“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.