenty miles or more to Bingham, and if he was gone too long, the alarm would be raised and the police alerted.
Scott had learned this to his cost, but it hadn’t stopped him from trying again, and the third attempt had killed him.
I parked on the road and walked through the gates.
As I did, a bell rang in the newest of the buildings, a redbrick structure more modern and utilitarian than the rest. A door opened at the eastern end of the block and boys began to appear: some running, some walking, some in groups, some alone, and a handful, older than the rest, indulging in horseplay.
At first glance they resembled any regular bunch of students at the end of the school day, if distinguished by their paucity, and only by looking closer was it noticeable how few of them were smiling.
Speaking as someone who’d wiped the dust of school from his feet at the first opportunity, I could understand their unhappiness.
I’d been able to leave school behind when the bell rang, but for these kids, it was all there was, and its discipline lasted twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
They also had to live with the knowledge that they were at Spero because their parents didn’t want them around.
Kids sent to fancy boarding schools might have sympathized, but boarders weren’t being punished, and for all its lawns and flower beds, Spero was a punitive institution.
The last of the students filed out, followed by a tall man carrying a leather briefcase in one hand and a sheaf of papers in the other.
He wore a navy blazer with shiny buttons, a blue turtleneck, and navy pants, like a sailor who’d taken a wrong turn at the ocean and got lost in the woods.
His dark hair was cut very short, and so faded at the sides as to resemble a mohican, while the ends of his mustache curled past the corners of his mouth to dangle halfway to his chin.
I didn’t like mustaches. I associated them with men who were trying to sell me something I didn’t want to buy.
As he spotted me, he stopped by a window, placed the briefcase on the ledge, opened it, put the papers inside, and closed the briefcase before leaving it behind.
This kept his hands free, and he flexed his fingers as he walked toward me.
It wasn’t the typical reaction of a teacher responding to a visitor.
At the risk of sounding conceited—heaven forbid—he knew who I was.
“This is private property,” he said. “No visitors without an appointment.”
“I know,” I replied. “I saw the sign.”
“And you ignored it.”
He spoke as though the consequences of this would be unpleasant, mainly for me. Here was the big guy on campus, in every sense. I ran up against people like him a lot, but it was more entertaining when Louis was with me because he enjoyed hurting them more than I did.
“Ignoring signs comes with the job,” I said. “I’d starve otherwise.”
I took a business card from my wallet and offered it to him. He made no immediate move to take it, and I made no move to pull it back, and thus we might have remained until winter set in. But I was more at home with awkwardness than he was, and he buckled first.
He looked at the card and handed it back to me.
“You can keep it,” I said. “If I reuse them, they get tatty.”
I could see him thinking about crumpling it in his fist, or tearing it to pieces and scattering it to the wind, but it would have made him look petty, and here was a man who stood on his dignity. It might have been a small hill, but he was prepared to die on it.
“My name is Renders. I’m the assistant principal here. And you still need to make an appointment.”
I saw five or six students gathered at the entrance to what might have been a dorm building, drawn by the prospect of trouble between adults, one of them unloved, because I couldn’t imagine Renders inspiring much affection.
He glanced back, caught the kids looking, and told them to get inside.
After a short delay for the sake of rebelliousness, they did as they were told, but not before the oldest gave the finger to Renders’s back.
“We seem to have gotten off on the wrong foot,” I said.
“I don’t see it that way,” said Renders. “The wrong is all on one side.”
“Because I didn’t make an appointment and ignored a sign?”
“Because you mean us no good. I know why you’re here. You want to lay the blame for Scott Theriault at our door.”
“He was under your care.”
“And there are limits to that care. The boy absconded on multiple occasions, and he’d been warned of the dangers. Are you an ambulance chaser, Mr Parker? Have you been promised a cut?”
“I get paid a daily rate, plus expenses. I don’t need more than that. You seem to be taking this very personally, Mr Renders.”
“I care about the school,” he said.
He was leaning into me now, using his height and bulk to intimidate.
I didn’t care for it, but I didn’t step back, though he was close enough for me to smell both his breath and his cologne.
It might have ended badly had one of us brushed against the other, but the situation was defused by a voice asking what was going on.
I looked away from Renders to see a small, balding man approaching from the direction of the cottage, and beside him a younger man dressed in a casual jacket and jeans, carrying a plastic document folder.
The older one was Santopietro. I recognized him from his appearances on TV after the discovery of Scott Theriault’s body.
“Can I help you with something?” Santopietro asked, when he was near enough to be touched by Renders’s shadow. Renders answered before I could.
“This is Mr Parker,” he said, “Mr Vose’s private investigator.”
Santopietro conjured up a smile and offered his hand.
We shook, and Santopietro said: “I’m surprised it’s taken you so long to get to us.
I feel as though I’ve been listening to your footsteps without catching sight of you, which I suspect might have been your intention all along.
Still, you ought to have called ahead. You might have made a wasted journey had I not been here. ”
“Are you often absent?”
The smile broadened. “Hardly ever.”
“Well, then.”