Exposure (31 page)

Harlan Wilkes, who knew very well the demographics of the area, who’d studied them carefully and had written out a long-term plan for additional business growth based on demographic trends, was not a news-watcher by habit, but since Amelia’s arrest on Monday night he’d found himself tuned in to all the news sources obsessively. TV, radio, newspaper, websites … as with witnesses to a plane crash, he was unable to tear himself away from the spectacle. At work, he kept his smartphone in his hand and checked the Web every spare moment, hoping to find nothing, dreading everything.

His day started with an examination of the Raleigh newspaper. A small, tucked-away article had run in the Wednesday edition, a recitation of facts: Amelia Wilkes had been indicted, arrested, and charged with multiple counts; she was the daughter of Harlan Wilkes, head of the Wilkes Automotive empire (“empire,” he liked that, at least they got that right); she’d been released Tuesday morning on $75,000 bail—which Hubbard had tried to get reduced, but here, Harlan being head of an “empire” worked against him, because the magistrate reasoned that any less of a penalty might not motivate Harlan to keep his daughter close to him and ready to appear in court when the time came. As if he might send the girl out of the country to live at his Swiss chalet, or some such. As if the Wilkeses were the Vanderbilts, or royalty. Harlan had spit nails about her having to stay in jail overnight and about the bail, but there was no arguing it, not unless he wanted his little girl to spend two more nights there, because she couldn’t see a judge for a bail review before Thursday. He absolutely would not allow them to keep her locked up like some common criminal, so he’d cussed the magistrate (to Hubbard), then called his banker and had him deliver a check to the courthouse personally.

On Wednesday, the news websites and TV news had no mention of her arrest, and Harlan thought, for a brief, pleasing little while, that they’d escaped negative publicity with only a scratch. He didn’t bring up the newspaper article to Sheri, or to Amelia, who had not left her room since Tuesday night, though what she could be doing in there was beyond him. Buttercup stayed in the hall outside her door full-time, moving only when Harlan called her to go out. Sheri’d brought meals upstairs for both daughter and dog, which Harlan didn’t approve of. If they didn’t bring Amelia any food, she’d get hungry and be forced to come out, wouldn’t she? But as touchy as Sheri had gotten, he kept his mouth shut on that one.

Harlan went into work on Thursday with every intention of getting himself re-engaged with the business of running his “empire.” He’d driven the Maserati and surfed the local radio channels, hearing nothing mentioning the Wilkes name, save for three of his commercials. With Thanksgiving coming up and one of the slowest car-buying times of the year to follow, the ad agency was saturating the market with enticements designed to get folks into the showrooms—because from there, it was easy to make the sale. Who didn’t want to buy a glossy new car to drive to the in-laws’ house for Thanksgiving or Christmas? What better way to show the family that you weren’t one of those unlucky SOBs who’d been hit with layoffs? Or, conversely, why not, if you could swing it, commit the charitable act of keeping the car salespeople and the factory linesmen and loan processors from getting pink-slipped? His agency was covering every angle.

Thoughts of this nature kept his mind occupied as he finished the drive and parked in his reserved spot at Wilkes Honda. It was early, a few minutes ahead of eight
A.M
., so the place was quiet. Only two detailers, a pair of twenty-year-olds who’d transferred over from the Zebulon location, were there, having a smoke and drinking those mega-caffeine, mega-sugar drinks while waiting for either Harlan or Les Greer, his general manager, to arrive and open shop. The newspaper had been delivered and was waiting, still wrapped in its clear plastic bag, on the ground beside the door.

Inside, Harlan had gotten the first pot of coffee going, bought his usual day-starting can of the soda he’d been raised to call Co-cola, and gone to his office. He ignored the files waiting on his desk and, still standing, took the paper from the plastic bag, unrolling it gingerly across his desk. There, just above the fold, began the headline:
WILKES HEIRESS CHARGED
and then, below the fold,
IN SEXTING SCANDAL
.

He pressed his hands against the paper.
Those bastards
. He couldn’t get them to care at all when the story was what Winter had done to an anonymous daughter, but now, now that they knew it was
his
daughter, oh, now they were interested all right. So interested that they made it a front-page story, big news, with as misleading a headline as they come.

