Chapter Twenty
M ichael was the first person to be called to the stand on the second day. He was unnaturally pale as he walked to the front and took his seat in the small witness box where he solemnly, sincerely and truly affirmed under the penalty of law for perjury to tell the truth.
Mia was not surprised to see that he had refused to swear in on a Bible, but she prayed that he would feel some comfort, some sense of relief once all of this was done. Richard was dead and this was the closest that Michael would ever get to justice for what he had endured.
Amy approached the stand, and the questioning began. “Good morning, Mr. Lansing,” she said pleasantly. “Thank you for agreeing to come here today. Let’s begin by having you tell us when you first met Gabriel Myers.”
Michael glanced at Gabriel and then back at Amy. “I was sixteen,” he said quickly. “So, it would have been more than a decade ago.”
“You were sixteen,” Amy said with an encouraging nod. “And how old was Gabriel at that time?”
“He was fifteen when I first met him.”
Amy nodded. “And how did you two meet?”
Michael hesitated, his face draining of what little color it had started with. “I lived with his uncle, Richard Miller. Gabriel was sent to live there, too.”
Amy began to pace slowly across the floor in front of the judge, nodding along with his answers and looking back at him when it was time to ask another question. “This was at Richard Miller’s house?” she asked.
“No, ma’am. He ran a …” Michael’s brow furrowed as he searched for the right word before giving up. “I don’t know what it was exactly, but he called it a school. We—all the kids, I mean—lived at the school.”
“This was a boarding school?” Amy asked, then continued to the next question without waiting for an answer. “Richard Miller was a pretty famous evangelical preacher, so I assume it was a religious school?”
“It wasn’t a school,” Michael said bluntly. “He called it one, but it wasn’t. We didn’t go there to learn—we went because our parents wanted him to fix us.”
“Fix you?” Amy shook her head, giving a small, puzzled shrug that Mia knew was theatrical. “What was wrong with you Mr. Lansing?”
Michael took a deep breath, the kind that shuddered a person’s whole body and left them hollow on the inside. “I’m gay,” he said simply. “My parents didn’t believe in that sort of thing.”
“They didn’t believe you were gay?”
“They didn’t want me to be,” he clarified. “They wanted Richard to fix it and make me straight. He preached fire and brimstone at them and anyone else who would listen, damnation in every breath. They were terrified that I was going to hell, and they would’ve done just about anything to stop it.”
“I see,” Amy said quietly. “Were all the kids there gay?”
Michael shook his head. “No, some of them were there for that kind of thing but most were just doing drugs or sneaking out or even just failing their classes. Richard took in pretty much any kid whose parents thought they were a problem, as long as they bought into his version of God and had the funds to pay for what he called discipline.”
Amy smiled tightly. “And were you there the entire time that Gabriel was?”
Michael nodded, shifting restlessly in his seat. Mia knew that Amy had practiced the questions with him before today and she suspected that he knew the more difficult questions were coming. “I was there for two years, and Gabriel was my roommate for just over a year. He ran away a few months before my parents finally came and picked me up.”
“So, you were there with him and saw the conditions that he was living in while he was with Richard?”
“Yes, ma’am. We pretty much all lived the same way while we were there.”
Mia flicked a glance at Gabriel, at the tense line of his shoulders as he stared straight ahead at Michael. His face, the eyes that were usually so expressive, were like stone as he listened.
“Can you describe what it was like? Living with Richard?” Amy continued.
Michael’s mouth moved to form a single word. He breathed it so quietly that the judge had to ask him to repeat himself.
“Yes,” he said again, more firmly this time. “It was hell.”
“It was hell in what way, Mr. Lansing? Can you be more specific?”
“It was hell in every way,” he said, glancing at Brittany and then away again quickly. “Different for each of us but hell, just the same.”
“Mr. Lansing …” Amy began, but he cut her off before she could finish.
“I was abused for two years,” he said bitterly. “Most of the time we didn’t have decent blankets in the winter, and we never had air conditioning. There was no hot water and there wasn’t a single day that I wasn’t hungry.”
The words settled over them all, stealing some of the air from the room. Mia breathed, slowly and intentionally, as Brittany gripped hard onto her hand. Her father tapped his fingers on the bench beside his thighs and when she looked up at him his mouth was set in a grim line.
