Stranger in the Room: A Novel (21 page)

“Mrs. Stargell, what are you doing here?”

“What am
I
doing here?
Ha
! Why, I’m just being a good neighbor, watchin’ out after Kirkpatrick’s property.” She wagged one of her scrawny fingers at us. “And wouldn’t they like to know I found you in here? I knew there was no way in blazes you two were house shopping up here. You got the city written all over you.” Her voice was shrill with accusation and excitement, dark eyes glittering like a rodent’s in the light of so many penlight batteries. “You’re investigatin’ that rascal Kirkpatrick, and you better let me in on it or I’ll blab to everyone I know.”

“You’re interfering with an investigation. Go home.”

“If I have to leave here before you leave, then I’m going straight up to that Kirkpatrick house and knocking on that door.” White skin, thin as parchment, creased into hundreds of little lines. The woman must have been in her eighties. Her eyes narrowed. “On the other hand, if we leave here together with me knowing everything you know, why, then it’s a whole nuther story and I won’t feel the need to discuss it with anyone.”

I moved my light over her—silver-white hair, pink quilted bathrobe, and hard-soled moccasin-style slippers. “Neil, fill her in and you two get busy looking for those accounts. I’m going to check out the crematory. Nice outfit, by the way.”

“I used to come up here and keep Joe Ray Senior company. God rest his soul. That’s the crematory room two doors down. Across from that are the coolers. ’Cause there’s a waiting period and they got to keep them cadavers good and cold.”

“Eeww,”
Neil shuddered.

“Keep that flashlight down and away from the windows, please.” I could hear the irritation in my own voice, but I didn’t care. I was aware of the waiting period. Twenty-four to forty-eight hours in most states. It was a safety measure in case an investigation was launched. Cremation prevents determining cause of death in most cases. There are exceptions. Bone fragments can tell the story if certain poisons and toxins contributed to death.

“Why are you being so mean to her?” Neil asked in a loud whisper. His nerves seemed to be fraying a bit too.

“Because I don’t want to spend the night in jail. And because she may actually be Satan.”

We looked at her standing at the large antique desk sucking her false teeth and tsk-tsking at the papers and stains and empty Coke cans and dirty ashtrays. Mrs. Stargell pushed the eyeglasses hanging around her neck onto her nose, plunked down in the desk chair. The glasses pulled up at the corners like Catwoman’s. “If he had a grave to roll over in, why, then Joe Senior would be rolling.” She looked up and added earnestly, “He was cremated, of course.”

“Of course,” I said.

“Of course,” Neil said.

She opened a drawer and began riffling through Kirkpatrick’s private papers with the fervor of a Cold War operative. Neil, penlight stuck between his teeth, went to a pile of papers on the floor in front of a paper shredder.

I left them and went to the door leading to the crematory chamber. Same Formica counters and cabinets I’d seen in the receiving room. There was a clipboard on the counter and a ballpoint on a chain. A wide, glistening stainless-steel chamber seemed to tunnel into the far wall. A
Caution
sign with warnings about high temperatures hung over it. A stainless conveyor system about five feet long was positioned in front of the oven. A gurney was pushed up to the conveyor.

I studied the crematory log. The top sheet was blank. I checked the
next page. Not one entry. Then, one sheet at a time, I went through the stack. Not one recorded cremation. What did it mean? At the very least, Joe Ray Kirkpatrick wasn’t keeping up his paperwork. The records were required by law. A corpse has to have a paper trail. It cannot simply disappear. Maybe Mrs. Stargell was right about him being lazy. Lazy, careless, and greedy. He’d probably dropped the urn himself and decided to stuff it with fake remains so he could get paid. It came back to bite him, though. He’d had to reimburse the Wades for everything.

Neil and Mary Kate appeared at the door big-eyed and grinning—Starsky after gender reassignment and Hutch on pot. Mary Kate waved a wad of papers. “We got ’em right here. Power bills and suppliers just like you wanted.”

