Chapter 99
I said nothing to Sabine Drew about the Smiling Seed T-shirt as we left the Norton house, but she was too sharp-eyed not to spot the change in me.
“What did you notice that I missed?” she asked.
“I’ll tell you later. Where are we meeting your boyfriend?”
“He’s not my boyfriend. We’re not nineteen.”
“So what is he?”
She stared out the side window.
“He’s company.”
“No more?”
“I’m working on it.”
“Well, that’s hopeful,” I said. “And you still haven’t told me where we’re meeting him.”
“He suggested the Kennebec River Brewpub, up in The Forks. It’s not like we’re spoiled for choice here, and pleasant though our lodgings may be, I’m beginning to feel the walls closing in on me.”
She continued to watch the town go by. Only when there was no more town to watch, which didn’t take long, did she speak again.
“Why didn’t Mr Norton come down to say goodbye?”
“Because I don’t think Mr Norton was capable of it,” I replied. “He’s drowning. What did you and his wife talk about while we were gone?”
“About how her husband is drowning,” said Sabine. “If the girl is dead, that marriage dies with her. Everything that’s happening revolves around Spero, doesn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“And now you’re worried that Tim might also be involved.”
Damn, the woman was good.
“Is he?” I asked.
“Would I be sleeping with him if I thought he was?”
“From what you’ve told me, you were sleeping with him before you knew much more than his name.”
“I hope you’re being facetious,” she said. “Otherwise, you’re just being mean.”
“Let’s go with facetious. But Spero is a small school. If there was something off about it, Sadlier must have noticed.”
“He did, but Spero pays reasonably well, and year-round, which is rare up here. Tim did his best for the boys. It was a job he used to like, even when it was hard.”
“So what changed?”
“That’s what you’ll have to ask him.”
The Kennebec River Brewpub was part of a resort called Northern Outdoors.
On this particular evening, in the downtime between leaf-peeping and winter sports, it was uncrowded, with only a handful of tables occupied by men who looked like hunters.
Tim Sadlier was in a corner as far removed as possible from everyone else, drinking a dark ale.
He stood awkwardly when we approached, as though unsure whether the done thing was to embrace Sabine or give her a manly pat on the back.
She settled the issue by rubbing his arm affectionately, and he and I shook hands.
I realized I was hungry, and this would be my only opportunity to take a break from the Shop ’n Save, so we ordered flatbreads to share, and a house salad as a sop to our arteries.
I drank water, Sabine asked for a fruit beer, and apart from thanking the server when it arrived, she said little more for the next hour.
She wanted me to form my own impressions of Tim Sadlier, unmediated by interference.
By the end of the conversation, I had no doubts about Sadlier’s character but more about Spero. Sadlier told me of the incident with Anthony Marshall, of Leonard Levesque and his hostility toward Scott Theriault, and of Scott himself.
“I knew he sneaked out nights,” said Sadlier. “He wasn’t the only one who did, but Scott would go read with a flashlight, or smoke a cigarette if he’d managed to bum one. If I was working late, he might come find me. I’d let him help, and then he’d head back to the dorm.”
“What about the running away?” I asked.
“That happened twice in the weeks after he arrived, and before I got to know him better. He learned fast that it wasn’t worth the effort, and life at Spero was hard enough without losing all his privileges.
The first time I caught him wandering around after dark, I thought he was trying to slip out again, but he said he wasn’t, and he only wanted to be alone for a while.
I made him promise to stay on the property, otherwise I might lose my job.
He promised he would, and he kept that promise. ”
“But he didn’t, did he? He went north and died.”
“I don’t understand that,” said Sadlier. “No one does.”
“And was it just time to smoke and be alone that Scott wanted?”
“I thought so. Company too, when it suited him, or what passed for it with me.”
“You liked him.”
“I did. He had no business being at Spero.”
“Could he also have been sneaking out to meet someone?”
“Like who?”
“A girl,” I said.
“The police asked me that same question. I said I didn’t know.
I stay late at the school one or two evenings a week, and other than that, only if I have to cover for staff.
I get paid extra for the hours. So I know how quiet it is up there, but not so quiet that I’d hear a vehicle if it stopped far enough away. ”
“Sabine told me that you felt the school had changed for the worse, and you were less happy there now. Why?”
“Apart from dead kids? It’s Renders, the new assistant principal. He’s a disciplinarian. He’s too weak to be anything else. He and Santopietro are tight, though.”
