Stranger in the Room: A Novel (14 page)

In my rearview mirror, I saw my father in the driver’s seat of his Ford Taurus. Miki was in front with him. Mother was in the backseat. It had been a long night for everyone. Dad had showed up at the station, big-eyed and drawn with worry, after Mother had called him crying. He was determined to take Miki home with them after the interviews. I thought it was a terrible idea. No one had a handle on what was going on. We didn’t know who this person stalking my cousin was. All we knew was that he had probably carried out the murder and ritually
displayed a body in her house. I’d argued with my father that my hotel has surveillance cameras, security, ten floors to get to my loft. But even as the words were coming out of my mouth, I was thinking about that terrible night last winter when I woke to a killer standing over me. It occurred to me for the first time that the scar from that night didn’t look so different from the scars up and down my cousin’s arms.

My father balked at the idea he couldn’t defend his castle. Rauser had finally convinced me it was a good idea. The Winnona Park neighborhood where my parents lived in Decatur was close-knit and quiet. Rauser figured the neighbors would notice someone out of place on the street, unlike the in-town neighborhoods or the hotel, which was full of new faces. Decatur Police Department had promised increased patrols. But I didn’t want them going home alone. And I hadn’t had a minute alone with Miki since we’d pushed open her front door and seen the corpse.

I called Neil as I drove down Ponce toward Decatur. I’d practically shoved him out of the car at the Big Knob Resort & Spa after White Trash had been spotted wandering my hotel. He sounded groggy. Briefly, I explained what had happened at Miki’s house.

“So you’re just leaving me in Hicksville? Alone?”

“At a resort and spa. I’m a monster.”

“I have one brick of coffee, two joints, and a Baggie with somebody’s ashes.”

“It’s not ashes,” I said. “It’s pulverized bone fragments.”

“By the way, it’s a holiday weekend. The lab Billy and Brenda Wade used is closed until Tuesday.”

“Shit.” Of course it was closed. It was nearly the Fourth of July. Ponce veered right, and I drove into downtown Decatur. Wreaths with red, white, and blue ribbon decorated the lampposts lining the street to remind me. I thought again about the weekend Rauser and I had planned and the fireworks on the square, something my parents had done each year for as long as I could remember. We’d pack up folding chairs and picnic baskets and wine for the adults. Jimmy and I sat cross-legged on blankets and listened to bands play in the gazebo until the fireworks exploded off the top of the courthouse.

“See if you can get back in touch with somebody from that lab,” I told Neil. “A bribe never hurts. Larry’s dime.”

“I’ve got some ideas.”

“What kind of ideas?”

“About the ashes. Don’t worry about it. Get some rest.”

I turned off South Columbia into Winnona Park and pulled up behind my dad’s car as he parked on the hilly driveway on Derrydown Way. We all walked to the front door. Two cats from Mother’s feral colony lounged on the porch in doughnut-shaped beds, each with one open eye on our every move. I’d been treated to this kind of suspicion from animals all my life, thanks to my mother’s attraction to wild things. But her love of nature and the desire to rescue the things it abandoned was, to her children, a glorious excursion into a heart she could not always freely share. My brother and I grew up with dew-covered grass slapping our ankles as we trailed behind our mother on early-morning treks through the rolling acreage behind the Methodist Children’s Home just a few blocks from our house. We followed her down the hill to the pond, where a pair of blue herons became so still at our arrival that we mistook them for driftwood at the water’s edge. But we always looked for them. Blue herons never fall out of love, Mother had told us. We tossed bread crumbs to the ducks and geese, and watched the fog lift up out of the reeds, then burn off the lake in the early-morning sun. Jimmy and I know the songs of mockingbirds and the sudden stillness of a meadow at the shrill warning of a red-tailed hawk. Our mother, a child of the Albemarle Sound and pulsing marshes and tundra swans and striped bass, had searched for and found the secluded marshes and private seascapes in her city life. And because we had been witness to this delicate beauty in her humanity, it was all the more confusing when her touch turned arctic and her tongue caustic.

I glanced at a huge metal vase in the opposite corner of the porch behind the porch swing. Tall metal flowers, some rust-covered, some polished steel, rustic and beautiful, bloomed out of it. Dad followed my eyes. “I’m getting better, aren’t I?”

