Stranger in the Room

by Amanda Kyle Williams

  Cash Tilison came out his front door in western boots, a short-sleeve T-shirt that hugged his biceps and pumped-up pecs and was tucked into blue jeans. Thick crop of reddish-brown hair, brown eyes, wide-shouldered and tall. Yum. Just my type. Well, except for the stalker thing. And the Miki thing. Oh, and the Rauser thing. But, hey, it does not hurt to look, right? Neil elbowed me. I think my jaw had dropped a little.

  “Cash Tilison.” He extended his hand to me, then to Neil. I introduced them. “So tell me Miki’s all right.”

  “There was a break-in at her house Thursday night,” I said.

  He stopped. “Oh God. Was she hurt?” He was leading us down a sidewalk that twisted around the house. I saw a terraced rock garden, a pond, a bridge, a limestone patio with stone bar that matched the house. An elaborate outdoor kitchen.

  “No.”

  “Thank the Lord for that.” We walked up stone steps to the patio. He gestured toward the chairs. “So how can I help? Why didn’t Miki call me herself? How do you know her?”

  “Where were you Thursday night, Mr. Tilison?”

  “Where was I?” He looked confused. “Who are you again?”

  “My name is Keye Street. I’m a private investigator.” I didn’t want to tell him Miki was my cousin. I wasn’t ready to give up anything that a stalker could use later.

  “Miki hired a PI to find out who broke into her house?”

  “Where did you say you were Thursday night?”

  “You think I broke into her house?” He started to laugh. “Oh that’s sweet! Why on earth would I do that? First of all, I don’t need to rob houses for a living. I’m doing pretty good, as you can see.” He gestured to the excessive mansion we’d seen only from outside. “Secondly, I have a key.”

  He leaned back, crossed an ankle over a knee, and grinned at me. “I don’t mean to be rude, but I hope you know how ridiculous this is, Ms. Street. Does Miki know you’re here?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so.” He laughed again, shook his head. “Why aren’t the cops asking the questions?”

  “Nothing was stolen,” Neil said.

  “So what was the point of the break-in?” Tilison wanted to know.

  “Miki mentioned that after the two of you discontinued your relationship, you had some trouble adjusting,” I said, ignoring his question.

  He looked at me, looked at Neil. “We didn’t discontinue our relationship. We’re still in a relationship. We’re friends.”

  “So when you were calling her even after she asked you to stop,” I said, “and stalking her while she was working and leaving messages saying she was a cold bitch, that was because of your friendship?”

  Tilison uncrossed long legs and sat forward. Color hit his face and neck, but he stayed cool. “Look, I fell in love with Miki.” He clasped big hands. “It was hard to accept at first that she didn’t return my feelings. I made a whole lot of mistakes. I admit that. I acted like an arrogant ass. But we moved past it. I’ve apologized for the way I behaved.”

  “Did you come back here after your fund-raiser Thursday night? I believe it ended at nine.” I looked at Neil for confirmation. He nodded.

  “As a matter of fact, I stayed in Atlanta. I drove back yesterday morning.” The singer’s tone had grown icy.

  “Were you alone?”

  “I don’t have to answer that.”

  “Miki came in late,” I said. “There was a guy about your size, Mr. Tilison, standing inside her house.”

  “I resent the hell out of the implication.”

  “And no evidence of a break-in. It’s almost like he had a key.”

  Cash Tilison came out of his chair, an impressive sight. He was about a foot taller than I was, and his nostrils had started to flare. I didn’t mind. Sometimes you have to punch a few holes in the bag and see what falls out. “You’re on the wrong scent, Ms. Street. Just so you know. And this is a waste of my time.” He walked to a set of French doors off the patio, turned the handle, and went inside. We watched him cross over marble floors.

  “So what do you think?” Neil asked.

  “Gorgeous,” I said. “Makes me want to listen to country music.”

  “Wow. Why don’t you just totally objectify the guy.”

