by Sean Black
Finally, mercifully, it was over.
“Okay, ladies, go get showered and dressed for dinner. And don’t be late.”
As they headed back to their dorm, Chris glanced over at Ty. “It’s tough love. It ain’t pretty. But it works.”
Ty kept his own counsel.
“You should stay for dinner, Mark,” Chris said to Ty.
“I’d like that,” lied Ty. “But I have some things to do if I’m going to be moving my gear in here tomorrow.”
26
The bus ride back into town gave Ty a chance time to cool down a little about what he’d just seen. Taking out the last part, where Chris had punished an injured kid for the crime of twisting her ankle, it hadn’t been all bad.
But what if he’d been right about her faking it? Ty hadn’t known for sure that she was injured. Yes, she’d slipped and seemed to have hurt herself. But if that was her way of getting out of running then she could have easily faked a slip.
As for the rest of it, it was hardcore. No talking, boys and girls separated, regular physical exercise that was mandatory. But it was hardcore compared to a regular school in the US. Some of which were, if people were being honest, like a zoo.
Compared to many other parts of the world, Broken Ridge wasn’t all that hardcore. Having traveled the world, Ty knew that in many places school discipline was extremely strict. Go to places in Asia or Africa and the kids were literally terrified of their teachers.
What else?
The kids he’d seen had appeared to be in good physical shape. Hell, Ruth Price had looked a ways healthier than she had back at home with her mom. She was eating right, getting her vitamin D from being outside, and moving around; all the stuff that used to come as the standard package for a kid of Ty’s generation and before.
There was no TV or video games or cell phones that Ty had seen. Even the staff didn’t appear to be carrying cell phones. Maybe that was lack of coverage in the area or maybe it was policy. He could ask Chris tomorrow. But those were all plus points in Ty’s book. Half the time people wandered around like zombies, their eyes glued to some kind of a screen or another.
The teaching seemed kind of basic. Or non-existent. But then again, these kids had been sent to Broken Ridge to get their heads on straight. If they’d been using drugs or booze or doing whatever else then presumably the priority was to fix that first. If they needed to, they could catch up on the academic part when they got home.
The bus rolled to a stop. The door hissed open. An old lady got on with a shopping bag, the kind that was on rollers. The driver got up to help her. Ty watched all this, impressed. He couldn’t imagine seeing something like that in LA. People on the coasts could rag on the ‘fly-over’ states all they liked, but out here there were good people here with solid values.
The bus pulled away. A County Sheriff’s patrol car rolled past it. The cop in front glanced over at Ty for a second then he was gone.
Okay, Ty thought to himself, so Broken Ridge was basic, but hardly a brutal regime. So why did he still have a nagging sensation in the pit of his stomach? It came back to Mary, the girl with the scars. But presumably that was why she was there? They hadn’t exactly looked fresh. He would ask Chris about her history tomorrow, see what he could find out. It might allow him to ask about Ruth too, seeing as how she’d got in trouble for helping out Mary. He’d run it past Lock first, but that could be a good way in. If he’d gone in asking questions about Ruth straight away then they’d have smelled a rat.
The bus was moving through the edge of town: Although the place was so small that there wasn’t much distance between the edge and the center. It was early evening. The place wasn’t so much quiet as dead. There was no one out on the streets, likely because of the heat. Most people were probably cooling off in a local bar or at home having dinner with their family.
The only place that looked busy, judging by the busy parking lot, was the place where Ty and Lock had eaten lunch. The lunch hadn’t been at all bad, which would explain the number of cars parked outside.
The elderly lady began to get up. The bus was still moving, and she was a little unsteady on her feet. Ty got up from his seat to see if she needed assistance.
“May I help you, Ma'am?” he said, putting out an arm to steady her, as he had done earlier with Mary.
She smiled, and extended her arm to him, but didn’t say anything. Not at first anyway. He took her bag, and rolling it behind them, walked with her down to the steps of the bus.
The driver pulled over at the end of a small street of neatly kept houses with white picket fencing and American flags on display. Ty took the woman’s bag down the steps and then turned back to help her down.
“Thank you, young man,” she said to him.
It sounded a lot better to his ears than being called sir. That was for sure.
“Say,” she said, casually. “Are you working at the school? Broken Ridge?”
Ty didn’t think too much of her asking. She was probably trying to figure out what he was doing on the bus if she hadn’t seen him before. He couldn’t imagine there would be many other things that would bring someone like him here. At least not as far as a local would be concerned.
“Yes, Ma'am. Just started there today.”
Her expression shifted. The smile dropped away.
“Well, shame on you,” she said, turning her back on him, and walking away, wheeling her shopping bag behind her.
27
A ten second check told Ty that no one had been in his motel room since he’d left. He wanted to take a shower, but that would have to wait. Lock would be impatient to see the footage and get a situation report.
Ty walked to the connecting door and gave three quick taps. “Honey, I’m home.”
He heard Lock get up and move to the door. It opened. Lock handed him a cold beer.