Michael continued speaking.
“If we were lucky, we got one meal a day, and that was only if they decided we had been good. If we hadn’t been, they just skipped our meal altogether. Sometimes we were locked in our rooms for days at a time and we had to piss in a bucket in the corner.”
Amy paused, giving him a moment to collect himself as the courtroom sat in silence. They all watched as he paused, his lip trembling as he composed his thoughts.
“And was Gabriel also treated this way?” she said once he seemed to have gathered control of his emotions.
“He was,” Michael said. “But he didn’t get scared like the rest of us. He got angry. Richard preached all the time about our sins and how tainted we were. Really awful stuff, you know? But Gabriel would go without his food or his blankets instead of doing what Richard told him to do, so they got rough with him more than the rest of us.”
“What did Richard tell him to do?”
Michael shrugged helplessly. “Not to sneak food to people that were being punished was the first thing. He brought me a piece of bread back from dinner that first week he was there, and Richard split his lip wide open.”
“What else?”
Another pause, longer this time. “Gabriel was big, even back then he was tall for a kid, so Richard wanted him to help with the rest of us and he wouldn’t do it. We were all mad about how they treated us, we all hated Richard, but Gabriel … Gabriel was stubborn. The more Richard tried to break him the angrier he got.”
“Did Richard ask for his help with anything else?”
“Yeah, he …” a small sob broke from Michael, his breath catching as everyone looked away to give him a moment. “Richard, he thought he could pray the gay away. When that didn’t work, they went with more aggressive methods. Gabriel wouldn’t help with that.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Lansing, but can you explain to us in more detail exactly what happened and what Gabriel saw when he was there with you?”
Michael pressed his palms to his eyes, trying to stop the steady drip of tears. Beside Mia, Brittany was stiff and tense, her nails digging painfully into Mia’s hand. “Um, Richard was … He was convinced that having sex with a woman would fix me and he wanted to intimidate me into doing it.”
“But Gabriel wouldn’t do that?”
“No, he wouldn’t, not even when they hurt him instead.” Michael looked at Amy helplessly. “He came back to the room one night, looking worse than any of us that I ever saw, but he wouldn’t hurt any of us.”
“And Richard was the one who hit you?”
“Sometimes it was him, but most of the time he just liked to stand off to the side quoting scripture ,” Michael sneered at the word, like it was contemptible in its very existence, “while his buddies did the dirty work. He had a guy, Charles, and he did most of it. That guy was huge, not even Gabriel stood a chance against him.”
“Thank you, Mr. Lansing,” Amy said, and he visibly tensed as she walked back to her seat, his eyes never looking up from the floor.
Gabriel watched Mr. Price stand to question Micheal and Mia noticed the clenched set of his jaw, the haunted regret in his eyes as Michael had to defend himself against the prosecution's accusations that he was lying for attention. Mia knew him well enough to know he was blaming himself for what the witnesses were going through and she smiled encouragingly at him when he glanced her way even though he wasn't supposed to interact with them while they were in the courtroom.
Amy called Brittany next, and she stood on legs that wobbled, holding onto Mia’s hand until she could stand on her own and make her way to the front. Her steps were slow and measured, a clear reluctance in her stride that was made even more obvious by the pinched look on her face when she turned to face them all.
They waited for her to be sworn in as Mia wrenched her gaze away from the small, terrified woman to Gabriel’s hunched form. He was staring straight ahead, his hand holding the arm of his chair so tightly that she was surprised it hadn’t cracked under the strain. He hadn’t seen Brittany in thirteen years and Mia swallowed her tears and her sudden insecurity as he stared with something close to longing at another woman’s face.
“Good morning, Mrs. Townsend,” Amy began, and Brittany turned away from looking at Gabriel to look at her instead.
“Good morning,” Brittany repeated, her hands twisting and untwisting in her lap.
“You also lived with Gabriel at Richard’s school?”
Brittany’s face twisted into a scowl. “I would agree that it wasn’t a school, but I did live there with Gabriel and Michael.”
“Were you there the whole time that Gabriel was there?”
“Nearly the whole time” Brittany clarified. “I think I got there a few weeks after him.”
Amy nodded again, continuing her pacing. “And what can you tell me about the living conditions while you were there?”
