“Vermont,” said Jake.
“That’s right. She told me they’d visited a few of the battlefields, and were making their way down to Atlanta. They were going to keep going till New Orleans.”
“Nothing about going to college, then?”
For the first time, the coroner looked genuinely surprised. “College?”
“It’s just, I’d heard they were on their way to Athens.”
“Well, I couldn’t say. Just a trip, as far as I was told, then back up north. Most people coming through Rabun Gap are on their way to Atlanta, maybe stopping to fish or camp. Nothing out of the ordinary for us.”
“I understand she’s buried here,” said Jake. “Dianna Parker is. How did that happen?”
“We have some provisions,” Roy said. “The indigent, people whose next of kin we can’t locate. One of the nurses took me aside and asked if we couldn’t do something for this young woman. She had no other family, and also she didn’t look like she had the means to ship her sister’s body anywhere. So we made the offer. It was the right thing to do. A Christian gesture.”
“I see.” Jake nodded, but he was still numb. Mike, he noticed, had cleaned his plate. The next time the waitress passed, he asked for pie. Jake himself had given up halfway through, or at about the time Roy had used the word “charcoal” to describe the body at the Foxfire Campground.
“I’ll tell you the truth, I was a little surprised she said yes. People can be very proud. But she thought it over and she accepted. One of the local funeral parlors donated the coffin. And there was a plot over at the Pickett Cemetery they made available to us. It’s a pretty place.”
“My grammaw’s there,” said Mike, apropos of nothing.
“So we had a little service, a couple days later. We ordered a headstone, just the name and the dates.”
Mike’s pie arrived. Jake stared at it. His thoughts were racing. He couldn’t let them out.
“You all right?”
He looked up. The coroner was looking at him, though more with curiosity than obvious concern. Jake put the back of his hand to his own forehead, and it came away wet. “Sure,” he managed to say.
“You know,” he said, “it wouldn’t kill you to tell us what this is about. You knew the family? Not sure I believe that.”
“It’s actually true,” said Jake, but it sounded lame, even to him.
“We’re used to conspiracy theorists. Coroners are. People watch TV shows, or they read mystery novels. They think every death has a devious plot behind it, or an undetectable poison, or some crazy obscure method we’ve never seen before.”
Jake smiled weakly. He’d never been one of those people, ironically enough.
“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. Aft
er 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
She’d been renting a small house on East Whittier Street in German Village, about five miles from campus, a quiet neighborhood with not too many OSU students. She still did her bill processing for Bassett Healthcare but mainly at night, keeping the days free for classes: history, philosophy, political science. It was all pleasure, even the term papers, even the exams, even the fact that she was obligated to lose herself among the 60,000 enrolled students on the Columbus campus and never become too familiar to her teachers; the deep thrill of having resurrected and met her once and forever goal, her so long buried goal, carried her through every day of her new life. Where would she be by now without that eighteen-year pause? Working as a lawyer, possibly, or a professor of some kind? A scientist or a doctor? Maybe even a writer! It didn’t bear thinking about, she supposed. She was somewhere now that she had given up all hope of being.
One afternoon at the end of May she arrived home to discover that most unwelcome mouse, Gab, waiting for her on the doorstep with a sad little backpack.
“Let’s go inside,” Samantha said, hustling her into the sitting room. As soon as the door closed, she demanded: “What are you doing here?”
“I got Maria’s address at the campus registrar,” said the girl. She was small, but covered in an extra layer of flesh. “I didn’t realize you were out here, too.”
“I moved a few months ago,” Samantha said tersely. “I sold our house.”
“Yeah.” She nodded. Her lank hair fell against her cheeks. “I heard that.”
“I told you, she has another girlfriend now.”
“No, I know. Only I’m driving to the West Coast. I want to try and live out there. I’m not sure where, yet. Probably San Francisco, but maybe LA. And I thought, I was passing by Columbus, so …”
She did a lot of passing by, this girl.
