Parting Shot

by Linwood Barclay

  “What’s that?”

  “Hiring Mr. Weaver here is all well and good, but maybe what we really need is one of those PR consultants.”

  “A what?” asked Bob.

  “You know, a public relations person. Someone who could get out our side of the story. How Jeremy—and by extension, all of us—is a victim too. I mean, the judge made his ruling and that should be the end of it, but here we are being tortured on social media. Being threatened, having our reputations dragged through the mud.”

  Bob actually appeared intrigued. “So what would a PR person actually do?”

  “She—and I would want it to be a woman, because they’re much better at this sort of thing—would get in touch with the media and make sure some sympathetic stories are written. She’d know the right people to approach, who’d be on our side. Get them to sit down with Jeremy, interview him, see what a decent boy he actually is, not that cartoon big baby they made him out to be through the trial.”

  “You know anyone like that?” Bob asked her.

  Gloria shook her head. “Madeline might.”

  I had my doubts Madeline Plimpton would be on board with this, but in the little time I had spent with these people, I supposed anything was possible.

  Bob left the room, shaking his head.

  Gloria put the question to me. “Do you know anyone like that, Mr. Weaver?”

  “No.”

  She frowned. I was becoming a disappointment to her. A fried phone and now this. Here I’d been trying to persuade Jeremy’s mother to stop all her interactions with the world, and now here she was trying to get her son on the Today show.

  “Maybe it’s not such a great idea after all,” she said.

  I decided to venture an opinion. “The more attention you bring to your situation, the longer the harassment will continue. Things’ll die down eventually.”

  Gloria studied me. “Maybe you’re right. When you’re in the middle of something, you want to make it end as fast as you can, but everything you do may just prolong it.”

  “Something like that,” I said.

  “I’m sure my aunt had you all checked out, Mr. Weaver. But I don’t know much about you. Are you married? Do you have children?”

  “I was,” I said. “And I had a son.”

  A glint in her eye told me she’d caught onto the past-tense phrasing, certainly where my son was concerned. “Had?” she said.

  “It’s a long story.”

  She smiled. “Have you ever heard anyone say it’s a short story?”

  I smiled back. “I guess not.”

  “I’m guessing it’s not a long, happy story.”

  “You’d be right about that,” I said.

  “You think you’re the only one with troubles,” Gloria said, “and then you realize you’re surrounded by everybody else’s heartbreak.”

  For the first time, I felt myself warming to her. “I think you may be onto—”

  “What the hell is this about hiring a PR consultant?” Madeline Plimpton said, striding into the room. “Bob just told me about some cockamamie idea of yours to bring someone on board to get your side of the story out? Seriously?”

  “Jesus,” Gloria whispered, taking another drink.

  “Because a PR person is going to cost you a fortune,” Ms. Plimpton said. “And I don’t know where you’re going to find the money for that.”

  “I was thinking out loud!” Gloria shot back. “Okay?”

  “Doesn’t sound like any thinking was going on at all,” her aunt said.

  I’d had enough.

  As I left the kitchen, I grabbed Ms. Plimpton’s laptop and took it with me to the living room. I sat down in a comfy armchair, opened up the computer and a browser, and entered “Jeremy Pilford trial” into the search field. I didn’t really need a lot of background info to perform the duties I was being contracted for, but I wanted a better handle on the cast of characters, and the incident that had precipitated this shit storm.

  A few hundred thousand results came back from my search, but I was quickly able to winnow those down to a handful of news accounts that summed things up pretty succinctly.

  What I learned was this:

  On the evening of June 15, a party was held at the Albany home of Galen Broadhurst. It was more an estate than a home. It sat on ten acres outside the city, about half of it untouched by development. Broadhurst, who had lived alone since the passing of his wife, had a seven-thousand-square-foot house to roam around in, and when he got bored with that, there was an outbuilding where he kept his stable of fancy cars. Three Porsches, one Lamborghini, an old MG, a 1969 American Motors AMX, and a new high-end Audi for daily driving.

