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

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.”

“That’s fucking insane,” said Mike.

Then, after a long and profoundly unpleasant moment, Roy Porter began, absurdly, to grin. He grinned and grinned and then he actually laughed.

“I know what this is,” he said.

“What?” said Mike.

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” said Jake.

“That book! It’s that book everybody was reading last year. My wife read it, she told me the story when she finished. The mother kills the daughter, right? And takes her place?”

“Oh, you know,” said Mike, “I heard about that book. My mom read it in her book club.”

“What was it called?” said Roy, still staring at Jake.

“I can’t remember,” Mike said, and Jake, who did remember, said nothing.

“That’s what this is! That’s the tale you’re trying to spin here, isn’t it?” The coroner had gotten to his feet. He wasn’t a very tall man, but he was managing a sharp downward angle over Jake. He wasn’t grinning now. “You read that crazy plot in the book and you thought you’d see if you could twist what happened here to make it like that. You outta your mind?”

“Shit” was Mike’s contribution. He was getting to his feet as well. “What kind of pathetic—?”

“I’m not”—Jake had to force himself to say these words—“spinning a tale. I’m trying to find out what happened.”

“What happened is exactly what I told you,” Roy Porter said. “That poor woman died in an accidental fire, and I only hope her sister’s been able to put it behind her and get on with her life. I have no idea who’s in this picture on your phone, and for that matter I have no idea who you are, but I think what you’re implying is sick. That’s Dianna Parker in the plot out there at Pickett. Her sister left town a day or so after we buried her. If she’s ever been back to visit the grave, I couldn’t say.”

Well, I wouldn’t put money on it, thought Jake, watching the two of them go.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHTThe End of the Line

Afterward, he ordered a slice of that pie Mike had eaten, and a cup of coffee, and he sat for a good long while, trying to think it through, but every time he felt it come nearly into his grasp it slipped away again. Truth being stranger than fiction was, itself, a truth universally acknowledged, but if that was true why did we always fight so hard against it?

A mother and daughter, viciously entwined—that was everyday life in more families than not.

A mother and daughter capable of committing violent acts upon each other—thankfully more rare, but hardly unheard of.

A daughter who would murder her mother and arrange to benefit from her death—that was the stuff of sensational true crime: yes, sensational, but yes, also true.

But a mother who would take the life