The Plot

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  “Sure, sure,” said Carole. She was pale with a forest of dark moles along both collarbones. Jake was finding it hard not to look at them.

  “Well, good luck,” Bailey said. “Keep us in mind if your daughter’s place doesn’t work out.”

  “Thank you so much,” Jake said. “I will.”

  He wouldn’t. Even she knew that.

  In the lounge, he took one of the old armchairs, which was as uncomfortable as it looked, and Carole Feeney took another one. She seemed already to be in mourning for this unnamed girl from “awhile back” whose family couldn’t reach her, and afraid to find out who it was.

  “So, like I said, my cousin’s daughter lived here, her freshman year. That was 2012 to 2013.”

  “Freshman year? Usually they’re in the dorms up on campus.”

  “So I understand. She got some kind of a waiver.”

  Her eyes widened. “Wait, is it Rose? Are you talking about Rose?”

  Jake seemed to lose his breath. He hadn’t expected it to be so fast. Now he wasn’t sure what to say.

  “Yeah. Rose Parker.”

  “In 2012, you said? That sounds about right. She’s missing? Poor Rose!”

  Poor Rose. Jake managed to nod.

  “Oh my word. That’s so sad. Her mother died, you know.”

  Jake nodded. He was still not sure. “Yes. It was very tragic. Is there anything you remember about Rose that might help her dad find her?”

  Carole folded her hands in her lap. They were big hands, and unsurprisingly rough.

  “Well, she was mature, of course. Didn’t have a lot in common with most of the other students. Didn’t go out to the bars. Didn’t go to the games, I don’t think. Didn’t Rush. I wasn’t cleaning for her, so I wasn’t in her place except now and then. I think she came from up north.”

  “Vermont,” Jake confirmed.

  “That so.”

  He waited for her to continue.

  “Most of these girls, they got their beds covered with stuffed animals, like they’re six years old. Every inch of the wall has posters. Throw pillows all over the place. A mini fridge in every room so they don’t have to walk more than a few steps to get a can of pop. Some of these apartments, you can barely turn around in for all the things they bring. Rose kept hers pretty plain, and she was a tidy person. Like I said, mature.”

  “Did she ever speak about anyone else in her family?”

  Carole shook her head. “Don’t remember that, no. She never mentioned a father. Your cousin?”

  “They weren’t together, the parents. Not for most of Rose’s life,” Jake said, thinking quickly. “That’s probably why.”

  The woman nodded. She had two thin braids of highly distressed orange hair. “I only ever heard her talk about her mother. But of course, that horrible thing with her mom had just happened, right before she got here. Probably that was the only thing on her mind.” She shook her head. “So horrible.”

  “You’re talking about … the fire, right?” said Jake. “Was it a car crash?”

  That’s what he’d been imagining, he realized, ever since the Parker Tavern, and Sally’s indelible she burned up. Obviously it hadn’t been at the house; Sylvia or Betty would have said so, folding that into the carbon monoxide poisoning and the overdose, just another dreadful thing that had taken place in an old family home where people were born and died. Since that night at the Parker Tavern with Sally he’d imagined it pretty consistently as car hits ditch, car flips, car somersaults downhill, car bursts into flame, and he could see a hundred film and television variations on that sequence, perhaps with the addition of a tragic/lucky passenger who’d managed to get out in time, screaming and crying and staring down at the conflagration from the road above.

  “Oh no,” said Carole Feeney. “Poor thing was in a tent. Rose just barely got out in time, had to watch it happen. Nothing at all she could do.”

  “In a tent? They were … what, camping?”

  It was the kind of astonishing detail a cousin of an ex-husband of a fatal accident victim probably ought to have known. But he hadn’t known it.

  “Driving down here to Athens, from up north. I guess, you said, Vermont.” She fixed him with a look. “Not everybody has the money to stay in a hotel, you know. She told me, once, if she hadn’t gone so far away from home to go to school, her mother would still be okay, not in some plot in north Georgia.”

