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

The waitress returned with their food, and it looked and smelled so good that Jake nearly forgot what it was they were talking about. He hadn’t known exactly what it was he was ordering. He still didn’t know. But he fell on it.

“Were you out at the campsite yourself?”

Roy shrugged. Unlike Jake, who was shoveling that chicken into his mouth, the coroner was delaying gratification, delicately cutting his trout.

“I was. I got there at about six in the morning, not that there was much to see. The tent went up almost completely. There was a little bedding left, and a couple pots, and the heater. And the body, of course. But the body was completely charred. I took some pictures, and had the remains taken down to the morgue.”

“And could you tell anything more once you got it there?”

Roy looked up. “What, in particular, do you think I was supposed to tell? I had a body that looked like a piece of charcoal. You ever hear that thing about hoofbeats in the park?”

It sounded vaguely familiar to Jake, but he said no.

“You hear hoofbeats in the park, do you think horses or zebras?”

“I don’t get it,” said Mike.

“You think horses,” Jake said.

“Right. Because it’s going to be far more likely there’s wild horses in the park than wild zebras.”

“I still don’t get it,” said Mike. “What park has wild horses running around in it?”

He had a good point.

“So you’re saying, it was pretty obvious this woman burned to death.”

“I’m saying no such thing. It was obvious she had burned, absolutely. But burned to death? That’s why you go to the scene, for one thing, to see if the person moved during the fire. People who are burning alive tend to move around. People who are already dead, or at least unconscious, usually don’t. And even though coroners do think horses, we’re trained to check for zebras. This body had a range of PMCT, appropriate to the circumstances.”

“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