“Your brother-in-law named Parker?”

The woman looked at him as if he had just insulted her. She had long and suspiciously bright yellow hair, so thin her scalp showed through in patches.

“Parker was the name of the guy who had it before. He died, though.”

“Oh, that’s too bad.”

She shrugged. “Not my favorite person. Grew up here. We both did.”

Jake detoured to ask Sally a few of the questions she plainly wanted him to ask. He learned that Sally had moved to Rutland as a kid, from New Hampshire. Two sisters, one dead. She was raising her late sister’s kids, she told Jake.

“That must be hard.”

“Nah. Good kids. But fucked up. Thanks to their mother.” She lifted her empty glass, half in salute, half as a signal to the bartender.

“So you grew up with the guy who owned this place before?”

“Evan Parker. Couple years ahead of me in school. Dated my sister.”

Jake was careful not to react. “Really? Small world.”

“Small town. Also, he dated pretty much everyone. If ‘date’ is really the word. I’m not sure he isn’t the father of my nephew if you want to know the truth. Not that it matters.”

“Well, that’s …”

“That was his spot, behind the bar.” She held up her already half-drained glass and tipped it toward the far end of the room. “Knew everybody who came in.”

“Well, the owner of a bar has to be social. Part of the job, listening to people’s problems.”

She grinned at him, but it was far from a happy grin. “Evan Parker? Listen to anyone’s problems? Evan Parker didn’t give a shit about anyone else’s problems.”

“Is that right?”

“Is that right,” Sally mocked him. She was slurring, ever so slightly, he noticed. It occurred to him that the tropical beverage wasn’t her first drink of the evening. “Yeah, that’s right. Why do you care, anyway?”

“Oh. Well, I just had dinner with an old friend. We’re both writers. And my friend said the guy who used to own this bar was a writer, too. He was writing a novel.”

Sally threw back her head and laughed. She was so loud that a couple of conversations around them stopped, and people turned to look.

“Like that asshole could ever write a novel,” she finally said, shaking her head, declining further amusement.

“You seem surprised.”

“Come on, the guy probably never even read a novel. Didn’t go to college. Wait, maybe community college.” She leaned forward on the bar and looked down to the end. “Hey Jerry,” she yelled. “Did Parker go to college?”

A burly man with a dark beard looked up from his own conversation. “Evan Parker? Rutland Community, I think,” he shouted.

“That your brother-in-law?”

Sally nodded.

“Well, maybe he took a writing class or something and decided to give it a try. Anybody can be a writer, you know.”

“Sure. I’m writing Moby-Dick, myself. What about you?”

He laughed. “I’m definitely not writing Moby-Dick.”

Now she was slurring even more, he noted. “Dick” had been rendered as “deek,” and “myself” as “my shelf.” After a moment, he said: “If he was writing a novel, I wonder what it was about.”

“Sneaking into girls’ bedrooms at night, probably.” Her eyes were half closed.

He decided to try something else before he lost her entirely.

“You must have known his whole family if you grew up together.”

She nodded glumly. “Yep. The parents died. We were in high school.”

“Both died?” Jake asked, as if he didn’t already know.

“Together. In the house. Wait.” She leaned forward on the bar again. “Hey Jerry?” she yelled.

Down at the end, the brother-in-law looked up.

“Evan Parker’s parents. They died, right?”

Jake, who could have done without all this shouting of Parker’s name, was relieved to see the brother-in-law lift up his hand. A moment later he’d ended his conversation and made his way to where his inebriated sister-in-law was seated.

“Jerry Hastings.” He extended his hand to Jake.

“I’m Jake,” said Jake.

“You asking about Evan?”

“No, not really. Just about where the Parker came from. In the name.”

“Oh. Old family around here. They used to own the quarry in West Rutland. Hundred and fifty years to get from a mansion to a needle in the arm. That’s Vermont, I guess.”

“What do you mean?” said Jake, who knew exactly what he meant.

