Chapter 1 #2
Seventeen-year-old Scott Theriault had drowned somewhere up in the Kennebec Valley about a month or so back, close to a plantation known as The Plains, one of the smallest and least-populated communities in the state.
The Plains was one of a number of plantations in Somerset County, the concept of a plantation being unique to Maine.
While it dated from colonial times, referring to a state of development somewhere between nothing at all and not a whole lot more, the Maine iteration defined a region with a small population, limited self-government, and no real urge to change the status quo.
Some plantations had religious roots, but as far as I knew, The Plains was founded by speculators early in the nineteenth century.
Lumber would have been the most reasonable assumption for the purchase, had the investors not cleared tracts of forest to leave the open spaces that gave the plantation its name.
That suggested groundwork being laid for a settlement, but if so, it was never built.
The Plains survived as an afterthought, an echo of a conversation ended more than a hundred years earlier.
It featured on only the most detailed of maps, hooked northeast of The Forks plantation, and was otherwise absorbed into its larger neighbor for the sake of convenience.
But it was its own entity, with residents who had been part of the landscape for generations, along with a handful of outsiders carried there by unknown tides, their habitancy marked by trailers left in place for so long that ivy had softened their lines, and RVs with tires so rotted that the rims were sunk into the ground.
Scott Theriault, however, was an inhabitant of a different stripe, closer to an inmate than a dweller.
His body was discovered floating in the Austin Stream, a tributary of the Kennebec, days after he’d run away from the Spero School, the behavioral-modification facility in The Plains to which he had been consigned by his family, one of those “tough love” places favored by parents who didn’t really understand the concept of love at all, or only as a synonym for blind obedience.
All I knew about the drowning was what I’d read in the papers or heard on the news.
Scott’s mother and stepfather “enrolled” him after he’d started acting up at home and been expelled from a pair of more conventional schools.
He hadn’t settled, and twice made breaks for freedom, once getting halfway to Augusta before being apprehended and returned to the Spero.
The third time, he’d gone north instead of south, but he must have fallen badly before entering the water, as his right leg was broken when he was found.
His parents had asked for privacy in the aftermath, and that request was being respected.
As for the school, it tried to counter any bad publicity by offering restricted tours of its facilities to the media and supervised interviews with some tamer students, all of whom claimed that being sent to Spero was the best thing to have happened to them since they emerged from the womb, and professed sorrow that Scott Theriault had disagreed. End of story.
“That death was investigated by the Maine State Police,” I said.
“Aided by the Somerset County Sheriff’s Office,” said Alcock, “and the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. It was ruled an accident. It went by the book, and neither Ward nor I are impugning the integrity of any of the officials involved.”
“But?”
“Ward Vose is convinced that his son was unlawfully killed.”
“On what basis?”
“Call it a feeling.”
“A feeling and a conviction aren’t the same thing,” I said.
“Let’s say that the first has hardened into the second,” said Alcock.
I looked at Moxie. Moxie looked at me. He was giving me nothing.
“Do you have an opinion on this?” I asked him.
“Only that I don’t like those schools, and I don’t like parents who submit children to their regime.”
“So you want me to cause trouble?”
“Isn’t that what you do?” said Alcock.
“Trouble may be a by-product,” I said, “but not an end in itself. As I get older, trouble also costs extra, because it has a way of bouncing back on the troublemaker and hitting him in the face.”
I pointed at my nose, recently broken by a man wielding a length of timber. The nose hadn’t set right and now it hurt when I sneezed. That was what came of looking for trouble.
“Talk to Ward,” said Alcock. “Listen to what he has to say. He has money: I can vouch for that. If, when he’s done, you believe his son died accidentally, you can walk away with a clear conscience.”
“I have a clear conscience already,” I told him. “Are you suggesting that if I don’t hear him out, I won’t any longer?”
Alcock set aside his unfinished beer to regard the Bear and its clientele. If the sight made him happy, it didn’t show. I doubted very much made him happy, beyond being a lawyer, and even that was relative.
