She thought, at one point in the deepest part of the night, I could be in shock. But it didn’t stick. That thought dropped behind her, and also lay still.

Samantha was, as it happened, wearing Maria’s discarded green T-shirt that night. It was soft, and it hung on her pretty much exactly as it had on her daughter: same narrow shoulders, same flat chest. She rubbed the cotton between her fingers until they hurt. There was another shirt of her daughter’s she had always liked, a black, long-sleeved T-shirt that looked slouchy and comfortable and had a hood. She thought of herself wearing it and wondered if anyone would see her and ask: Isn’t that Maria’s shirt? What would she say? Oh, Maria gave it to me when she left for college. But Maria wasn’t going to college now. Surely everyone would know that. But who would tell them?

I’m not telling them, Samantha realized. She wasn’t telling anybody.

It was all so obvious after that. She finished packing up her daughter’s belongings, and some of her own. She closed up the house and put everything into the car and drove west, as far west as she had ever traveled before, and then farther. At Jamestown she turned south and at last left New York state, and by late that afternoon she was deep in the Allegheny National Forest, taking at each turn the road that looked less traveled. In a town called Cherry Grove she saw a sign for a rental cabin, so remote the owner told her not to bother if she didn’t have a four-wheel drive.

“I have a Subaru,” she told him. She paid cash for a week.

The following day was spent looking for the best place, and that night she dug the hole with a shovel she’d brought from Earlville. The next night she brought her daughter’s body and left it there, deep in the soil and covered with rocks and brush, after which she took a shower and tidied the cabin and left the key on the front porch, as she’d been instructed. Then she got back in her old car and put that, too, behind her.

PART FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Athens, Georgia

“I need to go to Georgia,” he told Anna, a day after his return from Rutland. They were walking from their apartment up to Chelsea Market, and immediately they began to argue.

“Jake, this is crazy. Going around talking to people in bars and sneaking into people’s houses and offices!”

“I didn’t sneak.”

“You didn’t tell the truth.”

No. But it had been worth it. He had learned, inside of twenty-four hours, more than he’d been able to figure out in months. Now he understood what he’d actually been dealing with, or at least what he’d been avoiding dealing with, all that time.

“There has to be another way,” she said.

“Sure. I could go back on Oprah like my spirit animal, James Frey, and hang my head and whine about my ‘process,’ and everyone will totally understand, and it won’t destroy everything I’ve accomplished or get the movie canceled, not to mention the new book, or make me a pariah for the rest of my life. Or I could ask Matilda or Wendy to set up some kind of public breast beating, and make Evan Parker into a tragically lost Great American Novelist, and give him credit for a book he didn’t write. Or maybe just let this bitch have complete control over my life, and the power to blow up my career and my reputation and my livelihood.”

“I’m not suggesting any of that,” Anna said.

“I can see how to find her now, or at least where to start looking. It’s the wrong moment to ask me to stop.”

“It’s the right moment. Because you’re going to get hurt.”

“I’m going to get hurt if I do nothing, Anna. She doesn’t want to be exposed any more than I do. She wants to be in control, and so far she has been. But the more I find out about her, the more I can redress the balance. Frankly it’s the only thing I have in my corner.”

“But why is it still ‘I’? I got my own nasty letter from her, remember? And even if that wasn’t the case, we should be dealing with this together. We’re married! We’re a partnership!”

“I know,” Jake agreed miserably.

Maybe he hadn’t fully understood the impact of his own evasions on Anna, or even the damage he’d caused to his brand-new marriage, not until he’d been forced into this confession. Six months of hiding the existence of TalentedTom (not to mention the existence of Evan Parker himself) had worn away at him—that part he understood—but now he saw the risk he’d taken with her, and the worst part was that he probably still wouldn’t have told her about any of it, not if he hadn’t been forced to do so. It was a terrible indictment of what remained of his character, and she had every reason to be furious at him, but even as he acknowledged this he hoped the previous night’s confessions would ultimately serve to make things better. Maybe letting Anna into his personal circle of the Inferno, even against his will, would bind them closer together. He had to hope so. He was desperate to get to the end of it, and when he did, he vowed to start clean—with Anna and with everything else.

“I need to go to Georgia,” Jake said again.

He had told her, already, about the Rutland attorney, William Gaylord, Esquire, who’d acted in conjunction with the seller’s out-of-state representation. He had told her about the Rose Parker who was the right age, and had once lived in Athens, Georgia. Now he told her what he had learned by spending five dollars on a twenty-four-hour pass to the online Vermont Town Clerks Portal: the name and address of that out-of-state attorney, an Arthur Pickens, Esquire. Also of Athens, Georgia.

“So?” said Anna.

“You know what else is in Athens, Georgia? An enormous university.”

“Well, okay, but that’s hardly a smoking gun. More like a big coincidence.”

“Okay, if it’s a coincidence, then I’ll find that out. And then I can just resign myself to letting this woman destroy our lives. But first, I want to know if she’s still there, or if not, then I want to know where she went when she left.”

Anna shook her head. They had reached the Ninth Avenue entrance to Chelsea Market, and people were streaming out. “But why can’t you just call this guy? Why do you actually need to fly down there?”

“I think I’ll have a better chance of getting in to see him if I just turn up. That seemed to work in Vermont. You can come with me, you know.”

But she couldn’t. She needed to go back to Seattle to finish dealing with her stuff in storage and take care of some final business with KBIK. Already she’d put that off a couple of times, and now her boss at the podcast studio had asked Anna not to travel later in June (when he was getting married and going to China on a honeymoon) or July (when he’d be attending a podcasting conference in Orlando). Anna had been planning her trip for next week, and Jake couldn’t persuade her to change her plans, so he gave up trying, and there remained a palpable tension between them. He booked his flight to Atlanta for the following Monday, and then he spent the intervening days finishing his revisions for Wendy. He sent off the manuscript late on Sunday night and when he turned his phone on after the plane landed in Atlanta the following afternoon, there was an email letting him know the book had been put into production. So that particular weight, at least, fell away.

Atlanta was a city he had passed through a couple of times on his book tours but never really visited. He picked up a car at the airport and headed northeast to Athens, passing through Decatur, where many months earlier, as Crib first surged into the national consciousness, he’d attended a book festival and experienced his first “entrance applause.” He remembered that day—only two years ago—and the strange, disembodied feeling of being known by someone (in this case, by many someones) he himself did not know, and the sense of wonder that he had actually written a book strangers had paid money to buy, and spent time to read, and liked enough to have filed into the DeKalb County Courthouse just to see him and hear him say, presumably, something of interest. How far from that heady moment to this, Jake thought, passing the exit signs for Decatur on 285. He wondered if he would be permitted to feel pride in his new book when it came out, or whether he’d ever be able to write anything else after this ordeal, even if he did, somehow, manage to bring it to a peaceful conclusion. And if he didn’t, if this woman succeeded in bringing him to his knees, shaming him before his peers and his readers and everyone else who’d placed their own professional reputation in support of his, Jake wondered how he could continue to hold up his head in the world, not just as a writer but as a person.