Chapter 9 — LARKFIELD

My husband's company is called Larkfield Care Group.

I knew that. Obviously I knew that. I had been to two of their Christmas parties.

Here is the extent of what I knew about it after nineteen years of marriage: Daniel ran residential homes for kids in the care system, four of them, under contract to the Commonwealth; the state paid a daily rate per child; it was, he said, a hard business with thin margins and a lot of paperwork and no thanks.

That is all. That is genuinely all I knew, and I had never asked, and there are two reasons and only one of them is flattering.

The flattering one is that I ran my own business and had no time.

The unflattering one is that I liked what it did for us socially and I did not want to know the parts of it that would complicate that. He was the man who ran the homes for the kids nobody wanted. It is a very good thing to be married to.

The four houses are Larkfield House, Delaney, Cranmoor, and Beckett Road.

Nick Vasquez had been at Larkfield House for fourteen months.

I did not find that out from Nick.

I found it out on the Thursday, eight days after Bellamy's, from a woman named Odalys Pinto, who telephoned me at the Delaware Avenue store at ten past nine in the morning and asked whether I was Valerie Ashcombe and whether I was a director of Larkfield Care Group.

I said I was not.

She said, "Mrs Ashcombe, you're listed as company secretary."

I sat down on a stool behind the dispensary counter.

I had signed something in 2016. I remembered it about four seconds after she said it. Daniel had put three pages in front of me at the kitchen table and said it was a formality for the incorporation, and I had signed all three without reading any of them, and I had been the company secretary of Larkfield Care Group for nine years.

Odalys Pinto is a licensing investigator for the state Office of Children, Youth and Families.

She said, "I'd like to ask you about a complaint log."