Rabun County

A 32-year-old woman perished in the early hours of Sunday, August 26th at approximately 2 A.M. in a tent fire at the Foxfire Campground in the Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest. Dianna Parker, of West Rutland, Vermont, had been camping with her sister, Rose Parker, 26, who escaped the blaze and was eventually able to raise the alarm. Paramedics from Rabun County EMS and members of Georgia State Patrol Troop C responded but destruction of the campsite was complete by the time they reached the campgrounds.

He sent her the link now, along with the question: Don’t you see the issue here?

She didn’t. He didn’t blame her.

“Rose Parker was 16. Not 26.”

“So there’s a typo. One digit. Human error.”

“Sister?” he said. “Not daughter?”

“It’s a mistake. Look, Jake, I grew up in a small town. These local papers, they’re not The New York Times.”

“It’s not a mistake. It’s a lie. Look,” he said, “don’t you find it interesting that nobody seems to get sick in this family? Everyone dies suddenly in some kind of unexpected event. Carbon monoxide poisoning. Drug overdose. A tent fire, for God’s sake! That’s a lot to accept.”

“Well, people do die, Jake, in all those ways. There weren’t always carbon monoxide detectors—even with them people still get poisoned, sometimes. They also overdose. There’s an opiate crisis in this country, as you might be aware. And in Seattle we had tent fires in the homeless encampments all the time.”

She was right, he told her, but he was still going to take another day to drive up there. Maybe he’d find someone to talk to, who’d been at the accident site, or who’d maybe even spoken with the survivor at the time. And he could visit the campsite where the fire had happened.

“But why?” she said, with great exasperation. “Some campsite in the woods? What do you think you’re going to learn from that?”

He didn’t honestly know.

“Also I want to see where she’s buried.”

But that he could defend even less.

In the morning he drove north across the Piedmont Plateau and into the Blue Ridge Mountains, lovely enough to prod aside, temporarily, his ongoing preoccupations. What he would say when he got to Rabun Gap, and whom he would say it to, were unanswered questions, but he couldn’t stop himself from feeling there was some final insight waiting for him ahead, something that justified not only the long drive (which was very much not in the direction of the Atlanta airport) and the expense of the extra day and rescheduled flight, but most of all the obvious disapproval of his wife. Something he couldn’t learn anywhere else. Something that would confirm for him, finally, who this person was, and why she’d come after him, and how he could get her to stop.

He had found the campground easily on Google Maps, but finding it in actuality was considerably more difficult since his phone’s GPS seemed to falter the moment he entered the mountains. He had to resort to the decidedly analog method of stopping at a general store in Clayton to ask directions, and this required an obscure exchange of information before the information could be forthcoming.

“Gotcher license?” said the man behind the counter, when Jake explained what he was looking for.

“Beg your pardon?”

“We can sell you one, if you don’t.”

License for what? he wanted to ask, but it didn’t seem like a great way to establish a rapport.

“Oh, well, that’s good.”

The man grinned. His sideburns were so long they rounded the corner along his jaw, but didn’t meet at the chin. The chin had a dimple, à la Kirk Douglas. Maybe that was why.

“Not here to fish, I’m guessing.”

“Oh. No. Just trying to find the campground.”

Foxfire’s draw, as the man happily (and at length) explained to him, was trout fishing. Jilly Creek, just south of the waterfall, was a popular spot.

“How far from here, would you say?”

“I’d say twenty minutes. East on Warwoman Road for eleven miles. Left on the forest service road. Then it’s about two miles along.”

“How many campsites are there?” said Jake.

“How many do you need?” The man laughed.

“Actually,” said Jake, “I don’t need any. I’m just interested in something that happened there, a couple of years ago. Maybe you remember.”

The guy stopped smiling. “Maybe I do. Maybe I have a pretty good idea what you’re talking about.”

His name was Mike. He was a north Georgia lifer and, by an undeserved stroke of luck, a volunteer fireman. Two years earlier, his company had been called to the Foxfire Campground on a crowded summer afternoon to break up a fight between two women, one of whom had suffered a broken wrist. Five years before that, a woman had burned to death in a tent in the middle of the night. Apart from those two incidents, the only notable occurrences of the past several decades had involved the failure to release undersized trout.

“I can’t see why you’d have an interest in those two crazy girls from Pine Mountain,” he said. “Not that I have any idea why you’d be interested in the woman who died. Except she wasn’t from here and obviously neither are you.”

“I’m from New York,” said Jake, confirming the man’s worst suspicions.

“And so was she?”

“Vermont.”

“Well.” He shrugged, as if his point had been proved.

“I knew her brother,” Jake said, after a moment.

This had the advantage of being, at least, true.

“Ah. Well, awful thing. Terrible to see. The sister was hysterical.”

Jake, who didn’t trust himself to answer, merely nodded. Sister.

“So you were there that night,” said Jake.

“No. But I was there the next morning. Nothing for the EMTs to do, so they waited for us to do the removal.”

“Do you mind if I ask you about it?”

“You’re already asking about it,” he said. “If I minded I’d have stopped you already.”

Mike owned the store along with his two brothers, one of whom was in prison, the other in the stockroom. That one emerged at around this time, and looked at Mike for an explanation.

“Wants to know about Foxfire camp,” said Mike.

“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.