Mike, still a couple of steps ahead, turned back to give Jake a look.
“Not an electric heater. A propane heater.”
“And that’s how the fire started?”
“Well, it’s a pretty good bet!” Mike actually laughed. “Usually you’re worried about CO2 with those puppies, but you never want to set them down near anything, or put anything over them, or have them in a place somebody can knock them over. The newer ones can detect if they fall over. There’s an alarm that sounds. But this one wasn’t new.” He shrugged. “We think that’s what happened, anyway. She told the coroner she got up to use the toilet in the middle of the night. Walked down there to where we parked. Gone about ten minutes in all. Afterward, she said she might have brushed against it when she went out. Maybe it could’ve fallen over. She was a total mess, talking about it.”
He stopped. They were in a clearing, about thirty feet long. Jake could still hear the creek but now the wind in the tall pines and hickories overhead were just as loud. Mike had his hands in his pockets. His native irreverence seemed to have departed.
“So this is it?”
“Yep. The tent was over there.” He nodded at the cleared, flat place. There was a fire pit beside it, not recently used.
“It’s really the back of beyond,” Jake heard himself say.
“Sure. Or center of the universe, if you like to camp.”
He wondered if Rose and Dianna Parker liked to camp. He realized, again, how little he knew about them, and how much of what he thought he knew had turned out to be wrong. That’s what happens when you learn about people from a novel—somebody else’s or your own, just the same.
“Too bad she didn’t have a phone with her,” Jake said.
“She had one, but it was inside the tent, and by the time she got back the whole thing was in flames. It just went up, and everything in it.” He paused. “Not that it would’ve worked out here, anyway.”
Jake looked at him. “What?”
“The phone. You found that out yourself.”
Indeed he had.
“Do you have any idea why they were here?” he asked Mike. “Two women from Vermont at a campground in Georgia?”
Mike shrugged. “Nope. I never talked to her. Roy Porter did, though. He’s the coroner in Rabun Gap. I just assumed they were traveling around, camping. If you knew the family you probably have a better idea than either of us.” He peered at Jake. “You did say you knew the family.”
“I knew the brother of the woman who died, but I never asked him about it. And he died a year after this.” He gestured at the campground.
“Yeah? Bad luck in that family.”
“The worst,” Jake had to agree. If it was luck. “Do you think the coroner would talk to me?”
“Don’t see why not. We’ve come a long way since
“You’re … what?” Jake said.
“
That sent a chill through him. He couldn’t help it.
“Good thing you didn’t tell me before!” he said, with what he hoped would pass for a backslapping kind of tone.
“Or you wouldn’t have driven out to
He couldn’t tell if Mike was joking.
“Hey, could I take you both out to dinner, to say thanks?”
Mike seemed to give this more consideration than it deserved. In the end, however, he agreed. “I can give Roy a call and ask him.”
“That would be fantastic. Where should we go?”
It was a very New York question, needless to say, but in Clayton the range of options was not extensive. He arranged to meet the two of them at a place called the Clayton Café, and after Mike dropped him back at the store to retrieve his car, Jake found a Quality Inn and checked in for the night. He knew better than to phone or even text Anna. Instead, he lay on the bed watching an old episode of
The Clayton Café was a storefront on the town’s main street with a striped awning and a sign that said SERVING THE COMMUNITY SINCE 1931. Inside were tables with black-checkered tablecloths and orange chairs and walls covered with local art. A woman met him at the door, carrying two plates piled with spaghetti and tomato sauce, each with a wedge of garlic bread balanced on top. Looking at them, he was reminded of the fact that he hadn’t eaten since grabbing an English muffin for the road, that morning in Athens.
“I’m meeting Mike,” he said, belatedly realizing he’d never asked Mike’s last name. “And …” He had forgotten the coroner’s name completely. “One other person.”
She pointed at a table at the other end of the room, under a painting of a forest grove very like the one he’d visited a few hours earlier. A man was already there: elderly, African-American, wearing a Braves sweatshirt. “Be right over,” the waitress said.