“They’re gorgeous, Dad. Will you make something for my office?”

“You bet, kiddo,” my dad said, and wrapped a long arm around my shoulders as we walked into the home where Jimmy and I had grown up and where Miki had spent most of her time as a child. My father had practically lived in the garage back then, tinkering with engines and
anything else with moving parts. Howard Street’s natural talent for understanding the mechanics of a thing had put two kids through college and supported my mother’s rather expensive taste in antiques, cookware, stand mixers, food processors, and knives. And to think that all those years he’d welded and oiled and pieced back together whatever the community towed in or carried in boxes, his secret artist’s eye was mentally sizing up the shapes a gallery would later commission him to craft. I loved the idea that my parents were finding something that made them happy. And I found it all surprisingly unsettling. It wasn’t that they had found their passion, but that they
had
a passion, that their interior life had been hidden and completely unseen by their children. Or at least by me. Jimmy might have been privy to the dreams of adults. Jimmy had always been more plugged in.

Mother put a kettle on the stove. Hot tea for me. For everyone else she prepared her special toddy—hot milk, cognac, and honey, guaranteed to take the edge off. I waited at the kitchen table for my parents to leave, then looked at Miki. “You okay?”

“Some freak is hurting people and stringing them up in my house. So no. Not so much.” Her shoulders were scrunched up like she was cold on this hot July night.

“I want to help,” I said. “Look, I was pretty pissed about White Trash. And I was scared, Miki. I didn’t know what had happened. I couldn’t get in touch with you.”

Miki nodded, her face pale.

“Can we talk about what happened today with your phone?”

“I went to the store. I had my phone in the pocket of that little boyfriend jacket. I know it was there. I used it on the way. I felt it when I walked into the grocery store. When I got back to your loft, it was just gone.”

“You drive your Spitfire to the store?”

“Of course,” Miki said. “Oh shit. My car. I’ll have to get it tomorrow.”

“Don’t,” I said. “Leave it in the garage at my place. Classic cars are too easy to spot.”

Miki sipped her toddy and shivered. “You think he’s going to try something else?”

“It’s a reasonable assumption.” My phone pinged to let me know a
text had arrived. I saw Rauser’s name with a note. He’d sent a composite operator’s rendering of the man seen by the volunteer driver. APD and many other departments had begun using computers for composites rather than old-fashioned police sketches. The software allowed the victim to sit with an operator, choose from and tweak head shapes and facial features. It also allowed for quick access to facial-recognition systems and automatic comparisons to the databases. I clicked on the attachment. It wasn’t much—a head, shoulders, hairline, no details on the face except an eyebrow and ridgeline. The driver had apparently seen only a split second of profile as he walked by. I slid my phone across the table. “Anyone familiar?”

Miki took the phone in her hands and sat back hard. “So that’s supposed to be him? Just some faceless monster? The stranger in the room grabbing at me.”

Miki’s penchant for fully and publicly indulging her darkness always undid me a little. Emily Street had drilled it into us that we should not show it when something was wrong. And we certainly did not talk about it. In my mother’s world, that’s dirty laundry.

“He wants to ruin it,” Miki said.

“Ruin what?” I asked her.

“Everything. My house, because I love it. My life, because it’s good now.” Tears spilled from one blue eye, then another. Miki wiped them away hastily. But she was so fair that any emotion instantly reddened her buttermilk complexion. She looked at me with red eyes and nose, and I remembered a moment from our childhood when I’d come upon her sitting, alone, on the edge of the little creek behind the park, hugging her knees. She’d looked up at me the same way, and I’d known she’d been crying. I thought about the strangled boy and his sobbing mother. Not for the first time. Something about it was eating at me just like it was at Rauser. And neither one of us could put our finger on it.

“This guy isn’t some indestructible phantom from your nightmares, Miki. He’s not the bogeyman. He’s a plain old criminal. Don’t give him any more power in your life. Thursday night when you saw him in your house after you went out for dinner, was that dinner planned for a while?”

Miki shook her head. “Last-minute.”

“Remember where you were when you made the plans?”

“Home.”

