The Adored (4 page)

Jonathan Barnes was true to his word and had a member of his lawyer’s firm take the case, unfortunately a rather young and inexperienced associate. But as the senior partner later told Barnes, who followed the trial daily, “It was unfortunate. These young bucks need to cut their teeth somewhere, and it was a reasonable case for us to expect to win,” and added “Usually, I like to see them win their first one but better luck next time,” he told Barnes and they had a laugh. Barnes laughed uncomfortably with Michael Sutton. They had known each other their entire lives, and Barnes had always been intimated by Sutton’s bravado. He had wanted to do better for Mrs. Strong. Curtis Strong was tried as an adult for murder, convicted and sentenced to twenty-five years to life in prison.

Chapter 6

Out of the black water of the lightless night and against the horizon of charcoal clouds, the boat sailed into view. It was a mile offshore, ablaze with energy, as its crew prepared for the annual Stamford to Provincetown race. The yacht “Construction” introduced its owner Jonathan Barnes, Commodore of the Stamford Yacht Club and fierce competitor on the sea. He loved the American Sea, his American Sea. He named it after reading Whitman in college and Whitman’s descriptions of life along Long Island Sound. He grew to love the Sound even more as he sailed it competitively all summer while growing up. The Sea’s calm surface and strong westerly winds created a paradise for sailors.

Now in the seam, between the clouds of the night and the fog of morning, the boats came, forty in all, rigging rising, speed building, and then the gun—before the sun broke.

This would be Parker Barnes third Provincetown race with his father and his first as Captain. Jonathan Barnes had trained his boy well. He pushed him as a deckhand, no privileges; learn each position, understand wind and sails and lines and men, then bring them all together above the water. “A great race is never won in the water,” Jonathan Barnes coached his son, “always above the water, Parker, above the water.”

And Parker would reassure his father, “I understand, Dad.” While unassuming at seventeen, Parker had grown strong, stayed aware of all going on around him aboard the boat and learned his lessons well. For all of his father’s fierce competitiveness at sea, what came through to Parker was not the competitiveness but a love of sailing and of the American Sea.

On this day “Construction” would win the Provincetown race, but clouds of destruction were gathering on the horizon.

The young man had been developing addictions: first smoking and drinking, then marijuana and cocaine. None of his friends from the Brunswick School were aware of anything other than the smoking and drinking. They all did a little of the latter, and one friend, Gideon Bridge, had smoked a few joints with Parker on evenings when they took the “Construction” out for sails. Usually they would take girls from the Greenwich Academy, Brunswick’s sister school, on board and they behaved. But when it was just the two of them, they smoked pot.

Even Gideon did not know the seriousness of Parker’s drug addiction. Only Lenny “the Liar” Crane knew, along with Barnes’ parents, who were to begin a series of shuttles in and out of drug rehabilitation for their son.

The first rehab occurred at Hawk Hill in Chester, Connecticut. The fact that the other Brunswick School families all were off to summer homes helped the Barnes’ keep a low profile about Parker’s six-week effort at rehabilitation. And in this summer of his seventeenth year, Parker did try. But the following January, his senior year at Brunswick, when Parker’s behavior became noticeably more erratic and he went missing for another six weeks, this time to a more intense rehabilitation assignment to the Close Farm in Lakeville, Connecticut, the others knew. They talked about it and how to help young Barnes. They vowed they would not abandon their troubled friend, and true to their word, he was welcomed back with more caring and friendship than he knew he deserved. And he tried; he worked at his program, taking one day at a time of sobriety and abstinence.

There were constant parties in the spring of their senior year and all of the friends made a pledge they would not drink out of respect for Parker. That worked. Barnes continued refraining from drugs and alcohol.

Lenny the Liar Crane, another Brunswick friend, wasn’t as protective as the other six. He knew Parker’s weaknesses, all of them. It wasn’t that he wanted to bring Barnes down; he just wanted more of the limelight with the other Brunswick boys, the seven who formed the Brunswick Fund. In the classroom at the time of the Fund’s creation, some spark went off inside Crane. It became very important for Lenny to be part of that group. They were generally seen as “the” boys to be with. Some were athletes, some were scholars, but together they were the richest and most popular of the boys at Brunswick. Parker was Lenny’s entry, and it was Parker he befriended and even then not so much befriended as served.

Parker Barnes was a tall strapping boy, constantly tanned from sailing in the summer and skiing in Vermont in the winter. His blond hair was long and flowed freely down his neck. He’d had two high school romances. The first ended when the girl moved to Switzerland, and the second ended more disastrously on a double date with Leonard Crane and two sisters.

Graduation had occurred at Brunswick and Parker and Lenny Crane were headed to Columbia in the fall. As happens in a town with the wealth of Greenwich and Stamford, the social scene runs the length of the summer, especially after graduation when there were parties and celebrations night after night for weeks. Every child of privilege had to have their own party. At one of the parties given by a girl who had graduated from Greenwich Academy, Barnes and Lenny met two sisters, Rossie and Judy Leary, who attended Greenwich High School. One girl was a junior and the other a sophomore at the school.

The night began innocently enough; Barnes picked Crane up at his home. At the party, the hosting girl’s parents greeted everyone as they arrived. Crane and Barnes believed the two Leary sisters had also graduated. By 9 p.m. the party had swelled to over two hundred. Later in the evening, the police were called, and several young men and women were arrested for alcohol or drug possession, Parker among them. But it wasn’t until two months later when Judy Leary’s parents showed up with the young lady at the Barnes home that the real problem surfaced.

She was pregnant, Mr. Barnes was told. And Parker had been supplying her with a stream of drugs on their dates over the recent weeks. The parents and the young lady, while from Greenwich, were not well-to-do. The girl was a sophomore at Greenwich High and was fifteen years old at the time Barnes got her pregnant.

