“Have I had cases I wondered about, second-guessed myself about? Sure. Did a gun ‘just go off’? Did somebody just happen to slip and fall on an icy step? Plenty of things I’ll never know for sure, and they stay with me. But this wasn’t one of them. Let me tell you something: this is exactly what it looks like when somebody burns to death in a tent because a heater falls over. This is exactly what it looks like when somebody loses a close relation, suddenly and traumatically. And now you’re here asking some pretty provocative questions about people you never met. You’ve obviously got something on your mind. What is it you think happened, anyway?”

For a long moment, Jake said nothing. Then he took his phone from his jacket pocket and found the photograph. He held it out to them.

“Who’s this?” said Mike.

The coroner was looking closely.

“Do you know?” Jake said.

“Am I supposed to? I never saw this girl.”

Oddly, what Jake felt most about that was relief.

“This is Rose Parker. By which I mean, the real Rose Parker. Who, by the way, wasn’t Dianna Parker’s sister. She was her daughter. She was sixteen years old, and she actually was on her way to Athens to register as a freshman at the university. But she didn’t make it. She’s right here in Clayton, Georgia, in your donated coffin, buried in your donated plot under your donated headstone.”

“That’s fucking insane,” said Mike.

Then, after a long and profoundly unpleasant moment, Roy Porter began, absurdly, to grin. He grinned and grinned and then he actually laughed.

“I know what this is,” he said.

“What?” said Mike.

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” said Jake.

“That book! It’s that book everybody was reading last year. My wife read it, she told me the story when she finished. The mother kills the daughter, right? And takes her place?”

“Oh, you know,” said Mike, “I heard about that book. My mom read it in her book club.”

“What was it called?” said Roy, still staring at Jake.

“I can’t remember,” Mike said, and Jake, who did remember, said nothing.

“That’s what this is! That’s the tale you’re trying to spin here, isn’t it?” The coroner had gotten to his feet. He wasn’t a very tall man, but he was managing a sharp downward angle over Jake. He wasn’t grinning now. “You read that crazy plot in the book and you thought you’d see if you could twist what happened here to make it like that. You outta your mind?”

“Shit” was Mike’s contribution. He was getting to his feet as well. “What kind of pathetic—?”

“I’m not”—Jake had to force himself to say these words—“spinning a tale. I’m trying to find out what happened.”

“What happened is exactly what I told you,” Roy Porter said. “That poor woman died in an accidental fire, and I only hope her sister’s been able to put it behind her and get on with her life. I have no idea who’s in this picture on your phone, and for that matter I have no idea who you are, but I think what you’re implying is sick. That’s Dianna Parker in the plot out there at Pickett. Her sister left town a day or so after we buried her. If she’s ever been back to visit the grave, I couldn’t say.”

Well, I wouldn’t put money on it, thought Jake, watching the two of them go.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

The End of the Line

Afterward, he ordered a slice of that pie Mike had eaten, and a cup of coffee, and he sat for a good long while, trying to think it through, but every time he felt it come nearly into his grasp it slipped away again. Truth being stranger than fiction was, itself, a truth universally acknowledged, but if that was true why did we always fight so hard against it?

A mother and daughter, viciously entwined—that was everyday life in more families than not.

A mother and daughter capable of committing violent acts upon each other—thankfully more rare, but hardly unheard of.

A daughter who would murder her mother and arrange to benefit from her death—that was the stuff of sensational true crime: yes, sensational, but yes, also true.

But a mother who would take the life of her own daughter, then take it again, to live it herself? That was legend. That was the plot of a novel that could sell millions of copies and form the basis of a film by what Evan Parker had once called an “A-list director.” That was a plot someone’s mother would read in a book group in Clayton, Georgia, that would sell out a Seattle venue with 2,400 seats, that would get its author on the New York Times bestseller list and the cover of Poets & Writers. It was a plot to kill for, Jake supposed, though he himself had done no such thing; he had merely picked it up off the ground. A sure thing, Evan Parker had once called his story, and it absolutely had been that. But he might also have called it: the story of what my sister did to her daughter. He might have called it: the story somebody might come after me for telling, because it isn’t mine to tell. He might even have called it: the story it wasn’t worth dying for.

Jake paid the bill and left the Clayton Café. He got back in his car and found his way out to the cemetery, driving past the Rabun County Historical Society and then left on Pickett Hill Street, a narrow and overgrown road into the woods. After about half a mile, he passed a sign for the cemetery and slowed his car to a crawl. It was the last hour of light, and he felt lost in the trees. He thought of the places this unasked-for and unwanted adventure had taken him, from the tavern in Rutland, to the downmarket apartment complex in Athens, to the emptiness of this clearing in the north Georgia woods. It felt like the end of the line, which it was. Where could there be, after this? One way or the other, it came down to this plot of earth and the obliterated body underground. The track ended when he saw the headstones.

There were many graves, a hundred at least, and the first ones he came to dated from the 1800s. Picketts, Rameys, Shooks, and Wellborns, elderly men who’d fought in the world wars, children who’d lived for months or years, mothers and newborns buried together. He wondered if he’d already walked past Mike’s grammaw, or the graves of other recipients of Clayton’s generosity to the indigent and abandoned. The light was going fast now, leaving a deep blue above, and orange through the forest to the west. It was a peaceful place to spend eternity, that was clear.

He found it, finally, at the far edge of the clearing. The plot was marked by a simple stone, flat on the dirt and slightly reddish in color, with the name of the assigned occupant: DIANNA PARKER, 1980–2012. Simple, remarkably understated, and yet the horror it held rooted him to the spot. “Who are you?” he said out loud, but that was purely rhetorical. Because he knew. He’d known the moment he saw those old pineapples stenciled around the door of the Parker home in West Rutland, and everyone he’d spoken with in Georgia—the outraged attorney and the cleaner who hadn’t recognized Rose Parker from her high school field hockey photo, the defensive coroner who heard hoofbeats and thought horses—only underscored that knowledge. He wanted to fall to the earth and claw away at it until he reached her, that poor girl, the tool and inconvenience of her mother’s life, but even if he made it through that impacted Georgia soil, all the way to her donated coffin and beyond, what would he find but handfuls of dust?

In the last of the light he took a photograph of the grave and sent it to his wife, with only the corrected name of the occupant attached. More would have to wait until he got home, for a face-to-face conversation. Then he would explain what had really happened here, how a young person on the verge of escape had wound up in a burial plot in backwoods Georgia with her mother’s name on the headstone. Looking down into the dirt, as if he could possibly see the murdered girl’s obliterated and entombed remains, it occurred to him that this strangest of stories warranted a full retelling, and this time no longer as fiction. In fact, maybe writing Rose Parker’s real story was where this had always been heading, an unprecedented opportunity to write his book, his miraculous Crib, a second time, illuminating the real story even its author hadn’t known existed. Matilda, when she pushed past the discomfort of it, would be intrigued, then excited. Wendy would be thrilled from the get-go: a deconstruction of the global bestseller by its own author? A phenomenon!

And even if writing it required Jake to come clean about his late student Evan Parker, he’d still be able to control the narrative as he soul-searched and pondered the deep questions about what fiction was and how it got made, on behalf of every one of his fellow novelists and short story writers! Crib’s second telling would be a meta-narrative, destined to vindicate every writer and resonate with every reader, and telling it would render him brave and bold as an artist. Besides, what was the point of being a famous writer if he couldn’t use his unique voice to tell this story only he could tell?

In the cemetery, the last of the light died around him.

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remained.

CRIB

BY JACOB FINCH BONNER

Macmillan, New York, 2017, page 280