Mike Danton was a mistake.
And on the day he was born, Oct. 21, 1980, his father, Steve Jefferson, got kicked out of the hospital for showing up late after a night of drinking.
In many ways, Mike’s story begins with his “real,” or biological, father, Steve Jefferson. Since his son’s arrest, trial and conviction, Steve Jefferson has been on television and in the news pages blaming Dave Frost for all of his son’s troubles.
It’s not that simple. Frost may have come to dominate Danton’s life when he was young, but sons don’t disavow fathers — or drop their father’s name as Danton did — without some compelling reason. In the case of Mike Jefferson-turned-Mike Danton, that reason might well go back to the day he was born.
Over the course of young Mike’s life, Jefferson would give his son plenty of reasons to abandon him and his mother and younger brother. But the story begins on that October day in 1980 when Jefferson stood peering through the window of the door to the delivery room at Peel Memorial hospital in Brampton, Ont. where his wife, Susan Jefferson, was having a difficult delivery. Jefferson’s parents and in-laws were down the hall in a waiting room.
Today, nearly three decades later, Susan recalls her first pregnancy as a difficult one. It was also a time of both happiness and fear. She looked forward to being a mother. But she was also afraid because, at 23, she and Steve were just kids themselves. Yet she still remembers her first thought at seeing her first son: “I love him.” The father’s reaction? “A bloody mess” is how Steve Jefferson describes his first reaction to the sight of his new-born son.
After he presented his first-born to his parents, Ray and Shirley Jefferson, and in-laws Charlie and Luba Gebe, Jefferson left for a house party, where he enjoyed the congratulations and drinks offered by his buddies. He returned to the hospital at 2 a.m. and woke up his wife. The duty nurse wasn’t pleased and had him thrown out of the hospital.
It wasn’t Jefferson’s first confrontation with authority. In 1975, Jefferson, the son of a Halifax boxer, was convicted on a drug offence. But for the past five years, up until Mike was born, he’d stayed out of trouble.
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As a toddler, Mike Jefferson didn’t learn to walk. He learned to run. He ran everywhere. And into everything, including cupboards.
“He was a little hellion,” recalls Susan Jefferson. “It was hard to calm him down sometimes.”
Mike was three years old when he laced up his first pair of skates on the backyard rink. He started skating on his own in two days, using a hockey stick for balance. “It was like he never took them off,” says his father. Indeed, by the time he was five, Mike was telling everyone he was going to play in the National Hockey League and he was going to be a star. At school he wrote his first essay about playing hockey.
It was a dream his father fully supported. The family’s most memorable rink was the one behind a big house on Professor’s Lake in Brampton. Mike and his father were on the ice as often as possible.
The image of father and son on a backyard rink is, of course, iconic and touching, although in the case of Steve Jefferson and his son, you have to ignore everything else that was happening.
Jefferson’s five-year spell of abiding by the law came to an end the year Mike was born. In 1981, there was a narcotics conviction. In 1983, Jefferson was convicted of drunk driving. It got much worse the next year. In 1984, the young father was hit with charges of drug trafficking, conspiracy to commit an indictable offence, along with assault, a mischief charge, and breach of probation.
The 1984 drug trafficking charge landed Jefferson in jail for six weeks. He had been convicted for his links to a small hash oil-making operation at a Brampton-area cottage. It wasn’t Jefferson’s dope, he was the one caught running into the woods to stash two suitcases of hash when police raided the cottage.
Jefferson lost more than 40 pounds in jail. The day he was released, his four-year-old son didn’t initially recognize him. Jefferson stood outside the day care, waiting to hug his boy. But when Mike appeared, he had to look at his father twice. “He said ‘That’s not daddy, my daddy’s fat,’” Jefferson recalls.
There would be other convictions down the road. Theft, drunk driving and another assault — Jefferson beat the driver of a rival coffee truck in front of an office crowd. By the time his son turned 12, Jefferson had 11 convictions on his record.
Not a model father by any means, but his criminal inclinations, particularly assault, have their own history, at least as far back as Jefferson’s school years.
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At the age of 18, Steve Jefferson was looking for an excuse to quit Brampton Centennial High. By noon on May 28, 1975 he’d found his excuse. Or rather it found him. That was the day, a Wednesday as it happened, that a fellow student, Michael Slobodian, brought two rifles to school.
