Stranger in the Room: A Novel (19 page)

“Bet you’ve got some stories,” Neil said, and finished off his treats.
They’d cut me completely out now, which was fine. I’d never seen Neil quite so charming. He actually seemed to like the old windbag.

“Do I ever,” Mary Kate told him. “That one right there worries me a lot.” She was watching Joe Ray Kirkpatrick. “He’s always digging and planting something or another. Does what he feels like doing. Leaves his mama to take care of the place most days. He brings kudzu from the woods and plants it along the road to keep the bank in place.” She huffed at that absurdity. The wild-running vine had practically swallowed up the South. “Takes a hired man and a machete just to keep it off my black walnut trees once a week. If you ask me, anyone caught planting it deserves a good beating. But you know how stubborn blacks can be.”

My, the Confederate flag was flying high today. Neil must have noticed my fingernails digging into the armrest, because he put his hand on mine and asked Mrs. Stargell what it was like living near the crematorium. “Is there smoke?”

Mary Kate shook her head. “Never was like smoke, really. When Frank was alive, he called it the vapors. We’d see it coming out that metal stack pipe like steam. Especially in the winter. Joe Ray’s got the vapors, my husband used to say, and we’d just laugh and laugh.” She thought about that, rocked her chair a few times. “Joe Ray, Senior, of course. That rascal out there in the ditch took over when his daddy died a few years back.”

“So he’s a rascal?” I tried to insinuate my way back into the conversation.

“That’s the nicest thing I know to call it. Chases every skirt in town. And he’s lazy.”

Neil and I looked across the Kirkpatrick property to the man in the distance who had not stopped working since we arrived.

Mrs. Stargell seemed to read our thoughts. “Oh, don’t be fooled by that. It’s the only work he cares about doing.”

“How about the crematorium?” I asked.

“I ain’t seen the vapors for a good year. Last winter I could see my breath out here even with a space heater, but I didn’t see nothin’ venting out of that place.” Her voice got low, like she was telling a ghost story. “I saw him let in a hearse this morning and then he closed back up and was gone. That place is more closed than open.”

“Interesting,” Neil said, attempting to appear only casually concerned and not quite making it. “What’s your theory?”

“Lordy, I hate to think of why.”

I leaned back in my rocker and watched Joe Ray. “How’s the traffic from the employees on workdays? Does it bother you? I wouldn’t want to live on a road with a lot of traffic.”

“Always been a family business,” Mary Kate answered. Neil and I exchanged a glance. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody work there except the senior Joe Ray and Joe Ray Junior. Lordy, that place has got to be a mess in there. I know he didn’t have time to take care of those bodies this morning. I bet they’re just sitting there waiting for somebody to give two hoots. When I’m gone, I want somebody to do me right. I ain’t lying around on some gurney in one of Joe Ray’s cold rooms. We have to give up enough of our dignity in life.”

  
16

B
ig Knob had a little Niagara Falls in it—a carnival plopped down in the middle of eye-popping geography. I fully expected to find a house of wax wedged between homemade fudge shops and Jet Ski rentals and restaurants that buttermilk-battered lake fish and hush puppies and served them with offerings from local breweries. I’d come into town to get a general feeling from locals about Georgia’s oldest and, by volume, largest crematorium. Something still wasn’t adding up. The chicken-feed-and-cement-mix story seemed even more implausible now that I’d seen the property, just as Brenda Wade suggested it would. And something Mary Kate had said about the “vapors” stuck with me. I didn’t want to speak with Joe Ray Kirkpatrick just yet. I knew his story. And I sure didn’t want to tip him off to an investigation.

Neil had stayed at the lodge to follow my hunch on Rauser’s case. I’d asked him to search police blotters, which most of the local papers carried, for any violent crimes where wrapping paper or a balloon or anything similar was reported as part of the scene. It was a shot in the dark, I knew. But I’d come so close to overlooking the clues I now believed were being left at each crime scene, perhaps the police had too. Perhaps this important evidence had ended up on some inventory sheet just like the wrapping paper in Kelly’s pocket. And even more troubling, perhaps Miki’s stalker had killed before. As much as Rauser
had not wanted to discuss the possibility of a serial killer, he was a good cop. I knew he’d follow up, run the signature and MO through the databases and order comparisons from his fiber and trace specialists on the twine. I kept thinking about a grieving mother looking down at us from her window, Donald Kelly’s twisted old face, the brick-red stain on his shirt, the bright splotches that came to life on his body under a forensic light source. Rauser had given me that look when I’d suggested a connection. He hadn’t wanted to think about it at that moment. No one would. The implications are too great. But I knew he’d thought about it anyway. That’s the kind of guy he was.

Big Knob’s restaurants and taverns were busy. I had to search for a place to park. In most parts of the Bible Belt, liquor stores are closed on Sunday. But restaurants are allowed to serve alcohol from noon on, which coincides with church letting out so that God-fearing southerners can start drinking right away. But that kind of thinking is about as welcome on a Sunday in Georgia as a flock of pigeons on the runway.

I stopped at a narrow two-story tavern wedged between storefronts in the main strip with crowded tables sitting on a flat roof and tiny white lights strung around the railing. I went through a propped-open wooden door and took a stool at the empty bar. A couple of booths had customers. One of them was eating a good-looking salad.

“I’ll have one of those,” I told the bartender, a curly-headed brunette with a spatter of freckles across her nose and an easy smile. “And club soda with a lemon twist, please.”