“Excellent.” I was examining the control panel mounted on the right side of the crematory. “See if there’s a copy machine, and let’s get copies.”

“I peeped at the federal and state tax files too,” Neil said. “No employee reported. But he said he was paying cash under the table, right?”

“Never was no employee,” Mary Kate griped.

“Let’s find a copier and get out of here,” Neil urged. “I’m getting the creeps.”

I pushed a button on the panel labeled
Crematory Light
. I’d never been this close to one. I wanted to see what the inside looked like. Something was blocking my view—a huge container that looked like heavy-duty cardboard, the kind often used in cremation. It took up nearly the entire space. I could see edges of the ceramic lining inside the chamber, but that was about it.

“What’s that?” Mary Kate asked. She and Neil took a couple of steps forward.

I pressed a green mushroom-shaped button and heard the whir of fans. Arrow buttons pointed up and down. I pressed the down arrow; the conveyor wheels began a backward rotation. The container didn’t budge. It was too far into the chamber. I glanced around the room. A metal pole with a hook on one end stood in the corner. I grabbed it, stuck it in the chamber, pushed it up under the lid, and grabbed the edge. I pulled as hard as I could, moved it a few inches.

“Give me a hand,” I told Neil.

“Do you know what you’re doing?” He took hold of the pole, reluctantly, and helped me pull. “I Don’t Like This.”

We got the container far enough back for the conveyor to move it. The casket-like box backed evenly out of the oven. When it was out far enough so that I could lift the lid, I pressed the big red stop button. The rollers kept turning. I hit it a second time. Nothing. A third time. The coffin edged nearer to the end.

“It’s gonna fall out.” Mary Kate had an excited wobble in her scrawny old voice.

I tried shutting down the power. No luck. I banged on the stop button with a balled-up fist. The back half of the container came off the conveyor, an inch, two, three. I was hitting all the buttons. Another foot, two. I backed up. Nothing was going to stop it. In retrospect, we should have at least attempted to give it a soft landing. But we stood there watching it, morbidly, dumbly holding our little flashlights. Three feet out, the back half tipped toward the floor, started a slide on the tile. Then the front half came off the rollers and landed with a thud. Mary Kate closed the distance by a couple more steps. We stood there staring at it.

I put my fingers under one edge and flipped the lid off the box. An open-eyed, bluish pale and ghastly swollen naked corpse stared up at me.

“Holy crap!”
Mrs. Stargell shrieked.

I bent for a closer look, swept my light over the box. “There’s more than one body in here. Christ, there’s three or four of them, stacked one on top of the other.”

Neil and Mary Kate bolted for the door like Lindsay Lohan at rehab, just asses and elbows and a wad of Joe Ray’s power bills. They tried to push through at the same time. Mary Kate did a sideways move and slipped under Neil’s arm, squirted out into the hallway like she’d been squeezed out of a toothpaste tube. Neil ran after her. I heard them giggling like kids at a slasher flick. The little traitors never even looked back.

  
18

N
ow, I’m no expert in crematorium procedure, but I knew this wasn’t how it worked. I studied the bodies at my feet. Why weren’t they in the refrigeration unit? Why were they piled up? Like nothing. Like they were disposable. Tonight while I stared down at them naked, completely exposed and powerless, someone was grieving their death, their absence—empty chairs and beds, unanswered phones, all the routines broken by death. And here they were in a cardboard coffin on a scuff-marked tile floor.

Mary Kate’s explanation would have been that he’s a lazy rascal, that he just didn’t take the time to store them properly. But this was worse. Not only was it incredibly disrespectful, it was irretrievably stupid. If a death investigation was necessary on any one of these individuals, it would reveal his poor handling of the corpses, which are considered evidence during the waiting period. Mishandling a corpse is a serious crime. Fraud is a serious crime. Was this why urns were filled with fake ashes? Were there more? And why wouldn’t he be performing the cremations? Surely bodies in this condition are much harder to deal with than they are when simply reduced to bits of calcium and bone. I wanted to test the oven. Maybe something was wrong with it. But first I needed to get a few pictures.