Jerry shook his head. “Don’t mean to be cavalier. He was in recovery for a long time, but obviously he picked up again. Lot of people were surprised. I mean, some addicts, every day you think, Wonder if today’s the day. Others, they’re getting up and going to work, taking care of business, so it seems more like out of nowhere. But this place wasn’t doing all that great, I happen to know. And he told some people he was trying to sell his house, get some money into the business.” He shrugged.

“He heard Parker was writing a novel when he died,” Sally informed her brother-in-law.

“That so? Fictional novel?”

Sadly not, thought Jake. If only Evan Parker’s novel had been fictional, but unfortunately it was quite real.

“I wonder what it was about?” Jake said aloud.

“Why do you care?” Sally said. She had turned some corner into belligerence. “You didn’t even know the guy.”

He lifted up his mug. “You’re absolutely right.”

“What were you asking about the parents?” Jerry said. “They died.”

“I know they died,” Sally said with luxuriant sarcasm. “Wasn’t it like a gas leak at the house or something?”

“Not a gas leak. Carbon monoxide. From the furnace.” Over Sally’s head he was giving the bartender a discreet hand gesture, which meant—if Jake was interpreting it correctly—no more for this one. “You know the house I’m talking about?” he asked Jake.

“How’s he supposed to know?” Sally rolled her eyes. “You ever seen this guy before tonight?”

“I’m not from here,” Jake confirmed.

“Right. Well, big house in West Rutland. Like, a hundred years old. Right near the quarry on Marble Street.”

“Across from the Agway,” said Sally, obviously forgetting the point she, herself, had just made.

“Okay,” said Jake.

“We were still in high school. Wait, maybe Evan was out already, but the sister was your class, wasn’t she?”

Sally nodded. “Bitch,” she said distinctly.

Jake tried hard to stifle his natural reaction.

But Jerry was laughing. “You did not like that girl.”

“She was a piece of work.”

“So, wait,” said Jake, “the parents died in their home but the daughter didn’t?”

“Bitch,” said Sally again.

This time Jake couldn’t help staring at her. Were they not discussing a young person whose parents had both died while she was in high school? And in their own home? Which would also have been her own home?

“Like I said.” Her brother-in-law grinned at Jake. “She did not like that girl.”

“Nobody liked her,” Sally said. She sounded glum now. Maybe it had gotten through to her that she’d been cut off at the bar.

“She died too,” Jerry told Jake. “Parker’s sister. A few years ago.”

“Burned up,” said Sally.

He wasn’t sure he’d heard that accurately. He asked her to repeat it.

“I said, she burned up.”

“Oh,” Jake said. “Wow.”

“What I heard.”

“That’s horrible.”

And it was, it obviously was, but even so, Jake couldn’t muster more than baseline human empathy for these ancillary members of Evan Parker’s family, not just because he didn’t truly care about any of these people, but because none of the events under discussion—a sister’s premature and apparently grisly death, a carbon monoxide poisoning in an old house, decades ago, even, at the end of the day, Evan Parker’s own opiate overdose—had any real bearing on his own very current, very pressing concerns. And also, none of this was exactly new information. Predeceased by both parents and a sister had been right there in Evan Parker’s online obituary, which he’d read years ago at his own desk in Cobleskill, New York, before a single word of Crib had been written.

Actually, he was more than ready to leave the Parker Tavern. He was exhausted, a tiny bit drunk, and his situation had not been helped—nor his life in any way improved—by anything Jerry or Sally had told him. Besides, the two of them now had their heads together and seemed to be discussing some private matter, animatedly and with clear mutual antipathy. Jake tried to reach back to the last topic they’d shared—Evan Parker’s sister, a piece of work—just so he could say something vaguely on topic before he left, but it all felt very distant and utterly irrelevant. Slowly got to his feet and extracted his wallet, then he put a twenty on the counter.

“Well, it’s sad,” he said to the back of Sally’s head. “Isn’t it? The whole family’s gone.”

“Except for the sister’s kid,” he heard her say.

“What?”

“You said, boo hoo, so sad, the whole family’s gone.”