Chapter 24
Auggie
In the end, it turned out that I really shouldn’t have bothered.
For the first hour after coming into work, I searched as much as I could for the name Camp Green Hill, but my search was useless.
It wasn’t that I couldn’t find anything.
The real problem was that there was too much.
Green Hill was such a generic name, and I had nothing else to cross-reference.
Without a location, not even a state, to narrow down the search, I came up with more results than I could possibly sift through on my own.
I tried anyway and spent some time looking through the first few results I could find. The information was… not encouraging.
A summer camp that was accused of abusing its underage campers.
A church youth group that used questionable means to ‘educate’ young parishioners.
An after-school program that was caught teaching inappropriate material to children.
I found dozens and dozens of stories like this, and that was after limiting my search to cases where abuse had actually been documented.
If the Camp Green Hill I was looking for had got away with its crimes unnoticed, then I really had no hope of ever locating it among the sea of other Camp Green Hills littered across the country.
I was growing increasingly frustrated when someone suddenly grabbed the back of my chair and spun me away from my desk.
“What?” I barked as the room spun around me.
When my vision came back into focus I found Roland’s face just inches away.
“We found it.”
“What?” I repeated, still just as confused, but now for a different reason. My mind was still so filled with the endless list of Camp Green Hills that I couldn’t focus on anything else.
I was saved when someone else pulled Roland away, giving me some space to breathe.
“What’s all this ‘we’ business?” Tyler said as he forced his partner to step back.
Seeing Tyler here reminded me just how little time had passed.
Roland’s partner was only here visiting him for two weeks.
I hadn’t been keeping track of the days, but it felt like months had passed since I brought Mia home with me.
Tyler’s presence here in the office was like a slap in the face with reality.
How could Mia have become such an integrated part of my life in such a short amount of time?
Neither of the other men took any notice of my inner turmoil and continued to rattle on.
“Okay, okay,” Roland conceded as his partner shoved him into a chair to sit properly and stop bouncing around. “I didn’t actually do much. It was mostly Tyler who figured it out, but I helped sift through all the paperwork, so I deserve some credit.”
Taking a deep breath, I looked at Tyler for clarification.
“Here,” the man said as he shoved his phone in my face.
“I knew the name Tony Smith sounded familiar. It took me some time to find it, but I finally figured out where I’d heard it before.
It was from a case that I covered for one of my classes.
It was small, and mostly only covered locally.
The only reason it even came up was because it practically happened in the backyard of my university. ”
As soon as the name Tony Smith passed Tyler’s lips, I snatched the phone from his hand. On the screen was an article from a local Maryland newspaper about a dirty cop who was being investigated.
I wanted to believe it, I really did, but I’d bashed my head against too many dead ends with Mia’s identity already. I couldn’t get my hopes up too soon.
“How do you know this is the same person Mia remembers? The fact that he is a cop, as Mia mentioned, is promising, but Tony Smith is a relatively common name. I don’t want to get Mia’s homes up over a coincidence.”
Without taking the phone from my hand, Tyler scrolled down the screen until he came to a particular part of the article and pointed at a specific passage.
“Because of this right here.”
I immediately saw what he was pointing at, but I read it over several times just to make sure I was right.
The passage talked about witnesses who had come forward to condemn detective Smith, including several homeless individuals.
Surnames had been redacted to protect the individuals’ identities, but their first names were included in the article.
Right there on the list of witnesses was another name I recognized.
Eli.
Before I could say it, Tyler voiced exactly what I was thinking.
“One name could be a coincidence, but not two names, right? This must be the same incident your Mia was talking about.”
The easy use of ‘your Mia’ still made me squirm inside.
It was like everyone around me had just decided it was a forgone conclusion that Mia belonged to me, and I honestly didn’t hate the sound of it.
However, I didn’t have time to think about that.
I was too hung up on Tyler’s use of the word incident.
It was such a clinical term for what had happened.
Mia hadn’t been able to give me very many details, but from what I did know, this Detective Smith was a monstrous person that had caused him to flee all the way to Baton Rouge.
