Stranger in the Room: A Novel (22 page)

Just then, the passenger door opened and a woman stepped out. “I got it, Mama,” Joe Ray called, and pushed open the garage-style receiving door. “Won’t take long.”

She walked to the steps, a slow, rocking walk like one leg was too short. “I don’t want to be up all night again.”

Again?
What the hell was going on? I waited for her to disappear inside, then hightailed it down the gravel drive and through the front parking lot without wiping out. I was finally getting my gravel legs. I looked back over my shoulder. No lights on inside. Joe Ray and his mother show up in the middle of the night and use flashlights inside their own business. Something very weird was going on at Northeast Georgia Crematorium.

A flicker of light got my attention, a loud whisper.
Over here
. I found Neil and Mary Kate on the other side of the road in a dry ditch facing the building. I jumped in with them. My favorite jeans were ripped, and my knees were on fire. I was covered in mosquito bites. Mrs. Stargell and Neil were slapping at them too.

“What’s that rascal doing in there?” Mary Kate wanted to know.

Lights came on inside, then the floods mounted on the side of the building lit up the parking lot. We all ducked down, came back up slow. Joe Ray pushed through the front door. He had a rifle. Walking from one corner of the building to the other, he checked around corners and behind the line of azaleas planted up against the building. Then he kicked around in the parking lot for a while. Finally, he turned and went down the drive he’d backed into a few minutes before.

Neil let out a breath and so did I, but Joe Ray wasn’t done. He showed up a minute later with a handheld floodlight, kicked around some more. Mrs. Kirkpatrick opened the front door and told him to check up on the road.

“They’re gone, Mama. Probably kids again. Not even a tire track out here.”

Fortunately, the local high school kids had paved the way. The mind works that way too. It searches for safe explanations. Joe Ray would want to believe it wasn’t serious. I thought about the bartender’s kid brother seeing Kirkpatrick carrying corpses out on his shoulder in the middle of the night. Everyone had laughed it off as a spooked kid’s imagination. I desperately wanted to know why he was here so late tonight and why he’d backed his truck up. If we could see the docks, would we see Joe Ray carrying bodies out tonight? And to where? And why?

“Check it anyway,” Joe Ray’s mama ordered, and hobbled gooselike out into the parking lot. She knew they had a problem, kids or not. Someone had seen the bodies and knew they were being mishandled.

“Fuck,”
Neil said.

“All you can see in the dark is movement,” I whispered. “Just stay still.” I reached for my Glock.

Joe Ray’s light bounced around us. Flat in the ditch, we could hear his boots on the gravel road. Mary Kate sucked in air. The mosquitoes were relentless suicide bombers. Neil had talked me out of buying anything with Deet in it to repel them, said the chemicals would cause cancer. This from a man who puts hashish in desserts and pulls rolled-up dollar bills out of his pocket at cash registers.

“Nobody out here, Mama.” His voice was so near I felt Neil jolt. I held on to his wrist. Kirkpatrick started back for the crematorium. “You gotta let me spend a little money and get that alarm system.”

He went back to the building and to Mrs. Kirkpatrick. They were talking as they passed through the front door, but I couldn’t make out what they said. We stayed put. Whatever they’d come for, they would be leaving with. And none of us wanted to get caught on the road.

“Well, I just cannot believe Loretta Ann is involved in whatever’s going on in there,” Mrs. Stargell hissed, and slapped at a mosquito. “Joe Ray Senior loved that woman.”

“Maybe the senior Joe Ray was involved in whatever this is too,” I said.

“Hush your mouth,” she scolded, just as the truck came around the building. We ducked back down in the ditch. I was praying they’d head back to the house rather than down the road where the Impala was parked on the shoulder. They did. Our heads came up and we watched the truck take the lane to the house. I raised mini-binoculars and watched them pull up to the barn. The driver’s door opened. Joe Ray separated the big double barn doors illuminated by the headlights. Mrs. Kirkpatrick must have slid into the driver’s seat, because the truck went evenly into the barn.

“What’s happening?” Mary Kate demanded.

