by Sean Black
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 a hand 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, 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.
He 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 it.
“Hilarious,” said Lock. “How’d it go?”
Ty stepped into Lock’s room. Lock had his laptop open on the small dresser that was doubling as a desk. He had the windows open, and a notepad next to the laptop. 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.
He 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 wisecrack.”
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 to the laptop and placed the first card into the card reader that was hooked up to the laptop with a USB cable. He set the laptop to transferring the date, then turned 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,” he said.
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 set 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 toward 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 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, 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 the connecting door.
“Good work,” said Lock.
“Place ain’t that bad, Ryan. It’s not Disneyland, but it was never meant to be.”
Lock nodded and turned back to his laptop while Ty closed the connecting door behind him, and 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’d thought she would. She was so far ahead on her schoolwork that she was able to help some of the others when they got stuck – 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 that 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. 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, who kept looking at her. Every time she did, Ruth turned away. She had tried to help Mary today and it had only landed her in more trouble. It was the new guy who had thrown her off. At first he’d terrified her. But then she saw something else: 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, weaknesses. Acting a good little robot was the way to go. If you wanted to stay sane.
Right now, and pretty much since she’d got there, 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 Gretchen, or another staff member, would read them 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 might 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 from 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 also 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 it. 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 she 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 into 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 been in the ranch house and had seen both of Ruth’s letters being placed in the mail sack that was driven into town.
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 had no idea. 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 an LA-based criminal defense attorney whom 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. They had left her a good tip at lunchtime so she was glad to see them back.
The diner had emptied out a little since Ty had passed it on the bus. 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 drank 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 out of the window as a local PD cruiser pulled into the diner’s parking lot. “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. The two cops 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 tabletop to indicate that the two cops were now within earshot. “I tell you, I’m really lucky to have met Carmen when I did.”
Ty caught on. “No kidding. Lady like that doesn’t stay on the market too long.”
“Tell me about it,” said Lock, watching the two local cops walk up to the counter.
They weren’t looking at him and Ty, which was good. Lock planned on talking to local law-enforcement. Just not yet. He wanted a handle on who was who in the local community first.
Finally, the two cops got their food to go, and headed back to their patrol car. In the meantime, Lock and Ty’s dinner arrived. It sure as hell wasn’t LA or New York food, but it looked pretty damn good, and was just as tasty and filling.
Heads down, they resumed their conversation where they had left off.
“If he thinks his daughter’s at risk, he’s going to ask us to get her out of there,” said Lock, before he took another bite of cheeseburger.
“But we’re not gonna?”
“Nope.”
“I thought you were all high on how bad some of these schools are.”
Lock stared at Ty over the top edge of what remained of his burger. “I am. But I’m not about to catch prison time over it. If there are problems there, and it looks like his daughter is in danger, he can seek legal remedy. He has the connections and the resources to do that.”
“I hear ya. By the way, we seen any money come in beyond the retainer?”
Lock smiled. Ty had an eye for the bottom line right now that had a lot to do with a lease he’d just taken out on a brand new Mercedes. Lock had done his best to talk him out of it. As with Ty’s choice of female companionship, it had proven to be a losing battle.
“Paid in full. In fact, he’s a little ahead.”
“Now that’s the kind of client I can get behind.” Ty waved a finger, remembering something, the lady from the bus. He’d been so focused on giving Lock his bullet points that he’d forgotten to mention her when he’d gotten back to the motel. “I had an old lady on the bus back ask me if I worked at Broken Ridge.”
“And?”
“And when I said that I did she said, ‘Shame on you.’ Kind of came out of left field too. I was helping her with her groceries when she said it so she must have been carrying some strong opinions.”
Lock mulled that one over. Broken Ridge having a bad reputation locally could work to their advantage. “Wonder why she said it?” He was thinking out loud.
“And I thought you were supposed to be the smart one.”<
br />
“I mean, did she work there one time? Is it local gossip? Did something happen? And, if so, when? What’s the angle? If there’s a grievance, it comes from somewhere, smartass,” said Lock.
The waitress headed over with the coffee pot. “How are you boys doing over here? Enjoying everything?”
They both answered in the affirmative. She gave them a refill and left them to resume their conversation.
“So where d’you say this woman got off the bus?” Lock asked.
Ty described the street where the driver had stopped to let her off. Lock figured she should be easy enough to find in a town so small. “Well, the less popular the place is, the easier that makes my job. But you just be careful out there tomorrow. Remember your cover and stick to it.”
Ty smirked at him across the table. “What they gonna do? Put me in detention?”
“Ty,” said Lock, suddenly serious. “The digging I was doing today . . . People have died at Broken Ridge, two kids and one member of staff since it first opened. All three happened a while back, and the place was pretty much cleared of any wrongdoing, but this is not a zero-risk environment, so don’t go getting complacent. Okay?”
30
The flames from the fire pits flickered in the darkness. The day’s heat had given way to a chilling desert cold. Ruth sat, knees pulled up, her arms stretched out so that she could warm her hands by the flames.
When they had gathered at the pit, Mary had sat next to her. Ruth had got up and switched places with Abby. Abby seemed to be happy about having a seat closer to where the action was likely to be.
Chris hadn’t begun with what had happened with Mary and, by extension, with Ruth. He’d held off. Instead, he’d started out by lecturing them on the importance of keeping the dorm, especially their main bathroom, clean. He had even picked out Rachel as someone who wasn’t doing enough cleaning detail.