  Jake was staring at her. “Wait,” he said. “Wait, this happened in Georgia?”

  “Rose had to bury her mama in a cemetery up there, in the town near where it happened. Can you imagine?”

  He couldn’t. Well, he could, but then again, the problem wasn’t imagining it, the problem was making sense of it.

  “Why wouldn’t she bring her home, to be buried in Vermont? The whole family is buried in Vermont!”

  “You know what? I didn’t ask her that,” Carole said, with abundant sarcasm. “You think that’s a question to ask somebody who just lost her mother? She didn’t have anybody back there where she came from. It was just her and her mama, she told me. No sisters or brothers. And like I said, I never heard a single thing about your cousin,” Carole said meaningfully. “Maybe it made sense to her, to just take care of it up there. But if you find her, you can definitely ask her.”

  The interview, such as it was, appeared to be deteriorating. Jake frantically tried to think of what he still needed to know.

  “She left the university after her freshman year. Do you have any idea where she went?”

  Carole shook her head. “Didn’t know she was going till they told me to clean up her place, after the fact. I wasn’t really surprised she decided to go somewhere else to study. This is a party school. She was no party girl.”

  He nodded, as if he, too, was aware of this.

  “And there’s no one else who lived here then, who she might have kept in touch with?”

  Carole considered. “No. Like I said, I don’t think she had much in common with the other students. Even those couple of years, it makes a big difference at that age.”

  “Wait,” said Jake. “How old was she, would you say, when she was living here?”

  “I never asked.” She stood up. “Sorry I can’t help you. I hate to think of her as missing.”

  “Wait,” he said again. He was reaching into a back pocket for his phone. “Just … can I show you a picture?” He was looking for the blurry girl on the field hockey team: short bangs, large round glasses. Because that was all he had, the only proof of the Rose Parker who’d powered through high school in three years and left home at the start of what would otherwise have been her senior year, and who should have arrived here in Georgia as a motherless sixteen-year-old. “I just want to make sure,” he told Carol Feeney, holding it out to show her.

  The woman leaned closer, and immediately he saw the concern fall away from her. She straightened up.

  “That’s not Rose.” Carole Feeney shook her head. “You’re talking about somebody else. Well, that’s a relief. The girl’s been through enough.”

  “But … this is her. This is Rose Parker.”

  She indulged him by looking at it again, but this time for no longer than a second.

  “No it isn’t,” she said.

  CRIB

  BY JACOB FINCH BONNER

  Macmillan, New York, 2017, pages 245–46

  She made a point of returning a couple of times that first year, and when she ran into people she knew in Earlsville or Hamilton, people she’d been around her entire life, she let them know how Maria was doing at Ohio State.

  “She’s going to major in history,” she told the teller at her bank as she arranged a transfer of funds to her daughter’s account in Columbus.

  “She’s thinking of transferring,” she told old Fortis himself, when she saw him getting out of his car at the Price Chopper. “Wants to see more of the country.”

  “Well, who can blame her?” he said.

  “She seems really happy out
there,” she told Gab, who turned up at the house one day.

  “I just happened to be passing by. I saw your car?” Gab said, as if it was a question. “I never see your car anymore, when I pass by.”

  “I have a boyfriend just outside Albany,” Samantha said. “I’m spending a lot of time out there with him.”

  “Oh.”

  Gab, it turned out, had been emailing Maria since August, texting her, calling her until she got a message that the number was no longer functional.

  “She was hoping you’d get the message,” Samantha told her. “I’m sorry to be the one telling you this, but Maria has a serious girlfriend now. It’s someone in her philosophy class. A very brilliant young woman.”

  “Oh,” the girl said again. She left a painful five minutes later, so that was the end of that. Or should have been.

  “I’m thinking of moving out to Ohio, to live with my daughter there,” she told the woman in the local ReMax office. “I’m wondering how much you think my house is worth.”

