Stranger in the Room: A Novel (18 page)

“Okay, so I got pretty high after breakfast, but hey, there’s fucking nothing to do.”

“So we still have the sample from Huckaby’s urn, right? I was molested by a rottweiler for those ashes.”

“Oh yeah. We have a sample, all right. But it doesn’t look much like it did.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I said good-bye to my cat, locked up, and headed for the elevators.

“Well, see, I saw this store that has all kinds of hobby shit. Model airplanes, stuff like that. So I got this idea and, well, I might have decided to add water to the ashes and pour them in an ice tray.”

“You have got to be kidding.” Finding out Neil got stoned and acted on some harebrained notion was not nearly as shocking as discovering I had a trick cat, but it was supremely annoying. Another craving for a drink slapped me hard a couple of times. It was also my week to see Dr. Shetty, I remembered. For the last four years, we’ve had a Thursday appointment twice a month. I don’t know how she remains professional while listening to the same whiny crap over and over. This is a classic example of why I’d never even once considered having a private practice of my own. I’m so me, me, me when I’m in her office. I’d be
screaming at patients,
Shut the fuck up
. But there seems to be no statute of limitations on my crazy or on her patience. To be honest, I use her for many things, a sounding board, a way to stay sober and avoid the AA meetings I’ve neglected and the sponsor that held me together early in my sobriety. Dr. Shetty does not require an intimate connection. Our intimacy is achieved through the psychodynamic therapy process, which doesn’t make me feel like I’m choking. She does not look at me with soft eyes or try to hold my hand like they do at AA. The program saved my life. But sometimes the very last thing I want is for someone to be sweet to me. How can you hold together in the face of that? Dr. Shetty maintains a professional distance. As far as I can tell, she has absolutely no feelings whatsoever. It works for us both.

“At what point did it make sense to you to pour water on Huckaby’s ashes?” I asked Neil.

“It’s not like it was evidence the cops could use anyway,” he said sheepishly.

“What’s your point?” I pushed through lobby doors and walked to the garage. Miki’s Spitfire was parked where she’d left it. My car was parked next to it. I got in.

“They have this stuff at the hobby store in little paper packages like flour, but it’s called decorative cement or something like that. So I bought some. Then I got a mini-ice tray and brought it all back to the hotel. And guess what? First of all, the craft cement-mix stuff looked just like the stuff in Huckaby’s urn when it’s dry.”

“Really.”
I waved at the attendant and pulled out onto Peachtree Street with the top down.

“I’m telling you, Keye, side by side you could not tell them apart. That’s why I decided to add water. The lab isn’t responding to email or phone calls. I thought it was time to get this party started.”

“And?” I was beginning to appreciate Neil’s peculiar genius.

“It set up. I’ve got two hard-as-a-rock cement ice cubes sitting here. One made with Huckaby’s ashes. You can’t tell them apart.”

I let that sink in. “Why on earth would he fill an urn with cement mix?” I wondered aloud. “Unless you don’t have cremains. I’ll be there in two hours. I think we should have a look at Northeast Georgia Crematorium before the sun goes down.”

  
15

T
he Kirkpatrick family had been part of Big Knob’s history since Creeklaw County was mapped out and named back in 1823. The Internet was loaded with their history, because Joe Ray Kirkpatrick’s great-grandfather was the first black man to own a business in Georgia. Somehow the Kirkpatrick family had managed to prosper even during the years with the most violent racial unrest. The Kirkpatricks had found their own Switzerland in Creeklaw County, where hooded men and torches had once terrorized the non-white population. In 1937, Northeast Georgia Crematorium opened for business. It was the oldest in Georgia, a kind of wholesaler that served the tristate area. The client base: morticians and funeral homes. No walk-ins, please.

“You see these road names?” Neil wanted to know. He had a mapping program on-screen, and he was rolling two miniature cubes he’d made with cement around in his hand like marbles. “Loretta Ann Kirkpatrick Lane, Bobby James Kirkpatrick Drive, Kirkpatrick Road. What’s next? I Own the Fucking Road Road?” He snickered his sneaky, wet little George W. Bush laugh. “Jesus, why don’t they just pee on everything? Turn right here on Crematory Road.”