The hallway was crowded with students, including Jefferson and his girlfriend, Susan Gebe, also 18.
The couple was standing in front of the locker they shared near the art classroom. At first they didn’t see Slobodian because he was still around the corner in another hallway. But then they heard shouting and screams.
They turned to see a crowd of panicky students stampeding toward them. Jefferson grabbed the arm of one running boy. “What’s going on?”
“He’s got a gun,” the boy shouted, shaking himself free. Jefferson looked down the hall to see Slobodian kneeling to take aim with one of the rifles. He grabbed Sue and rushed her down the hall and out of the building. As they ran with the crowd he heard the crack of a rifle and looked back to see a student collapse on the hallway floor. “When I looked back, I saw the guy behind me fall,” Jefferson later told reporters.
He wasn’t the only one. In a few minutes of gunfire, Slobodian killed two people, his English teacher Margaret Wright and fellow student John Slinger. He also wounded 13 students. Then he used one of the rifles to kill himself.
As for Jefferson, he dropped out of school after the killings. He wasn’t interested in school anyway. He wanted to go into business for himself. He was going to make a living, like his father, behind the wheel of a lunch truck, driving to muddy job sites selling cigarettes and coffee to construction workers.
He didn’t leave school empty handed, though. On the day of the shootings Jefferson won a lifetime of trust from Susan Gebe. She would marry the man who rescued her.
And she would stay married to him, raising two sons, Mike and Tommy, making dinner when he wanted,
doing his laundry, wiping down the kitchen counter after one of his nights, or afternoons, of rum-and-coke. She jokes that it was hard sometimes to get a good view of a young Mike learning to skate on the backyard rink because her ankle was usually chained to the kitchen sink.
More than 30 years after that school shooting, Susan Jefferson still credits her quick-tempered husband with saving her life. She has stayed with him and worked with him — she, too, drives a lunch truck — all these years because, in part, of what he did on that one day in 1975.
“I knew I could trust him and he was loyal. That was important to me,” she says.
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Jefferson met his future wife a year before the high school shootings, on a ski hill in Mansfield, Ont.
They shared a Boston cream doughnut at the ski chalet. It was after that doughnut, she says, that he became her “protector.”
Jefferson, it seems, took the concept of honour to extremes. If someone trashed-talked his girlfriend he would use his fists to defend her reputation.
There was one guy in particular who wouldn’t stop bragging about his relationship with Susan Gebe, who was recognized as a local beauty.
Jefferson decided to shut him up good. He used his favourite instruments, his fists, to pummel the guy in the bar at what was once the Hotel Brampton. The manager let Jefferson slip out the back door before the police arrived.
Three years after they started going steady, Jefferson asked Susan to marry him. It was in 1977. St. Paul’s United Church in Brampton wouldn’t let them walk down the aisle to Procol Harum’s flower-child anthem Whiter Shade of Pale. They settled on having the song played for the first dance at the wedding reception at St. Mary’s hall.
After the reception, they drove Jefferson’s 1975 TransAm back to the Ramada Inn. It was 4 a.m. Jefferson was drunk and fell asleep in the hotel room.
Still, the newlyweds figured they had it pretty good. Jefferson got the best girl at school and got to go fishing on weekends.
But even though he’d married Susan Gebe, Jefferson still thought he had to fight for her honour. In the summer of 1979, when Susan was working as a clerk, Playboy magazines started turning up on her desk. She complained to her boss, but the co-worker who had been depositing the magazines kept his job. She quit. Jefferson was furious.
He wanted an apology from his wife’s tormentor. He drove to the office only to find that he had missed the man. He raced to the man’s home.
Jefferson knocked on the door, but nobody answered. He heard people inside, so he opened the door and challenged them to come out. They didn’t, so he shouted for them to look out the window as he took a baseball bat from his TransAm and smashed the headlights of the man’s car. For good measure, he also smashed the windshield. All the while he kept taunting those inside the house to come out. They didn’t. They called the police. Jefferson was charged, convicted and ordered by the court to pay the repair bill on the car he smashed.
The way Jefferson tells it, he handed the cheque over outside the courtroom, with a word of warning: Don’t even think about cashing it.
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To Jefferson, being a father was as much about hockey as it was anything else. Outside of fishing trips and video games — they played Nintendo’s Zelda for hours at a time, sometimes until four in the morning — watching his son play hockey was what being a parent was all about.