  It was worth a lot less than she wanted for it, but she sold it anyway that spring, and Samantha drove the Subaru west again, though this time with a U-Haul van attached and without a detour to Pennsylvania.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Foxfire

  Even before he called her, he knew she’d be upset. Her own flight to Seattle was coming up soon and Jake had been scheduled to return the following morning after two days of a trip she hadn’t wanted him to make in the first place; instead he was changing his plans, extending his rental car, and, worst of all, driving north to a place he’d never even heard of before today, in a part of Georgia he’d never had any reason to visit. Until now.

  “Oh Jake, no,” Anna said, when he told her.

  He was back in his room at the hotel, eating a burger he’d picked up on his walk back from the library.

  “Listen, I just assumed she died in Vermont. I had no idea the accident happened in Georgia.”

  “Well, so what?” Anna said. “Why does it matter where it happened? I mean, for fuck’s sake, Jacob, what is it you think you’re going to find out?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, honestly enough. “I just want to do whatever I can to get her to stop extorting me.”

  “But she hasn’t done that,” Anna said. “Extortion implies a demand. She hasn’t asked you for a penny. She hasn’t even asked you to come clean.”

  He had to let that sit there for a moment. It was an intensely painful moment.

  “Come clean?” he finally said.

  “I’m sorry. You know what I mean.”

  But he didn’t. That, it occurred to him, was becoming a bit of a problem.

  “You don’t find it interesting that she apparently dropped the body by the side of the road and went along on her way? There’s a hundred and fifty years’ worth of Parkers in a cemetery in Vermont!”

  “Well, no,” said Anna, “it just doesn’t seem all that strange to me. Under those circumstances? She’s on her way from Vermont to Georgia, she’s probably got her whole life in the back of the car, and this happens? Maybe she already knew she wouldn’t be going home. Maybe she wasn’t sentimental in general. Maybe a lot of things! So she thinks, okay, my life is forward, not back. I’ll just find a nice place around here for her to be buried, and I’ll keep going.”

  “What about family members? What about friends? Maybe they had an opinion.”

  “Maybe they didn’t have friends. Maybe Evan Parker wasn’t a part of their lives. Maybe none of this stuff matters. Would you please just come home?”

  But he couldn’t. It had taken him all of thirty seconds and the search terms “Dianna Parker+tent+Georgia” to find this brief and highly problematic story from The Clayton Tribune of Rabun Gap:

  By News Staff on August 27, 2012

  Rabun County

  A 32-year-old woman perished in the early hours of Sunday, August 26th at approximately 2 A.M. in a tent fire at the Foxfire Campground in the Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest. Dianna Parker, of West Rutland, Vermont, had been camping with her sister, Rose Parker, 26, who escaped the blaze and was eventually able to raise the alarm. Paramedics from Rabun County EMS and members of Georgia State Patrol Troop C responded but destruction of the campsite was complete by the time they reached the campgrounds.

  He sent her the link now, along with the question: Don’t you see the issue here?

  She didn’t. He didn’t blame her.

  “Rose Parker was 16. Not 26.”

  “So there’s a typo. One digit. Human error.”

  “Sister?” he said. “Not daughter?”

  “It’s a mistake. Look, Jake, I grew up in a small town. These local papers, they’re not The New York Times.”

  “It’s not a mistake. It’s a lie. Look,” he said, “don’t you find it interesting that nobody seems to get sick in this family? Everyone dies suddenly in some kind of unexpected event. Carbon monoxide poisoning. Drug overdose. A tent fire, for God’s sake! That’s a lot to accept.”

  “Well, people do die, Jake, in all those ways. There weren’t always carbon monoxide detectors—even with them people still get poisoned, sometimes. They also overdose. There’s an opiate crisis in this country, as you might be aware. And in Seattle we had tent fires in the homeless encampments all the time.”