  The Porsche that I’d just seen on the street here in Promise Falls was not in the garage that night, but sitting in the driveway, right out front of the house.

  The party was in celebration of a huge deal Bob Butler had done with Broadhurst, who’d acquired a tract of land in downtown Albany that would enable him to get a state contract to erect several new office buildings. The deal was worth nearly fifty million in future dollars. Butler didn’t own the land, but had represented the seller, and he had been offered the opportunity to be an investor, which had the potential for a huge windfall in the coming year.

  I skimmed over the details to get to what I really wanted to know about.

  Butler brought Gloria and Jeremy along for the fun. Broadhurst had invited plenty of work associates, and his neighbors, including the McFaddens—Reece and Megan and their daughter Sian (pronounced, as Jeremy’d told me, “Sharn”). Gloria and Jeremy lived close enough that Jeremy and Sian attended the same high school, and knew each other.

  A number of the other guests were mentioned in various articles, but the only name I recognized was Wilson. Alicia and Frank Wilson, who were, I suspected, the parents of Charlene.

  Alcohol had been flowing freely at the event, and Jeremy had helped himself to several bottles of beer without anyone taking notice. It was calculated that by the time he got behind the wheel of the Porsche, he’d had ten.

  Sian had made off with only one bottle, but it was wine, and the coroner’s office testified that she had in all likelihood consumed all of it.

  The two of them had been hanging out together out back of the property, lying on the grass, looking at the stars and continuing to drink. At some point, they got up and wandered around to the front of the house, where the Porsche caught Jeremy’s attention. Jeremy’d never really been a car guy, the story said, but even someone who didn’t give a shit about sports cars could appreciate that an old Porsche was a pretty neat vehicle.

  He found the car unlocked, got into the driver’s seat, and invited Sian to get in on the other side, which she did. He wanted her to take a picture of him behind the wheel with her phone.

  Broadhurst had left the keys in the ashtray—he didn’t smoke so he often tossed them there, at least when the car was right out front of the house, which was a long way in from the road. Jeremy found them, and was searching in frustration for the ignition slot. Instead of being on the steering column, as it is with most cars, including any that Jeremy had ever driven, it was to the left of the wheel, on the dash.

  Before he could insert the key, Broadhurst himself came out of the house and spotted what Jeremy was up to. He came around to the driver’s door, opened it, and hauled Jeremy out. Several guests who’d heard the commotion—including Bob and Gloria—had gathered around the open front door and witnessed the whole thing. Sian got out of the Porsche without being asked, and the two teenagers skulked away.

  Broadhurst then did something that everyone deemed very, very stupid.

  He tossed the keys back into the car’s ashtray.

  Even he was willing to concede that had he not been so careless, things would have turned out very differently.

  About an hour later, there was a rumbling sound outside the house. No one paid much attention to it. Broadhurst’s 911 was not the only sports car parked out there,
and a couple of people had decided to leave early.

  But a few minutes later, Broadhurst came storming into the living room and said, “Where the hell’s Jeremy?” He announced that his car was missing.

  The remaining guests came outside. The driveway from the Broadhurst home to the road was three fifths of a mile long, and crested a hill about a hundred yards from the house. Once a car passed that point, it was no longer visible.

  But there was a reddish glow, and the sound of an idling motor, beyond the hill.

  Bob and Broadhurst led the pack of people running to the scene, but everyone saw the same thing.

  Sian’s bloodied, twisted body lay in the grass to the left of the road. About fifty feet beyond that, on the other side of the driveway, was the Porsche, nosed into a tree, the front end crumpled. The engine continued to race.

  The door swung open.

  Jeremy, his forehead bloodied where it had hit the steering wheel, stumbled out of the car. Being an older-model Porsche, it was not equipped with an airbag. He looked around, dazed, blinked several times at all the people staring at him.