“A lot of roads in rural areas are named after residents,” I explained. “Mail carriers in the early days needed—”

“Keye,” Neil interrupted. “Whatev, okay? Keep your eyes on the road. I don’t want to have an accident out here in the sticks and wake up to banjos playing.”

Gravel popped under my tires and red dust rose up behind the car like a jet trail. Half a mile down, we took our first far-off look at Northeast Georgia Crematorium and the property behind it, where the owners lived.

I pulled over and reached across Neil for the binoculars in my glove box. The crematory was brick, reddish brown, one level, L-shaped, with rows of narrow tinted windows in the front. Looked like a million cheap office buildings I’d seen in small towns—uninviting, meant for work, not for visitors. A gravel road split off the front parking lot and curled around the building.

No cars at the crematory. No lights, no sign of life at all. Not surprising on a Sunday. I wondered what happened if one was unlucky enough to need a crematorium on a weekend.

The house rose up beyond rolling fields, flanked by woods, then mountains. There was a small lake, a few acres at most. Behind the house, I saw a red barn with white X-shaped braces on wide double doors. Equipment storage. The fields were mowed. Sixteen acres, Quinn had told me. They would need a tractor. I moved the binoculars around slowly, surveyed the property. No horses or cattle or dogs. Good news. The last time I’d met a field of cattle, they’d turned on me. More recently, the encounter with Tank, Huckaby’s rottweiler, had cured me of crotch-level dogs. I saw a couple of cats stretched out near the house. A partially enclosed chicken coop built with raw wood and wire was next to the barn. The framed-out wire door was open. A few chickens pecked around in the dirt. I saw a small room built onto the coop, also raw unpainted wood. The door was closed. Food storage, I assumed. A padlock hung off a steel hasp. “Who padlocks chicken feed?” I wondered aloud.

Brenda Wade had been right about the way the property was laid out. The story about the crematory employee mixing the cement mix with the chicken feed made even less sense to me now. Northeast Georgia Crematorium sat on the frontage road at the end of the lane, a substantial distance from the house and barn and chicken coops. How would an employee manage this without being seen from the
house? The land had leveled out here—a holler, as the locals call it, a nestled-in valley. My binoculars showed me bits of flaking paint around the window frames on a dated but stately eighteenth-century Georgian farmhouse with a slanted roof and stone chimneys running up each end, all the rage in the pre–Civil War South. French and Roman architecture wowed us a bit later, and the influence remained through Reconstruction. Then huge plantation homes with giant pillars and sprawling porches—Tara on steroids—began to dot the landscape. We are a mishmash of styles, a full-on architectural identity crisis. The South had reinvented itself many times since the Civil War turned previous incarnations to ash.

I had once lived in a two-room apartment with a round bedroom on the top floor of a Victorian. I remember having a very hard time deciding where to put my bed. I’d rented it for two hundred and thirty dollars a month my last year at Georgia Southern. The owner, who lived on the ground floor, had liked me. She made warm flour tortillas from scratch in the mornings, and waking to that scent, like baking bread, warmed me each day. We smeared them with butter and homemade fig preserves and talked over coffee before school. She had felt some kinship with me, I think, because I’m Chinese and she was Hispanic. We’d both had the experience of growing up looking different in the South.

“So why would a guy who’s clever enough to use cement mix to replace the spilled ashes go all the way to the house where the chicken feed is stored to refill the urn?”

I handed Neil the binoculars. He studied the property. I saw something moving on the dirt lane that ran between the house and business. “There’s someone on the road halfway between here and the house.”

“It’s Kirkpatrick,” Neil said. “Looks just like the picture on their website. Except he’s sweaty.”

“What’s he doing?”

“Digging,” Neil said, and handed the binoculars back to me. I saw a pile of dirt and weeds and debris in a wheelbarrow. I watched Kirkpatrick shoveling out more debris into the wheelbarrow.

