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CHAPTER 21
FOR HIS FIRST visit to the site, O’Keefe wanted to be alone. No distractions. He told Hartley to hold off on the photographer until next time.
“All by your lonesome, huh?” Hartley said. “Spooky.” “No worries now that Bitson’s cleansed the place.” He hadn’t visited the building for years, not since the last time he’d been the one to pick Kelly up at the end of the day, which he’d done only rarely, in part because he couldn’t always be depended on to arrive on time—or sometimes at all. Annie and he had still been married then, though they seemed to have taken up permanent residence on the bitter cusp of imminent divorce. They’d never seemed particularly “made for each other.” Just the opposite. But in truth, it had been mostly his fault: the drugs, the drink, and the idiotic idea—one he’d not been fully conscious of at the time—that if a marriage wasn’t near-perfect, it wasn’t worth preserving.
He had obtained and studied the building plans. Typical of its era, it was brick, two stories, plus a semi-finished basement. Double entry doors opened into an abbreviated foyer where another set of double doors led to the building proper, a long hallway with four classrooms, two on each side. At the end of the corridor, a staircase led up to a second floor with administrative offices and a teacher’s lounge. In the basement was an unfinished room, now infamous, containing the boiler and other utilities over which Marvin Smith had presided. Across the hallway was the also now-infamous large multi-purpose room used for naps, art, music, and special programs and gatherings.
A security guard greeted him. It would be ironic, O’Keefe thought, if the guard refused him entrance and turned out to be one of George’s people, his own employee. But the guard was not his employee and did let him in. They’d turned enough lights on for him to see but not to see well. He wondered how his photos would come out and made a mental note to request proper lighting when the photographer came on-site.
Ginny’s classroom was the first one on the left. He switched on the lights.
Nothing noticeably different from the last time he’d seen it six years earlier. A bit scuffed up and shabbier than the fanatical festive spic-and-span orderliness of Betsy Mortimer’s Children’s Clinic, but far more comforting … the miniature desks, the clutter of toys, the crude drawings pinned haphazardly to the walls, the goofy uplifting slogans on banners and blackboard. Here is the Eden from which we fall.
He’d forgotten about the window in the doorway, though not the four windows spaced evenly along the opposite wall. Those looked onto the parking lot, where parents and others came and went throughout the day, and onto the adjacent building used by the church for administrative offices and various parish support functions and meeting areas.
The church people had initially denied vehemently that such abuses would be possible given the busyness of the area, all the comings and goings, and insisted they’d never witnessed anything remotely suspicious, nor heard one complaint of any kind of abuse in all the years the school had operated.
That was before some of the parents announced their intention to sue the church as well as the school. After that, it had been “no comment.”
Between the two classrooms were restrooms, the boys’ on one side of the hallway, the girls’ on the other. Crimes were alleged to have occurred in both. Some of the children were barely toilet- trained when they started at the school. Others occasionally had accidents or just needed help. Money for teachers’ aides was scarce and volunteers sparse. If kids needed help, their teacher might ask a colleague across the hall to take an occasional look into her classroom while she accompanied the student to the bathroom. The female teachers—and they never seemed to be male—had to help the boys as well as the girls. The bathrooms were alike except for urinals in the boys’ and two additional stalls in the girls’. There were windows, but they were frosted. Both rooms had stalls. Unfortunate, O’Keefe thought. While it was difficult to believe that the alleged abuses could have occurred without detection given the number of windows and doors and fairly constant and unpredictable traffic in this environment, the partitioned toilet areas allowed for concealment. The prosecution had already picked up on that theme, and the children’s stories had begun to emphasize it.
But the real problem for the defense was the basement, where most of the alleged horrific events had occurred. Sliding his hand along the banister, O’Keefe felt his way down the steps, wondering if they’d deliberately left the basement lights off. As he felt along the wall for a light switch, he noticed the clicking, whirring, and bumping sounds that since childhood had made him anxious when he found himself alone in dark places. He felt the light switch, flipped it, and tensed, anticipating a revelation of something in the hallway to be afraid of. Of course there was nothing. The hallway just looked old, bruised, defeated.
He found the multi-purpose room. Kelly’s graduation ceremony had taken place there. She’d been five then, and blushingly proud of her achievement, even if not quite sure exactly what she’d achieved other than a vague but somehow special marker of progress toward the cherished goal of “growing up.” In the boisterously decorated room, each set of parents had received a hand-decorated program made by their child. Annie still probably had theirs stored away somewhere.
Now, in this quite different present, he noticed the complete absence of windows. No lock on the door either. Marvin Smith could easily have come in, but so could others—teachers, administrative staff, parents. Surely the other teachers and administrative people would travel back and forth to the room at will and unannounced, and maybe the parents too, when picking up their children.
Marie Dreyer, the school’s principal, had greeted the abuse allegations with contempt, and had been vociferous about it, using words and phrases like “insane” and “hysterical idiocy” and “witchhunt.” The authorities had responded by promptly opening an investigation of Marie Dreyer. Not long after, a couple of children identified her as an occasional witness to the abuse, and it was rumored that she might even have been an active participant.