  “What the fuck?” he said.

  Reece and Megan McFadden were hovering in horror over their daughter’s body. Megan had taken the girl into her arms and was screaming. Reece looked at Jeremy and ran at him full force.

  “You son of a bitch!” he cried. He threw Jeremy up against the car and started hammering him with his fists. Bob, Broadhurst and another man had to haul him off before he killed the boy. (Gloria, perhaps not surprisingly, had wanted Reece McFadden charged with assault. And equally unsurprisingly, the prosecutor had opted not to.)

  Jeremy was charged with aggravated vehicular homicide. The amount of alcohol in his system constituted recklessness, and he was facing up to twenty-five years in prison.

  Grant Finch, lawyer to and friend of both Galen Broadhurst and Bob Butler—and, I believed, Madeline Plimpton—was brought in. Several defense strategies were hatched. The first was to spread the blame, highlight the mitigating circumstances. There was the easy access to alcohol at the party, coupled with Galen’s foolishness in leaving the keys in the car after Jeremy’s first attempt to make off with it. That struck me as astonishingly stupid.

  But then Grant, fearing those points would not be enough to get Jeremy off, hit upon something grander. Jeremy’s mother, everyone said, had a history of micromanaging his life and making excuses for him when he did wrong. When he misbehaved at school, it was the teacher’s fault. The system wasn’t challenging him, so he acted out because he was bored, his mother would argue. If he got in trouble for fighting, Gloria would claim the other kid started it, even if she hadn’t seen what happened. Shortly after Jeremy got his driver’s license at the age of sixteen, he had backed into a lamppost and done several thousand dollars’ worth of damage to his mother’s car. The light on the post, she argued, was not bright enough, and she attempted to sue the town. Jeremy’s behavior could always be traced by his mother to something other than her failure to make him accountable for his actions.

  Grant Finch, in attempting to explain Gloria’s parenting style and also garner her some sympathy, highlighted her own traumatic upbringing. She’d been raised by an emotionally abusive father after the death of her mother from cancer when Gloria was only five. By the age of eight, it was more like she was raising him. A real-estate agent with unpredictable hours, he expected Gloria to take care of the house, prepare meals and clean up after. He was relentlessly critical about everything she did, and punished her when she didn’t do well in school.

  I jumped to several other stories, looking to fill in the blanks. Gloria’s father died in a car accident when she was eleven. Mad-eline Plimpton, it turned out, was Gloria’s father’s sister. She applied for legal custody of Gloria, and raised her from that point on.

  Gloria’d always vowed that when she had children of her own, she’d never treat them the way her father treated her. All the love and attention her mother failed to share with her, she would lavish on her son. Enter the law of unintended consequence. Gloria so managed every aspect of Jeremy’s life—what sports he’d play in, what clubs he’d join, what course he’d take, what friends he’d play with, even what TV shows he should watch—that he began to lose the ability to make a decision of his own. And when he attempted to, he’d get it wrong.

  When he was seven years old, he nearly burned the house down while playing with matches. Gloria, so the story went, blamed the manufacturer for making matches that were too easy to light.

  Finch brought in other factors that could have had an impact on Jeremy. He played video games—something he managed to do without his mother’s approval—that might have made him unaware of the real consequences of reckless driving. His parents had recently split up and he was emotionally distraught. And, since they were throwing everything at the wall to see what might stick, the defense floated the idea that he had too much gluten in his diet.

  The bottom line, though, was that Jeremy could not easily tell right from wrong after years of not being held responsible for his misdeeds. When he got into that car drunk, he would have had no idea that it could lead to something catastrophic.

  Despite the humiliation it brought on her, Gloria Pilford went along with the defense strategy. But no one predicted how notorious it would become, or that Jeremy would end up being nicknamed the Big Baby.