I used the camera on my smart phone, a pretty good twelve-megapixel.
The auto-flash popped in the dark room and fully illuminated an obese, white, midlife female. Underneath her, white arms and legs, brown ones under that, male. Three bodies of varying race and gender, funeral home customers delivered for cremation on a holiday Sunday. Stacked.

I ran my flashlight over the body on top. No visible signs to indicate cause of death. She was wide with a lot of fat. I tried to move her a little so I could see underneath, but she was big, and secondary flaccidity had replaced rigor. I considered splitting the box down the side. But then I’d have three dead bodies spilled out on the floor, fluids leaking out. And in the end, I couldn’t subject them to any more mishandling. Not even to find the truth. It felt like a violation. There’s no privacy in death. It’s disturbing.

I stood there deciding what to do next. I had a mess on my hands. Even if I could get the rollers turning the right way, I had no chance at getting the box back in the oven so that Kirkpatrick wouldn’t know he’d had a break-in. Neil and Mary Kate were probably still sprinting up the gravel road.

I returned to the receiving room. I grabbed the log, took it with me back to the crematory chamber where the corpses had fallen, held my flashlight, and read the names. Faye Milner, Demetrius Trite, and Joseph Wagner, the last three names on the list. I looked back at them stockpiled here in one of Joe Ray’s rooms. Flipping back through the log, I found the name Wade, Shelia Marlene. I noted that the same funeral home that delivered the three bodies at my feet had also delivered Billy Wade’s mother a month ago. I took a picture of both pages.

My phone vibrated. I pressed the tiny button on my earbud. Neil was breathy. He’d seen headlights coming down the lane from the farmhouse.

Joe Ray
. Had he seen something, the flash from my camera, maybe? I quickly propped the metal hook back up where I’d found it on the off chance he’d assume his equipment had gone nuts on its own, set off a flash, and dumped out some bodies. Hey, I’m trying to be an optimist. I cut my flashlight and groped my way through the dark, palms out like a bad mime’s, the receiving room log under my arm. The receiving room had a standard door next to the dock. It was my best bet.
Hurriedly, I reattached the log to the clipboard. Kirkpatrick should be busting in the front door any second.

I have to admit I moved pretty fast, considering the surroundings were unfamiliar. I’m not exactly saying I did it with catlike agility, but let’s just say I was out the back door and stepping onto the metal steps next to the loading dock in a matter of seconds.

Have you ever had that empty feeling of just stepping out into nothing? I mean literally, like you accidentally go two steps down instead of one? Well, only moments after congratulating myself on my natural feline grace, I missed the bottom step entirely. I might have stayed upright if gravel wasn’t the main fucking industry up here. Everything was covered with it. My right foot started to slide, and I went down hard. My phone flew out of my hand; rocks punctured my knees and palms.

 … Then, tires on the gravel. Close. Kirkpatrick was driving around back. I looked at my phone. It had landed right in front of the dock. Red taillights, yellow reverse lights lit up the corner as the rear end of a pickup truck came into view. He was backing in? He hadn’t seen. He was here for something else.

A line of trees behind the crematorium and twenty feet to the right of the dock offered the only cover. I looked at it, looked at my phone, back at the tree line. If he found my phone, I was screwed. I’d broken in, spilled bodies out on the floor, taken pictures of them and his logs, and left a cranky conveyor running backward.

I went for it obstacle-course-style on elbows and bloody knees, praying I was low enough to stay out of Joe Ray’s side mirrors. I grabbed my phone one-handed and rolled out of the way, tires so close to my ankles I felt a rough wave of gravel pushing against them.

I made it to cover and hunkered down in the pine straw. The mosquitoes liked the heat this year too, and they were having their way with me. Kirkpatrick stepped out of his pickup truck and ambled toward the big dock door, unlocked a brass padlock with the key. He was in no hurry. That was going to change once he saw the cardboard coffin on the floor. I needed to clear out, fast.