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As we crossed the parking lot, I caught the smell of smoke in the air. “From the plane, it looked like half your state’s burning.”
“It is.” She made a face. “Most of the panhandle is owned by timber and paper companies. They’ve got huge tracts of gangly cultivated pines — slash pines, I think — planted in rows like crops. They burn the underbrush every spring so nothing competes with the trees for water and nutrients. It’s destroying the natural ecosystem. The longleaf pine, the slow-growing native species, is headed for extinction, and so are a lot of the plants and animals that used to live in the longleaf pine forests. Don’t get me started.” She clicked her remote key, and a blue Chevy Blazer a few rows back beeped at us. I was expecting an FDLE vehicle, but judging by the QUESTION AUTHORITY bumper sticker, this was Angie’s own car. Suddenly she stopped. “Dr. Brockton, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate what you’re doing for me.”
I smiled. “You don’t have time to tell me — not till we’re in the car, anyhow. The courthouse closes in an hour, and we’re, what, fifty-nine minutes away?”
“You’ve obviously never ridden with me.”
* * *
Thirty minutes later, we crossed the state line, and ten minutes after that, the Blazer skidded to a stop in front of the Cheatham County courthouse in downtown Mocksville. The papers were waiting for us at the office of the court clerk, who handed them over to Angie only after she’d carefully examined our identification and our faces. “Shame,” the woman said, reminding me that we were in a small town where everyone knew everyone else’s business — and generally had strong opinions about it. “She was your sister, wasn’t she?” Angie nodded. “It just don’t seem right.”
Angie nodded. “Thank you,” she said, managing a small smile.
The woman drew herself up and stared at Angie across the counter. “What I mean is, it don’t seem right messing with her now. Seems like she ought to have a quiet, decent burial, so she can rest in peace, instead of being poked and prodded at by people like you.”
Angie’s head snapped back as if she’d been slapped. Then her eyes got fierce, and I thought for a moment she was going to vault the counter and punch the woman. Instead, she spun and strode out of the courthouse, her heels clacking like gunshots on the black-and-white checkerboard of the marble hallway.
By the time I caught up with her, she was already in the car, slamming the door. I got into the passenger seat just as she clutched the steering wheel and began to weep — deep, racking sobs that made the car tremble like some frightened animal with wheels instead of legs.
“People… like… you,” she gasped. “How dare she? People like me are the only ones who give a damn about what really happened to Kate.” She took a few heaving breaths, then the crying shifted from angry to mournful. “People like me didn’t do enough to save her.” She leaned her head on the steering wheel. I squeezed her shoulder awkwardly, just once, and then we sat in silence for a few moments before heading to the funeral home.
* * *
Morningside Funeral Home occupied a small, tidy brick building on the edge of Mocksville, alongside a memorial garden adorned with brass urns and plastic flowers. The receptionist—Lily, said her name tag — seemed flustered by our arrival, but she got a lot more flustered when Angie explained who we were and why we were there. She bloomed a splotchy crimson and looked from Angie’s face to mine, and back to Angie’s again. Angie finished by saying, “So could we see the body now, please?”
The flustered woman stood up from her desk. “You need to speak with Mr. Montgomery,” she said. She held up both hands, as if warding off evil, and backed through a doorway into an inner office. The door closed behind her, and I heard voices speaking in hushed, urgent tones.
Eventually the door reopened, and a tall, pale man with a wispy gray comb-over emerged. His upper body didn’t move or sway in any way that corresponded to his footsteps; it simply glided forward, as if he were on casters. “Hello, I’m Samuel Montgomery,” he said. The name seemed to ooze out of his mouth in a way that made my ears feel greasy. He held out a hand for me to shake, so I took it. It was as cool and flaccid as the hand of a dead man after rigor mortis has come and gone. Angie also shook his hand, and I saw the surprise and distaste flit across her face as she did. “What can I do for you?”
Angie repeated the explanation she’d given to the receptionist, then handed him the twenty-four-hour injunction and the court order authorizing us to examine the body. He studied the documents somberly. Gravely, even. Finally he looked up, handing the pages back to Angie. “I’m sorry to say that we have, ah, a bit of a problem, Ms. St. Claire.”
