“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.
“Was anyone else staying out here that night?”
“One of the other campsites was occupied, but you see how it’s set up. They’re pretty spread out, along different paths. Even if the sister’d known there was someone nearby she probably wouldn’t have known how to find them, especially in the dark. And I doubt they’d of been much help even if she managed it. They were a couple from Spartanburg in their seventies. Slept through the whole thing, came out in the morning to load up their car and dump their trash and found the parking lot full of EMTs and the fire marshal. No idea what was going on.”
“So which way did she go to get help? The sister. Out toward the road?”
“Yep. Two miles from here to the main road, and when she got out there, no cars, obviously, at four in the morning. Took another couple of hours before somebody came along. By then she was a couple of miles closer to Pine Mountain. And it was a cold night, and she was just in flip-flops and a long T-shirt. People can be surprised by how cold it gets up in the mountains. Even in August. But I guess they’d been planning for that.”
Jake frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Well, they had the heater, didn’t they?”
“You mean, like, an electric heater?”
Mike, still a couple of steps ahead, turned back to give Jake a look.
“Not an electric heater. A propane heater.”
“And that’s how the fire started?”
“Well, it’s a pretty good bet!” Mike actually laughed. “Usually you’re worried about CO2 with those puppies, but you never want to set them down near anything, or put anything over them, or have them in a place somebody can knock them over. The newer ones can detect if they fall over. There’s an alarm that sounds. But this one wasn’t new.” He shrugged. “We think that’s what happened, anyway. She told the coroner she got up to use the toilet in the middle of the night. Walked down there to where we parked. Gone about ten minutes in all. Afterward, she said she might have brushed against it when she went out. Maybe it could’ve fallen over. She was a total mess, talking about it.”
He stopped. They were in a clearing, about thirty feet long. Jake could still hear the creek but now the wind in the tall pines and hickories overhead were just as loud. Mike had his hands in his pockets. His native irreverence seemed to have departed.
“So this is it?”
“Yep. The tent was over there.” He nodded at the cleared, flat place. There was a fire pit beside it, not recently used.
“It’s really the back of beyond,” Jake heard himself say.
“Sure. Or center of the universe, if you like to camp.”
He wondered if Rose and Dianna Parker liked to camp. He realized, again, how little he knew about them, and how much of what he thought he knew had turned out to be wrong. That’s what happens when you learn about people from a novel—somebody else’s or your own, just the same.
“Too bad she didn’t have a phone with her,” Jake said.
“She had one, but it was inside the tent, and by the time she got back the whole thing was in flames. It just went up, and everything in it.” He paused. “Not that it would’ve worked out here, anyway.”
Jake looked at him. “What?”
“The phone. You found that out yourself.”
Indeed he had.
“Do you have any idea why they were here?” he asked Mike. “Two women from Vermont at a campground in Georgia?”
Mike shrugged. “Nope. I never talked to her. Roy Porter did, though. He’s the coroner in Rabun Gap. I just assumed they were traveling around, camping. If you knew the family you probably have a better idea than either of us.” He peered at Jake. “You did say you knew the family.”
“I knew the brother of the woman who died, but I never asked him about it. And he died a year after this.” He gestured at the campground.
“Yeah? Bad luck in that family.”
“The worst,” Jake had to agree. If it was luck. “Do you think the coroner would talk to me?”