  We headed back down granite slab steps, through the rock garden, and back to the Impala. “He still has a fierce attachment. You see how he reacted when I mentioned discontinuing the relationship? It doesn’t mean he’s stalking her, though. Not sure I bought the contrition act. Embarrassment, maybe. But after so many months of calm with Miki, it doesn’t make sense. How ’bout you? Any thoughts?”

  “Yeah,” Neil said. “I think you should skip applying for diplomatic service.”

  8

  We drove another hour through gently rising landscape into the foothills, then twisting mountain roads took us into Creeklaw County and Big Knob, a battle site during the Civil War, according to the historic markers. A sign pointed the way to a Confederate cemetery. A mountain wall rose up on one side of the narrow main street. Gift shops advertised authentic Native American jewelry, and property rental offices built to look like log cabins dotted the stretch of land between the mountain and the road. On our right, Lake Chatuge cut a deep blue gash into the lush mountains. Boat docks and gear rentals, walking piers and fish houses lined the banks in downtown Big Knob. Vendors sold funnel cakes off carts, and a pontoon with a Rent Me sign was anchored next to a restaurant with a full patio. The air was spicy with lake fish and fried dough. Jet Skis and sailboats skirted the lake. Lake Chatuge’s advertised one hundred thirty miles of stunning shoreline went on far beyond our line of sight. Traffic was heavy and slow, lots of stoplights. We’d go like hell for fifty feet, then sit for a couple of minutes. The town looked like it was about to burst its seams. It had never crossed my mind that Big Knob was a big deal on a holiday weekend. This might have been good news. For once everyone seemed to be dressed like Neil.

  “So how does it work, exactly?” Neil’s first words in nearly thirty minutes startled me. “The crematory, I mean.”

  I looked at him. “That’s what you’ve been thinking about all this time?”

  “Is it just, like, a big, long oven?”

  “Kind of.”

  Neil thought about that. “With rollers to slide a casket in?”

  “I think a lot of the time it’s just some big cardboard coffin. I’m not sure how they load them.”

  I focused on a Confederate flag in the back window of the pickup truck in front of us and felt my anger spike. There has been a good, long debate down South about this flag and its current appropriateness. People who fly it claim it’s about Georgia’s rich history, about state’s rights and southern identity. Bullshit. Everyone knows what it’s really about. Whatever the flag meant once to the Confederate States, the Civil War South, for people of color it came to represent prejudice and terror, pure and simple. It has been marched down the street on the shoulders of hooded Klansmen. It was used as a symbol of white supremacy by Strom Thurmond supporters during his segregationist presidential bid in ’48. After that, everyone knew what the Confederate flag had been turned into. If I could, I’d set fire to every one of them. Screw free speech.

  “So there’s just a pile of ashes left?” Neil said again, obsessing. It was wearing a little thin.

  “Okay, so what’s the fascination with the crematory?”

  He shrugged and didn’t answer for a while. My car moved a full twenty-five feet in traffic. There was a nice breeze coming off the lake. “I guess I’m just wondering about the person whose job it is to do all that,” he finally admitted. “I mean, here’s a man who knows how hot a fire has to be to burn flesh and bone. What do you think he talks about after work? He probably has, like, trade publications about cooking people and catalogs for creepy instruments. He knows all about disposing of the dead, this guy. You think he just sees bodies now? Like maybe in the beginning he saw people who had lives and stuff but now he just sees some
dead flesh to be disposed of.”

  “God,” I said, and looked at him. “I’m so glad I asked.”

  The truck in front of me with the Confederate flag stopped suddenly, even though there was plenty of space in front of it. I jammed my foot on the brake pedal. Neil’s phone and a couple of other devices flew out of his hands and landed on the floorboard. He cursed.

  In the pickup, a teenage boy was leaning out his window, talking to a group of girls on the sidewalk. He had thick biceps, a crew cut, a dangling earring that picked up the sun. The driver got involved. Everyone was chatting and laughing. The light ahead changed to green and more space opened up in front of the truck. My heart was still doing a hundred and fifty after nearly driving up his tailpipe, so I didn’t find any of it particularly endearing. I laid on my horn.

