The Plot полностью

“Most of these girls, they got their beds covered with stuffed animals, like they’re six years old. Every inch of the wall has posters. Throw pillows all over the place. A mini fridge in every room so they don’t have to walk more than a few steps to get a can of pop. Some of these apartments, you can barely turn around in for all the things they bring. Rose kept hers pretty plain, and she was a tidy person. Like I said, mature.”

“Did she ever speak about anyone else in her family?”

Carole shook her head. “Don’t remember that, no. She never mentioned a father. Your cousin?”

“They weren’t together, the parents. Not for most of Rose’s life,” Jake said, thinking quickly. “That’s probably why.”

The woman nodded. She had two thin braids of highly distressed orange hair. “I only ever heard her talk about her mother. But of course, that horrible thing with her mom had just happened, right before she got here. Probably that was the only thing on her mind.” She shook her head. “So horrible.”

“You’re talking about … the fire, right?” said Jake. “Was it a car crash?”

That’s what he’d been imagining, he realized, ever since the Parker Tavern, and Sally’s indelible she burned up. Obviously it hadn’t been at the house; Sylvia or Betty would have said so, folding that into the carbon monoxide poisoning and the overdose, just another dreadful thing that had taken place in an old family home where people were born and died. Since that night at the Parker Tavern with Sally he’d imagined it pretty consistently as car hits ditch, car flips, car somersaults downhill, car bursts into flame, and he could see a hundred film and television variations on that sequence, perhaps with the addition of a tragic/lucky passenger who’d managed to get out in time, screaming and crying and staring down at the conflagration from the road above.

“Oh no,” said Carole Feeney. “Poor thing was in a tent. Rose just barely got out in time, had to watch it happen. Nothing at all she could do.”

“In a tent? They were … what, camping?”

It was the kind of astonishing detail a cousin of an ex-husband of a fatal accident victim probably ought to have known. But he hadn’t known it.

“Driving down here to Athens, from up north. I guess, you said, Vermont.” She fixed him with a look. “Not everybody has the money to stay in a hotel, you know. She told me, once, if she hadn’t gone so far away from home to go to school, her mother would still be okay, not in some plot in north Georgia.”

Jake was staring at her. “Wait,” he said. “Wait, this happened in Georgia?”

“Rose had to bury her mama in a cemetery up there, in the town near where it happened. Can you imagine?”

He couldn’t. Well, he could, but then again, the problem wasn’t imagining it, the problem was making sense of it.

“Why wouldn’t she bring her home, to be buried in Vermont? The whole family is buried in Vermont!”

“You know what? I didn’t ask her that,” Carole said, with abundant sarcasm. “You think that’s a question to ask somebody who just lost her mother? She didn’t have anybody back there where she came from. It was just her and her mama, she told me. No sisters or brothers. And like I said, I never heard a single thing about your cousin,” Carole said meaningfully. “Maybe it made sense to her, to just take care of it up there. But if you find her, you can definitely ask her.”

The interview, such as it was, appeared to be deteriorating. Jake frantically tried to think of what he still needed to know.

“She left the university after her freshman year. Do you have any idea where she went?”

Carole shook her head. “Didn’t know she was going till they told me to clean up her place, after the fact. I wasn’t really surprised she decided to go somewhere else to study. This is a party school. She was no party girl.”

He nodded, as if he, too, was aware of this.

“And there’s no one else who lived here then, who she might have kept in touch with?”

Carole considered. “No. Like I said, I don’t think she had much in common with the other students. Even those couple of years, it makes a big difference at that age.”

“Wait,” said Jake. “How old was she, would you say, when she was living here?”

“I never asked.” She stood up. “Sorry I can’t help you. I hate to think of her as missing.”

“Wait,” he said again. He was reaching into a back pocket for his phone. “Just … can I show you a picture?” He was looking for the blurry girl on the field hockey team: short 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.