Chapter 11 — SIXTY-ONE UNFOUNDED

The filing cabinet in Daniel's office is a four-drawer Steelcase and it has a lock and the key lives in a bowl on his desk with paperclips in it, which tells you what he thought the risk was.

I did not take anything.

I want to be careful here. On Odalys's instruction I photographed and I did not remove, and I called her from that room while I was doing it, and there is a recording of that call which was later played at the hearing.

The second drawer down is complaints.

They are filed by house and then by year. Larkfield House, 2019 through 2025.

I read for four hours.

I am not going to reproduce them. Some of them are about food and some of them are about laundry and some of them are about a supervisor who took phones off children as a punishment, which is against regulation.

And some of them are not about food.

Twenty-two of the sixty-one unfounded complaints across all four houses were about the same eleven staff members.

Nine of those eleven had no completed background check on file.

Not a failed one. An absent one. A form started, a fee not paid, a fingerprint appointment never made, and a child in a bed anyway because an empty bed is a day's rate not billed.

The daily rate for a therapeutic residential placement in the Commonwealth in 2025 is between two hundred and eighty and four hundred and ten dollars per child per day.

Larkfield had fifty-eight beds across four houses.

I did that arithmetic standing up in my husband's office and then I sat down on the floor and did it again on my phone because I did not believe it the first time.

Fifty-eight beds at full occupancy at the middle rate is about seven million three hundred thousand dollars a year.

An empty bed earns nothing.

A closed house earns nothing.

And a substantiated complaint triggers a follow-up inspection, and a pattern of follow-up inspections triggers a licensing review, and a licensing review can close a house.

That is the whole machine. There is nothing clever in it.

My husband was not stealing money. He never stole a dollar in his life.

He was keeping beds full by making complaints disappear, and he was doing it through a friend with a licence and a laptop who had been in the buildings eleven times in six years.

Sixty-one times, a child or a member of staff said *something is happening here*, and a man in Harrisburg clicked a box that meant *no it isn't*, and the money kept arriving.