We called them the boys even though they are, like me, in their fifth decade now. I am raising sons, and man is an honorific in my home. So is woman. I do not like to think of those two as men. This might be a way to continue to contain and reduce them in my mind. Nevertheless, Detective Curtin and Lieutenant Ford were careful to follow my lead with language, introducing new terms only where legal diction required it.
Sometimes they introduced other terms, such as when Lieutenant Ford explained to me that for complicated reasons, the statute of limitations had not expired on prosecuting Rick and Taz: we could still bring a case against them if I wished.
“Speaking as a cop,” said Lieutenant Ford on speakerphone, “this is predatory behavior. And a tiger doesn’t change its stripes.”
Predatory. Yes. I admitted one shivery thrill. This was a new feeling, to have someone fighting for me.
But the boys weren’t monsters, and they weren’t tigers. They were men out there living their lives, and I was living mine. I had looked them up in a half-assed way—not going to the second page of search results, not trying alternate terms. Never on social media, ever. I found only one. I learned he had a daughter. What good would come of her daddy being taken away? How on earth could this help me?
“No,” I told the police officers. “Thank you, but no.”
“We support your decision, whatever it is, one hundred percent,” said Julie. “But you also said that you might reconsider if it was to protect other girls.”
Now I felt a new queasiness. Could it be that by exercising my right to keep my private life private, I had failed to offer witness to other victims?
“Would you be comfortable with us just talking to the boys, to ask some questions?” asked Julie.
It hadn’t occurred to me until now that nobody had ever done this. I’d been having this complicated and brutal one-sided conversation for decades, and the boys might not have had any clue.
“Yes,” I told her. “I’m okay with that. I don’t even know where they live.”
“We do.”
“Who will go?”
“Detectives.”
“What will they say?”
“They will have a conversation.”
I told her I didn’t see any value in revenge. I didn’t feel vindictive. I didn’t want anyone’s money. I didn’t want anyone to go to prison. “One of them has a daughter,” I said, to prove this point.
“Right,” said Julie, turning my point. “A daughter.”
I would have these exchanges with Detective Curtin and Lieutenant Ford, and when I hung up the phone I’d go back to my life, heading downstairs to start dinner for my children. It felt surreal and I wanted it to stay that way: St. Paul’s had receded in my mind to a span of gothic misery that was tangled in an adolescence and a certain narrow class consciousness I’d done my best to leave behind. I did not tell a single friend about my involvement in the investigation of St. Paul’s. The school itself had hired a new law firm, Casner & Edwards, to produce a fresh set of reports about faculty misconduct. The firm’s first report, issued in May of 2017, revealed much of the failure of response to the initial alumni allegations of 2000 and indicated that the firm was continuing to solicit accusations of faculty abuse from victims and witnesses. Once the AG opened its investigation in August of that year, this meant both Casner & Edwards and state investigators would potentially be talking to the same witnesses. I saw the school’s call go out over email, to all SPS alumni, for witnesses to “boundary violations,” and I laughed with my friend who had also been raped at St. Paul’s about what a fool’s errand that would be—to trust a firm on the payroll of the school with your story, rather than going straight to the police. “They’re beating the bushes,” said my friend. “Driving out all the victims before the cops can get there.” The current rector, we heard, was delivering heartfelt apologies by phone to survivors who offered their stories.
“Yeah, that’d help,” deadpanned my friend.
Even so, I didn’t tell her that I was talking to investigators in Concord. I wasn’t sure I would ever tell a soul outside my family.
But at the end of August 2017, I got a personal email from Casner & Edwards anyway. In cold and officious tones, I was informed that the law firm wanted to speak to me. The email did not indicate how they’d gotten my name or what they wished to say. I forwarded the email to Detective Curtin: What was this about?
She called me immediately. “It’s go time.”
She drove up to the campus that afternoon to request my student files. I had faxed her written consent to receive my documents, and on the St. Paul’s map in my mind I saw her car approaching the school, taking the left off Pleasant Street, and nosing into a spot in the empty lot behind the Schoolhouse, where I imagined records were kept. I felt guilty and wondered why. The rector at the time, Mike Hirschfeld, happened to be in his office, and he handed Detective Curtin my file. She photographed every page, both covers, and the little thumbnail photograph of me, aged fourteen, pinned inside.
The next day she called me again. Did I have any idea why someone would have been working in my file in the years after I graduated? Ten, fifteen years afterward?
I did not.
Did I have any idea why members of the administration would have wanted to go back through all of my documents? Did anything happen subsequently?
No, not that I knew.
There was something else in the file, Detective Curtin told me, that she and her fellow investigators had not expected to find. Something she was sure the school would not have wanted them to find.
She did not say this triumphantly. She
