Jack said, “Enough.” He gently pushed Malcolm back into the house. Malcolm allowed it to happen, even showing some satisfaction that his behavior had brought about that reaction. Jack closed the door and stepped outside.
“I’m sorry,” he said again. “And Jeremy, you know I wanted to be at the trial, I wanted to be there for you, but Gloria, your mother—”
“You don’t have to do everything she says,” Jeremy interrupted.
“She said to me, and these were her exact words, ‘We don’t need a couple of gaylords turning the trial into a circus.’ That’s what she said.”
“You could have ignored her.”
“It wasn’t just her,” Jeremy’s father said.
Jeremy said, “Who?”
Jack Pilford hesitated. “Madeline called me. She said she’d been talking to Grant Finch, who more or less agreed with your mother. That they had a defense worked out, that bullshit about you not understanding the consequences of your actions. They didn’t want to complicate the message with stories about your father—about me—being gay. I guess Finch and Madeline thought gay was the same thing as sensitive, and if that’s what I was, how come none of my influence rubbed off on you while your mother and I were still together. It was all a crock of shit, far as I was concerned, but if they had something worked out, I didn’t want to mess it up. I didn’t want to do anything that might work against you. Not that the world didn’t find out about me anyway.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
Jack tipped his head back in the direction of the house. “That’s what’s got Malcolm riled up. I’m sure it’s just a fraction of what you and your mother are dealing with, but we’ve been targeted, too.”
“Targeted?” I said.
“Harassing phone calls, being mocked online. I’m the Big Baby’s faggot father who didn’t teach his kid right and wrong. How could I, half of them say, considering I’m a sick, twisted pervert.”
It was like a cancer, all this social-media shaming.
“Malcolm’s furious that I’ve had to endure this,” Jack said. He smiled wearily at his son. “But I’ll survive it. One day, when it all blows over, we can do something, get together. How does that sound?”
Jeremy looked at me. “I guess we should be going.”
I said, “Okay.”
“No, wait,” Jack said. “Maybe we could go somewhere, get a cup of coffee.”
“I hate coffee,” Jeremy said, already walking back to the car.
We lost about half an hour detouring to Jeremy’s father’s house, so making it to New York tonight was no longer an option. As we neared Kingston, I felt it was time to start looking for a place to bed down. There was a Quality Inn we could see from the highway, but there were plenty of other hotels to choose from if we were willing to drive a mile or two.
I pulled up in front of the Quality Inn. “Wait here,” I said to Jeremy. He’d been pretty sullen since we’d left his father’s house.
I took the car key, and parked close enough that I’d be able to see my Honda from the registration desk. I wasn’t convinced Jeremy wouldn’t make a run for it if the mood struck him. So far, he’d seemed pretty agreeable to the whole road trip idea, although he had to be thinking dropping in on his dad had been a bad call. Then again, he could be setting me up. Maybe he’d figured out a way to get a message to his girlfriend Charlene, and she was waiting around the next bend in her Miata.
I went to the desk and asked if they had a room available with two beds. Single, double, queen, didn’t matter. While the woman was scanning her computer for availability, a young couple came through the main doors.
I could hear their conversation as they walked through the lobby in the direction of the elevator.
“That was him!” the woman said.
“That was who?” the man asked.
“From the news. The Big Baby kid. That was him in the car.”
“Seriously?”
They slowed, the man craning his head around to look back at my car.
I said to the woman on the desk, “Never mind.”
“I’ve got something,” she said. “Two queen beds and—”
I shook my head. “No thanks.”
I got back into the car, put the key in the ignition and started the motor. I reached for the seat belt, buckled myself in.
“Full up?” Jeremy asked.
“Yup,” I said.
The Hampton Inn and the Courtyard were full, but the Best Western had a spot for us. At all three places, before heading in, I made a point of not parking under any bright lights where someone might be able to spot Jeremy. Once I had us a room, I hustled him through the lobby as quickly as possible.
“They’re going to think you’re some sort of pervert who likes little boys,” Jeremy said.
“You’re not a little boy. You’re eighteen.”
“Oh, so it’d be legal?”
“That’s not the point I was trying to make.”
The room was adequate. First thing Jeremy did after tossing his bag onto one of the two beds was grab the remote and troll through all the available channels. “Wanna order a movie?” he asked.
“No.”
“There’s dirty ones, too.”
“No.”
“You think it’s weird that my dad’s gay?”
“No.”
“That he’s living with Malcolm?”
“No.”
“I’ve never liked him.”
“Malcolm?” I said.
“Yeah. Not because he’s gay. Well, sort of. Because my dad fell in love with him, because they’re both gay, so that meant my mom and dad split up. But mostly I don’t like him because he’s a dick.”
“Okay,” I said.
“I mean, if your dad’s gonna leave, you’d like to think he had a really good reason, right? That the person he was leaving you for was going to make his life better.”
“You don’t think he and Malcolm are happy?’
Jeremy shrugged. “I don’t even care.” He propped up some pillows at his back so he could sit up on the bed. “What are we going to do?”
