Chapter 1 – Enterprise
I was sitting in the Best Ever Bake Shop on a Saturday afternoon in mid-February. I often went to the Bake Shop on Saturday afternoons, because Amy Ducharme was usually working and it was fairly slow after the noon rush. Amy was sixteen, a Junior in High School, and the cutest girl in Essex. It would have been normal, and expected, for her to look down her nose at me, four years younger, and scorn my attentions, but, when my friends and I spent the first six weeks of the school year hiding in the woods, she had been so delighted that she had been good to me ever since. As she said, every kid in High School wished they could do what we had done, and put one over on the teachers and the cops.
Most times, if her father wasn’t there, she gave me a free drink and a doughnut, and today was no exception. I was munching my butter crunch doughnut and sipping my hot chocolate while Amy read a four page essay I had written. There were a couple other customers at the counter, but they had been taken care of, so she had time.
When she had finished, she put it down and gave me a quizzical look.
“Denny, this is really good. Your handwriting stinks, though.”
“But you can read it?”
“Oh, yeah. I can read it alright,” She leaned over closer to me. “Listen, kid,” she said softly, with a grin on her face, “this isn’t for you, is it?”
I grinned back at her. “No, it’s for my buddy, Win.”
“Are you selling it?”
“No, no; not for him.”
So, here’s what was happening. The four of us, Win, Tom, Rollo, and myself, were under the gun. We had all been loaded down with catch-up work from the six weeks we had missed, and that, on top of our regular work, was adding up. Rollo, who had only missed four weeks, was in pretty good shape, thanks in large part to Kate, who was his next-door neighbor and had been helping him with his homework and the catch-up stuff. I was doing okay, except for French, but Win and Tom were struggling.
One thing I was really good at was writing, and I was fast. We had two term papers to do, one in Social Studies, and the other in English. We had had this great idea of just writing one paper and submitting it to both teachers, but we had to give it up. Mr. Ermentrout had laughed when I proposed it to him, and he might, in the right circumstances, have gone for it, but Miss Randall, who had replaced Mrs. Rock as our English teacher, was no fool, and she guessed what we were up to and put a stop to it.
Win and Tom had completed their papers for Ermentrout; they were on U.S. History, which they both loved, and both of them finished their papers on time, but they had fallen hopelessly behind on the English paper. They were both smart kids, but they were over-loaded, and they couldn’t churn it out as fast as I could. So I offered to help. The essay I had just written was the last preliminary one in English before the ten-page term paper, which was due in two weeks.
“You could, you know. Sell them, I mean.”
I had been thinking the same thing.
“But not to Win and Tom. I’m just helping them because they’re my friends.”
“Oh, I know. But you could do them for other kids, if you have the time. This is good enough for High School.”
“Do you think so?”
“Are you kidding me? I know kids who would pay good money for an essay like this.”
Now this was sounding better and better, and having Amy Ducharme bending over and whispering to me, her face only inches from mine, was about as close to Heaven as I had ever been.
The little bell over the door rang, and we both turned to see Jane Alberts walking in. Amy called out a cheery hello, I smiled, and the two men sitting at the counter smiled. Men always smiled when they saw Jane walk in.
She sat down beside me and ordered a coffee and a cinnamon bun.
“So, how’s my favorite detective?” she asked with a grin.
“Good; I’m good. I’ve just been catching up on some writing.”
Jane picked up the essay from the counter as Amy set down her coffee and bun.
“Check it out, Jane,” Amy urged her.
Jane was a fast reader, being a secretary at a busy law firm, so it only took her a couple of minutes to read it.
“Well done, Denny. Your format is good, you’ve supported your thesis, and your citations are done just right. It gets an ‘A’ from me.” I smiled as she handed it to me, and Amy started laughing.
“What’s so funny?” Jane wondered.
There was no reason not to tell her, really. “I wrote it for Win.”
She grinned, and I knew she was remembering one of our conversations from December. When she had told Win and me about her friend Roger’s business enterprise, selling term papers at UVM, the two of us had joked about the possibility of my doing the same thing. So I explained the situation.
“I see. Are you going to do their ten page papers, too?”
“Yes. It actually shouldn’t be that difficult. They each have an outline and a thesis already, and I’ve read their stuff, so I have a pretty good idea of their style.”
Amy was grinning like the Cheshire Cat, and Jane looked from me to Amy and back, a knowing look in her eyes.
“You’re thinking about selling papers, aren’t you?”
“Well…”
“He could make a killing!” Amy exclaimed, looking warily to make sure the other customers weren’t listening. “I told him; this is good enough for High School, easy, and I can find him plenty of customers.”
“Hmm,” Jane mused, “You’ll have to be careful. It’s pretty easy in college; there are so many students, and the professors don’t get to know most of them. They’re just names on a seating chart. But in High School, everybody knows everybody. And people talk.”
“Of course,” I said, “I’m not in High School. We’d have to keep my identity secret anyway, because they might not want to buy papers from a twelve-year-old.”
