“I don’t mean to be rude,” I said. “But you really need to tell me what you’re doing here.”
“Of course. I’m sorry.” She opened her purse and removed a photograph, which she held out for me to take. “This is my son, Adam.”
It was a picture of a rugged-looking young man, probably no older than eighteen. He had the wavy brown hair of a Kennedy and piercing blue eyes set off by a skier’s tan. The photo had been taken outside against a white mountain backdrop so beautiful, it looked fake.
“He’s a handsome kid,” I said, not knowing what else to say. I tried to return the picture, but she refused to take it.
“He doesn’t look like this anymore,” she said sadly. “He’s been through so much. Anyway, the reason I’m here—” She took another yoga breath. “I’m hoping you can find him for me.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Adam is missing.”
“Have you spoken to the police?”
“You don’t understand,” she said. “The situation is—it’s not that simple.”
I had a feeling that I would regret my next sentence. “Then explain it to me.”
“Three years ago, Adam was a senior at the Alpine Sports Academy outside Rangeley. Do you know it?”
“It’s a high school for skiers,” I said, hoping to hurry her along, “like Carrabassett Valley Academy.”
“I wish he’d gone to CVA!” Her eyes welled up again and she dabbed at them with a wad of tissue from her purse. “But ASA offered him a scholarship. The school pays for a few local kids to go there—kids with athletic potential—everyone else is rich. And he did so well, too. I mean, his grades were never the best, but he was the best racer in his class. He had a shot at making the U.S. Ski Team and maybe even going to the Olympics.”
I was still struggling to understand what any of this had to do with me. “So what happened to him?”
“Senior year, he met a girl from Vail. Her name was Alexa Davidson. She was a freshman.”
From the way she spit out that last word, I suspected I knew what was coming next. “How old was she?”
“She was fourteen, although she looked and acted a lot older than that.”
“And how old was Adam?”
“He was seventeen for most of the semester.”
I set the photo on the table between us, facedown. “And then he turned eighteen. And someone found out he and Alexa were having sex?”
“The parents demanded that the school investigate. It would have been bad enough if they’d just expelled him, and taken away his dreams of skiing professionally, but the fucking headmaster decided to bring in the police.”
“And they arrested Adam for statutory rape,” I said.
“They totally set him up to make it look worse than it was.” Her hair fell around her face. She pushed the strands away violently. “I had to sell my condo to pay for the lawyer—thirty thousand dollars—and all he did was lose the case. Adam still ended up going to jail. They were both just kids!”
Not in the eyes of the law. “How long was he in jail?”
“Two years.”
“Where?”
“Bucks Harbor.”
It was a prison in easternmost Maine, not far from one of my old districts. It was a minimum-security facility—low-to medium-risk prisoners. Informally, it was known to be a warehouse for convicted sex offenders, although the Department of Corrections would deny up and down that it was a dumping ground for the lowest of the low.
I noticed she hadn’t mentioned Adam’s father. There was no ring on her finger, either.
“How long has he been out?” I asked.
“Three months,” she said with a sneer. “He’s on supervised release, which means he has to register as a sex offender for the next ten years. He has to meet with a probation officer in Farmington every week and pay to go to counseling with a bunch of child rapists until he’s ‘cured’ or something.”
At least he hadn’t been fitted with an electronic monitoring device, I thought.
She removed a pack of Capris from her vest and then seemed to realize she shouldn’t light up in my house without asking permission. She stuffed the cigarettes in her pocket. When she looked up again, her eyes were full of fury.
“Do you know what the worst thing is, though?” she said. “They put his picture on the Internet! There’s a Web site where you can look up who the sex offenders are in your town. So people see there’s this new ‘predator’ named Adam Langstrom living nearby, and they freak out about their kids, even though he is completely normal and would never, ever hurt a child. My landlord wouldn’t allow him to stay with me because the fucking neighbors saw his picture on the Internet. Adam had to go live at this logging camp in the middle of nowhere.”
“A logging camp?”