“Okay,” I said. “Let’s start by figuring out just what the situation is.”

Madeline Plimpton got back on one of the island stools, next to Bob Butler. Gloria maintained her station near the fridge.

“How many people would know Jeremy’s here and not at your place in Albany?”

“I haven’t told a soul,” Ms. Plimpton said. “Except for you.”

“Neither have I,” said Butler.

Gloria had busied herself putting the almost-empty wine bottle back into the fridge, her back to us.

“Ms. Pilford?” I asked.

“I’m sorry?” she said.

“Gloria, answer the man’s question,” Ms. Plimpton said.

Gloria closed the fridge and turned around slowly. “I haven’t told anyone,” she said. “Not specifically.”

“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.