  She was right, he told her, but he was still going to take another day to drive up there. Maybe he’d find someone to talk to, who’d been at the accident site, or who’d maybe even spoken with the survivor at the time. And he could visit the campsite where the fire had happened.

  “But why?” she said, with great exasperation. “Some campsite in the woods? What do you think you’re going to learn from that?”

  He didn’t honestly know.

  “Also I want to see where she’s buried.”

  But that he could defend even less.

  In the morning he drove north across the Piedmont Plateau and into the Blue Ridge Mountains, lovely enough to prod aside, temporarily, his ongoing preoccupations. What he would say when he got to Rabun Gap, and whom he would say it to, were unanswered questions, but he couldn’t stop himself from feeling there was some final insight waiting for him ahead, something that justified not only the long drive (which was very much not in the direction of the Atlanta airport) and the expense of the extra day and rescheduled flight, but most of all the obvious disapproval of his wife. Something he couldn’t learn anywhere else. Something that would confirm for him, finally, who this person was, and why she’d come after him, and how he could get her to stop.

  He had found the campground easily on Google Maps, but finding it in actuality was considerably more difficult since his phone’s GPS seemed to falter the moment he entered the mountains. He had to resort to the decidedly analog method of stopping at a general store in Clayton to ask directions, and this required an obscure exchange of information before the information could be forthcoming.

  “Gotcher license?” said the man behind the counter, when Jake explained what he was looking for.

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “We can sell you one, if you don’t.”

  License for what? he wanted to ask, but it didn’t seem like a great way to establish a rapport.

  “Oh, well, that’s good.”

  The man grinned. His sideburns were so long they rounded the corner along his jaw, but didn’t meet at the chin. The chin had a dimple, à la Kirk Douglas. Maybe that was why.

  “Not here to fish, I’m guessing.”

  “Oh. No. Just trying to find the campground.”

  Foxfire’s draw, as the man happily (and at length) explained to him, was trout fishing. Jilly Creek, just south of the waterfall, was a popular spot.

  “How far from here, would you say?”

  “I’d say twenty minutes. East on Warwoman Road for eleven miles. Left on the forest service road. Then it’s about two miles along.”

  “How many campsites are there?” said Jake.

  �
�How many do you need?” The man laughed.

  “Actually,” said Jake, “I don’t need any. I’m just interested in something that happened there, a couple of years ago. Maybe you remember.”

  The guy stopped smiling. “Maybe I do. Maybe I have a pretty good idea what you’re talking about.”

  His name was Mike. He was a north Georgia lifer and, by an undeserved stroke of luck, a volunteer fireman. Two years earlier, his company had been called to the Foxfire Campground on a crowded summer afternoon to break up a fight between two women, one of whom had suffered a broken wrist. Five years before that, a woman had burned to death in a tent in the middle of the night. Apart from those two incidents, the only notable occurrences of the past several decades had involved the failure to release undersized trout.

  “I can’t see why you’d have an interest in those two crazy girls from Pine Mountain,” he said. “Not that I have any idea why you’d be interested in the woman who died. Except she wasn’t from here and obviously neither are you.”

  “I’m from New York,” said Jake, confirming the man’s worst suspicions.

  “And so was she?”

  “Vermont.”

  “Well.” He shrugged, as if his point had been proved.

  “I knew her brother,” Jake said, after a moment.

  This had the advantage of being, at least, true.

  “Ah. Well, awful thing. Terrible to see. The sister was hysterical.”

  Jake, who didn’t trust himself to answer, merely nodded. Sister.

  “So you were there that night,” said Jake.

  “No. But I was there the next morning. Nothing for the EMTs to do, so they waited for us to do the removal.”

  “Do you mind if I ask you about it?”

  “You’re already asking about it,” he said. “If I minded I’d have stopped you already.”

  Mike owned the store along with his two brothers, one of whom was in prison, the other in the stockroom. That one emerged at around this time, and looked at Mike for an explanation.

  “Wants to know about Foxfire camp,” said Mike.