“That didn’t silence her,” Hartley had said, “but it sent everyone else involved with the school rushing for cover. None of the other staff had supported the accusations against Virginia and Marvin, but they aren’t saying anything publicly in their favor either.” O’Keefe intended to try to interview them but couldn’t force them unless Judge Snyder could be persuaded to order depositions, which was unlikely. It was enough to hope that during the remaining proceedings Snyder wouldn’t maintain the unmistakable initial hostility to the defense he’d shown at the preliminary hearings. Certainly he’d do nothing special for them, nothing out of the ordinary that would allow the parents and the media to paint him as a black- robed abettor of the depraved.
At the back of the larger room, behind a wall extending the width of a room, there was a nook with hooks in its walls that had served as a cloak room. There was no door, just openings at both ends. Vile things were said to have occurred here. If any of it were true, the evildoers must have been seized with a desperate, insane courage to take the risk, so easy would it have been for someone to come through the unlocked main door and through to the nook and behold the shocking scene. Ginny seemed the opposite of a risk-taker.
He crossed the hallway to the boiler room and opened the door. The door was a little too large for the doorway, and the floor squeaked, as if in pain, as the door dragged across it. Since the place had been untended for weeks, the spiders had wasted no time asserting their dominion. But aside from the webs and the crumbly stuccoed walls and ceiling, the place was surprisingly clean and Mr. Smith’s nook tidy.
On his worktable were a couple of pencils and a small, crumpled notebook with writing on it that appeared to be a to-do list. There was a cot, a dark gray pillow, a thin mattress covered by a sheet, and a soft, thin blanket. Very comfy. Dainty, even — disturbingly so. He wondered what that might mean, and whatever it really meant, how the prosecution might spin it.
On his way out, he spotted a padlock latch at eye level on the inside of the door.
Why would anyone want to lock the door to a boiler room from the inside? Had this been installed at the time the building was constructed, probably in the 1930s at the latest? It didn’t look that old. If Marvin Smith had installed it, that could be a problem. Hartley would need to ask Marie Dreyer about that.
He climbed back to the main floor. At the far end of the hallway toward the entrance, the security guard was shifting from one foot to another, broadcasting an air of hostile impatience.
“Almost done,” O’Keefe called out. “Just need to do the second floor.”
He waited for the guard to say something, which didn’t happen. O’Keefe mumbled, “Okay,” and headed up the stairs, pretty sure he’d find nothing of interest since there’d been no mention of anything untoward occurring on that floor.
The man navigated his van through the streets adjacent to the St. Stephen’s complex. It was now a mostly commercial zone, older buildings of the same vintage as the Operation Go! structure, most of the businesses closed on this Sunday afternoon. Only a single bedraggled block of houses and a shabby two-story brick apartment building indicated that the area had once been residential, and those stragglers looked like they were only barely managing to hold on for dear life against the commercial onslaught. But the whole area had so deteriorated that they now risked little danger of anyone even bothering to want to tear them down.
Which worked for him just fine. It was unlikely that some resident would notice him circling and report a suspicious vehicle to the police. The people who lived here were the type likely to still be snoring in bed, even on a Sunday afternoon, and even if awake, they probably wouldn’t care enough to call anyway.
He found three available spots around the St. Stephen’s quadrangle where he could position his van inconspicuously and still be able to observe the Operation Go! building entrance and the Jeep Grand Wagoneer parked in the lot. To minimize the risk of attracting unwanted attention, he could stay for a while in each place, then move to another. But even if someone challenged him, he’d simply explain that he often came here to observe this horrible place where his son and the other children had been violated. It was part of his grieving process, approved and even encouraged by his therapist.
He’d used only two of his observation posts when the man exited the building, walked around to the side and into the parking lot, checked out each of the windows of the witch’s classroom and took photos. He understood the man to be Peter O’Keefe, a private detective hired by the witch’s lawyer to assist her in thwarting justice. He’d begun following O’Keefe, thinking that the PI might be doing the same to him and other parents of the violated children, sneaking sinisterly around, maybe even stalking the children themselves. Would he be trying to dig up dirt on the families? Maybe do even worse?
No way was that going to happen. He would turn the tables. He’d already visited O’Keefe’s office, taken the elevator to the man’s floor, walked up and down the hallway, ready, if challenged, with a story about looking for a business that was apparently no longer a tenant.
But this was the first time he’d observed the detective in the flesh for more than a few seconds. Taller than the average man, above six feet for sure, slim, dark hair worn a bit longer than most people were wearing it these days, short-sleeved polo- type pink shirt, jeans, loafers, no socks.
As he watched O’Keefe climb into the Wagoneer, Ralph’s revulsion, turning physical, rose in his gorge.
Keeping what he calculated was a safe distance, he pursued. Ralph congratulated himself. He was getting good at this.//
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