girls lie here?
Lila had replied to the post: Where can I read it? and IceVirgin33 responded: The Cora Rockwell House. PM me and I’ll tell you more.
So there it was; that’s how they were connected. Luther was telling the truth about that. I scroll back to the top of the page. The most recent posts make a case against Woody Hull. There are photos of a young Woody leading hikes with the Refuge girls, old newspaper articles about his efforts to find Noreen Bagley, and links to stories about Woody’s donations over the years to Haywood Academy and the Rock Harbor Historical Society.
Why has Woody Hull given so much money to the school and scholarship program over the years? one post asks. Since his retirement in 1999, Woody Hull has given increasingly more money to scholarships for underprivileged girls both to attend the Haywood school and go to college after graduation. Does he do this out of the goodness of his heart? Or is someone extorting hush money from him to keep his crimes hidden?
I click on a link and find myself looking at a picture of Woody Hull and Jean Shire at a fund-raising event for the school. The caption of the article is “Headmistress Shire accepts generous donation to scholarship program.” Below, LostGirl99 has posted How has Jean Shire gotten Woody Hull to donate so much money to underprivileged girls? What does she know?
I scroll down through the comments:
Wasn’t she Woody Hull’s assistant before she became headmistress?
How could she not have known what he was?
If she knew and didn’t report him she is just as guilty as him.
She’s his enabler . . . his cover-up . . . his pimp.
I feel a sudden chill that makes me look up at the window across from me. The curtains have been left undrawn—a chore Harmon usually attends to before going to bed—and I feel suddenly exposed. I get up to draw the drapes but pause at the window, my hand frozen on the cord. The scholarship. Jean got me that scholarship even though it had been six years since I graduated from Haywood and my academic record was pretty dismal.
I’ll pull some strings, she’d told me with a flip of her well-manicured hand. I’d been in awe of her then—of her elegance and competence and enlightened vision for the school. Places like this, she told me, can’t just be for the children of the rich. Haywood can do so much more; it can change lives.
I’d worked with her on the outreach program to inner-city schools. She’d extended the scholarship program to bring minority and underprivileged students to Haywood and then send them to college—all bankrolled by the Haywood family fortune. If I ever wondered how she did it, I attributed her success to her persuasiveness, her driving ambition, her charm.
Not to blackmail.
But what if there is something to the rumors? What if she had used something she knew about Woody to make him fork over the money for those scholarships? Would that really be so bad? Look at all the young people she had helped, students like Paola Fernandez, who had come out of a poor school in Yonkers and was going on to Mount Holyoke in the fall. Maybe I could help Jean put together a list of all the students who had benefitted from those scholarships to counterbalance the accusations—
But I see another list in my mind.
Priscilla Barnes
Barbara Hampton
Shirley Eames
Was there any counterbalance to those dead girls? And for all I knew there might be more. Girls that Woody mistreated over the years, predatory teachers he overlooked—
Like Luther. Had Jean known about me and Luther? Had that been one more thing to hold over Woody’s head as leverage to get him to give me that scholarship?
No, I can’t believe that, I tell myself as I pull the drapes shut. Jean was a mother; she’d never stand by and watch another young woman be victimized. I’m letting myself be carried away on a tide of speculation and gossip. I’ll talk to Jean myself tomorrow.
I turn away from the window to the warm lamplit room, safe now behind closed drapes, but the laptop reminds me what an illusion that is. No closed drapes can shut out the world flooding in through that window.
Chapter Twenty-Six
I’ve only managed to get a few hours of sleep when my phone alarm goes off. I set it for six so that I can get to campus to talk to Jean before anyone else gets in.