Sexting
. This was a word that wasn’t in his vocabulary. And
scandal
? Amelia’s situation wasn’t a scandal! What was scandalous was the way the paper was using his name and his baby’s misfortune to sell more copies. “Damn it all,” he said through clenched teeth. What gave them the right? “I ought to sue the sons’a bitches,” he said.
Wilkes Heiress
. Like she was some spoiled rich girl who’d gone wild.

He got out his phone and dialed Hubbard, left him a strongly worded voice mail, and then dropped into his chair and picked up the paper again to read the entire article, if only to see how many ways he was going to put the screws to whoever had written it and whoever had authorized it to run. He spent a hundred thousand goddamn dollars a year running ads in that paper, and they gave him
this
.

The story went simply enough at the start. It began with an introduction to what was called “sexting,” a catchall term for sending explicit photos by email or text message. And apparently there’d been some bad seeds who’d previously gotten caught engaging in similar behavior in other areas throughout the country, which the article blamed on the proliferation of cellphones that had built-in cameras. Harlan blamed it on the proliferation of kids whose parents, like Kim Winter, did a piss-poor job of raising their children right. The fact was, in the same way that one molding slice of bread spoiled the whole loaf, one charismatic, sly teen could get a bunch more acting out in ways they’d never dream of otherwise. “Bad influence, bad influence,” Harlan muttered, talking back to the article, “not the phones. That’s like blaming drunk-driving on the car.”

He was halfway through the article when his phone rang. He checked the display: not Hubbard, Sheri. He answered, and she said, “The paper—”

“I’m reading it.”

“How can they do this?” Her voice was hoarse.

“I told you, it’s public record.”

“No, I mean, how can they make her out that way? Where is the decency?”

“I haven’t read the whole thing. Let me finish and call you back.”

The reporter, having established what sexting was, went on to say,

Amelia Wilkes, 17, heiress to the Wilkes Automotive empire, is a senior at the prestigious Ravenswood Academy who has demonstrated her appeal in a number of local theatre productions. She allegedly demonstrated it far more explicitly to one of her fellow students and costars, Anthony Winter, eighteen, a senior and free-ride student at the school, where his mother, Kim Winter, is an Upper School teacher. Winter was arrested earlier in the week for allegedly sending explicit photos of himself to a female, in a related charge. Both now face felony charges that could put them in prison. It is unclear whether other individuals may have been involved. Further investigation continues. Wilkes posted $75,000 bail and was released under stipulation that she not have contact with Winter, who at this writing remains jailed on $30,000 bail. The disparity in the amounts reflects the differences in the defendants’ charges, and the families’ differing financial circumstances. Amounts this high are unusual for nonviolent crimes. A source in the OA’s office says the pair are considered a strong flight risk
.

Harlan sat very still. He read the article once more. When his phone rang again, the caller was Hubbard, who said, “Mr. Wilkes, I’m very sorry that your morning started this way. I’ve seen the article—”

“It’s obscene!” Harlan interrupted, or more accurately
erupted
—that was his sensation as the words pushed up from his gut. “They’ve made it out like she’s the one to blame, the one who got Winter in trouble. She’s, Jesus Christ, she looks like she’s a porn actress, or wants to be.”

“The wording could be seen as … let us say
salacious
, yes. Unfortunately, it is also, strictly speaking, truthful.”

“It’s not! How can they say that, about ‘other individuals’? They’re making it seem like they got a sex ring going.”

“Do you have a copy of the warrant nearby?”

“No, I’m at my office.”

“All right, well, I’ll tell you, then. The warrant, you’ll recall, details the actions behind the charges, and it’s a long list, and someone not privy to all the particulars could hypothesize or speculate as to there being others involved.”

“Then you get on the phone to the newspaper and you tell ’em there aren’t. And tell ’em that it was Winter who started all this trouble, who corrupted her, and tell them, by God, they better watch themselves, because I will not see my good name and my daughter’s dragged into the mud this way!”