“That’s right,” Amy said, pausing to wave goodbye as one of the other customers left. “But I’ve got this all figured out. Everybody knows that I dated a boy from South Burlington last year, and I have a lot of friends there, so I’ll just tell them it’s a kid at South Burlington High who wants to sell papers. Safer for everybody if it’s a kid from another school.
“So, here’s what we’ll do.” I sat there in awe as Amy, transformed from cute waitress to young businesswoman, outlined the whole process. “I’ll find you customers, and we’ll work out the prices. I’ll be very careful, I promise, and I won’t even talk to anybody that I think would rat on us. You write the papers, and I’ll type them. I’m a pretty good typist. Some of the kids, the seniors, mostly, the snooty ones, like their papers typed, and some of my friends and I make a little money typing for them.”
“But those kids will write their own papers, won’t they?” I asked.
“Not necessarily. It’s all about laziness, and taking the easy way. Some of the smartest kids in my year do the most complaining about all the work they have to do.”
“Yeah, I get that. But most kids still write their papers by hand, right?”
“Yes, and here’s what I figure. If a kid hands in a paper that’s not only better than anything he’s done before, but is neatly typed, as well, the teacher’s going to smell a rat. So most of the kids will be better off to copy them in their own handwriting. But they won’t be able to read your writing, so I’d better type them all.”
“Will you have time to do that?”
She shrugged. “I’ll make time. We can make some money doing it, and I’d rather do that than this.” She spread her hands as if to take in the almost-empty bakery.
Jane laughed. “You two. I had no idea when I told you about Roger that I would be inspiring a couple of junior criminals. But it’s no skin off my nose; go for it.”
After we had a good laugh, I asked her about Roger. Roger Warren had been the boyfriend of Sally Delisle, the student teacher who was murdered by Mrs. Rock. Jane was a good friend of both, and had grown up with Roger in California. Roger was in jail in Burlington, charged with selling marijuana he had brought in from California.
“Well, he’s still here, but probably not for long. It’s getting pretty complicated. The Feds are investigating, because he brought the stuff across State lines, but they haven’t charged him yet. The State of California wants him, and Jim Berthelsen, his lawyer, is trying to work out a deal before the Feds charge him with anything. See, if Vermont agrees to let California extradite him, he can get a better deal, because he can testify against his suppliers. That’s what his Dad wants him to do, and that’s what Berthelsen is working on.”
“So he’d have to rat out his friends?” Amy asked.
Jane shook her head. “Not friends; there are no friends in that business. I know it sounds horrible, but it happens all the time. From what I know, most criminal cases are solved by someone informing on someone else.”
Amy and I looked at each other and we both smiled. “Not us,” she said.
The other criminal case we were deeply interested in, of course, was that of Mrs. Rock. She was still being held at the State Hospital in Waterbury, under observation for psychiatric evaluation. If she was determined to be insane, and not competent to stand trial, she could possibly be held there for the rest of her life. If deemed competent, she would stand trial, but she could still use an insanity defense.
There was a surprising amount of sympathy for her in the village. Hundreds of people in Essex Junction had been taught English by her, and many of them professed to have liked her, though I couldn’t imagine why. Also, the way the Police and the school administration had played up the relationship between Miss Delisle and Roger Warren, the West Coast drug dealer, and portrayed them both as dangerous outsiders, had worked to a great extent. People were scared of outside influences, and especially narcotics. No one was saying that excused Sally’s murder, but I think it definitely affected peoples’ opinions on the case.
We talked about that for a while. Jane, who had been Sally’s roommate at college, and her best friend since they both came to Vermont, was appalled.
“I can’t believe the things I’ve heard people say. You know, I’ve liked the Junction ever since I moved here, but if that woman gets off, I don’t think I want to live here anymore.”
“It’s not the village that will be trying her,” I pointed out.
“No. The State will be trying Mrs. Rock, but it feels like the village is trying Sally.”
She was right; that’s exactly what it felt like.
“How long do you think it will take?” I asked. “Before Mrs. Rock’s trial?”
“Well, I think they’ll make the determination as to competency soon; it’s been over a month. If she’s found competent, the judge will schedule the trial. It could be anywhere from a month to six. But my bosses were talking about it the other day. They think the prosecution is ready to go; it’s a pretty clear-cut case, especially with the confession. But if the defense attorney asks for a delay, it’s almost always granted. My guys think, though, that, given all the public sympathy for Rock, he might want to have it as soon as possible. If public opinion was strongly against her, her attorney would try to delay the trial, and maybe ask for a change of venue. But it isn’t.”
I knew what all that meant, having watched almost every episode of “Perry Mason” ever since it started, but Amy didn’t, so Jane explained “competency” and “change of venue” to her. Then Jane had to get going, so she finished her coffee, left a nice tip for Amy, and said goodbye.
I stayed a little while longer, talking about our plan. That was how our business enterprise got started, and it ended up keeping both of us in spending cash for a year and a half, until Amy graduated High School.