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Chapter 20
I packed my little bag and checked out, utterly dissatisfied. It was useless to stay here, useless to engage Angela Steele again. She was hard as iron and unwilling to open up, even the smallest bit. All funeral directors know that some families will be uncooperative, some funerals will not go well, some situations will be unpleasant. To be honest, I was professionally affronted by their reticence, their lying. What would Emery Plott have done in my place? I wish I were in the office to have another quiet conversation with him.
As I approached the interstate I saw a sign for the road where Maude Prescott's nursing home was located. I had nothing in particular to ask her and no reason to revisit our conversation, but I found myself driving in that direction. My heart was pounding. I felt resentment. I knew I was going to see her again simply because her daughter had told me not too. It was a bit early to show up at a nursing home, but the girl at the front desk remembered me from the day before and smiled, waving me down the hall. So I went.
She was asleep. Slits of light filtered into the room as before. The clock ticked on the bedside table. One of her hands twitched and rustled on the sheet but otherwise she lay still. I approached the bed slowly, observing her troubled, sunken face, so riddled with the scars of a life of fear and sorrow. How many regrets did she rehearse in her mind each day? Did she now wish, after so many years, that she'd never given Anita away? I bent over her head and wondered who had ever comforted her.
Then I heard a movement behind me in the dark, a step coming from the shadow behind the door. “What are you doing here?” the woman hissed. “I thought I told you to leave my mother alone!” Angela Steele's form appeared before me and even in the dimness of that room I could see – I could feel – the fury in her face. I was afraid and backed away from her. “Get out!” she said fiercely.
Her mother stirred. She struggled to sit up in the bed. Then behind Angela I saw Desiree appear as well. They'd both been there, hidden across the room from the bed, before I came in. Maude Prescott's body shook with the effort to right herself and see what was happening in her room.
“Anita?” she said, shakily. “Anita? Is that you?!” She peered at the woman at the foot of her bed. Then she fell back and began to weep. “I thought you was dead, Anita!” The sobs shook her body. “I thought you was dead!”
Angela struggled past me to her mother's side. “Mom, it's Ange. It's me, Ange. Anita's not here, Mom. She's not here. She died up in South Carolina weeks ago.” And the daughter stroked her mother's head with such gentleness I would not have recognized her as the same woman. Whispers of tenderness and comfort issued from one woman to the other.
Desiree Steele gripped me by the elbow. “I think it's time you left, lady,” she said. Her voice was like ice. “We don't need none of yer help here anymore.” She pulled me toward the door. “You need t' go back up to yer town and take care of what my aunt asked you t' do, and stop causin' more grief here than you know.”
The mother's sobs and the daughter's soothing whispers made me wonder if Desiree's words were true, and I found my way outside. It was time to go home, time to give up this charade, time to cremate the body and move on. I sat in the car, my hands trembling on the steering wheel. I didn't trust myself to drive yet. I needed to calm myself, to make sure I would not cry in frustration while 18-wheelers barreled past me on I-85. I tried the breathing exercises I'd used ever since childbirth classes all those years ago. Breath in for four seconds. Hold. Breath out long and fully for four seconds. Hold and relax.
Tap! Tap Tap! My eyes flew open and I looked up at the driver's side window. Angela Steele was there, her face still red with fury. I didn't want to hear what she had to say. I certainly didn't want her that close to me, angry as she was.
“What?” I asked, putting on a face of assertive confidence that I didn't feel.
“Roll down the window!” she yelled. She'd wanted to yell inside the nursing home, and now she could. “I want to talk to you!” In the brilliance of the morning sun her auburn hair was shimmering and only a thin thread of gray shone along her part. Her blue eyes were livid with rage just inches away from me.
I frowned and shook my head. “This will do just fine. You're too angry,” I replied through the glass.
“You bet I'm angry!” she retorted, and slapped the car with her palm. “I'm telling the nursing home staff to prohibit you from visiting my mother. And I'm contacting your professional organization to lodge an official complaint!” Her voice rose with each sentence and her wild eyes flitted from my face to the trees overhead to the inside of my car. “If you ever --” she railed again, but her voice broke off. Her eyes had fallen on something in my car, and seeing it had stopped her in mid-sentence. Her face fell, softened, and all intensity drained from it. Her lips came together, and slowly she backed away from the car. But still she looked at me, differently now, a wash of fear coming over her face. She backed further away, at last folding her arms across her chest and around each other like a child protecting itself. One hand gave a small flip as if to dismiss me. I stared at her, trying to understand what had just happened. Finally, I drove away.
