“Gotcher license?” the brother said. “Can sell you one, if you don’t.”
Jake wished he could avoid going through this again. “I’ve never fished, actually. I won’t be starting today. I’m a writer.”
“Writers don’t fish?” Mike grinned.
“This one doesn’t.”
“What do you write? Movies?”
“Novels.”
“Fictional novels?”
He sighed. “Yes. My name’s Jake.” He shook hands with both brothers.
“You writing a novel about that woman at Foxfire?”
It was a bit much to explain that he’d already written one.
“No. Like I said, I knew her brother.”
“I’ll drive you out, if you want,” Mike said. His brother from the stockroom looked about as surprised as Jake himself was to hear it.
“Really? That’s incredibly kind of you.”
“I think Lee can hold down the fort here.”
“Think I can,” the brother said.
“Not that you couldn’t find it on your own.”
Jake had serious doubts that he could find it on his own.
They took Mike’s truck, which had the detritus of at least four meals underfoot and reeked of menthols, and for eleven miles of slow country road Jake had to hear far more than he wished to know about the taxes generated by trout fishing in north Georgia, and how little of it went back into the community it came out of and not into, say, subsidies for Obamacare in other parts of the state, but all that was worth it when they turned off the road onto a track Jake absolutely would have missed if he’d attempted this on his own. And even if he hadn’t, he’d still have given up long before finishing the next part of the route, along a dirt track miles deep into the woods.
“There,” Mike said, cutting the engine.
There was a small parking area with a couple of picnic tables and a battered old sign with the campground’s hours (twenty-four per day, of which 10 P.M. to 6 A.M. were meant to be “quiet”), reservation policy (not accepted), amenities (two chemical vault toilets, whatever they might be), and nightly fee ($10, payable at the drop box). Foxfire was open year round, maximum stay fourteen days, nearest town, as Jake now knew all too well, was Clayton, fifteen miles away. It really was the middle of nowhere.
But it was also pretty. Very pretty and very tranquil and so surrounded by forest he could only imagine what it must be like out here in the dead of night. Really the last place in the world you’d want to have a crisis of any kind, let alone of a life-threatening nature. Unless it was exactly the place you wanted to have that kind of a crisis.
“I can show you which site they had, if you want.”
He walked behind Mike along the creek and then left, past two or three unoccupied campsites, each with its own fire pit and tent pitch, and farther back into the woods.
“Was anyone else staying out here that night?”
“One of the other campsites was occupied, but you see how it’s set up. They’re pretty spread out, along different paths. Even if the sister’d known there was someone nearby she probably wouldn’t have known how to find them, especially in the dark. And I doubt they’d of been much help even if she managed it. They were a couple from Spartanburg in their seventies. Slept through the whole thing, came out in the morning to load up their car and dump their trash and found the parking lot full of EMTs and the fire marshal. No idea what was going on.”
“So which way did she go to get help? The sister. Out toward the road?”
“Yep. Two miles from here to the main road, and when she got out there, no cars, obviously, at four in the morning. Took another couple of hours before somebody came along. By then she was a couple of miles closer to Pine Mountain. And it was a cold night, and she was just in flip-flops and a long T-shirt. People can be surprised by how cold it gets up in the mountains. Even in August. But I guess they’d been planning for that.”
Jake frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Well, they had the heater, didn’t they?”
“You mean, like, an electric heater?”
Mike, still a couple of steps ahead, turned back to give Jake a look.
“Not an electric heater. A propane heater.”
“And that’s how the fire started?”
“Well, it’s a pretty good bet!” Mike actually laughed. “Usually you’re worried about CO2 with those puppies, but you never want to set them down near anything, or put anything over them, or have them in a place somebody can knock them over. The newer ones can detect if they fall over. There’s an alarm that sounds. But this one wasn’t new.” He shrugged. “We think that’s what happened, anyway. She told the coroner she got up to use the toilet in the middle of the night. Walked down there to where we parked. Gone about ten minutes in all. Afterward, she said she might have brushed against it when she went out. Maybe it could’ve fallen over. She was a total mess, talking about it.”
He stopped. They were in a clearing, about thirty feet long. Jake could still hear the creek but now the wind in the tall pines and hickories overhead were just as loud. Mike had his hands in his pockets. His native irreverence seemed to have departed.
“So this is it?”
“Yep. The tent was over there.” He nodded at the cleared, flat place. There was a fire pit beside it, not recently used.
“It’s really the back of beyond,” Jake heard himself say.
“Sure. Or center of the universe, if you like to camp.”
He wondered if Rose and Dianna Parker liked to camp. He realized, again, how little he knew about them, and how much of what he thought he knew had turned out to be wrong. That’s what happens when you learn about people from a novel—somebody else’s or your own, just the same.
“Too bad she didn’t have a phone with her,” Jake said.
“She had one, but it was inside the tent, and by the time she got back the whole thing was in flames. It just went up, and everything in it.” He paused. “Not that it would’ve worked out here, anyway.”
Jake looked at him. “What?”
“The phone. You found that out yourself.”
