“I can’t see why you’d have an interest in those two crazy girls from Pine Mountain,” he said. “Not that I have any idea why you’d be interested in the woman who died. Except she wasn’t from here and obviously neither are you.”
“I’m from New York,” said Jake, confirming the man’s worst suspicions.
“And so was she?”
“Vermont.”
“Well.” He shrugged, as if his point had been proved.
“I knew her brother,” Jake said, after a moment.
This had the advantage of being, at least, true.
“Ah. Well, awful thing. Terrible to see. The sister was hysterical.”
Jake, who didn’t trust himself to answer, merely nodded. Sister.
“So you were there that night,” said Jake.
“No. But I was there the next morning. Nothing for the EMTs to do, so they waited for us to do the removal.”
“Do you mind if I ask you about it?”
“You’re already asking about it,” he said. “If I minded I’d have stopped you already.”
Mike owned the store along with his two brothers, one of whom was in prison, the other in the stockroom. That one emerged at around this time, and looked at Mike for an explanation.
“Wants to know about Foxfire camp,” said Mike.
“Gotcher license?” the brother said. “Can sell you one, if you don’t.”
Jake wished he could avoid going through this again. “I’ve never fished, actually. I won’t be starting today. I’m a writer.”
“Writers don’t fish?” Mike grinned.
“This one doesn’t.”
“What do you write? Movies?”
“Novels.”
“Fictional novels?”
He sighed. “Yes. My name’s Jake.” He shook hands with both brothers.
“You writing a novel about that woman at Foxfire?”
It was a bit much to explain that he’d already written one.
“No. Like I said, I knew her brother.”
“I’ll drive you out, if you want,” Mike said. His brother from the stockroom looked about as surprised as Jake himself was to hear it.
“Really? That’s incredibly kind of you.”
“I think Lee can hold down the fort here.”
“Think I can,” the brother said.
“Not that you couldn’t find it on your own.”
Jake had serious doubts that he could find it on his own.
They took Mike’s truck, which had the detritus of at least four meals underfoot and reeked of menthols, and for eleven miles of slow country road Jake had to hear far more than he wished to know about the taxes generated by trout fishing in north Georgia, and how little of it went back into the community it came out of and not into, say, subsidies for Obamacare in other parts of the state, but all that was worth it when they turned off the road onto a track Jake absolutely would have missed if he’d attempted this on his own. And even if he hadn’t, he’d still have given up long before finishing the next part of the route, along a dirt track miles deep into the woods.
“There,” Mike said, cutting the engine.
But it was also pretty. Very pretty and very tranquil and so surrounded by forest he could only imagine what it must be like out here in the dead of night. Really the last place in the world you’d want to have a crisis of any kind, let alone of a life-threatening nature. Unless it was exactly the place you wanted to have that kind of a crisis.
“I can show you which site they had, if you want.”
He walked behind Mike along the creek and then left, past two or three unoccupied campsites, each with its own fire pit and tent pitch, and farther back into the woods.
“Was anyone else staying out here that night?”
“One of the other campsites was occupied, but you see how it’s set up. They’re pretty spread out, along different paths. Even if the sister’d known there was someone nearby she probably wouldn’t have known how to find them, especially in the dark. And I doubt they’d of been much help even if she managed it. They were a couple from Spartanburg in their seventies. Slept through the whole thing, came out in the morning to load up their car and dump their trash and found the parking lot full of EMTs and the fire marshal. No idea what was going on.”
“So which way did she go to get help? The sister. Out toward the road?”
“Yep. Two miles from here to the main road, and when she got out there, no cars, obviously, at four in the morning. Took another couple of hours before somebody came along. By then she was a couple of miles closer to Pine Mountain. And it was a cold night, and she was just in flip-flops and a long T-shirt. People can be surprised by how cold it gets up in the mountains. Even in August. But I guess they’d been planning for that.”
Jake frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Well, they had the heater, didn’t they?”
“You mean, like, an electric heater?”
