“What does that mean?” I asked.
Her eyes looked down, like a child who’d been caught with her hand in the cookie jar. “I might have posted something.”
“Like?” I said.
“I said how good it felt to get out of Albany, to find some peace and quiet.”
I nodded toward her aunt, who was closest to the laptop. I wiggled my fingers, air-typing, and she got the message, reaching for the computer and reopening it. “Could you find the page?” I asked her.
“I’ll do it,” Gloria said, crossing the kitchen and taking the laptop from her aunt. She made a few keystrokes. “There, I didn’t really say anything.”
I took the laptop from her and studied her most recent posts.
“Tell me again when you got here?”
Ms. Plimpton said, “Four nights they’ve been here.” She made no attempt to disguise the weariness in her voice.
I scrolled down to see what Gloria had been telling the world earlier in the week. Last Friday, she’d posted: The world is full of so many haters. People need to stop hating and start understanding.
That morsel of wisdom had produced more than three hundred likes, and about sixty comments. Some supportive, others not so much. As I scanned through them, I guessed that about eighty per cent of them were negative. One typical reply: And some mothers need to start teaching their kids not to run people down.
The next day, Gloria had written: It’ll be good to get out of town. It’ll be good to go where they always have to let you in.
I was no English major, but I recognized a version of the Robert Frost line about going home.
“This one,” I said, pointing, “is basically telling everyone you’re going back to your home town.”
Gloria became defensive. “But I don’t say where it is.”
I went up to search field and typed in, “Where is Gloria Pilford, the Big Baby mother, from?”
Hit Enter.
Up came dozens of news stories. It didn’t take long to find one that mentioned that Gloria had been raised by her aunt Madeline, who lived in Promise Falls. Going back a hundred or more years, this one story went on to say, the Plimptons were among the town’s founders, at one time running a tannery, and in later years starting up the town’s first newspaper. Madeline Plimpton, the story said, often attended Jeremy’s trial.
“There,” I said. “You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out where you probably are. And no doubt Ms. Plimpton’s address is easily found on the Internet.”
“Oh Gloria,” said Bob derisively. “You might as well have hired a skywriter to draw a big arrow pointing to the house.”
Madeline Plimpton had put her head into her hands.
I said, “You’re banned.”
“I’m what?” Gloria said.
“If you can’t stop yourself from posting, you need to stay off the computer, your phone, whatever other device you may have, altogether. You’re exposing yourself. You’re putting yourself in danger.”
Gloria bit her lip again and turned away. “You don’t understand,” she said, putting both hands on the counter’s edge, supporting herself. “You don’t know what they’ve put me through.”
None of us said anything.
Without turning around, she said, “I let you all make a national laughing stock out of me. I’m mocked and ridiculed. The coddling, smothering mother who kept her child from learning right from wrong. Okay, it worked. Jeremy didn’t go to jail. And that’s good.”
Slowly, she turned around. Tears had traveled halfway down her cheeks.
“But I paid a price, too,” she said. “And now you want to keep me from telling the world I’m not the person they think I am.”
An unmoved Ms. Plimpton walked across the room, picked up the laptop and held it tightly under her arm.
Bob said, “Give me your phone, honey.”
Gloria looked as though Bob had just asked for a kidney.
“This is humiliating,” she said. “You have no right.”
I said, “I can’t protect Jeremy if there are leaks coming out of this very household as to his whereabouts.”
“You think I’d do anything to hurt my son?” Gloria asked me.
“Not intentionally,” I said. “But those postings are dangerous. Even if you don’t say anything specific, people can tell where you are when you write them.”
Bob said, “Come on, Gloria. Give me your phone.”
Gloria wasn’t ready to surrender. “I need a phone in case there’s an emergency. You get to have your phone, Bob, so you can do all your deals.”
“That’s different,” Bob said. “If I’m not making deals, then I’m not bringing in any money, and if I wasn’t bringing in money, how the hell would I have paid for your son’s defense?”
“I like the way you toss that in,” she said. “My son.”
“Well, he is your son. I think it shows how much you mean to me that I was willing to help him out despite that fact that he’s not mine.”
“I know, you’re a hero.” It was an out-and-out sneer. “You care so much about him.”
“Your phone?” Bob said.
“I don’t know where it is,” Gloria said, with little conviction.
Bob reached behind a decorative bowl on the island. “For Christ’s sake, it’s right here.”
She lunged for it, but she was too slow. Bob had snatched up the phone, which was in a pale pink cover with tiny white polka dots, and dropped it into the inside pocket of his sport jacket.
“That’s a start,” I said, although I’d have rather held onto it myself. “Now there’s the business of Jeremy’s phone,” I said. “I’m guessing when he isn’t playing games he’s texting with his friends. He may also be telling people more than he should.”
Gloria laughed scornfully. “Good luck taking his phone away.”
She reopened the fridge and brought out the wine bottle.
Ms. Plimpton said, “Gloria, take it easy.”
“I’m fine, Madeline.” Gloria held up the bottle. “The only comfort I get around here is from this. None of you give a shit what I’ve—”
That was when we heard the crash. The sound of breaking glass.
Gloria and Ms. Plimpton let out short screams. Bob and I exchanged quick glances. The sound had come from the front of the house. I ran to the hall. Shards of glass were scattered across the marble floor, and in the midst of them, a fist-sized rock. There were narrow floor-to-ceiling windows on either side of the main door, and the rock had gone through the one on the left.
I flung open the door and saw a long-haired man — late teens, I was guessing — running flat-out to a vehicle idling at the curb. It was a blue van, the side door open.
Before the man leapt in, he glanced back and shouted, “Take that, ya fuckin’ big baby!”
Then he was in the van, hauling the door shut as the tires squealed and the vehicle lurched forward.
I started to run, but there wasn’t a hope of catching a look at the plate. The van was up the street and around a corner in seconds. It looked like one of those older GM vans, of which there are only about a hundred thousand in every town. And the rock-thrower was white, brown shoulder-length hair, maybe a hundred and eighty pounds. Jeans and a blue T-shirt. Not much help when it came to offering police a description.
I walked back into the house, where I found mother, aunt, and Bob Butler standing.
“Who was it?” Ms. Plimpton asked. “Did you see them?”
“A quick look is all,” I said.
What struck me as alarming was not what had just happened, but that all the commotion had not drawn Jeremy from the porch. Even if he’d tucked some buds into his ears, he still should have heard what had happened.