  The passenger door opened. Oh boy. A big number seven sat squarely in the center of the boy’s chest on a sky-blue football jersey. “What’s your problem, lady?” he yelled back at us. He was wide-shouldered and thick-necked.

  “Oh great, get our ass kicked by rednecks. Good thinking,” Neil mumbled.

  The young man shaded his eyes with one hand and squinted, then leaned into the truck and said something to the driver. The driver’s door opened, and he got out too. Same color jersey, thicker neck and shoulders, a double-digit number. There was a lot of conversation, looking back at us, nodding. Neil and I exchanged an uncertain look.

  Number Seven yelled to the girls on the sidewalk he’d been flirting with, “Hey, it’s the Booger Bandit Bounty Hunter!”

  “Oh shit.” I sank down low in the driver’s seat. Heads turned our way from traffic, from pavement cafés, from the sidewalk.

  “What the hell?” Neil wanted to know.

  “Miki YouTubed a bond-enforcement job,” I grouched. “I’m never taking her with me again.”

  Neil typed something into his tablet. Chipmunk-like sounds came from tiny speakers. His shoulders begin to shake. “This is hilarious. Ooohh. Look at that. This thing has gone totally viral. Awesome.”

  So much for blending in. The car behind us honked and the guys in the truck finally got back in, but Number Seven pressed his face up against the back window and pressed a knuckle into his nostril so it looked like his finger was jammed up there. Neil laughed. We inched forward another few yards. I found a crack in traffic and turned off the main drag. We went about three blocks, then turned right on Chatuge Drive. This is where Big Knob lifted its tourist mask. Here, all the makeup came off and the town’s support staff came home to squat frame houses in need of paint jobs, broken-down cars, and oil-stained driveways.

  “So back to the ovens.” Neil was still on the crematory thing. “A body goes in and a little pile of ashes rolls out?”

  “It’s not ashes, Neil. Basic elements like calcium don’t burn. It’s bone fragments, mostly. Pulverized.”

  This seemed to shut him up. He looked away. We found the suspension bridge that would get us to Highway 75, which twisted through the mountains toward the North Carolina line. There was a distinct change in real estate after we crossed the bridge. No more glitzy tourist town. No cement-block foundations and beat-up cars either. This was the resort community Quinn had talked about—gated communities with huge homes, lake views, and immaculate lawns, surrounded by mountains and golf courses. A discreet sign in muted colors at the entrance of one of the lakeside communities went almost unseen until we passed: Water’s Edge, from the Low 3.5s.

  Neil had pulled up satellite imagery of the area. “Crematory’s about three miles north. The hotel’s coming up on our left. I’m starving. Can we get some lunch and get checked in?”

  It had been awhile since I’d had a partner. I’m fine with teamwork. You have to learn how to function as a unit in the field. The Bureau had drilled this into me. But I wasn’t happy about my current partner’s nutritional requirements. I would have been just fine scoping out the crematory grounds, maybe finding a few neighbors at home, poking around a little, and locating Billy and Brenda Wade and their urn full of fake ashes. I glanced at Neil. He looked pouty.

  We rounded a turn and saw rising up over flowering gardens and a rolling green golf course the Big Knob Resort and Spa—an enormous granite slab lodge, part railway hotel, part castle, nestled in the southern Appalachians and staring at the vast blue waters of Lake Chatuge. I slowed the car. We gazed at it.

  Neil brightened. “Larry booked this?”

  “He did. Said everything else was full.”

  “Least he could do after he sent you to find that cow at some lesbian colony last year.”

  “It wasn’t a colony. It was a couple that owned the cabin where I stayed.”

  He grinned at me. “Fun to think about, though.”

  I pulled onto the long drive that led to the Big Knob Resort and Spa. Golfers, two to a cart, cruised over the paved paths next to the green. “What’s the appeal, anyway? I don’t get the obsession men have with lesbians.”

  “It’s about challenge, Keye. We’ll pretty much do anything that moves. The cat stops purring when I walk in.”