“Who else is Santopietro tight with? Roger Teal?”
“I think they go right back to the early years of the school, when Teal was the inspector for the department. He still comes up every month or so, or when a tough nut needs to be cracked. That’s what they call it when they have to bring in a boy by force: ‘cracking a tough nut.’ He and Santopietro go on trips together too, outside of school business. ”
He let that hang.
“Are you suggesting they’re in a relationship?”
“They could be. Teal is married, but when did that ever stop anyone? I know only because I saw printouts of hotel bookings in Santopietro’s office when I was fixing a radiator.
They were going to Tampa.” He coughed. “I say that I ‘saw’ the bookings, but I might have gone poking where I shouldn’t.
They don’t tell me much at the school, and the only way I can find out what’s happening is by being nosy. ”
I wasn’t taking notes. It wasn’t that Sadlier was nervous, exactly, but seeing someone writing down what he said might be counterproductive. I’d remember what needed to be remembered.
“Tell me about the Smiling Seed Company,” I said.
Sadlier looked puzzled.
“What about it?”
“Does it supply the school?”
“Sure. We get a good discount, and they throw in a bit extra for free. The head of the company is another of Santopietro’s old friends.”
“Edward Kenney.”
“That’s right. He and Santopietro were at the élan School together. Whatever they went through, it brought them closer. Kenney calls Santopietro ‘the Saint.’”
Which was also how Roger Teal referred to Santopietro. Teal had said that one of his friends was once immured at élan. It would make sense if that friend were Edward Kenney.
“Do the extras provided by Smiling Seed include company T-shirts?”
“Oh yeah, and the Spero’s glad of them. Those boys go through clothes like you wouldn’t believe.”
“Who makes the deliveries?”
“Kenney himself.”
“The head of the company makes deliveries all the way up here?”
“It’s not a big company, and like I said, he and Santopietro are close.”
“Does Kenney also like cracking tough nuts?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Does he ever visit the school at the same time as Roger Teal?”
“I’ve seen them together there, but I couldn’t say how often.”
“And where does Renders fit in?”
“He doesn’t,” said Sadlier. “Renders looks at Teal like he’s shit on a shoe, excuse my language, and I’ve heard him tell Santopietro that the school should cut its ties to Smiling Seed.”
“To Smiling Seed, or Edward Kenney?”
Sadlier thought for a moment.
“To Kenney, but Kenney is Smiling Seed, just like Santopietro is Spero.”
I had hoped for a revelation, but so far I was coming up short. I still had the Smiling Seed T-shirt, and the cords linking Teal, Kenney, and the Spero were drawing tighter, but it was all circumstantial, with no proof of wrongdoing.
“Why do you dislike Renders so much?” I asked Sadlier.
“It’s his attitude, and the way he treats the boys.”
“Or is there more than that?”
Sadlier’s face reddened.
“This happened just a couple of days ago,” he said.
“I told Sabine about it. Renders keeps his own place between Bingham and The Forks, but each member of the staff has to spend a set number of nights on campus each week, and they sleep in one of the cabins. I heard noises from the one Renders was using when he was on duty. It was late, and I was on my way home, but the sounds were so strange that I was obliged to see what they might be. It helps that I know my way around the motion sensors.”
He swallowed and winced, as though he’d rather have spit out whatever he’d choked back.
“Renders was sitting in an armchair, watching pornography on this big laptop he has. He wasn’t playing with himself or anything like that, just sitting there with a beer in his hand.
Look, I’m not a prude, and I won’t condemn a man for whatever occupies him when he’s alone in the privacy of his bedroom, but the girls on that laptop were teenagers, or not a whole lot older, and they weren’t enjoying what was being done to them, not one bit.
You could see it on their faces, and the sounds they were making weren’t ones of pleasure.
If you ask me, Renders was getting off on their pain and humiliation at least as much as the sex, and I don’t think a man like that has any place in a school. ”
“Did you tell anyone about it?”
“No.”
“Because you were worried it would be your word against his, and you might lose your job if you weren’t believed?”
“Oh, I’d have been believed all right, and I’d still have lost my job.”
“So tell me why.”
“I was about to be on my way when I heard Renders speak,” said Sadlier. “A man laughed at whatever he’d said, and I realized Renders wasn’t alone. It was Santopietro. They were in there together, watching those girls being hurt.”
Sadlier drained his beer.
“Now I really am looking for a new job.”