“So?”
“I just thought, it would be really nice to see Maria. Get some, you know …”
Closure? Samantha thought. She had a particular distaste for the word.
“Closure.”
“Oh. Of course. Well, she’s up at campus now. But she ought to be home in an hour or so. I’ll pick up a pizza for the three of us. Why don’t you come with me?”
So Gab did, which was just as well. Samantha certainly didn’t want her poking around the house with its single bedroom, wondering where Maria slept at night. She asked Gab polite questions as they drove to Luigi’s, where Samantha often ordered pizza, and learned that she—like Samantha herself—had no intention of ever returning to their hometown or maintaining ties to any living person there. Everything Gab owned, in fact, was in the Hyundai Accent she was bravely driving west, and once this last little bit of closure was achieved, she intended to head off, literally, into the sunset. That is, Samantha supposed, unless she made some unfortunate discovery here in Columbus that warranted a return to Earlville, New York. But really, it was all unfortunate discovery at this point. Wasn’t it? “I’ll just be a minute,” she said as she went inside to pick up the pie.
Later, as Gab set the table for three in the small dining room, Samantha crushed a handful of peanuts between a metal spatula and the countertop, and pressed them under the oily discs of pepperoni.
Pepperoni, of course.
Because she remembered that.
Because she had been a good mother, and even if she hadn’t, there was no one left to disagree about that now.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Such a Waste of Energy
When he arrived home, Anna wasn’t there, but a pot of her green soup was on the stove and a bottle of Merlot open on the table. The sight of the two Pottery Barn place settings cheered him far more than the plain fact of them—or even the soup, or even the wine—might have warranted, but then again: he was home. That, on its own, would have been enough. But also, it had been so worth it, to know for sure.
He went into the bedroom and unpacked his bag extracting the bottle of Stillhouse Creek bourbon he’d picked up on the drive back to the Atlanta airport. Then he opened his laptop and saw, to his disbelief, that another message had been forwarded from the contact form on his website. He stared at it, and then he took a deep breath and clicked to open it.
Here’s the statement I’m getting ready to release in a day or two. Any corrections before it goes out?
“In 2013, while ‘teaching’ at Ripley College, Jacob ‘Finch’ Bonner encountered a student named Evan Parker who shared with him a novel he was writing. Parker died unexpectedly later that year, after which Bonner produced the novel called Crib with no acknowledgment of its true author. We call on Macmillan Publishers to confirm its commitment to original writing by authors of integrity, and to retract this fraudulent work.”
A jab at the artifice of his middle name—annoying, but it wasn’t exactly a secret: Jake had told innumerable interviewers about his love for Atticus Finch and To Kill a Mockingbird. An indictment of his worth as a teacher—that was new, and more than mildly annoying. But the headlines here were the imminent intention to publish, and the insinuation that he had stolen every word of Crib, rather than its plot alone, from its unfortunate “true” author. And was it Jake’s undeniable paranoia, or was there also a suggestion that he was somehow responsible for the unexpected death of that true author, his former student?
All things considered, he ought to be terrified by this latest missive, but even as Jake sat on the edge of his own bed and let the awfulness of the message pass over him, he wasn’t afraid. That “we,” for one thing, radiated weakness, like the invented comrades of the Unabomber or any other demented loner on a noble quest from his basement. More to the point, Jake now understood that his correspondent wanted to avoid exposure every bit as much as he did himself. The time had come for him to hit that Return button on their so far one-way conversation, and reveal that he knew who she was and was prepared to make her story known. And not his previous, unwitting version of that story, this time, but the actual, factual account of what she had done to her own daughter, and the fraudulent identity she was presenting to the world. And didn’t that make for a pretty compelling story of its own? Like, cover of People magazine compelling? In fact, Jake sat for a distinctly enjoyable moment, mentally composing his very first—and with luck, his last—email to her:
The Plot Page 26
