The Plot, Jean Korelitz [read e books online free txt] 📗

bangs, large round glasses. Because that was all he had, the only proof of the Rose Parker who’d powered through high school in three years and left home at the start of what would otherwise have been her senior year, and who should have arrived here in Georgia as a motherless sixteen-year-old. “I just want to make sure,” he told Carol Feeney, holding it out to show her.

The woman leaned closer, and immediately he saw the concern fall away from her. She straightened up.

“That’s not Rose.” Carole Feeney shook her head. “You’re talking about somebody else. Well, that’s a relief. The girl’s been through enough.”

“But … this is her. This is Rose Parker.”

She indulged him by looking at it again, but this time for no longer than a second.

“No it isn’t,” she said.

CRIB

BY JACOB FINCH BONNER

Macmillan, New York, 2017, pages 245–46

She made a point of returning a couple of times that first year, and when she ran into people she knew in Earlsville or Hamilton, people she’d been around her entire life, she let them know how Maria was doing at Ohio State.

“She’s going to major in history,” she told the teller at her bank as she arranged a transfer of funds to her daughter’s account in Columbus.

“She’s thinking of transferring,” she told old Fortis himself, when she saw him getting out of his car at the Price Chopper. “Wants to see more of the country.”

“Well, who can blame her?” he said.

“She seems really happy out there,” she told Gab, who turned up at the house one day.

“I just happened to be passing by. I saw your car?” Gab said, as if it was a question. “I never see your car anymore, when I pass by.”

“I have a boyfriend just outside Albany,” Samantha said. “I’m spending a lot of time out there with him.”

“Oh.”

Gab, it turned out, had been emailing Maria since August, texting her, calling her until she got a message that the number was no longer functional.

“She was hoping you’d get the message,” Samantha told her. “I’m sorry to be the one telling you this, but Maria has a serious girlfriend now. It’s someone in her philosophy class. A very brilliant young woman.”

“Oh,” the girl said again. She left a painful five minutes later, so that was the end of that. Or should have been.

“I’m thinking of moving out to Ohio, to live with my daughter there,” she told the woman in the local ReMax office. “I’m wondering how much you think my house is worth.”

It was worth a lot less than she wanted for it, but she sold it anyway that spring, and Samantha drove the Subaru west again, though this time with a U-Haul van attached and without a detour to Pennsylvania.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVENFoxfire

Even before he called her, he knew she’d be upset. Her own flight to Seattle was coming up soon and Jake had been scheduled to return the following morning after two days of a trip she hadn’t wanted him to make in the first place; instead he was changing his plans, extending his rental car, and, worst of all, driving north to a place he’d never even heard of before today, in a part of Georgia he’d never had any reason to visit. Until now.

“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