Page 2 of A River Red With Blood
“Where do you think?He’s in Maine State Prison, and likely to stay there for the foreseeable future.”
“Is this where you tell me he’s innocent?”
Alcock made a sound like air slowly escaping from a balloon, or the wheezing of an asthmatic kitten.It took me a moment to realize he was laughing.
“Good Lord, no,” he said.“He’s never denied any of it.For Ward, criminality is not so much an occupation as an unignorable calling.It’s just a pity he’s not better at it, though at least he represents a reliable source of income for the legal profession.I always feel a pang of regret when he receives a heavy custodial sentence: the sooner he gets out, the sooner I can begin earning again.”
Alcock resumed looking mournful, but now he was feeling sorry for someone other than himself.
“Ward has had a rough time of it lately,” he continued.“His son died and he wasn’t permitted to attend the funeral.”
If you were bereaved while in a county jail, and you hadn’tantagonized the sheriff, they’d find a way to escort you to the service, even if they billed you for it later.But at Maine State, you had to pray for the deceased in your cell.
“The death made the papers,” said Moxie.“Ward Vose’s son was Scott Theriault.”
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 favoredby 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?”
