Naturally, she had not been unaware of this exit, in itself; Maria was hardly going to mess up her chance the same way Samantha herself had, or any other way. From her earliest years, when she’d toddled about reading letters out loud, she was headed for college if not even farther, and some life—it went without saying—beyond Earlville and probably upstate New York itself. But there was something about that final year Samantha had been expecting, in her life as a mother, perhaps holding inside it some slim possibility of reversal, even redemption, which now was suddenly not there. Or possibly it was the way Maria had managed to get back at her for that skipped sixth grade she hadn’t given permission for. This time, under her old calculus teacher’s oblivious eye, she had signed that release, too cowed and too ashamed not to give in. It was June now. Maria, she supposed, would be gone by August, if not before.

She did not confront her daughter. She waited to see if Maria would at least invite her to the graduation ceremony, but in fact Maria had no interest in walking across that crepe-paper-decorated basketball court, and on the day in question she was off with Gab in Hamilton, possibly at the bookstore or even cluelessly hanging out on the porch of the College Inn. (The inn was now Family run for four generations!, Dan Weybridge having died of pancreatic cancer.) The only thing she said when she got home that night was that she had ended things with her girlfriend, and it was for the best.

The summer, a hot one, began. Maria saw no one. Samantha stayed in her office with the fan on, doing the same medical billing job she’d been doing since Maria was small, the job that had paid for her daughter’s food and clothing and doctors’ appointments. June passed, and July, and still Maria said not one word about the fact that she was about to depart, but Samantha did begin to see some incremental motion. Clothing was being bagged and taken to the donation box in town. Books were being boxed and dropped off at the Earlville Library. Old papers, tests from middle school, crayon drawings from all the way back to early childhood were being sorted and then wedged into the wastepaper basket under Maria’s desk. It was a complete rout.

“You don’t like that anymore?” Samantha said once, pointing to a green T-shirt.

“No. That’s why I’m getting rid of it.”

“Well, I might keep it, if you don’t want it.”

They were, after all, the same size.

“Suit yourself.”

It was early August.

She wasn’t planning it. Truly, she wasn’t planning anything.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Sole Survivor

Afterward he needed to think. He drove back into town and parked outside a Walgreens for nearly an hour, head bent, hands gripping his own knees, trying to peel away the many layers of what he’d assumed he knew about @TalentedTom, and then to form some sense of what he needed most to know right now. There was much, and he was starting from a radically different place, and it was so hard not to want to hold on to his earlier assumptions about vengeful novelists and loyal MFA classmates. He had to be humble now, Jake decided, if he was going to stop this person—this, he now recalibrated, woman—before she caused him irreparable injury.

On his phone he hastily typed a list of what he didn’t know, more or less in descending order of priority:

Who is she?

Where is she?

What does she want?

Then he stared at that for another twenty minutes, overwhelmed by the breadth of his own ignorance.

By two he was at the Rutland Free Library, trying to learn as much about Evan Parker’s family as he could cram into one afternoon. The Parkers had deep roots in Rutland. They’d arrived in the 1850s with the railroad, but only twenty years later the family patriarch, Josiah Parker, owned a marble quarry on the same West Rutland street—Marble Street—where he would also build Betty and Sylvia’s Italianate mansion. The house, obviously, had been a showplace for Josiah Parker’s wealth at the time of its construction, but Rutland’s fortunes, alongside those of the Parker family itself, had mirrored the area’s general decline, and the gradual extinction of Vermont’s marble industry. On the 1990 property tax rolls its value was listed as $112,000, at which time its owners were Nathaniel Parker and Jane Thatcher Parker.

Evan’s parents. Or, more to the point, the parents of Evan and his late sister.

A bitch and a piece of work, according to his bar friend Sally (who, to be fair, could have passed for both, herself).

He said she’d do anything, according to Martin Purcell.

I heard she burned up.

There was no internet tribute page for this particular member of the Parker family, which might have spoken to her dearth of friends, or possibly just to Evan Parker’s specific lack of brotherly love (since he’d presumably handled matters after his sister’s passing). Her name, apparently, was Dianna, which was pathetically close to Diandra, the name he had given her in his “fictional” novel. And her death notice, on the same Rutland Herald obituary page that would host Evan Parker’s own a mere three years later, was basic in the extreme:

Parker, Dianna (32), died August 30th, 2012. Lifelong resident of West Rutland. Attended West Rutland HS. Predeceased by parents. Survived by a brother and a daughter.

No mention of what, in particular, had caused her death, not even one of the usual banalities (“sudden,” “unexpected,” “after a long illness”) let alone anything personal (“beloved”) or blandly regretful (“tragic”). No mention of the place where the death had taken place, or where the deceased person was to be buried. No listing of a memorial service, not even Evan Parker’s own “burial private” or “memorial to be announced later.” This woman had been a daughter, sister, and above all mother, and she had certainly died young after a life that was by any measure constrained and devoid of experiences. Dianna Parker hadn’t even graduated from high school, not if Jake was correctly interpreting the use of the word “attended,” and if she’d never left West Rutland, Vermont, he really did have to feel sorry for her. This was the most barren sendoff imaginable after not much of a life and—if she really had “burned up”—an indisputably horrible death.

Attempting to find birth records for Dianna and, more importantly, for her still nameless daughter, presented Jake with his first serious roadblock, since the state of Vermont’s public records wanted a formal application, and he wasn’t sure he was entitled to access, so he purchased a membership to Ancestry.com on the spot and found the rest in a matter of minutes.

Dianna Parker (1980–2012)

Rose Parker (1996–)

Rose Parker. He stared at the name. Rose Parker was the granddaughter of Nathaniel and Ruth, the daughter of Dianna, the niece of Evan. Apparently the sole survivor of her family.

He went straight to one of the search websites and started looking for her, but while there were nearly thirty Rose Parkers currently in the databases, none of them, to his extreme frustration, had the right birth year apart from one with an old address in Athens, Georgia, and the only Vermonter named Rose Parker was an octogenarian. He asked a librarian about yearbooks from West Rutland High School and was excited when she pointed to a corner of the reference section, but the collection yielded little of value. Dianna, having merely “attended” high school, had no graduation portrait in the 1997 or 1998 yearbook, and after Jake looked carefully through the years before that when she might have been pictured in clubs or teams or held class offices he had to conclude that she’d been remarkably uninvolved at West Rutland High; there was only her name on a dean’s list of scholars and a single citation for a prizewinning essay on Vermont during the Revolutionary War to show she’d made any mark at all on the school. Rose Parker presented an even more frustrating absence. Born in 1996, she’d left home without graduating from high school—Sally had told him that—so it made sense that there was no Rose Parker among the graduating seniors of 2012. In fact he found only a single image of Rose Parker from what must have been her tenth-grade year: a spindly girl in short bangs and large round glasses, holding a field hockey stick in a team photo. It was small and not completely in focus, but he took out his phone and snapped a picture anyway. It might be all he’d ever find.

After that, he turned to the sale of the house on Marble Street, from Evan Parker’s heir to its first owners not to be named Parker. As the women had said, Rose wasn’t present for the transaction itself, and was apparently indifferent to the fate of a century and a half’s worth of family possessions, not to mention her own childhood belongings. But the attorney, William Gaylord, Esquire, was right here in Rutland, and if he didn’t know where Rose Parker was today he had to have known where she was at the time of the sale. That was something.

Jake gathered his notes and walked out of the Rutland Free Library and through heavy rain to his car. It was just past three in the afternoon.