“Man, you are going to make someone a great wife one of these days,” said Ty, taking the beer.
“Hilarious,” said Lock. “How’d it go?”
Ty stepped into Lock’s room. Lock had his laptop open on the small dresser that he had doubling as a desk. He had a bunch of windows open, and a notepad next to the laptop. A bunch of papers were spread out over the bed. Since they’d taken the call from Donald Price, Lock had been deep into his research about not just Broken Ridge, but the entire industry it was a part of.
Lock had become a little obsessive about the whole thing. Not to mention opinionated. That was why Ty had decided to attempt to be as objective as he could. He felt like their investigation needed some kind of counterweight.
“Well, I guess if private security doesn’t work out for me, I can always go work as a camp counselor.”
“You got the job?”
Ty shrugged and hefted the beer can in a mock toast of self congratulation.
“Guess they really are having trouble finding staff then,” said Lock.
“Funny,” Ty replied.
“Just getting you back for the wife wise-crack.”
Ty shrugged. That was fair. “So they want me to start officially tomorrow. But it’s pretty much a live-in kind of a deal, like we thought.”
Ty dug out the two memory cards with the video footage he shot and palmed them to Lock. Lock took them over to the laptop and placed the first card into the card that was hooked up to the laptop with a USB cable. He set the laptop to transferring the date before turning back to Ty.
“This beer tastes awesome,” said Ty, tilting back the can and finishing the final third. “I kind of want a shower, so how about I give you the bullet points, and save the details for when we go eat.”
“Sounds good.”
“So, the set-up is pretty much as we thought it would be. Just like all the other schools in the organization,” said Ty.
Lock’s research had thrown up that a few years back Broken Ridge, which had been set up by Gretchen’s German-born father Albert, had been bought out by a large private investment company. Albert had originally se
t up Broken Ridge as a school for ‘wayward’ teenagers. When the State had withdrawn funding after an abuse scandal, Broken Ridge had gone private, just in time to catch the first major wave of interest in schools for troubled teens from parents with money who wanted the best for their kids.
The ethos was one built upon strict discipline, psychotherapy that tended towards the confrontational, and a system of rewards and punishments that aimed to modify behavior. When it worked, it worked well. The big question though wasn’t the immediate effectiveness, but in what happened afterwards: the long term outcomes.
“Okay, so the good news is Ruth Price is definitely there.”
“The bad news?” Lock prompted.
“Not sure there is any. Not yet anyway, or none that I could confirm today. She’s in good health. Her hair’s shorter and she’s dropped a few pounds. She seems well fed and looks like she’s getting enough sleep.”
“So if it’s all good then why am I sensing a ‘but’ here. . .?”
“Psychologically, I don’t know. She had a look about her. In her eyes. But that could just be because she’s still pissed at what her mom did, or because she’s having to follow the rules there. She’s a teenager, so who the hell knows, right?”
“Okay, go get that shower. I’m going to call Don Price in D.C.. At least we can set his mind at ease a little. That his daughter’s there and she’s in good health. I’ll save the other stuff until we know more,” said Lock.
“Cool,” said Ty, tossing the empty beer can across the room and into the wastebasket without it touching the sides.
“Hey, Ty?”
Ty turned back from connecting door.
“Good work,” said Lock.
“Place ain’t that bad, Ryan. It’s not Disneyland, but then it was never meant to be.”
Lock nodded and turned back to his laptop while Ty closed the connecting door behind him, and started to strip off, headed for that long anticipated shower.
28
More than any other time of the day or night, Ruth had grown to loathe and fear her time around the fire pit with the other girls from her dorm. Everything else she could just about handle. She had actually come to enjoy the exercise more than she thought she would. She was so far ahead on her school work that she was able to help some of the others when they got stuck – and if Rachel or one of the other girls who were bad for snitching weren’t around. And, she had found a friend, despite a rocky start at their first fire pit.
It was her friendship that was about to put her in a world of torment around this evening’s fire pit. She was sure of it. Nothing got under Chris’s skin more than one of the girls sticking up for another one. It drove him crazy. Ruth was fairly sure he saw it as a challenge to his authority. Not that it took much. She had also quickly learned that for a grown man, Chris was one of the most insecure people she had ever met. No doubt that also explained him sleeping with Rachel, which was all but an open secret at Broken Ridge.
At dinner, Ruth sat apart from Mary. Mary kept looking over at her. Every time she did, Ruth looked away. She had tried to help Mary today and it had only landed her in more trouble. It was the new guy that had thrown her off. At first he’d terrified her. But then she saw something else, a humanity. But he was new. They’d soon have him playing by the rules, or he’d be gone.
She still felt sorry for Mary. You had to be inhuman not to. Mary had no place being somewhere like this. But being her friend, showing compassion, had only made Ruth’s situation worse. That pretty much summed up the place as far as she was concerned. Compassion was seen as a weakness. Pretty much any display of emotion was used against you: anger; anxiety; love. They were all deemed, despite what the staff said, as weaknesses. Staying a good little robot was the way to go. If you wanted to stay sane.
