For the first time, I felt myself warming to her. “I think you may be onto—”

“What the hell is this about hiring a PR consultant?” Madeline Plimpton said, striding into the room. “Bob just told me about some cockamamie idea of yours to bring someone on board to get your side of the story out? Seriously?”

“Jesus,” Gloria whispered, taking another drink.

“Because a PR person is going to cost you a fortune,” Ms. Plimpton said. “And I don’t know where you’re going to find the money for that.”

“I was thinking out loud!” Gloria shot back. “Okay?”

“Doesn’t sound like any thinking was going on at all,” her aunt said.

I’d had enough.

As I left the kitchen, I grabbed Ms. Plimpton’s laptop and took it with me to the living room. I sat down in a comfy armchair, opened up the computer and a browser, and entered “Jeremy Pilford trial” into the search field. I didn’t really need a lot of background info to perform the duties I was being contracted for, but I wanted a better handle on the cast of characters, and the incident that had precipitated this shit storm.

A few hundred thousand results came back from my search, but I was quickly able to winnow those down to a handful of news accounts that summed things up pretty succinctly.

What I learned was this:

On the evening of June 15, a party was held at the Albany home of Galen Broadhurst. It was more an estate than a home. It sat on ten acres outside the city, about half of it untouched by development. Broadhurst, who had lived alone since the passing of his wife, had a seven-thousand-square-foot house to roam around in, and when he got bored with that, there was an outbuilding where he kept his stable of fancy cars. Three Porsches, one Lamborghini, an old MG, a 1969 American Motors AMX, and a new high-end Audi for daily driving.

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.