What arrived on a plate in front of me was nutty mache and peppery arugula with toasted pecans, split red grapes, and an air-light Danish bleu vinaigrette that made me rethink pub food. I watched the bartender fill orders and thought about the perfectly good bottle of Jameson I’d poured down the drain earlier.

Servers ran up and down the stairs with trays to the rooftop crowd. When the bartender looked like she’d caught up, I called her over and asked her if she was from Big Knob. She was. “So what do you do if you’re bored? Any scandals, deceptions, gossip?”

She grinned at me. “In Big Knob? Relationship drama, maybe. That’s the most that happens here unless the tourists get drunk.” One of the servers slapped a ticket on the bar and unloaded a tray of
used mugs. “You a reporter or something?” the bartender asked while she filled the order. The waitress glanced over inquisitively.

“Me? No way. Just looking for some dish,” I said.

The waitress and the tray disappeared upstairs. The bartender dried her hands on a white hand towel. She smelled like the lime she’d just squeezed into tequila, and I had a vivid recollection of the way Cuervo Gold melts through the slush and citrus and lands at the bottom of your frozen margarita. That’s how a drunk remembers drinking, I reminded myself, through a soft-focus lens. We want to waltz with those memories, whisper in their ear—just one of addiction’s dirty little tricks. But even with all its pressures and temptations, I still loved a bar—the low light and glistening bottles, rows of clear, spot-free glasses, the smell, the chatter.

“We had a drought and then the economy went south,” she told me, and I finally pinpointed her accent, southern Appalachian, a confusing, quick-stepping rhythm with a hint of a brogue—the Clampetts go to Scotland. “So I guess the big news up here is for the first time in four years, we can make a living without having to leave the county for work.”

“I hear there’s a big crematory up here.”

She nodded. “Handles three or four states, I think. I’m no expert. My family plants their dead in the ground.”

I thought about Brenda and Billy Wade and Huckaby. They all had urns full of something they didn’t pay for.

She pushed a fresh club soda in front of me. “You hear any stories about the crematory?” I asked.

She laughed. “We used to get drunk in high school and sneak around out there. Scare the shit out of each other. It’s still going on. You can’t have a crematorium within a couple miles of a high school without there being stories. Nothing else for kids to do in a tourist town in the off-season. Crematorium and the funeral homes get broken into about every Halloween. My little brother still swears he saw the crematory owner carrying out bodies on his shoulders in the middle of the night and throwing them in a truck.” She chuckled and shook her head. “Now, just why in the hell would anybody do that?”

“Crazy,” I said, going back in my mind to Mary Kate talking about the vapors and Joe Ray digging on a dirt lane.

The kitchen door swung open to my left and I felt the heat from the ovens. A red-faced young man in a chef’s hat came out with two enormous shrink-wrapped trays. I glanced over at them as he set them on the end of the bar. Raw veggies and dip, hummus and pita, jalapeño poppers, and a bunch of fatty pub food. “Stewart order,” he told the bartender. “One more tray coming out. They’re picking up any minute.” He handed her a ticket, disappeared back into his hot kitchen, came out again with the third tray.

“We cater a lot of parties,” the bartender told me. “People like the food here.”

“The vinaigrette is excellent,” I said, and finished my salad while she rang up the order and collected money from a couple who’d showed up for the trays.

“Tell Mr. Stewart happy birthday,” the bartender told them.

I watched them leave. A thought hit me. I reached for my phone. “Rauser, was Donald Kelly’s birthday party catered?”

“Who is this?”

“Hilarious,” I said. “Just never gets old.”

“Kelly’s daughter gave us a list of everyone at the party,” Rauser told me. “No caterers on the list. And we’ve interviewed everyone there.”

“It would have given him access to the building. Service people would have a code. He’d have opportunity to hide a weapon.”

“And it would explain why the guy might have been dressed like a waiter. But I got nothing in any of the interviews about caterers.”

We were quiet for a minute. “Maybe they weren’t there,” I told him. “Maybe they delivered and left.”

“We asked about service people, anyone that might have access to the building.”

Of course they had
, I thought. Rauser had a top-notch team. But I couldn’t let it go. “Did you ask specifically about a catering company?”

“I wasn’t present for every interview, Keye. I’ve got five other cases open.” He sounded annoyed.

“Okay. Sorry.”

“No, no. I’m sorry. Long day. We’ll double-check and I’ll let you know. I got some other stuff I wanna talk to you about later anyway.”

“Thanks.”

“So how’s it going up there in God’s country? Figure out why there’s no ashes in the urn?”

“Not even close,” I told him. The door opened and a group filed in. The sun was going down and the bar was filling up.

“Where are you? It sounds like a bar.”

“That’s because I’m in a bar.”

“Great,” Rauser said. “Good to know I don’t have to worry about you at all.”

“Bye, Rauser,” I said, and smiled.

“Bye, darlin’.”

  
17

“J
esus, it’s pitch black out here.” Neil stumbled over gravel and rocks. It was almost midnight on Crematory Drive. I’d parked the car a quarter mile or so back and we’d started up the dirt road on foot. The cicadas were buzzing this year, worked up by July’s smothering heat. No moon. No stars. The mountains, black waves against the clouded, charcoal sky, were our only point of reference other than raggedy treetops. They’d looked different during our daylight visit. We had bright LED penlights, but I didn’t want to use them. I had a feeling Mary Kate Stargell didn’t miss much. For all I knew, she slept on that porch where she had served us sweet tea and lemon bars and insulted my ethnicity. And the ground was flat here. Maybe a penlight would look like a firefly from a farmhouse window. Maybe it would just look like a prowler on the road.