Linwood Barclay - Parting Shot

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.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“Pack a bag,” I said.

Barry Duckworth was pulling into his driveway when his cell phone rang. He put the car in park, turned off the engine, and dug the phone out of his pocket. The display said the call was coming from Promise Falls City Hall.

He had a bad feeling.

“Hello?” he said.

“Hey, Barry, how’s it hangin’?”

“Randy,” he said.

Randall Finley chortled. “Barry, aren’t you supposed to call me Your Worship or Your Honor or Mr. Mayor or some shit like that?”

Duckworth thought “Some Shit Like That” did have a nice ring to it, but kept the thought to himself. “What can I do for you, Randy?”

“There’s talk going around that you aren’t coming to the memorial thing. Tell me that’s not true.”

“I’m pretty busy,” Duckworth said.

“You’re the fucking star of the show. You’re the one that caught the guy. You have to be there.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Look, Barry, I’m being serious here. The town needs this. They need to honor those who died a year ago. They need to pay their respects. And everyone loves a hero. You’re the hero. If you don’t show up, it’s like a massage without the happy ending. You gotta be there. We need something like this to counter all the shit that’s been going on. You know what I saw yesterday? Go on, ask me.”

“What did you see yesterday, Randy?” Duckworth asked.

“I was out by the water plant, by the tower.”

It had been the deliberately contaminated water in the tower that had killed scores of Promise Falls residents.

“And there’s this dumb fuck who’s managed to get over the gate and gone up the stairs, and he’s standing right on the top of the water tower and he’s got on a cape or something like that and the words ‘Captain Avenger’ on his shirt. The fire department had to send a crew over to get the dumb bastard down before he killed himself. You know what, Barry? There are a lot of sick fucks out there. People who think we got what we deserved. That what happened here was justice. Can you believe that kind of thinking?”