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That’s how I find myself flying up to Deerville the week before Thanksgiving with a stack of cash—a hundred thousand, to be exact.
I got the idea for this whole thing after Brett told me that he thinks the mother still has evidence. He figured it out from something Denny said to him about the Woodruffs having to keep her quiet.
This little nugget doesn’t put him back in my good graces, but it’s a start.
Maybe.
The news crew is made up of Marv Jenkins, the on-camera personality, two camera operators, and a tech guy. The address they got for Vicky’s mother, Esme O’Neil, is wrong, but we track her down to a trailer park and then follow the bread crumbs from there to a poorly lit local bar.
I recognize her right away, down at the end.
She’s the skinny woman drinking alone, hair dyed red, skin wrinkled beyond her fifty-something years. She looks bewildered and angry when the lights and cameras fire up—it’s an ambush and a half.
Newscaster Marv buys her a drink and coaxes her into repeating the lies on camera. My blood boils as she tells the world how surprised she was that her own daughter lied. She’d believed the girl—how would she know her own daughter turned out to be a liar? It’s a well-worn speech, calibrated for maximum sympathy.
Her voice wavers when she meets my eyes. Does she feel my rage? Does she sense it’s the end of the road for her story?
The cameras go off when she’s done. I step up and slap the cash onto the scratched wooden bar. Bundles of fifties. The Woodruffs were paying her, but probably in the low five figures. My money adds up to more.
“Now you’ll tell the truth,” I say. “And after that, you’ll deliver the evidence you’re holding back. We know you have it.”
She protests, but her gaze doesn’t leave that money. When she looks up at me, there’s defeat in her eyes, I know she’ll bite. She’ll take that money. She’ll sell herself out.
Maybe I should have some compassion.
She lost the love of her life and couldn’t cope.
I get it. I’ve been there.
I live there.
The footage they gather is insane. Esme O’Neil takes us to a safety deposit box where she has the shirt and a nanny cam—still inside a bear. There’s a cop along to keep the chain of evidence right. The footage inside the bear is Papa Woodruff and Denny bargaining with her for the shirt.
We fire it up on a tablet. It’s captured perfectly. The money exchange is clear as day. “Helloooooo,” Marv says, sounding like a mustachioed, bathrobe-wearing porn star greeting his bedmate. “And with this, the story goes national.”
They get Esme being sorry. They get actual lab shots of the shirt testing. It’s like one of those hidden treasure shows or something.
The Woodruffs got a mayo-spattered shirt, as it turns out. You can never trust a drug addict.
The news feature crew does a Denny ambush at a black-tie gala—they actually hold everything under wraps just to surprise him at the gala. They make him repeat the lie about how Vonda must have fixated on him, and how he doesn’t blame her for the lies.
They run the footage on a phone for him. They get it on camera, him watching himself standing behind his dad in the sad O’Neil living room all those years ago, paying Vicky’s mother for the shirt.
He calls it fake news and storms out of there, lawyering up soon after.
There’s a simultaneous confrontation with the Woodruffs on their doorstep that night—the same doorstep they stood in when they announced they forgave Vonda and that they’d drop the charges.
There’s nothing the public loves better than liars getting caught on camera.
Marv and the I-team make it onto a sixty-minute news show, with the new material spliced up with old Vonda footage.
The statute of limitations has run out on Denny’s crime as well as the cover-up, but there’s no statute of limitations in the hearts of the public.
The story rips like wildfire through social media. Denny’s friends and client base dry up overnight. The Woodruffs are ostracized by all but the hugest assholes.
Who knows, maybe they’ll try to sue Esme O’Neil. But she’s in rehab. It’s more than she deserves.
She turned on her own child. A beautiful, honest girl who deserved love. Still does.