Right now, and pretty much since she’d got here, staying sane had been Ruth’s priority. Now even more so than before. Her last hope, her father, had failed her. At the end of the first week, she had been allowed to write two letters. She already knew from Mary that the letters would be read by Gretchen, or another staff member, before they were mailed. Mary also knew that the school primed parents ahead of time, warning them that students often made false accusations against staff and the institution in general. They even gave parents a list of things that their child may claim had occurred. Of course the switch was that these things did occur. But the parents were already set up to discount them out of hand.
Armed with that information, Ruth spent hours in her little cubicle crafting two letters. One was to her mother, the other to her dad. Both letters were very different to what she would have written if she had known they would be delivered unread by anyone at Broken Ridge.
Writing the one to her mom was the hardest. She thanked her mom for ‘intervening.’ To make it sound plausible Ruth wrote that at first she had resented her mom’s decision to send her to Broken Ridge. But as the days had passed, and the initial shock had worn off, she had come not only to understand it, but to appreciate it. She knew how difficult it must have been, and the financial sacrifice it involved. She wound up by telling her mom how much she loved her, and how she was going to do her very best.
In reality, Ruth knew that her dad would be picking up the bill for this, one way or another. She also knew that she would never forgive her mother for doing this. She didn’t plan on cutting her out of her life, but their relationship would never be what it had been once upon a time. Beyond her anger, that was the saddest part of all of this. That her and her mom would never be the same. That the damage had been done as soon as Ruth had been woken by two men standing over her bed, put in a truck, and driven here against her will.
The letter to her dad was easier. She kept it as neutral as possible. She borrowed some of the material she had used in the letter to her mom. But in between the lines her dad would know that she hadn’t agreed to any of this. She didn’t have to say that she needed his help. He would know.
She handed over the two letters. Her mom sent a letter in reply. Ruth got it five days after she had sent her own. She heard nothing from her dad. At first she thought they must not have mailed it. Surely that had to be it. But then Mary told her that she had seen both of Ruth’s letter being placed in the mail sack that was driven into town. Mary had been in the ranch house and seen them being put into the sack and taken outside.
Ruth’s heart had broken. How could her dad not have replied? Even if he had and they had kept his letter from her, why hadn’t he shown up? Why hadn’t he sent help? Or come to see her himself? Why hadn’t he made the trip and demanded that he could see she was okay?
She didn’t know why. All she knew was that none of those things had happened. There had been no letter, no call, no visit, no attorney turning up to demand that her father be allowed access or to ensure she was safe.
He had abandoned her. She was on her own now. The only person she could rely on was herself. That was the real lesson of Broken Ridge. Today had been proof of it. She had to protect herself because when it came down to it, no one else would.
29
Lock and Ty took a corner booth at the far end of the diner. They ordered coffee and talked about general stuff for just long enough to shake off anyone casually listening in.
“You speak to Carmen today?” Ty asked him, taking a sip of his coffee.
Carmen was a LA based criminal defense attorney that Lock had been dating for a couple of months. Part of the reason he had taken this gig was that he had promised her he would keep a check on the high-risk assignments. Compared to their usual work, which had ranged from protecting an adult movie star from a violent stalker to going undercover inside a maximum security prison, this was about as low risk as life got.
“Yeah, she just caught a double homicide out of Newton.”
“Lucky gal,” said Ty.
“She thinks so.”
The waitress came and took their order. Having left her a good tip at lunchtime, she was glad to see them back.
The diner had emptied out a little since Ty had passed it on the bus coming back. There was no one in the adjoining booth and behind them was a wall. Unless someone had their booth tapped, they were free to talk.
“You speak to Don Price?”
“Yeah, I brought him up to speed.”
“How was he?”
“Glad to take the call. I think he felt better knowing that we’ve seen her and that she’s okay.” Lock had some coffee. “He had a lot of questions about the place.”
“Such as?” Ty asked.
“The stuff you’d expect. How are the kids treated? What are the staff like?”
“And?”
Lock grimaced slightly. “Security protocols. Access. Perimeter. Cameras. Proximity to local law enforcement. All the questions you’d expect a guy like Donald Price to ask about a place that has his daughter.”
“What you tell him?”
Lock glanced to the window as a local PD cruiser pulled into the diner’s parking lot and parked up. “I answered his questions to the best of my ability. Then I reminded him that we weren’t about to assist in abducting his daughter from a facility where she has been legally placed.”
Ty had also noticed the patrol car and the two cops who had gotten out and were heading inside the diner. They were both male, white, late forties and carrying about a hundred excess pounds between them. “How he take that?” Ty asked his friend.
“Same as he took it the last time we had that conversation.”
Ty gave him a look, as if to ask, “which was how?”
“Politely.”
“But you don’t believe him,” said Ty.
Lock tapped two fingers on the table top to indicate that the two cops were now within earshot. “I tell you, I’m really lucky to have met Carmen when I have.”