  Jeremy and his mother were mocked and ridiculed in TV news shows, even by the late-night comedians, as if there was anything about this story that was funny. Not that tragedy had ever stood in the way of comedy before. Back in the nineties, Jay Leno had his Judge Ito dancers during the O. J. Simpson trial, conveniently ignoring the fact that two people had been brutally murdered.

  But the outrage didn’t kick in big-time until the judge waived a prison sentence for Jeremy and instead placed him on four years’ probation.

  The fury was immeasurable. That part I was already up to speed on.

  There were plenty of pictures accompanying the articles I’d found online. The accident itself; shots of Sian McFadden, who was a beautiful young girl and would have grown up to be a lovely woman; Jeremy dressed for his court appearances in a dark blue suit that always looked too big for him, and a matching tie.

  There was always that same look in his eyes. Lost, and frightened.

  When I looked at the pictures, I couldn’t help but be reminded of someone else. My son, Scott. Who, despite my wife Donna’s and my best intentions, went off the rails. And while the drugs he experimented with weren’t the reason for his death, he was headed down a road that could ultimately have killed him.

  I sometimes envied my late wife, who no longer had to deal with the grief and the self-recrimination.

  “A lot of it was just bullshit,” said a voice behind me.

  I wondered how long Gloria had been standing there, watching me read the various news stories.

  “Which parts?” I asked, shifting around on the cushion.

  I extended a hand to the closest chair, inviting her to sit. She took me up on it, setting her refilled wine glass on the table next to it.

  “A lot of it,” she said. “But there’s enough of it that’s true that people think the worst of me.”

  “News stories don’t usually convey what people are like,” I said. “On TV, they try to sum you up in two-minute segments. In a newspaper, your whole personality gets reduced to a couple of hundred words.”

  Gloria nodded. “It’s true I pampered him. That I basically smothered him with too much attention. I had a horrible upbringing.”

  “I read about your father.”

  “I know I probably seem like a crazy woman to you, but there are reasons I’m the way I am.”

  I said nothing.

  “But some of the stories Grant told the court—they were pretty much a fiction. The playing-with-matches tale, for one. That never happened.”

  “It didn’t?”

  She shook her head. “Anything that couldn’t
be challenged, that supposedly happened just between me and Jeremy, where they couldn’t bring in a witness to contradict my testimony . . . well, we came up with a few good tales.” She smiled sadly. “It was probably like a TV series story meeting. Pitch me your most outrageous idea! You should have heard some of the ones we never used. Like where Jeremy strangled a chicken just for fun and I cooked it to get rid of the evidence.”

  “That didn’t happen,” I said.

  “No,” she said. “That did not happen. Despite what you’ve been led to believe, Jeremy’s a wonderful boy. He really is.” She grimaced. “But if I’d had to tell that story about the chicken to save him, I’d have done it.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Don’t you think that proves I love him?” she asked.

  The question seemed odd to me. “I don’t think anyone ever questioned your love for Jeremy,” I said. “I guess what Grant Finch was doing was showing you loved him too much.”

  Her eyes began to well with tears. She raised the glass to her face and tipped it to her lips, partly, I think, to keep me from seeing her cry.

  “I’m the one who’s always questioning it,” she said, setting the glass back on the table and wiping her cheek with her sleeve. “The world says I’m a terrible mother, and maybe they’re right.”

  We sat there a moment, not talking. Finally, I said, “Do you trust my judgment where your son is concerned?”

  She looked at me with red eyes. “I suppose.”

  I closed the laptop and left it on the coffee table. I went up the stairs to the second floor. There were a dozen doors along the upstairs hallway, all of them open but for one. I walked past bedrooms and bathrooms until I reached the closed door at the far end.

  I rapped softly on it.

  No answer. Jesus, he’d taken off again.

  I rapped harder.

  “Yeah?” Jeremy said.

  “It’s Mr. Weaver.”

  “Yeah?”

  I opened the door. He was lying on the bed, just staring at the ceiling. He turned his head slightly to take me in.