“Did you bring a book to read or anything?”
He shook his head.
“I brought three,” I told him. I unzipped my bag, intending to toss them out for his perusal, when my cell phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Mr. Weaver?”
“Hello, Gloria.”
“Is Jeremy there?”
“Of course.” I looked at him and mouthed, “It’s your mom.”
His head went down like a bag of sand. Blindly, he held out his hand and let me drop the phone into it.
“Hi, Mom . . . Yeah, we had some sandwiches . . . I don’t know.” He looked at me. “Are you going to get me a hot meal?”
“That’ll be breakfast,” I said.
“He says I’ll get a hot meal at breakfast.” He gave me a look that suggested his mother did not think that was a good enough answer. “It’s okay, I’m fine. No, we drove straight here. No stops along the way. We’re in Kingston now. I think we’re going to New York City.”
I shook my head.
“I guess I wasn’t supposed to tell you that . . . Yes, I know you’re my mom and you deserve to know where I am . . . Are you going to call Ms. Harding in the morning and tell her what’s going on?”
I gave him a puzzled look. He whispered to me, “My probation officer.”
Then, back to his mother, “Okay . . . Yes, I’ll check in. Okay . . . Yes, I love you too. Goodbye.”
He handed back the phone. I put it to my ear, wondering if Gloria was still on there, wanting to give me a piece of her mind, but she’d hung up.
“She really does treat me like I’m five sometimes,” he said.
“And she probably always will. Kids are kids to their parents no matter how old they are.”
“She had kind of a rough time when she was little,” he said.
I nodded. “I read about that
.”
I went back into my case and brought out three books. “I’m reading this one,” I told him, holding up an old copy of John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany that I had bought at Naman’s. “But you can have one of these if you want.”
Onto his bed I tossed two paperbacks. Early Autumn, by Robert B. Parker, and The Stand, by Stephen King. The latter was about five times the thickness of the former. Jeremy gave them a cursory look, then picked up the remote.
“I wish I had my phone,” he said.
He watched a couple of episodes of The Big Bang Theory while I tried to read, but I found it hard to concentrate with the background noise. Finally, I said it was time to turn in. I went into the bathroom to brush my teeth, then made way for Jeremy. He closed the door. I heard the shower running, but he was in there a long time after the water stopped.
I called out to him, “You okay in there?”
“Yeah,” he said quickly. “Tummy’s kind of off. I think it was one of those sandwiches. We should have gotten a pizza or Mickey D’s.”
The sandwiches hadn’t upset my stomach.
At long last, he came out and slid under the covers of his bed. Light from the parking lot filtered through the drapes, so we weren’t in total darkness once I’d turned off the bedside lamp.
“Do you snore?” Jeremy asked.
“I’ve been told I do.”
“Great. I heard Madeline say you aren’t married or anything.”
“Not any more.”
“You got divorced?”
“No.”
Jeremy went quiet. There was no sound from his side of the room for a long time, and I thought maybe he’d fallen asleep.
I was wrong.
“What will happen to me?” His voice came through the darkness like someone in the distance calling for help.
“What do you mean?”
“What kind of life am I going to have?” he asked. “I mean, the whole world knows who I am and hates me. What happens when I have to go back to school? What about when I want to go to college or something? If I even decide to do that. Or after that, when I want to get a job? Who’s going to hire me? They’ll google my name and find out who I am and what I did and they won’t want to have anything to do with me. I’m like the world’s biggest asshole.”
“No you aren’t,” I said. “I think that might be Galen Broadhurst.”
I heard an actual chuckle from him.
“Sorry,” I said. “That was unprofessional.” I shifted onto my side so that, even if Jeremy couldn’t see me, my voice would project more clearly to him. “Look, I don’t have all the answers. I sure can’t claim to have been the greatest father that ever lived.”
“You’ve got kids?”
“I had a son.”
“Oh.” A pause. Then, “But not any more?”
“No.”
“Oh.”
“The thing is,” I said, “you did what you did, and there’s nothing you can do to change that. You own it. You can’t hide from it. If you don’t tell people up front, and they find out later, they’ll think you’re trying to put something over on them, even if all you’re doing is what anyone else would do. Wanting people to respect their privacy.”
“Yeah, sure. So I put on the top of my résumé, I’m the kid who ran over that girl?”
“No. You did something stupid. All kids, by the time they’ve reached your age, have done something stupid. The others are just luckier than you. Maybe they drove drunk, too, but nothing bad happened. So that’s tough. But you have to accept responsibility for what you did. You can’t go blaming others. You have to say, ‘I did it, I own it,’ and every day moving forward you have to learn from that.”
Silence from the other bed.
“Does that help any?” I asked.
“Not really.”
I heard him turn over and pull up the covers.
We were done.
TWENTY-SEVEN
EVEN with his eyes still closed, Barry Duckworth became aware that someone was in the bedroom.
He opened them, blinked a couple of times to get used to the light coming through the window, and saw his son, Trevor, standing just inside the door.
“Trev?” he said.