“I met Scott a couple of times,” said Alcock.
“He wasn’t a demon child. He wasn’t even very difficult, not by the standards of some rebellious kids I’ve represented, and their parents weren’t talking about having them hauled off in the dead of night to a school that’s only a step away from a correctional institution.
Scott had a smart mouth, and he didn’t like being told what to do, especially by an ambitious stepfather who might have preferred that he vanish from sight and a mother who wouldn’t have shed more than the minimum of tears if he did.
Some people, men and women both, shouldn’t be permitted to raise children, and the law manages to intervene only in cases of violence or neglect.
It can’t do much about an insufficiency of love.
It’s my belief that Scott’s mother and stepfather regarded him as more effort than he was worth. I would question that verdict.”
“So Ward Vose and the boy’s mother are divorced?”
“Ward Vose and Hailee Theriault were never married,” said Alcock.
“They were together for a few years when they were younger, and Scott was born in the middle of them. Only subsequently did Hailee marry Scott’s stepfather, and she lives for her new family.
Had Scott fitted in better, she might have been more patient with him, but he struggled to adapt.
Her sorrow at her son’s death may be diluted by a measure of relief.
“Ward Vose, meanwhile, was a lousy role model, but he did love his boy. He just couldn’t stay out of jail long enough to look out for him.
Ward is a deeply flawed, fundamentally undisciplined man with a wayward streak, but he has never been convicted of a crime of violence, nor do I believe he has ever committed one.
He is also self-aware enough to accept that he bears some responsibility for his son’s death, if only by his absence from Scott’s life, and he will have to carry that guilt for the rest of his days.
If hiring a private investigator to examine the circumstances surrounding Scott’s death helps ease that guilt somewhat, or offers the illusion of agency, I see no reason to hinder him.
We will pay you for the time it takes to listen, and should you agree to act on Ward’s behalf, we will meet your quoted rate.
Should you choose not to pursue the matter further, no blame will accrue. ”
Allen Atwood Alcock certainly spoke like a man who charged by the word. Compared to him, Moxie was practically taciturn.
“Let me sleep on it,” I said.
Alcock said he thought that would be acceptable.
He even paid the check before leaving, though Moxie and I told him we’d stay where we were for a while.
I watched Alcock as he departed. He walked with a peculiar stooping motion, like a heron or a stork, pecking his way through the patrons at the bar, shedding feathers of melancholy in his wake.
“Well?” said Moxie.
“I’m not being told the full story.”
“When are you ever? If we knew the full story, there’d be no reason to hire you.”
“Do you trust Alcock?”
“He’s sincere. I can’t speak for his client. That’ll be for you to decide when you meet him.”
“If I meet him.”
“You know you will,” said Moxie. “You’ve already pictured him in his cell, beating himself up about his boy. He’s a father who couldn’t save his child.”
“Like me, you mean.”
“No, not like you. Never like you. But you understand his pain.”
“It won’t bring his boy back.”
“That’s no reason to turn away.”
“I said I’d sleep on it.”
“Sure,” said Moxie. “It’ll take me a couple of days to clear a visitor’s permit anyway. I’ll book you an afternoon slot, knowing how averse you are to mornings. Let’s say Wednesday. That means it won’t intrude on your weekend.”
“Why are you pushing so hard on this?” I asked.
“Because the troubled-teen industry stinks. If the Spero School is part of it, then it stinks too. I like the idea of you rattling that cage.”
Moxie was giving me an answer that was general, but behind it lurked the specific, and in the specific lay the personal. I was content to wait Moxie out. If waiting was an Olympic sport, I’d have killed at it.
“You’re a pain in the ass,” said Moxie, who has the patience of a child. “You know that?”
“That’s why they pay me the big bucks. More importantly, it’s why you pay me, big bucks or otherwise. So tell me: Who was the client who had a hard run at a behavioral-modification school?”
“There was no client,” said Moxie. “It was me.”