Five hours of driving alone through Georgia is a long time to think. Concerning Anita Wagner's case, my mind was a blur of confusion and chaos, and I could not order my thoughts. After breathing deeply and listening to some James Taylor on the CD player, I attempted to rid my brain of her death, her family, her tattoo, anything about her. I turned my thoughts instead to Karen and Rick, Jeffrey and Jimmy. Of Beau and how he must be missing me. Of the meals I should be cooking for them and the cleaning and chauffeuring and playing and long talks on the porch at twilight I should be enjoying with them. Why had I allowed my work to consume me so? As I drove along, whenever the tiniest wisp of thought concerning the funeral home tried to wiggle its way into my mind, I'd beat it back, focusing on my family, my life, my own dear concerns. Who cared about Anita Wagner? Why should I care more for her than her own family did?
By the time I'd reached Atlanta my heart rate had calmed itself a little. I stopped at the Dwarf House Chick-Fil-A, always a comfort. Instead of a chicken sandwich, I got a Hot Brown and some sweet tea. North of Atlanta I stopped for a Krispy Kreme jelly-filled donut to top off my sugar intake. By the time I reached the South Carolina line, I had ordered my head again and righted my world. I decided that, first thing in the morning, I would proceed with the cremation of Anita Wagner's remains and be done with that huge headache. Patty Goyle and I would find a new normal at the office, and all would proceed in Peace Valley, at least with the care of the deceased, unruffled and boring. I needed boring. I wanted desperately to sit quietly in my office with Beau whiffling quietly on his chair and Patty gently scraping away at her fingernails with a file. I wanted to sit with Karen on her bed and eat ice cream. I wanted never to see Angela Steele again. I wanted to be done with Anita Wagner's death.
I got to the office about 3:00. Patty looked up as I came through the door.
“So,” she said. “How'd it go? Find any skeletons lurkin' in any closets?”
I groaned loudly. “I don't even want to talk about it!” I moaned at her. “Those people in Opelika are crazier than anybody I've ever known!”
“That bad, eh?” She smacked her gum in such a way that demonstrated decades of practice. It had just the right amount of sassy crack in the back of her mouth. “Well, it ain't nuthin',” she went on, “compared to the hullabaloo we had here yesterday.” She gazed at me from eyes narrowed into slits. “Myron Wagner's back in town. And he's hell-bent on destruction, lemme tell yoo.” She nodded. “He's gonna have sombody's head, and I think it might be yours.” She swiveled her chair around and crossed one scrawny knee over another.
“Whatever!” I replied. “I don't care. I've just been two rounds with Angela Steele, and he can't have anything on her. That lady's wackadoodle!”
Patty, whose face had been grim the moment before, burst into peals of laughter. She slapped her desk and had to take her reading glasses off her nose before they fell on the floor. She guffawed until Beau, who must've been sleeping soundly in my office, stumbled from the hallway and gazed at me lovingly. I think he was surprised at Patty's uncharacteristic silliness.
“Beau!” I exclaimed, and held out my arms to him. He grinned for a moment and then remembered that he was supposed to be grumpy at me for leaving him, at which point his face turned sour, his mouth turned down, his tail drooped, and he slunk back into my office.
“Oh, good grief,” I said. “Even my dog's treating me bad.”
“He don't like it when yer gone,” Patty noted. “And that girl of yer's been callin' me this mornin' too, wonderin' when yer comin' home.”
“I've got a cell phone,” I replied. “Why didn't she just call me?”
“She don't want to disturb you, I 'magine,” Patty answered. “She knows this case is driving you near crazy. Although why, I can't imagine.” Patty returned her focus to her fingernails and looked away. “You just outa forget that there tattoo, cremate that body, and move on. Ain't no sense in disturbin' yer life over it.”
“I agree, Patty,” I said. “That's exactly what I'm gonna do, first thing in the morning.” I walked to my office, put my purse on my desk, and took off my shoes. Emery's urn sat on the shelf. “I'll get back to you later,” I said to him. “We have things to talk about, you and I.” Why oh why couldn't Emery Plott have lived just a few weeks longer, and handled all this?
Patty appeared in the doorway. “Yeh talkin' to somebody?” she asked. “Y'know, he'd a been mystified by this one too, Ivy. He would.” She picked Beau up and sat in his chair, setting him delicately in her lap. “By the way, yesterday after you left, Herbert Plott came by. He sat and visited the longest time. I told him we'd had a break-in, so he went right out and got a security camera and had 'em put in this mornin'.” She pointed with a polished aqua-colored nail out my office door. “One's in the morgue, and one's over top o' the back door.”
I nodded. That was a good idea, although it did us little good now.
“And he installed a better dead-bolt on the front door. It was busted and I hadn't been usin' it in the longest time.”
At 5:00 we closed up shop and I drove home with Beau nestled in my lap under the steering wheel. I decided then and there that I'd never travel out of town again to hunt down information concerning a funeral, no matter what. If the family did not care to fully inform the funeral home on any matter, I would tell them to have the body transferred to a different facility, and I'd send them a bill for whatever services I'd already rendered. I sighed deeply, smiled a little, and tapped the steering wheel along with “Copacabana” on the oldies station. My stress was ever so slowly subsiding as I neared home.
Copyrighted by M.K. Christiansen
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