There’s no question that Jefferson was a stick-on-the-ice, up-in-the-wee-hours hockey dad. Early-morning practice, late-night skates, season-long hockey games, tournaments —he attended them all.
Of course, he went to the rink bar between periods and after games. But what he liked best was watching his son play. “You think, that’s my stallion out there,” he says, remembering those years. Over those years, Mike would spend a lot of time waiting for his and the other hockey dads to drain that last shot.
Mike was an average player, so when he turned nine, his father signed him up for a Toronto hockey league. Jefferson figured there would be more ice time and better coaching for his son as a member of the Toronto Red Wings, named after the team captained by Mike’s childhood hockey hero, NHL superstar Steve Yzerman.
Young Mike quickly made a reputation for himself as an off-the-walls grinder. His father gained a reputation, too. The coffee-truck driver liked to cheer the team on from behind the net. Some of the stories about him took on a life of their own, like the time other parents were gossiping about how Jefferson let Mike, then 12, drive home from an out-of-town tournament.
“I let him drive around in the evening after a game, just around the hotel (in St. Catharines). I was sitting right beside him,” recalls Jefferson. “By the next practice, some woman was saying ‘I can’t believe you let your son drive home.’”
If some of the hockey parents were questioning Jefferson’s conduct, they were certainly impressed by his son. There were no bad players on the Toronto Red Wings, and Mike made friends fast. One friend was a young Joe Goodenow, son of Bob Goodenow, then an influential NHL agent who would go on to become executive director of the NHL Players’ Association. Joe Goodenow would go on to play for Michigan State in the NCAA, the Hershey Bears in the American Hockey League and the Pensacola Ice Pilots in the East Coast League.
The hockey circuit was small, and over the years, Jefferson and his son bumped into the same boys and the same parents.
One was Brian Keefe, a Prince Edward Islander originally from Skinner’s Pond, who also lived in Brampton. They met a few seasons before Mike dressed for the Red Wings. In Keefe, Jefferson found a friend. The two men often parked themselves at the Jeffersons’ kitchen table, where they ate snacks from the lunch trucks parked outside, watched hockey and drank beer.
Jefferson cheered for the Leafs. Keefe was a Habs fan. The two men’s sons also became friends. In Keefe’s son Sheldon, Mike found someone he could trust, someone to whom he could turn for help, at least off the ice. They lived a short walk away from each other and would grow up playing on the same line.
On the ice, Mike handled himself just fine. He learned how to get the puck in the net, break through heavy traffic and maul his opponents. And he learned how to do all this while being his best friend’s on-ice bodyguard.
Sitting around the kitchen table, their fathers reached the conclusion that their boys need to get serious about the game of hockey. They needed someone who could bring them along, maybe even beat the odds and take their sons all the way to the NHL.
Keefe figured he knew the right man. It was Keefe who introduced Jefferson to the man who would eventual claim his son’s loyalty and regard. Keefe made the introductions outside a Toronto rink in 1992.
When Jefferson shook hands for the first time with David James Frost, he already knew a bit about him. He knew that the Frost, then 25, was a coach who paid the bills by running a hockey school in Brampton.
Jefferson also knew that Frost ran his players like dogs and demanded they play every game like a down-to-the-wire championship contest.
They certainly didn’t know that Frost would help their sons make it all the way to the NHL. Nor did they know that there would be a heavy price to be paid along the way, that their sons would be estranged from their families, substituting their fathers’ influence for loyalty to that of a man who, besides being their coach, would become a surrogate father.
Nor, of course, did Mike and Sheldon have any inkling of what the future would bring. They were just kids, playing for the Young Nationals, or to anyone in the hockey world — the Young Nats.
At first, it seemed a good matchup. Frost called the shots, challenging the boys to overcome their fears of both being hit and hitting back. He taught them to drop their gloves against anyone who got in the way of putting a puck in the net.
They watched countless tapes with Frost and Bob Goodenow. Just as Mike Jefferson and Joe Goodenow became friends, so did Frost and Bob Goodenow, who years later would ultimately certify his friend as an NHL agent.
It was like a science. They would break down the game so precisely that they could show the players that one bad pass on a power play could cost them 25 seconds of scoring opportunity.
By all accounts, it was a winning formula.
