“PMCT?”
“Post-mortem computed tomography. To look for fractures, metal objects.”
“You mean … like a knee replacement?”
Roy, who had been about to take a bite of his trout, stopped and looked at Jake in disbelief.
“I mean, like, a bullet.”
“Oh. So. No fractures, then.”
“No fractures. No foreign objects.” He paused. “No replaced knees.”
Mike was grinning. He continued to tear through his chicken.
“No bullets either. Just a lady who had burned to death in her tent, from a fire almost certainly started by a propane heater, which I personally saw was lying on its side.”
“Right,” said Jake. “But … what about identification? Did the PMCT help with that?”
“Identification,” said Roy.
“Well, yes.”
The coroner set down his fork. “Do you believe this young woman was mistaken about who she’d been sharing a tent with?”
Not exactly, thought Jake.
“But don’t you need to prove it?” he said.
“Are we on a television show?” said Roy Porter. “Am I Jack Klugman, solving crimes? I had a set of human remains and I had someone to make the identification. That is the standard at any morgue in the country. Should I have given her a DNA test?”
Which one of them? Jake thought blandly.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Well, then, let me assure you that Miss Parker was given the same protocol as any other identifying witness. She was interviewed—eventually—and signed an affidavit attesting to the identification.”
“Why eventually? Weren’t you able to speak with her out at the campground? Or in the morgue?”
“She was hysterical at the campground. And yes, I realize the term is out of favor today. But by then, remember, she’d seen her sister burn to death, and she’d been running around the back roads for a couple of hours in the middle of the night, in a T-shirt, trying to find help. She wasn’t doing any better by the time we reached the hospital. Bringing her down to the morgue was out of the question. She wasn’t sick, so she wasn’t admitted, but they didn’t want to let her go, either. She knew no one locally, and she’d just lost her sister. Gruesomely. Also, she believed she’d caused the accident by knocking against the heater as she went out of the tent. One of my colleagues in the emergency room made the decision to sedate her.”
“And you didn’t ask for any identification?”
“No. Because I was aware that her personal papers were in the tent. I believe she’d just left to use the bathroom. I don’t know what it’s like where you’re from, but we tend to leave our IDs at home when we go out to take a leak in the middle of the night.”
“So when were you able to speak with her?”
“The next morning. The GSP trooper and I took her to the cafeteria and got some food into her, and she gave us the basic details about what happened, and her sister’s name and age. Home address. Social security. She didn’t want anyone contacted.”
“No family members? Friends back home?”
He shook his head.
“Did she say why they were here? In Clayton?”
“They were just having a trip together. They’d never been out of wherever they were from, up north—”
“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.”