Indeed he had.
“Do you have any idea why they were here?” he asked Mike. “Two women from Vermont at a campground in Georgia?”
Mike shrugged. “Nope. I never talked to her. Roy Porter did, though. He’s the coroner in Rabun Gap. I just assumed they were traveling around, camping. If you knew the family you probably have a better idea than either of us.” He peered at Jake. “You did say you knew the family.”
“I knew the brother of the woman who died, but I never asked him about it. And he died a year after this.” He gestured at the campground.
“Yeah? Bad luck in that family.”
“The worst,” Jake had to agree. If it was luck. “Do you think the coroner would talk to me?”
“Don’t see why not. We’ve come a long way since Deliverance. We’re pretty nice to outsiders now.”
“You’re … what?” Jake said.
“Deliverance. They shot that movie a couple miles from here.”
That sent a chill through him. He couldn’t help it.
“Good thing you didn’t tell me before!” he said, with what he hoped would pass for a backslapping kind of tone.
“Or you wouldn’t have driven out to the back of beyond with a total stranger and a phone that won’t work.”
He couldn’t tell if Mike was joking.
“Hey, could I take you both out to dinner, to say thanks?”
Mike seemed to give this more consideration than it deserved. In the end, however, he agreed. “I can give Roy a call and ask him.”
“That would be fantastic. Where should we go?”
It was a very New York question, needless to say, but in Clayton the range of options was not extensive. He arranged to meet the two of them at a place called the Clayton Café, and after Mike dropped him back at the store to retrieve his car, Jake found a Quality Inn and checked
in for the night. He knew better than to phone or even text Anna. Instead, he lay on the bed watching an old episode of Oprah in which Dr. Phil advised a couple of sixteen-year-olds to grow up and take responsibility for their baby. He nearly fell asleep, lulled by the groans of audience disapproval.
The Clayton Café was a storefront on the town’s main street with a striped awning and a sign that said SERVING THE COMMUNITY SINCE 1931. Inside were tables with black-checkered tablecloths and orange chairs and walls covered with local art. A woman met him at the door, carrying two plates piled with spaghetti and tomato sauce, each with a wedge of garlic bread balanced on top. Looking at them, he was reminded of the fact that he hadn’t eaten since grabbing an English muffin for the road, that morning in Athens.
“I’m meeting Mike,” he said, belatedly realizing he’d never asked Mike’s last name. “And …” He had forgotten the coroner’s name completely. “One other person.”
She pointed at a table at the other end of the room, under a painting of a forest grove very like the one he’d visited a few hours earlier. A man was already there: elderly, African-American, wearing a Braves sweatshirt. “Be right over,” the waitress said.
The man looked up, just at that moment. His face, as was probably appropriate to his profession, gave away nothing, not even a smile. Jake still could not remember his name. He crossed the room and held out his hand.
“Hello, I’m Jake. Are you … Mike’s friend?”
“I am Mike’s neighbor.” The correction seemed highly consequential. He gave Jake’s outstretched hand an appraising look. Then, apparently concluding that it met his standard of hygiene, he shook it.
“Thank you for joining me.”
“Thank you for inviting me. It isn’t often a complete stranger decides to buy me dinner.”
“Oh, that happens to me all the time.”
The joke landed about as badly as it could have. Jake took a seat.
“What’s good here?”
“Pretty much everything,” said the coroner. He hadn’t picked up his own menu. “The burgers. Country fried steak. The casseroles are always tasty.”
He pointed at something beyond Jake’s shoulder. Jake turned to find the specials board. Today’s casserole was chicken, broccoli, and rice. He also saw Mike enter, nod at someone seated just inside the door, and make his way across the room.
“Mike,” said the coroner.
“Hi, Mike.”
“Hello, Roy,” said Mike. “You two getting acquainted?”
No, thought Jake.
“Yes, indeed,” said Roy.
“Mike really put himself out for me today.”
“So I understand,” Roy said. “Not sure why he troubled himself.”
The waitress came. Jake ordered what Mike was having: poppy seed chicken, mashed greens, and fried okra. Roy ordered the trout.
“Do you fish?” Jake asked him.
“I’ve been known to.”
Mike shook his head. “He’s a maniac. This man has a magic touch.”
Roy shrugged, but he was up against his own considerable pride. “Well, I don’t know.”
“I wish I had the patience for that.”
“How do you know you don’t?” Mike said.
“I don’t know. Not my nature, I guess.”
“What is your nature, would you say?”
“I’d say, to find things out.”
“Is that a nature?” the coroner said. “Or a purpose?”
“They merge,” said Jake, becoming annoyed. Was this guy only here for a free dinner? He looked as if he could afford his own damn trout. “I’m very curious about the woman who died up there at the campground. Mike might have told you, I knew her brother.”
“Their brother,” said Roy.
“I’m sorry?”
“They were sisters. Ergo, the brother of one would have been the brother of the other. Or am I missing something?”
Jake took a breath to steady himself. “You sound as if you might share some of my questions about what happened.”