Angie took a long, slow breath. “What sort of problem?”
“I received a phone call earlier today from Mr. Nicely — the, ah, husband of the deceased — saying he wished to make a slight change in the arrangements. He asked that we proceed quite, ah, expeditiously.” He looked down, brushed a few flakes of dandruff from the lapel of his pinstripe suit, then looked up again, but not quite all the way up, so his eyes stopped just short of meeting Angie’s and my own. “I’ve just returned from the cemetery. The, ah, deceased — Mrs. Nicely — was buried an hour ago.”
* * *
Angie and her husband — Ned, an ornithologist for a Tallahassee environmental education center — dropped me at a hotel in downtown Tallahassee. Our new plan, which I hoped Burt DeVriess’s colleague could help with, was to obtain an exhumation order allowing Kate Nicely’s body to be dug up and examined. I wasn’t terribly optimistic about the chances — it’s one thing to delay a burial, but another, bigger deal to dig up a corpse. But between Grease’s high-wattage connections and Angie’s law enforcement credentials, it might work.
I’d suggested staying at the Hampton Inn, a chain I’d always found clean, comfortable, and affordable. Instead, they booked me at the Hotel Duval, a stylish and recently renovated hotel whose lobby was an Art Deco study in green glass, black granite floors, and — overhead — thousands of luminous soap bubbles. The bubbles, I realized upon closer inspection, weren’t actually soap; they were spheres of thin blown glass, suspended from the ceiling on spider-thin threads of clear nylon. The illusion was remarkably convincing.
After I’d rubbernecked sufficiently, I ambled to the front desk, where the clerk greeted me with an obliging smile and began checking me in. “Do you have a room preference, Mr. Brockton?”
“Nonsmoking, please.”
“Of course. And do you have a color preference?”
“Excuse me?”
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“A color preference. Our rooms feature six different color themes. We have refreshing blues, uplifting yellows, energizing citrus, exhilarating reds, peaceful neutrals, and serene greens. What are you in the mood for?”
What was I in the mood for? A juicy hamburger and a hot shower were the only things I was truly in the mood for. I felt overwhelmed by the pressure to choose. “I’m so used to boring beige,” I told her. “So the rooms are all basically the same? Only the wallpaper’s different?”
“Oh, it’s not just the wallpaper,” she chirped. “The entire color palette is coordinated — the walls, the art, the bedding, the flowers.”
I asked her to repeat the colors. “Okay,” I said, “since I’m in Florida, I’ll try energizing citrus.”
“Good choice.” She smiled approvingly, her fingers clattering across the keyboard energetically. Then her smile faded. “Oh, I’m so sorry; we don’t have anything available tonight in citrus.”
I shrugged. “Okay, how about green? What was it — serene green? If I can’t have energy, I’ll take serenity.”
Again her fingers clattered; again she looked disappointed. “Oh, dear, I’m afraid there’s nothing in our serene greens, either.”
“So, what is there?”
She did a search. “I can put you in peaceful neutrals.”
“I’m feeling ambivalent about the neutrals,” I joked. Her brow furrowed; either she didn’t get the joke or she thought it was lame. “Peaceful neutrals will be just fine,” I assured her. She brightened and made me a key card.
Peaceful neutrals, I learned when I opened the door, were variations on a theme of boring beige.
Angie and Ned had offered to take me to dinner, but I’d declined; Angie was upset — she’d lost her sister, she suspected her brother-in-law of murder, and now she and her family had been denied even the chance to bury Kate. The last thing Angie needed to spend her evening doing was making small talk with me. I was getting hungry, though, so I called the front desk to ask about nearby restaurants. The Duval, it turned out, had both a steakhouse restaurant and a rooftop bar. The sun was going down and the temperature was dropping by the time I settled peacefully and neutrally into the room, so I decided to take in the view from on high and hope that the rooftop bar’s menu included variations on a theme of burger. The bar was on the eighth floor — not exactly the Empire State Building, but then again, Tallahassee wasn’t exactly New York, so maybe eight stories high was high enough.
