“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