“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.Onlysubsequently 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 picturedhim 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.”
Chapter 2
It is odd, I suppose, how little one may know about one’s friends.Moxie and I had grown closer since I’d become what he liked to describe, only half-jokingly, as his “tame investigator,” but even then, we didn’t discuss our pasts.In Moxie’s case, this was because he didn’t care to be told anything about me that he didn’t want to hear, and what he did want to hear, he already knew.As for me, I’d noticed early on that Moxie deflected questions of a personal nature with a joke before changing the subject.He didn’t mind talking about the women in his life, and in eye-popping detail, but his own history was off-limits.
Now, at the Bear, he described without hesitation a nightmare childhood: alcoholism, physical abuse, desertion, foster care, and finally, his consignment to a troubled-teen school by a mother unable to cope and a father who was only a mistimed fist or boot away from killing his son.
“Where did they put you?”I asked, but I could guess the answer.Given Moxie’s age and Maine upbringing, there was only one.
“Élan,” he said.
The Élan School was founded in Androscoggin County, Maine, in 1970, on thirty-three acres in Poland that once housed a hunting lodge.Later, it added more campuses, including one in Parsonsfield, in York County, where the worst of the abuse was said to have occurred: beatings, sleep deprivation, public humiliation, and punishments for misbehavior that verged on torture.From the start, Élan was dogged by allegations of mistreatment, but serious flaws in the state’s system of school supervision meant that investigations were stymied, when they occurred at all.TheParsonsfield campus shut down within a decade or so, but the Poland facility remained in operation until 2011, when it was finally forced to close because of declining enrollment.Throughout, Élan’s owners denied accusations of misrule, claiming they were the victims of a smear campaign, yet students repeatedly attempted to escape.One of them ended up being raped and murdered while trying to return home.Another was reportedly beaten so badly in the school’s boxing ring, where students were reputed to have been forced to fight one another as part of their therapy, that he later died of his injuries and was buried in an unmarked grave.