Quietly, Jonathan Barnes took care of things once again for Parker. An abortion was performed once it was confirmed that Parker was the father. Legal papers were drawn up, and a sum was paid. And yet another rehab assignment began for young Mr. Barnes.

Chapter 7

Curtis Strong Jr. was eighteen when his trial ended, and the jury returned a verdict of guilty of second degree murder. The judge sentenced Strong to twenty-five years to life in prison. That night, two years before, sitting in his cell in the Stamford Police jail he tried to envision Auburn, New York, where the maximum security prison he was sentenced to was located. Louise Strong visited her son on the night before he was to be transferred to the upstate New York lockup. She had gone to the library to find out about the prison and the area once the location for Curtis’ incarceration was determined. She read stories about the place and its past inmates that terrified her. This was no place for her boy. She felt like she was being slowly strangled as the gears of justice were grinding away at her son. This night she settled on telling Curtis other stories about the area of New York and the town of Auburn and about two of its illustrious citizens, Harriet Tubman and William Seward, both stalwarts in the fight against slavery and for equal rights. She wished they were alive now to stop the injustice her son was undergoing.

On that final night in Stamford with his mother, Curtis put on a brave front, telling her not to worry, flexing his biceps to show his strength and that he would be able to take care of himself. Louise Strong laughed at CJ’s bravado but urged him to keep a low profile in that place of monsters.

The initial days at Auburn were wearing: travelling to the prison; processing through so many check points for pictures, finger prints, showers, uniforms, bedding, and arriving at his cell; meeting his cellmate, a sullen southerner who spit on him as the guard turned away. Then there were the work assignments, meeting the doctor and getting a partial physical, digesting the scope of this place that might as well have been on another planet for the different life it presented to him, and most intimidating to him were the twenty-foot-thick walls around the prison that towered over everything in town. What struck him was those walls were keeping him from his freedom for the next twenty-five years and on the other side somewhere, Billy Stevens, the person who did kill Augusto Santos, had his freedom. But Curtis vowed he would not yield—not the name, not the loss, and not to the scum-spitting murderer next to him.

Chapter 8

Valerie McGuire was in love. It was not something she was looking for, he just happened upon her. Well, not just. Sol Katz, the head lifeguard at Tod’s Point for over a quarter of a century, put the two together. At the beach in Old Greenwich, they were training partners as junior lifeguards. When paired up against other guards in training competitions, both being athletes and strong, they won a majority of contests. Whether swimming out to the dummy and bringing it back in, speed dashes up and down the beach or distance swimming, they were the youngest but they were the best. Valerie liked her new friend Eddie Wheelwright. He was well mannered, very good looking and listened to her when she spoke.

Then love arrived, quite unexpectedly. It was another in Sol Katz’s endless preparation drills that prompted the thought of love. “Here’s how you do it,” Katz said hunched awkwardly over the dummy, giving it mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Valerie wanted to ask when was the last time anyone drowned or even had to be rescued in the calm waters of the Point, but being seventeen she demurred to the wise leader.

“Today we’re going to do it live. Each of you will practice it with your partner,” Katz intoned. Groans went up among the six pairs of guards; particularly loud from the only male pairing of Parker Barnes and Lenny Crane.

“No way, Mr. Katz,” Parker shouted.

“Barnes, I’m not asking you to kiss Crane. If you need to do the job for real, you have to know what it’s like. Rubber man here is OK for practice but nothing substitutes for the real thing.”

“Nope, not doing it,” Barnes replied.

“Stop your whining. Wheelwright, you show Barnes how it’s done.” The prospect tickled Edward Wheelwright. He found Valerie McGuire quite attractive.

Wheelwright stood up and asked Val to “assume the position.”

“Wheelwright, not her. Crane. Perform CPR on Crane.”

Edward did as he was told. Crane complied being the dummy he was while the others all cringed. Valerie cringed more than the others. She was looking forward to having Edward place his mouth over hers. She even had it in her mind to put her tongue in his mouth. And now a strange thing happened: She became jealous of Lenny Crane.

There was such a fuss, such noise going up among the young lifeguards after Wheelwright performed CPR on Lenny Crane that Katz called off the broader exercise.

That night lying in her bed, Valerie fell in love with her friend, Edward Wheelwright. Since providence is truly divine, across town in his own bed Edward Wheelwright reached back to the afternoon exercise and envisioned his mouth on Valerie McGuire’s. He liked the image as he drifted off to sleep.

His last thought before exploring the depths of teenage sleep was of the girl with the vocabulary of a ghetto punk and the pure heart of a newborn. A smile crossed his lips as he slipped away; she was a girl of clear thought and good nature. She just liked to swear.

Chapter 9

“This is my world, the kingdom I have been searching for.” Robert Holmes

Upon entering Robert Conetta’s Great Questions class at the Brunswick School for the first time, that quote is what his students saw on the chalkboard.

The first question Mr. Conetta posed for his students was, “What did Mr. Holmes mean by that.”

The only student who ever got the question right was Sebastian Ball, at least according to Mr. Conetta. Sebastian Ball answered Mr. Conetta’s question with the question: “What is ‘This’ in what context or where is this.”

Most students made an assumption of what “This” was and developed their answer accordingly. In Mr. Conetta’s logic, one could not possibly answer his question until you understood “This.” It was like trying to solve mathematics problems with only one number, he would tell his class.

Robert Conetta had been a teacher at the Brunswick School for twenty-five years. It was in his class that students learned the skill of critical thinking. The subject was a requirement beginning in the third grade, and it continued every year through twelfth grade. Sometimes it was part of a history class, occasionally part of a mathematics class, but generally it was included in a writing and logic class.