In later years, Frost would remember the Young Nats of the 1993 season as the best team he ever coached. Both Keefe and Jefferson thought so, too, publicly supporting Frost’s hard-driving coaching style.
When the Young Nats didn’t play as well as Frost thought they should, or even when they didn’t beat the other team with a sufficient point spread, Frost laced into them. There were post-game lectures, with Frost yelling at them for up to 90 minutes.
One time when the team played poorly, Frost ordered them outside in their game-day dress shoes and ordered to run laps around the arena in knee-deep snow. Some parents, including Jefferson, looked on, laughing and smoking cigarettes, as their young sons churned through the snow in their shoes.
In hindsight, Jefferson admits that, even then, Frost’s presence was driving a wedge into his family. “I had blinders on,” he says. “I was only thinking about Michael and hockey and making it to the NHL.”
Indeed, no matter their concerns about Frost or his methods, Jefferson and Keefe thought their sons were finally matched with a coach who could steer them toward a future in professional hockey.
As for young Mike, it seems that he wanted nothing more than to please Frost. He became increasingly needy and dependent on his new, gravelly-voiced coach. He obeyed him, even if it meant abandoning his own world for the one Frost showed him.
There was one thing in particular that Frost impressed upon his boys: Don’t talk to your parents about the game. They don’t know a thing about hockey.
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Mike was Frost’s most loyal player.
And, it seems, Jefferson was Frost’s most admiring fan. The father thought Frost was the best thing for his son.
Jefferson remembers the first game Mike played under Frost’s coaching.
“I couldn’t believe the way Mike was playing. It was like somebody stuck a prong up his ass. He was flying.”
So, Jefferson willingly supported the relationship between Frost and his son as Mike moved into junior-level hockey. Jefferson, in fact, was elated that his son was playing hockey for a real coach. He felt like he, too, was part of the team.
You certainly couldn’t find a more diligent hockey dad than Jefferson. He came to almost every game. And when he wasn’t in the bar with the other hockey dads, you’d find him in the parking lot, letting the players raid his lunch truck.
But Jefferson’s life, and that of his family, wasn’t all hockey glory.
He was also losing his son, even if he didn’t realize it. Early in the first season with the Young Nats, Mike Jefferson was picked up for shoplifting at a Sears store in Brampton. He was caught on a security videotape stuffing clothes and underwear into his jacket.
But it wasn’t his father who came to help him. It was Frost. Frost agreed to pick Jefferson up and they would meet Mike in the department store’s security office. In the car, Frost says, he told Jefferson to stay calm. It’s not an account with which Jefferson disagrees, even after all these years.
Except now he sees a more sinister motive behind Frost’s apparent concern. Jefferson will tell you he can’t count how many times Frost told him not to “lose it” on his son, as if, Jefferson says, the coach was trying to create the idea that Mike suffered an abusive home life so that he, the coach, could offer refuge.
At the department store, Frost and Jefferson watched the security tape of young Mike trying to steal clothing. But it was Frost who walked into the security room to find Mike crying. He told his coach he had to steal because he had no clothes at home.
Mike thought that he would really get it when he got home.
Frost says he reassured Mike that that wouldn’t happen, but when they all got into his car Jefferson couldn’t restrain his anger. He smacked Mike on the back of his head and started cursing and berating his 13-year-old son. “What the … is wrong with you? Wait till you get home.”
Frost pulled the car over and told Jefferson to stop. Mike was crying in the back seat, but he watched as his hockey coach confronted his father.
They pulled into the Jeffersons’ driveway, and as soon as the front door closed behind them, Jefferson started in on his son again, grabbing and shaking him.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?
I give you everything, you son of a bitch. A pair of underwear? Are you thinking? Obviously not.”
Jefferson then told the 13-year-old to leave. He did, at least temporarily, heading for Frost’s house. It wouldn’t be the last time he sought refuge there.
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When Mike turned 17, he left his family for good. Jefferson says Frost kidnapped his son, while Frost says Jefferson effectively put his son up for adoption.
Jefferson acknowledges that when things got heated at home — and that was quite often, he admits — his son always ended up at Frost’s house. But young Mike Jefferson wasn’t just spending the odd afternoon at the home Frost shared with his wife Bridget while Mike’s father sobered up and cooled off. He spent the nights there, too. Before long, Bridget was helping him with his homework.