“Rain comes pouring off the mountains when there’s a thunderstorm,” Neil said. “If you don’t keep your ditches clear, you flood.”

“Really, Mr. Green Jeans? Wow. I didn’t realize you were up on irrigation.”

“I did a lot of reading about the area while you were gone. Do you want to know how Big Knob got its name?”

“Definitely not,” I said, surveying the area. I inspected a small brick house with a screened porch, located fifty yards dead ahead, off the frontage road and across from the Kirkpatrick property. Through the magnification, I spotted a ceiling fan making slow turns behind the dark screened porch. “Holy cow,” I exclaimed. “We’ve just been made by the local snoop.”

I was looking at a slight, white-haired figure in a chair. She had a pair of old military-style binoculars about the size of two thermoses. She was looking right back at me. I put the car in gear and eased up the road, pulled into the driveway. The mailbox was decked out for the upcoming holiday with a red, white, and blue foil cover.

“What’s the plan?” Neil wanted to know.

“How about we say we’re house shopping,” I suggested.

“Together?” Neil snickered at that. “We don’t have rings.”

“We’ll wing it,” I said, as we walked toward the house and the dark screened porch, and the American flag on a pole mount at her front door.

Neil seemed to freeze up on me. I took the lead. We had been looking at a property close by, I told the small, wiry figure who stood at her door. She had white hair and quick brown eyes, the same woman who had been watching us through binoculars. We liked the area but had concerns about living so near a crematorium, I explained. On that, the door flung wide open and we stepped into Mary Kate Stargell’s small, immaculate, doily-covered home.

She waved for us to follow her to the kitchen, where she filled tall glasses with ice cubes and poured us sweet tea from a pitcher, then wrapped a cloth napkin round the bottom so as not to leave a ring on the broad, flat armrests of her white rocking chairs on the front porch. She left us for a minute, then returned with a platter of lemon bars with powdered-sugar tops. Chilled lemon bars were the perfect companion to iced tea on a hot day, Mrs. Stargell informed us. Neil didn’t need to be sold. He was all about it.

The rockers were in a straight line across her front porch, facing
the Kirkpatrick pond, rolling fescue fields, and Joe Ray’s dirt lane, where he was still working with his shovel.

“It’s so quiet up here,” I remarked, after we had settled into our rockers and stared at Joe Ray for a while. Apparently, Mary Kate Stargell wanted to keep it that way, because she did not respond.

“That’s one reason we’re thinking about living up here.” I elbowed Neil.

“Right,” he managed with his mouth full of lemon bar. “We love the country.” Bits of graham-cracker crust sprayed my arm. I brushed them off.

“I guess that’s one of the neighbors? Or is he hired help?” I nodded in Joe Ray’s direction.

“You watched him long enough. What was your opinion?” Mrs. Stargell’s voice had a little age wobble in it.

“I think he lives there,” I replied, without letting her know she’d surprised me. I was getting the feeling Mary Kate Stargell was a little bit more than I’d bargained for. Something about old women can be a little chilling anyway, in the same way a cat that attacks is scarier than a dog. She was sizing me up now.

“Where you from, honey?” There it was, loaded with subtext, southern style with a smile.

“I’m Chinese American, Mrs. Stargell, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“So’s that kudzu out there. It’s taking over everything too. Lordy, lordy.” She snorted. “If you ask me, you got to pick one. Chinese or American. Which is it?”

I felt myself coming up off the chair. Neil grabbed my arm. “These lemon bars are the best I’ve ever had, Mrs. Stargell,” he said in a good-ole-boy voice I’d never heard him use. Sugar always brought him to life.

She smiled at him with teeth too big and too perfectly sheared off on the bottom to be real. I was betting they slept in a glass of water next to the bed. “You’re a polite young man.” She offered him the platter, and he helped himself. “You remind me of my Frank. God rest his soul. He’s been gone since ’97. We bought this property thirty-five years ago.”