  The lobby was furnished with heavy wood, claret rugs, a high beamed ceiling. A couple of huge granite fireplaces that probably burned all winter were unlit now. We were told our adjoining rooms were ready even though we were here way in advance of the official three-o’clock check-in time. My room was small but nice, more lodge than hotel, crowded with heavy furniture. A mahogany four-poster bed was angled in one corner with a view of the lake. I pulled the covers back and checked the sheets and the mattress. Don’t judge. The bedbug thing really gives me the creeps.

  My feet didn’t reach the woven rug on the floor when I sat on the edge of the high bed. I sat there for a minute, glanced at the wrist that had been sliced open the night a killer broke into my bedroom with a knife. I remembered letting my 10mm loose, blood spatter and tissue flying at me, filling my nose and mouth, the killer’s carotid artery gushing wide open like black oil spilling out into the dark night. And the taste—unlike anything I’d ever known.

  Why was it taking so long to get past the memories? I’d spent most of my adult life learning about sadists and psychopaths, profiling their crimes, their victims’ seemingly unendurable pain. So many people had been through so much worse than I had ever suffered. They’d grown and become healthy and whole again. On most days, it’s like the scar on my wrist; it’s healed over, unthought-of. But when it hits, it’s as blunt and ruthless and unexpected as the killer who shook my trust and almost took my life that night. And just for those few moments, I’m in it. I’d studied psychology and criminology. I am a PhD, for Christ’s sake. I didn’t need Dr. Shetty to tell me that something as simple as noticing that scar could act as an external cue and spark me to reexperience the trauma. The mind has a terrible time processing an act of violence perpetrated by another human. I’d noticed the changes in me, observed myself swinging from heightened anxiety and hypervigilance to a kind of psychic numbness. I recognized the symptoms of post-traumatic stress. Seeing them for what they were—memories, flashbacks, reactivity, psychological distress—was what kept me mentally sound. My professional self understood it was happening inside me. I wanted to move past it. But my obsessive addict’s brain had found something new to latch hold of. “No, no. Don’t blame yourself,” Dr. Shetty would have said. “That’s part of the problem.”

  I was mentally addressing invitations to my pity party when I heard a tap at the door that joined my room to Neil’s. I opened it and saw blond eyelashes peeking out behind a smooth coating of dark grayish-green facial mask. To keep his hair off his forehead, he had twisted it up with one of those fuzzy rubber bands. It stuck straight up on top of his head Pebbles Flintstone–style. I was reminded of how much I loved the men in my life—my dad, Rauser, Neil, Jimmy—and how silly they were.

  I stood there staring. I was utterly speechless. His skin was drawn so tight he had that weird wide-mouth post–plastic surgery look. He was wearing a white hotel robe wit
h Big Knob Resort and Spa embroidered over crossed golf clubs. Behind him, his espresso maker was on the dresser next to a yellow-and-red Café Bustelo can. His socks were folded and lined up on the bed with his other clothes, an impressive collection of hair- and skin-care products, and a snakeskin shaving kit. I don’t unpack when I travel anymore. The bedbug thing. Until they bring back DDT, my shit stays in my suitcase.

  Neil spoke through clenched teeth without moving his mouth. “I knee ten ninits.”

  “Ninits?” I laughed.

  He asked again for ten minutes and heard himself this time. He tried to squash the smile that was causing creases in the plaster at the corners of his mouth. A section of mask flaked off his right cheek. We watched it float to the pine floors.

  “Can I borrow a tampon?” I asked, and Neil swung the door closed in my face.

  9

  We crossed over the suspension bridge and drove back into another one of the neighborhoods skirting Big Knob’s touristy downtown, a hidden community visitors would probably never see. The pavement stopped, and we went for a hundred yards over a sandy one-lane that ended at a gate with a wooden sign. Lakeshore Gardens, it said, in pastel green and pink. We peered past the entrance at a trailer park with neither a lake nor garden. Children were out playing. I saw a couple of bright plastic Big Wheels, bikes lying on their side or propped against trailers, more sand and dirt, a few small tomato gardens, some folding chairs.