At no point had anyone suspected that canker sores were the answer. Nobody was even fool enough to write that down.
I paged through these documents sitting on the floor of my bedroom, in front of a white cardboard file box I had commandeered to contain them. Old work files were unhoused to make room. This felt like a regression. The pages began with my infant vaccinations. First well-child checkups. That time I had an infected spider bite in second grade.
As I read them, the person I ached for was my mom: the woman who kept calling, as these pages noted, the one who brought me in every single time, the unseen person behind all these details, trying to make and keep her daughter well.
I was at St. Paul’s in the first place because I had parents who believed, above all, in the education of a girl.
“Mother called again,” reads a note from November 1991. “Child in infirmary. Fever, losing weight. Mrs. C very concerned.”
I contacted Jim Kinney in the New Hampshire attorney general’s office and was told politely that they intended to investigate every case and that they would not overlook mine.
Then, on the Friday before Thanksgiving, Detective Curtin and Lieutenant Ford called again. It was the end of the day in New Hampshire when they rang, and the upcoming holiday had taken from the workweek its momentum and its obligations. The timing of their call was worrisome. Didn’t they want to get started on their weekend, head out, head home?
Ford spoke first. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
I hovered patiently. “What’s happened?”
Though they had been severed from my case, Detective Curtin and Lieutenant Ford had been called to present their early findings to the attorney general’s office. It had not gone well. “They called us in,” he explained. “It felt like the Inquisition. We almost felt like we were the suspects. I’ve been doing this for twenty-five years and it’s the most difficult experience I’ve had in that time.”
Both of them were quiet for a moment.
“They’re rejecting my case,” I said, so they wouldn’t have to. Silly seasoned detectives—they’d thought the law would prevail. “They’re actually going to cover it up again.”
“We’re all in agreement that there seems to be some collusion or incestuous relations between attorneys here,” said Julie.
I did not know at the time, but there was certainly a case for incest because the lead counsel for St. Paul’s happened to be the former attorney general of New Hampshire. He’d be working with his former colleagues on which documents would be admitted into the investigation. Anything related to me, apparently, would not.
“It’s attorneys tipping off attorneys,” said Lieutenant Ford. “Put it this way: If I’m the San Francisco Forty-Niners and I’m playing the New England Patriots this weekend, I don’t call up Bill Belichick and tell him what plays I’m going to run.”
I was too upset during the conversation to work out immediately that this was likely how Casner & Edwards, the firm working for the school, got my name. Once Julie and Lieutenant Ford had begun presenting my case to the attorney general’s office, the information had gone to the school’s attorneys—and Casner & Edwards had contacted me to try to get their piece of my participation in the investigation.
“This is like that movie The Pelican Brief,” said Lieutenant Ford. “You know, the St. Paul’s pelicans? I mean, you can’t make this stuff up. We should retire and write a book.”
The pelican is the mascot of St. Paul’s School. An icon of early Christianity, the pelican represented martyrs in their faith because mother birds appear to violently tear flesh from their own breasts to feed their young. In fact, early Christians misunderstood what they were seeing: adult pelicans hunt other birds’ nestlings, eat them, and regurgitate them for their own chicks.
“The way we were treated up there is shocking,” said Julie. “They won’t include, will not include, anything from your file. They have specifically instructed us not to send them anything else. And I think what we have with your case is the smoking gun.”
Smoking gun. I had heard this before, from the pediatrician decades earlier. She’d used the phrase to explain to my mother how the sores in my throat were so far down that they all but precluded the possibility of consensual activity—never mind that my age negated consent altogether. When the doctor had said this, my mind had conjured a hot gun shoved in my mouth, muzzle right where it hurt.
“What’s the gun?” I asked.
Julie finally explained. When she had driven up to the school to request my file, the documents the rector handed her contained, right near the top, a letter written in the summer of 1991—the summer I was accused of being a drug dealer and so on. In this letter, the school’s attorney laid out for then-rector Kelly Clark his formal advice for how Reverend Clark should handle “any further communications” with my family.
“I don’t want to read it to you,” said Julie, “because it will make you crazy.”
I appreciated her concern, but crazy was not a useful barometer at this point.
The lawyer made three points in his letter, and Julie, with Lieutenant Ford listening, read them to me.
One: Rector Clark was advised to say that from the beginning, the school had acted in concert with legal counsel, which Julie interpreted for me as potentially providing cover for the school’s failure to report.
Two: Clark should be sure to say that the
