Chapter 9: Unraveling

After speaking with Barry Milton and his parents, Archie began pressuring Arlene to reveal his son’s whereabouts. Arlene refused to speak to him; she was impervious to his entreaties. He went to the police trying to file a criminal kidnapping complaint, but they turned him away. They said that (absent a judicial order) it was a civil, not a criminal matter. His only remedy was through the family court, and it would be at least a month before he could obtain a hearing.

Despite his promises to his son, Archie was making no progress trying to locate and free Larry from the “school” that had spirited him away. He oscillated between fury and despair, trying every possible approach without success.

It turned out, however, that Larry obtained his freedom in an entirely different way.

The owners and managers of the Temple of the Spirit School were committed to a “non-violent” approach, meaning they used only the starvation and the restraints on their “students,” not whippings or other visible scar-causing punishments.

The invisible threat to their program which they didn’t anticipate happened during Larry’s third week of incarceration. Suddenly almost all of the “students” and staff were sick with norovirus, the same disease that ruined tourists’ experiences on cruise ships.

Causing severe vomiting and diarrhea, norovirus spreads easily and rapidly. Cruise ship passengers endure terrible misery but they almost always recover. But at the school the already-starved teens were constitutionally unable to cope.

Almost all were too sick to leave their cots, some became unconscious, and then two of them died in the same afternoon. By the time ambulances were called, the situation was dire, and the responding crews discovered the two that were now beyond help.

The sheriff and the coroner were summoned, and consequently the leadership and staff were all arrested and the prisoners freed, to be returned to their parents or into foster care.

Larry had only endured less than a month of substandard rations, so the effects on his body were less pronounced. He was aware of the two deaths, but he was amazed and pleased that Dale Parley was still among the living.