That prompted Maureen, under the covers next to Duckworth, to turn over, remove the eye mask that blocked out all light, and say, “What’s going on, what’s happening? What time is it?”
She glanced at the clock radio on her bedside table. “It’s six forty. What are you doing up so early?”
Trevor was fully dressed. His hair was slightly tousled, and he didn’t appear to have shaved yet this morning.
“I haven’t been to bed,” he said, his voice shaky. “Dad, I need help.”
His father raised himself up, swung his bare feet down to the hardwood floor. “What happened, son?”
“It’s Carol,” he said. “Something’s happened to Carol.”
Duckworth dressed quickly. By the time he was down in the kitchen, Maureen had made coffee. Trevor was pacing.
“Okay, let’s start from the beginning,” Duckworth said, taking a mug from Maureen and standing by the counter to drink it.
“So we were going to meet up last night. After you and Mom went out for dinner.”
“Where?”
“At the mall.”
“Promise Falls Mall?”
“Yeah. We were going to grab a bite in the food court. They’ve got that movieplex there now and we were thinking we’d check out what was playing, maybe see something.”
“What time were you going to meet?”
“Eight. That’d give us time to eat and see what the shows were.”
“Okay.”
“I got there about quarter to eight. I went to the food court first, in case she was early, but I didn’t see her there, so I decided to look in a couple of stores first, and go by and see what the movies were. But I got right back to the food court for eight, and she still wasn’t there.”
Trevor was trembling as he spoke. Maureen put her hand on his arm as he continued talking.
“So I sat down and started thinking about what I would get to eat, but then it was five after eight, and then ten after eight, so that was when I texted her. You know, like, I’m here, where are you?”
Duckworth nodded. “Did she get back to you?”
Trevor shook his head. “Nothing. I kept looking to see if the text was delivered, and it didn’t come up that it was. So then I phoned, and it went straight to message.”
“She must have turned off her phone,” Maureen said. “Sometimes I turn off my phone, meaning to restart it, and then I forget, and your father’s trying to reach me and I’ve left my stupid phone off.”
“Yeah, but it’s more than her phone being off. She didn’t show.”
“What happened next?” Duckworth asked.
“I started looking around the mall, wondering if she’d gone shopping and lost track of time, always circling back to the food court to see if she was there. But she wasn’t. And the whole time, I’m holding my phone, you know? In case I get a text or anything. But nothing.”
“How long did you wait?”
“Except for the theaters, the mall closes up at nine. So when it got to be nine, I stood for a while where people were buying tickets, thinking maybe Carol got held up and she’d show up at the last minute, but there was no sign of her. So I left the mall, and looked around the parking lot for her car.”
“What does she drive?”
“She’s got a little silver Toyota. A Corolla. It’s about five years old.”
“Did you see it?”
Trevor shook his head. “So I decided to go by her place.”
“Where does she live?”
“She’s got an apartment in Waterside Towers?”
Duckworth knew it. A condo development about half a mile downstream from the falls, in the town’s core.
“I drove over there, and Carol has an assigned parking space, and her car wasn’t
there. But then I thought, maybe she had some kind of car trouble, and came home in a taxi and—”
“Did you try her landline?” Maureen asked.
“She doesn’t have one,” Trevor said. “Just her cell. So anyway, I hang around in the lobby and managed to get into the building when someone else was going in, and I go up to her door and bang on it, and there’s no answer.”
Duckworth asked, “When was the last time you tried her cell?”
“One minute before I came into your room,” Trevor said. “I waited in the parking lot of her place all night. When the sun came up, I came home.” He looked to be on the verge of tears. “I don’t know what to do.”
“Where’s she work again?” his father asked.
“She works at the town hall.”
“That’s right.”
Maureen’s eyebrows went up a notch. “For Randall Finley?”
Trevor shook his head. “No, she doesn’t work in the mayor’s office. She’s, like, in the town planning department. She’s got some kind of degree in how to organize cities, that kind of thing.”
“How’d you meet her?” Duckworth asked.
“Does that matter?” Trevor asked.
“Probably not,” he said. “Just curious.”
“I went in there to drop off a résumé, and she recognized me. We were in a couple high-school classes together. We met up later for a coffee—this was about a month ago—and we started seeing each other.”
“When were you planning to bring her around her so we could meet her?” Maureen asked.
Trevor looked at her. “Seriously? That’s what you’re concerned about right now?”
Maureen frowned. “Sorry.”
Duckworth said, “I’m sure she’s fine. I’ll bet there’s a simple explanation. A family emergency, maybe. Something that called her out of town.” He glanced at his watch. “The town hall opens up in another hour or so. We’ll drop by, see if she’s there.”
Trevor nodded very slowly, licked his lips as though there was something he still had to say.
“There’s more,” he said quietly.
“What’s that?” Duckworth asked.
“We weren’t . . . we weren’t entirely honest with you yesterday, when you talked to us at Starbucks.”
Duckworth waited.
“I mean, it wasn’t my place to say anything. If anyone was going to say anything, it was going to be Carol.”