“How about the restaurant that night? Notice anything off? You said it felt like you were being watched at the gym. Anywhere else?”

“No. I’m sorry.” She yawned. Mother’s magic toddy was working.

“You’ve got a penlight on your keychain. You used it that night, right?”

Miki thought for a minute. “I
did
. I heard a noise just as I was going to put the key in the lock. I recognized the sound of the floorboards inside. It scared me. I went down the porch really quietly and pressed the light against the window. I saw the couch and some stuff I’d left on the table and then the light just kind of blacked out and I realized someone had stepped in front of it.”

“How did you know it was a man? What did you see?”

“I don’t know. His stomach, maybe, and his height. He was wearing black. No buttons. Some kind of pullover. He wasn’t fat, but he wasn’t buff either. His belly filled the shirt out.”

I thought about Cash Tilison in those jeans. Definitely buff. “And then he pointed at you like this? Thumb and forefinger?”

She shook her head again. “He didn’t just point. He pointed, then squeezed the trigger. Like a gun. Or like gotcha. He had on gloves. The kind germophobes get in the box at the pharmacy. They seemed really white compared to his clothes.”

“And then you looked up, right? You told me he stood there looking at you. Was the penlight still in your hand?”

“I dropped it and then I ran off the porch.” She stared down into her drink. “I threw up.”

I nodded. I’d seen the reports tonight at the station. The officers had found her keychain under the window. Poor Miki. I wanted to reach out to her now. Why is it so goddamn awkward for me? Why the hell didn’t my mother teach me this stuff? I brooded over that for a moment. My mother, the feral cat rescuer. Any kind of animal, really, but the wilder the better. For as long as I could remember, my mother had humanely trapped, vetted, and released back into our neighborhood some very confused cats with missing private parts. The free-roaming, mostly untouchable colony had become a fixture in Winnona Park. The numbers had dwindled over the years. New cats wandered in occasionally, and mother began her voodoo-like seduction with chicken livers and
mackerel before the trapdoor slammed and they found themselves at the high-volume spay/neuter clinic up the street. To this day, my mother had wild cats on her porch waiting for breakfast each morning, standing back four feet until she cleared out. They returned to the sound of her voice and clinking bowls each evening. She kept track of them and worried over them, these creatures she could never lay hands on or hold.

A thought hit me for the first time—a full-on head-slapper. I made a mental note to share this with Dr. Shetty. My mother wanted to rescue things without having to get too close—love without intimacy. It’s what she’d done with Jimmy and me—her feral children. She read to us and made us read to her after school when we’d pile up on the king-size bed she shared with my father, taking turns reading our way through her favorite books. She had snacks waiting when we came in from school. She treated our scrapes with peroxide and made sure we were educated and well dressed. She tucked us in and captivated us with stories of growing up on the pungent marsh-scented shores of the Albemarle Sound. I had forged a connection to water, to the low country, before I had ever seen sound or sea or salt marsh. Her stories and her rich voice had mesmerized and altered me. But I could not remember Emily Street throwing her arms around me in a spontaneous display of affection. Not ever. It’s a special kind of restraint one learns at the hands of a southern woman.

I thought about my brother, Jimmy, and me lying on our backs as kids in pajamas staring at the glow-in-the-dark solar system on the ceiling and saying what we wanted to be. Jimmy thought if I was going to be a superhero, I’d have been born one, so I settled on being a cop. Every night when the lights went out, I could hear Jimmy’s little voice say
“Wow”
as the stars lit up on our ceiling as if he were seeing them for the first time. He’d leave his twin bed and climb into mine, and we’d whisper ourselves to sleep. Jimmy wanted to be a dancer. I wondered how he got from that to becoming an adman. Since he’d left years ago, our relationship had been reduced to holiday visits, quick phone calls, and emails. There was so much I didn’t know about his interior life now. I missed my brother. Reaching for him was second nature. I’d never had to work at it. So why was it so hard with everyone else in my life? Why was I struggling now with my fragile, tormented cousin? I
blamed my mother and her detachment. I blamed alcohol and all the ways addiction changes you. Addicts are natural saboteurs.

“Miki, listen, I … I’m sorry. I didn’t get it. I didn’t get how real this was.”