Linwood Barclay - Parting Shot

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. Madeline 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.