It was, he knew, already too late. Still, he could not keep from venting. His anger was lava—not spewing, but bubbling up and boiling over, the deepest well supplying it and no discernible end in sight. He felt the burn of it on his face and neck, and hoped he would not burst into flames.

After a walk around the lot, he managed to cool down slightly by the time the sales and finance and administrative staff arrived. While he would have liked little better than to remain shut away in his office and never have to face any of them, he knew that was the surest way to get them thinking that he or his family had reason to hide. So, at nine forty-five, when he knew everyone had come in, but before they opened the doors to customers, he got on the PA and requested that they all gather in the showroom for an announcement.

“Good morning,” he said from atop the reception desk, once his employees had fitted themselves in among the four vehicles on display. His staff answered in kind. Then he said, “First of all, I want to thank all y’all for the hard work you’ve been putting in so far this month. Our numbers are slightly above what they were this time last year and, given the sorry state of things, that is saying quite a lot—so I commend you, and I encourage you to keep up the good work.

“Second, well, I’ll suppose that a good many of you have heard the news by now. My little girl was arrested on Monday evening and, yes, I know it looks pretty bad, but I want to say it isn’t at all like it seems. Not at all. A lot of you know her. She’s a sweet, quiet, good girl, real devoted to Sheri and me, a great student—pretty sure she’ll get into Duke on early decision, that’s how hardworking she is. And anyway, what happened was she got taken in by this sleazeball guy—good-looking, real smooth-talking, an actor. She never knew what hit her.”

No one spoke right away, and then the buzz of a few people who hadn’t heard asking for details prompted him to add, “It has to do with him sending indecent photographs using cellphones and whatnot.”

“Oh my God, Harlan,” said Joyce Potts, his bookkeeper since the Honda store opened in ’97. Her wrinkled face with its wide-eyed expression of surprise and dismay was almost as dear to him as his own mother’s would have been, if she’d been much of a mother. “How is she? Poor thing!”

“Thank you for asking, Joyce. She’s hanging in there. I’d appreciate it—as would Sheri and Amelia—if you, all of you, would help spread the word and ask folks not to believe what all they hear or read. Her being charged this way is a travesty of justice, and you know me, I’m not gonna sit still and take it.”

“That’s right,” one of his better salesman shouted. “You go get ’em.”

Harlan gave a thumbs-up, then got down from the desk, but not before noticing that a few of the guys hanging at the back of the group—those two detailers, plus a parts guy and a couple of the mechanics—appeared to be snickering and nudging one another. That feeling of lava rising again made Harlan itch to go storming back and knock some heads together—something he’d never done, but which sounded like what you’d do with these sort—and he stood there for a few seconds, watching them, until the parts guy noticed him. Harlan turned his attention to the group of people surrounding him, wanting to extend wishes for good luck and a speedy resolution. “Prob’ly be a good idea,” he overheard one of the salesmen say to another as the pair walked toward the offices, “if I delete some of the stuff I’ve got on my phone.” The other laughed and said, “Yeah, you don’t want your wife catching up with that.”

And then came Thursday evening’s television news. Harlan had come home early in order to catch the broadcasts, turning on the living room TV so that Sheri, who was chopping celery and garlic for a chickpea dish Amelia loved, could watch it from the adjoining kitchen. He set up the picture-in-a-picture feature that, in the past, had been useful for watching multiple bowl games or sports matches. He enjoyed not having to choose. With the news, though, he’d be able to hear only one station at a time.

Each station began with the day’s headlines, which he listened to bits of by flipping from one to the next. Sheri said, “Maybe there won’t be anything. Maybe now they’ll all have moved on to other stories.” Harlan, seated on the leather sofa—a sofa that had cost eight times as much as his first car, truly—turned and told her, “I put Hubbard on this. He’s supposed to have contacted each news outlet and asked for some consideration.”

“Then why are you sitting here, watching?”

“You don’t think they’re all going to cooperate, do you?”

She stopped chopping and said, “Don’t you think you might have made a mistake, getting the police involved?”

Harlan had an answer on his lips, a denial that he would have spoken with assurance, but it died away when the mug shots of both Amelia and Anthony appeared on-screen together with the accompanying words, “Area teens face prison time on sex crime charges.”