“They’re pulling into the barn,” I said. “We need to see what’s going on up there.”

“We?” Neil squeaked. “I don’t think so.”

“You can count me in,” Mrs. Stargell said. “As long as it ain’t tonight.” She climbed out of the ditch in her pink robe and hard-soled moccasin slippers, brushed herself off. “Y’all come on.” She started up the road. “I’ll feed ya.”

S
he scrambled eggs for us, southern style, large curd finished in a butter toss and a sprinkle of chives and black pepper, exactly the way my mother had always done them. She piled them on sourdough toast and set a glass of milk and a chewable Flintstones vitamin next to our plates. We didn’t ask. We just took our vitamins and drank our milk and used our napkins and remembered our yes-ma’ams and thank-yous, which is what’s expected down here when you’ve been invited to someone’s table.

Mrs. Stargell drove us to my car in a money-green Cadillac Fleetwood, spanking clean and boxy like they made them in the early nineties. Her head barely made it over the steering wheel. I glanced at the mileage. Sixty-four thousand. It must have been parked for the better part of twenty years.

It was past three when we returned to the hotel. We’d agreed to start new after a few hours’ sleep. I sat up in the big bed with my back against a hardwood headboard and my notebook in my lap. I started a list.
Urn, unrefrigerated bodies, waiting period, flashlights, bartender’s brother
. I stared at it. The clouds didn’t exactly part. Why would he leave the bodies out like that? I wrote:
Motive?
How hard would it be to move them into the refrigeration unit? Whatever was going on, the mother appeared to be in charge. I added her to my list.
Loretta Ann Kirkpatrick
.

I thought again about what Mrs. Stargell said, that we suffer indignities enough in life. The prospect of being devalued that way had frightened her. I’d seen it in her face when we sat on her porch talking about the vapors while we watched Joe Ray plant kudzu. Country people take death seriously. Plus, she was old. She’d no doubt begun to contemplate the inevitable. Perhaps we are just shells after we die.
I don’t know. But if for no other reason than the fear people have in life about being mishandled in death, they should be treated with respect.

I added to my list.
Vapors. Utilities
.

I looked at the pictures I’d snapped earlier, almost as shocking now, so brightly lit on my camera phone as that moment in the chamber room. I remembered Mary Kate’s face when the lid came off the box and I chuckled. Hey, funny is funny.

I attached the photographs of the stacked-up corpses to an email to Quinn and hit the send button, then pulled the sheet up to my chin and reached for the bedside lamp. So far this July Fourth weekend had been about as much fun as PETA at a backyard barbeque.

  
19

I
woke to my phone ringing, hints of sunlight under heavy hotel curtains. I glanced at the clock. Nine-fifteen. “I’m seeing this email you sent, but I don’t know what the heck I’m looking at,” Larry Quinn complained. “Is this some kind of joke?”

I got out of bed, pulled the cord on the draperies, looked out at a dark blue day, thunderclouds but no rain. “That’s what was sitting in the oven last night in Kirkpatrick’s crematory.”

“Okay, first of all, I have zero knowledge of how you obtained these photographs.”

“Relax, Larry. It’s not like I’m wearing a wire. Hang on a second?” I slipped into jeans and a pale blue blouse and knocked on the door leading to Neil’s room, braless. He opened it smiling and handed me a cup of coffee, which was why I was there, of course. He looked wide awake. Bare chest, pajama pants with a gathered elastic band under his navel.

“I heard you moving around,” he whispered, seeing the phone in my hand. I gave him an air kiss, took a sip of coffee. It was good, strong but not bitter, black, exactly the way I like it.

“We found three uncremated bodies stacked one on the other sitting inside the crematory chamber,” I told Larry Quinn. “According to a neighbor, the last delivery to the crematorium had been early
yesterday morning. She says the owner left and never came back. The last entry on the receiving log was three names: Faye Milner, Demetrius Trite, and Joseph Wagner. I also found the entry where the Wades’ mother was logged in. So if that’s not weird enough, Kirkpatrick and his mother show up. It’s the middle of the night, Larry. He pulled up to the docks in back so I couldn’t tell what they were doing.”