How could something like that simply be labeled as an incident, like Detective Smith had just accidentally offended him?
I realized that I now had the answers right here in my hand. Even if the article didn’t tell me who Mia was, it would at least tell me what specifically happened to Mia. I could help him gain back that chunk of his memories.
The conversation I’d had with Mia over breakfast came to mind.
If he was remembering things and specifically wasn’t telling me, then maybe he wouldn’t want me to read this article.
Once I read this, I’d know the kinds of things that Detective Smith did to him. There would be no going back from that.
Two pairs of eyes were watching me, oblivious to my dilemma. Tyler and Roland had gone to a lot of trouble to find this information for me, and I appreciated it, but I also needed a moment to process everything without the weight of their attention.
“Hey, while I read over this case, can you look something else up for me?” I asked, partially as a distraction and partially because I needed the answer.
“Can you look up if there are any cases about a Camp Green Hill in the same area that Detective Smith operated? Mia also mentioned that camp, but it’s such a generic name that I’ve been having trouble locating it.
Hopefully, with a more specific area to focus on, something useful will turn up. ”
It was no surprise when they agreed. Roland was also a detective, and Tyler was studying criminology. The two were both passionate about helping victims and bringing criminals to justice, though they each did so in their own way.
With the pair occupied, I finally had a moment to myself to read over the details of Tony Smith’s case.
Yet, when I opened up the case details on my own computer, my hand hesitated over the button to scroll down the page.
If Mia really did want to keep his past secret from me, then maybe I shouldn’t read any further.
No, Mia knew I was looking into this. Every day, I reported to him whether or not I’d found anything concerning his past. Most of the time, my search came up fruitless, and there was nothing to report, but that didn’t change the fact that he knew I was looking.
If he wanted me to stop, he would have said so.
For now, I had to assume his silence was the same as permission to keep looking into his past.
Still feeling a little uneasy, I started reading.
It was worse than I feared. The crimes that Detective Smith was accused of were excessive, even for a dirty cop.
The man didn’t just manipulate people for personal gain.
He seemed to enjoy hurting people and used his position of power to intentionally wring pain out of those who couldn’t fight back.
The worst were the reports of how he’d use drugs to keep vulnerable people under his control, making them do “favors” for him on a regular basis.
In this area, the report switched to vague language, but I worked in the FPA department.
I could read between the lines and recognize the signs of sex crimes when I saw them.
The more I read, the more certain I became that Mia had been one of Detective Smith’s victims. It matched too well with the few details he’d managed to tell me, yet I was still taken by surprise.
That smiling man that I’d left at my apartment barely more than an hour ago was one of the victims I was reading about right now.
If even half of this report was right, then the kinds of things that Detective Smith had made him do were too painful to even think about.
So much had been taken from Mia, and now, it turned out he’d even been forced to basically sell himself to survive, and his abuser had been one of the people who should have been upholding his rights.
Over at Roland’s desk, it wasn’t that long before I heard a cheer of success come from the pair that were helping me out.
They had indeed managed to find a Camp Green Hill near the same city as Detective Smith had been located.
The place was shut down a few years ago, and it seemed like a lot of effort had been put into covering up the whole ugly business, but nothing could be hidden forever if you knew where to look.
This time, I wasn’t even surprised by the result.
A conversion therapy camp.
I probably should have guessed it would be something like that, based on what Mia had told me so far. It was exactly the kind of place that would make a kid burn their clothes to force them to conform to “traditional” gender expressions. If only it stopped there.
Starvation.
Isolation.
Electroshock therapy.
Forced heterosexual.
I wasn’t surprised by any of it. I’d come across the aftermath of conversion therapy before, but I hated imagining it applying to Mia.
What was I supposed to do with the information now?
If Mia really did attend this camp, then I could probably identify him. I’d finally be able to give him back his past.
But did he want it?
Or should I let these secrets stay secret?
Maybe, in this case, ignorance really would be bliss, but I wasn’t sure if I had the right to make that decision for him.