“Well, you’re wrong,” said Roy mildly. “I have no questions. And I don’t see why you should have any, either. Mike here says you’re a writer. Am I being interviewed for a publication of some kind?”
He shook his head. “No. Not at all.”
“A newspaper story? Something that’s going to wind up in a magazine?”
“Absolutely not.”
The waitress was back. She set three plastic glasses of iced tea on the table, and left.
“So I don’t have to worry about looking over the shoulder of the guy sitting next to me on the plane and seeing myself in a book.”
Mike grinned. He’d probably have liked nothing better, himself.
“I’d say not.”
Roy Porter nodded. He had deeply set eyes and wore a blue polo shirt, buttoned up the neck, and an oversized watch on a wide leather band. He also radiated a deeply discomforting power. All that death, Jake supposed. All those terrible things people did to one another.
The waitress returned with their food, and it looked and smelled so good that Jake nearly forgot what it was they were talking about. He hadn’t known exactly what it was he was ordering. He still didn’t know. But he fell on it.
“Were you out at the campsite yourself?”
Roy shrugged. Unlike Jake, who was shoveling that chicken into his mouth, the coroner was delaying gratification, delicately cutting his trout.
“I was. I got there at about six in the morning, not that there was much to see. The tent went up almost completely. There was a little bedding left, and a couple pots, and the heater. And the body, of course. But the body was completely charred. I took some pictures, and had the remains taken down to the morgue.”
“And could you tell anything more once you got it there?”
Roy looked up. “What, in particular, do you think I was supposed to tell? I had a body that looked like a piece of charcoal. You ever hear that thing about hoofbeats in the park?”
It sounded vaguely familiar to Jake, but he said no.
“You hear hoofbeats in the park, do you think horses or zebras?”
“I don’t get it,” said Mike.
“You think horses,” Jake said.
“Right. Because it’s going to be far more likely there’s wild horses in the park than wild zebras.”
“I still don’t get it,” said Mike. “What park has wild horses running around in it?”
He had a good point.
“So you’re saying, it was pretty obvious this woman burned to death.”
“I’m saying no such thing. It was obvious she had burned, absolutely. But burned to death? That’s why you go to the scene, for one thing, to see if the person moved during the fire. People who are burning alive tend to move around. People who are already dead, or at least unconscious, usually don’t. And even though coroners do think horses, we’re trained to check for zebras. This body had a range of PMCT, appropriate to the circumstances.”
“PMCT?”
“Post-mortem computed tomography. To look for fractures, metal objects.”
“You mean … like a knee replacement?”
Roy, who had been about to take a bite of his trout, stopped and looked at Jake in disbelief.
“I mean, like, a bullet.”
“Oh. So. No fractures, then.”
“No fractures. No foreign objects.” He paused. “No replaced knees.”
Mike was grinning. He continued to tear through his chicken.
“No bullets either. Just a lady who had burned to death in her tent, from a fire almost certainly started by a propane heater, which I personally saw was lying on its side.”
“Right,” said Jake. “But … what about identification? Did the PMCT help with that?”
“Identification,” said Roy.
“Well, yes.”
The coroner set down his fork. “Do you believe this young woman was mistaken about who she’d been sharing a tent with?
”
Not exactly, thought Jake.
“But don’t you need to prove it?” he said.
“Are we on a television show?” said Roy Porter. “Am I Jack Klugman, solving crimes? I had a set of human remains and I had someone to make the identification. That is the standard at any morgue in the country. Should I have given her a DNA test?”
Which one of them? Jake thought blandly.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Well, then, let me assure you that Miss Parker was given the same protocol as any other identifying witness. She was interviewed—eventually—and signed an affidavit attesting to the identification.”
“Why eventually? Weren’t you able to speak with her out at the campground? Or in the morgue?”
“She was hysterical at the campground. And yes, I realize the term is out of favor today. But by then, remember, she’d seen her sister burn to death, and she’d been running around the back roads for a couple of hours in the middle of the night, in a T-shirt, trying to find help. She wasn’t doing any better by the time we reached the hospital. Bringing her down to the morgue was out of the question. She wasn’t sick, so she wasn’t admitted, but they didn’t want to let her go, either. She knew no one locally, and she’d just lost her sister. Gruesomely. Also, she believed she’d caused the accident by knocking against the heater as she went out of the tent. One of my colleagues in the emergency room made the decision to sedate her.”
“And you didn’t ask for any identification?”
“No. Because I was aware that her personal papers were in the tent. I believe she’d just left to use the bathroom. I don’t know what it’s like where you’re from, but we tend to leave our IDs at home when we go out to take a leak in the middle of the night.”
“So when were you able to speak with her?”
“The next morning. The GSP trooper and I took her to the cafeteria and got some food into her, and she gave us the basic details about what happened, and her sister’s name and age. Home address. Social security. She didn’t want anyone contacted.”
“No family members? Friends back home?”
He shook his head.
“Did she say why they were here? In Clayton?”
“They were just having a trip together. They’d never been out of wherever they were from, up north—”
The Plot Page 25