“You think he forgot to turn the oven on?”

“No. I don’t think whatever’s going on there has anything to do with forgetting.”

“Maybe he’s doubling or tripling up to save money,” Larry suggested. “He just collects the remains and splits them up. Who would know?”

“That doesn’t explain the chicken feed. And I’m pretty sure there was never an employee. Also, those ovens are
designed
to do one body at a time. Even at twenty-one hundred degrees, it wouldn’t work if they were stacked up. I guess he could do it without a container, but there’s body fluids and leakage to consider. It would be messy.”

“Okay, okay. I just had breakfast.”

I drank some more coffee, found a room-service menu, and handed it to Neil. “Order us something? Also, Larry, they’re supposed to be kept in a refrigeration unit during the waiting period.” I then told him what the bartender had said about her brother seeing Joe Ray carting bodies out at night.

“I knew something was going on up there,” Larry congratulated himself.

Neil was on the hotel phone with room service. I wandered back into my own room. “Kirkpatrick has already violated the law about six different ways. If he’s not cremating them, that’s theft by deception and improperly handling a corpse right there.”

“I want to show a pattern of noncompliance and neglect.”

“At least one other urn had cement mix instead of ashes,” I said, and told him about Huckaby and the ashes that had turned to craft cement when they got wet.

“I want more. And stay away from the local cops, okay? We don’t know what kind of network Kirkpatrick’s got up there. Any theories?”

“I’m stumped.”

“I really don’t understand why he would fill urns with cement mix rather than cremate the bodies.”

“Tell me about it.”

I hung up and headed for the shower. Mrs. Stargell’s scrambled eggs had worn off and I was hungry. She was expecting us later. I did not particularly want to include her, but her house was a perfect vantage point from which to watch the Kirkpatricks. And she’d promised us lunch. My hopes were high. The passionate southern cook I’d grown up with regularly put her own flair on regional delicacies like spicy shrimp and grits. She grew poblano peppers in her own garden and stuffed them with cheese and cubed acorn squash she’d sautéed in garlic. She skewered fresh peaches on cinnamon sticks and bathed them in bourbon and honey on the grill until their meat was sweet and smoky. She filled tiny pastry cups with goat cheese and homemade lime curd and glass pitchers with sweet iced tea and fresh thyme. Southern cooking gets a bad rap. But when it’s done right, it’s a beautiful thing.

I opened a tiny, overscented bottle of shampoo I found in the bathroom. I’d forgotten mine. My knees and palms stung under the hot water after last night’s fall, and I used the towel carefully on my sore body.

Neil wheeled in a room-service cart as I squeezed Kinerase from a hundred-and-fifty-dollar bottle on my face, then brushed on a little blush and mascara. He glanced at me. “That’s hot.”

“Yeah, well, don’t get any ideas.”

“I have Joe Ray’s gas and electric bills for the last couple of years,” he said. I heard dishes rattling as he set our breakfast table. “Doesn’t that turn you on a little? Twenty-two months without a spike or sharp decline.” He sat, picked up a small silver pitcher, drizzled syrup over his plate.

I let my hair down, picked up my coffee cup, and took it with me to the table. Under the silver lid on my plate, I found poached eggs nested in wheat toast and potatoes, two pancakes with blackberry butter on a separate plate.
Perfect
. Neil had a spinach omelet with vegetarian sausage, hash browns, and a tall stack of pancakes. We dug in.

“Something interesting, though,” Neil said. “Twenty-three months ago the bills were seventy percent higher than they have been for the last twenty-two months.”

I looked at him. “And before that?”

“I went back as far as they had records online. Five years. Monthly usage was pretty consistent. Then it declined and never went back up.”

I thought that over while we ate, watched the window for a minute or two. Golf carts moved up and down paved paths over the fairway. Dark foliage lined the nooks and crannies of the nestled-in lake, and pine trees without branches for the first hundred feet towered over it with lime-colored needles.