Stranger in the Room

by Amanda Kyle Williams

  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

  Now, 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.

  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.”

  She 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 th
an 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.