“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
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.