It was a situation that Mike seemed to prefer, although not one his mother liked. She found it hard to understand.
“Mike would get into a fist fight with you if you tried to intervene or ask a question,” his mother now recalls.
“I watched Sheldon and Mike grow up since they were little. They never did that kind of stuff. They were normal kids. ‘How are you, Mrs. Jefferson?’ Respectful. It all changed when Dave (Frost) came along,” she said.
She’d go to give her son a hug and he wouldn’t let her touch him. She had to settle for a handshake.
“You couldn’t touch him without him losing his mind. I couldn’t even touch him anymore.”
By his last season with the Young Nationals, Mike, then 15, started calling his mother names. She recalls them now: Lesbian. Bitch. Sometimes it got to the point where they couldn’t be in the same room without yelling.
It seemed every night Jefferson got home from his coffee truck run, mother and son would be flying off the walls at each other. “Mike was telling his mother to shut the fuck up. Sue would be screaming about the way Mike was treating (her),” Jefferson says.
There may have been a reason. Susan Jefferson had finally started asking questions: What’s going on at the Frost home? How had her son lost his smile? Why had all his pranks stopped? Why was he so withdrawn, so robotic?
Sue Jefferson might have thought her son had fallen under the spell of this coach, but her husband was spellbound by his son’s potential hockey future. He thought Mike was playing better than ever before and, all things considered, saw Frost’s influence as the best thing that had ever happened to his son.
Jefferson told his wife she was worrying for nothing. For now, their boy was playing top hockey on a winning team. Jefferson figured his son could come to his senses as he got older.
It didn’t happen that way. One night after a Young Nats game, Mike came bounding in the front door, his equipment dropping to the floor. It looked as if he’d been pushed into the house.
Brian Keefe and Jefferson were sitting at the kitchen table drinking beer when the door swung open.
“I looked at Brian and said ‘That bastard, somebody’s gotta kick the shit out of him,’” Jefferson recalls himself saying.
His son didn’t take it well. In tears, he yelled at his father to stop bad-mouthing his coach. He grabbed his father with one arm and cocked the other as if to punch him. “(He said), ‘You don’t ever talk bad about Dave Frost again. He’s done more for me than you ever have.’”
“At this time, I could see it had gone too far,” Jefferson says.
But even after this, Jefferson still didn’t question the relationship between Frost and his son, or, it seems, what was happening to his own relationship with his son.
Sure he asked customers along his coffee-and-doughnut run what they thought about his 15-year-old boy’s bond with the coach. “‘Don’t worry, eventually your kid’s going to wake up.’ I heard this umpteen times. I honestly thought one day he was gonna wake up,” Jefferson says.
But Mike didn’t wake up, at least in the way his father had hoped. When he turned 16, he told his parents he could leave for good whenever he wanted. “There was always this threat of ‘I can go,’ or ‘I’ll never talk to you again.’ There was always the threat of him being taken away,” his mother says.
Their son was now spending more time at his coach’s house than his own. He’d still come home, but only to shower and get clothes, maybe grab a meal or tap his father for money, before running back to “Frosty.”
Even so, the Jeffersons kept showing up at games. There were plenty of reasons to cheer their son. It was Frost’s last season with the Young Nats and they went all the way to the top, winning the Ontario championship.
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Surely the big day wasn’t supposed be like this. The day his son fulfilled his father’s dreams — in June, 2000 — and made it to the NHL, Jefferson was driving down a dirt road, on his way home from another weekend at the cottage. He turned on his cellphone when he hit the top of a hill. He got a signal and started checking his messages.
The first one was from Brian Keefe, his close friend and father of his son’s best friend, Sheldon. Congratulations, Bone — they called one another Bone, an overused nickname that applied to almost everyone the Jeffersons knew — your son’s just been drafted in the fifth round by the New Jersey Devils. Jefferson teared up, partly for joy, partly in sorrow. His son never called.
But then Mike never called when his grandfather died, either. The family wanted him to be a pallbearer at the funeral, but his younger brother, Tommy, had to do the job. The NHLer took a pass on the funeral of Ray Jefferson, a one-time Halifax boxer and one of Mike’s biggest fans.
His father, too, had become just another fan. Steve Jefferson remembers going to watch a game when his son was with New Jersey’s farm team, the Albany River Rats.
