Part 3 — Room Fourteen Remembered
The man in the long dark coat introduced himself to me at the foot of the casket. His name was Raymond Okafor, seventy-three, retired trucker, and in 1998 he had been asleep in Room 14 of the Pine Rest Motel when a fire started down the hall.
Grandma was working the night shift. She smelled smoke, ran the length of the corridor, and kicked in the door to wake him. She dragged him out through the back window by his belt. By the time the engines arrived, the roof was coming down, and she was sitting in the gravel with soot on her uniform.
The small brass key on her chain opened a safe deposit box at the credit union on Hardy Street. The retired deputy with the cane, whose name was Mr. Lyle Stamper, drove me there himself on Monday morning. He had worked the fire as a young investigator and had never been satisfied with how it was ruled.
Inside was a sealed envelope and a cassette tape. Grandma had written out what she saw that night in her careful block letters. A man in a tan jacket carrying a gas can across the back lot at half past one. She knew his face, because he was the motels owner, Cecil Barlow, and he had stopped her every Friday for years to hand over her pay.
Barlow was in the chapel, at the end of the fourth pew, wearing a gray suit and holding a hymnal. He was eighty-one now, long since retired and living in a golf community. He had heard Grandma was gone, and he came to make certain nothing in her belongings was ever opened.
Mr. Stamper simply walked over, sat beside him, and said, Cecil, we need to talk about Room 14. Barlow looked at the envelope in my hand. He did not run. His shoulders dropped, and he said, I have been carrying it twenty-six years.
He confessed in the sheriffs office that afternoon. He had burned the motel for the insurance money after a bad year. Nobody was supposed to be inside, but Raymond had been sleeping in 14 that night, and Grandma had caught him in the act. He had stayed silent for twenty-six years, and she had kept her silence out of fear that no one would believe a housekeeper.
He was charged with arson, insurance fraud, and endangering lives, and he took a plea within the month. The insurance company, which had paid out a settlement in 1998, was ordered to recover it. Part of the money went to Raymond, who had lost all of his belongings in that room.
Raymond came to my house the following week with a thick envelope. Grandma, it turned out, had left me savings, and a note: For Kayla, for the college I never saw. My mother held the paper for a long time. At the end, she said, I was wrong about the job.
We held a second memorial at the Methodist church on Fourth Street. The housekeeping staff came in uniforms again, and Mom served the ham herself. She stood in the kitchen with a ladle and said she had never been so proud of a pair of rubber gloves.
The brass key on its green plastic diamond hangs from a hook in my kitchen now. On quiet nights I touch it with one finger and say, Thank you for the clean sheets, Grandma.