“The same as Michael,” Brittany said, ignoring the tears that slipped down her cheeks. Mia wasn’t certain if they were born from sadness or anger. Her tone had plenty of both. “Richard Miller was a bastard who cared more about the rules in some fucking book than he ever did about any of us.”
Amy’s demeanor remained carefully neutral in the face of her outburst. She waited patiently for Brittany’s body language to relax before she proceeded with her questioning. “Can you tell us about your experiences at Richard’s? About what brought you there?”
“My parents brought me there,” she said with a bitter laugh, swiping at her cheeks in annoyance. “They caught me sneaking out at night, meeting my boyfriend and getting high, and they didn’t like it. Richard told them he could settle me down, so they dropped me off and didn’t even look back.”
“And did he? Settle you down?”
“He certainly tried.”
Amy nodded, tapping her finger against her chin. “Mrs. Townsend, how would you describe your relationship with Gabriel during this time?”
Brittany hesitated, biting her lip. “He was protective of all of us, and I gravitated to him when I arrived. I guess I would say he was my boyfriend, or the closest that any of us could come to that kind of relationship in a place like that.”
“And was your relationship with him sexual?” Brittany winced at the question and Amy hurried to add, “I’m sorry, I have to ask.”
Brittany looked down at her hands. “Yes, it was. He would sneak out of his room whenever he could to come and find me. I loved him,” she said, shrugging slightly and glancing up at him before quickly looking down at her hands.
Mia looked at Gabriel, at the single tear that was sliding down his cheek, and then away. She knew the story already but seeing them relive it together made her an intruder in their private grief.
“Can you tell us why you left Richard’s school, Mrs. Townsend?”
“I tried to kill myself so my parents finally believed me when I said I would rather die than stay there.”
“Why would you do that, Mrs. Townsend? Did something happen at Richard’s to drive you to such an extreme method of escape?”
“I was pregnant,” Brittany said quietly, looking down so that they could barely hear her. “Richard forced me to get an abortion. I don’t know where he found the doctors, but I never even left the school. They came to me, and I don’t think either of them ever even looked at me.”
Amy stopped pacing, addressing Brittany directly but with great tenderness. “Was the child Gabriel’s?”
“I believe so,” Brittany said, nodding her head as she glanced up at Amy. “He had just found out and he was … He was so excited to be a father, even though we were too young and living in that awful place.”
Amy shook her head, resting her hand on the banister beside Brittany as she spoke. “Richard was a very religious man. Did he tell you why he would do something that would have been so against his faith?”
“He didn’t think Gabriel was the father,” Brittany explained. “He thought Michael might have been the father because he made us … well, you know? To make Michael like having sex with girls.”
“He forced you to be physically intimate with Mr. Lansing in an attempt to cure him of homosexuality and you believe Richard was afraid that the baby would be proof of that abuse?”
Mia looked at Gabriel in surprise. He hadn’t told her that he might not have been the father of Brittany’s baby and she realized now how much distance Michael and Brittany had put between themselves, the way that they hadn’t spoken that morning even though they had known each other so long ago.
“Yes,” Brittany confirmed, “I believe Richard was afraid that DNA could prove the child was Michael’s and that it could support our stories if we ever came forward with allegations of abuse. Although, I suppose that even if the child had been Gabriel’s, it would have looked bad for the school. If any of the other parents found out that I got pregnant while I was staying with him, it would have damaged his reputation.”
“What did Gabriel do when he found out what Richard had done?”
“He was angry, worse than I had ever seen. I was angry, too, and hurt that Gabriel had let it happen. I know it wasn’t his fault but back then … We argued, and I was so mad that he hadn’t protected me that I told him that I would never forgive him.”
“And then what happened?”
“He confronted Richard and when Richard denied it, Gabriel attacked him. There was a lot of shouting, things breaking … and then Gabriel was gone. He never came back and the next time any of us even knew where he was, it was when he saw him on the news after, well, you know.”
Amy nodded. “After his father’s death.”
“Yes, after that.” Brittany turned to face Judge Turner, her eyes clear and earnest. “I tried to kill myself to get away from that place and if my parents had tried to send me back there … I would be the one sitting in a prison cell today. I would’ve done anything to not have to go back.”