He wanted to tell him he was impressed by his play, but he left the rink like all the other fans. His son didn’t know he was there — or if he did, he didn’t let on.
For his part, Mike had replaced his father with Frost, his coach, mentor, and, later, his agent. He even wrote letters to Frost, closing with the words, “Your son, Mike.”
The last time Jefferson spoke to his son was on the phone. It was five days after Sept. 11, 2001, the day of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. Jefferson didn’t know his son’s number, so he punched in Frost’s, hoping he would pass along his son’s number. He got lucky, sort of. Frost and his player had mixed up their phones. So when Jefferson called, his son answered. It was a brief conversation.
Mike, now a forward with the New Jersey Devils, whispered that he was on the team bus, going to a pre-season game against the New York Rangers, and that he had to get off the phone. “I said, ‘Wait a minute,’ and he said, ‘I gotta go, I’m on the bus,’” Jefferson recalls, laughing when he tells he story. “He’s all embarrassed. His dad’s phoning him, and he’s on his way to play an NHL game.”
The Devils lost that game 6-1 to the Rangers. The next day, the Jeffersons saw a picture of their son in the newspapers. He was standing with his opponents, including Eric Lindros, in a moment of silence for the those who died in the Sept. 11 attacks. Lindros, wearing a No. 88 Rangers jersey for the first time, told reporters the game was like an escape for the fans, “some sunshine in an otherwise gloomy situation.”
Susan Jefferson cut the black-and-white photo out of the paper and put it in one of the scrapbooks she keeps on her son’s career. It’s the only recent picture she has of her son. The rest are from his younger days. Most of the good shots are up on a wall in the TV room, a shrine that includes old team ball caps, plaques and tournament banners.
Besides the pictures of Mike, one of the few other framed images — the biggest one in the room — is a poster of John Wayne. The Jeffersons’ wedding picture is there too, inside the case of an old wall clock that stopped ticking a long time ago
It reminds the Jeffersons of a time when their family seemed fine, before all the problems, before Frost, before people started picking sides and laying blame.
In the end, that’s what it came down to, sadly enough. That phone call might have been the last conversation between Jefferson and his son, but it got increasingly hard for Jefferson to present himself as the proud father of an NHLer after this son publicly disowned his family by changing his surname.
In the summer of 2002, Mike dropped “Jefferson” and adopted “Danton,” the name of a boy he had met at hockey school.
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It seemed like Jefferson was having a heart attack. When he was in high school, he stood five foot ten and weighed a muscular 190 pounds.
But now he was almost 50, a 245-pound heavy smoker and drinker who snacked on junk food and didn’t exercise.
On April, 16, 2004, he was watching television as his team, the Leafs, pushed the Senators to the brink of elimination in Game 5 of the Eastern Conference. It was a home game for the Leafs, but Jefferson was forced to watch it on CBC. The Toronto goaltender, Ed Belfour, got his third shutout as the Leafs beat the Senators 2-0 to take a 3-2 lead in the series.
Normally, Jefferson would have enjoyed his team’s win, but then a picture of his son, Mike Danton, flashed on the top right corner of the big screen television. Something about Danton being arrested, something about a murder charge. Jefferson got up and made his way upstairs.
He couldn’t believe it, and he couldn’t get the words out. He was moaning, trying to tell his wife their son had been arrested.
“I could hear this noise coming up the stairs. He was trying to say ‘Sue.’ He was not sounding normal,” Susan Jefferson recalls.
She came downstairs, waiting to see the headlines and then went back to her bedroom and cried herself to sleep. She remembers thinking that her son had finally tried to get away from Frost.
Jefferson stayed downstairs, flipping channels, watching the story, which was still sketchy, as it emerged.
Of course, the phone started ringing, mostly family and friends. Then the reporters started calling.
Jefferson once said that he wished his son had succeeded, and so did his wife. Foiled or not, Mike Danton had provided his father with the opportunity he needed. He was finally given a stage on which he could brand Frost a monster.
The Jeffersons took the next week off work to guide reporters through their version of events. They repeatedly sat at their dining room table to explain how Frost had somehow gained control over their son, how he had somehow programmed their son into a new life that didn’t involve his parents.
They had no smoking gun to pin on Frost, but the series of scenes they wove together knitted a dark portrait of their son’s mentor.
PART TWO LATER
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