I knocked on the glass storm door, but I didn’t get an answer, so I peered inside. The office looked vacant. The door was unlocked, so I stuck my head in and called, “Hello? Ms. Taylor?”
From around a corner, in the garage-looking part of the building, I heard a muffled female voice say, “I’ll be right there.”
A pleasant, fiftyish woman emerged. Dressed in a gray pantsuit and black pumps, she would have looked at home in a bank or real-estate office, except for the work gloves she wore—the leather-and-canvas kind favored by carpenters and farmers. She took off one glove and held out a hand.
“You must be Dr. Brockton,” she said. “I’m Helen Taylor. Sorry to keep you waiting.”
“I kept you waiting for two days,” I said, “so you’ve still got a ways to go before you need to apologize. Thanks for agreeing to give me a look around.” I shook her hand. She had a firm grip and an open, direct gaze that I liked. For some reason, maybe because so many funeral directors tended to look deferentially downward, I hadn’t expected someone so forthright.
Helen had started out more than twenty years earlier working as a secretary in the office of a company that made metal cemetery vaults. Several years later, when the owner of the vault company branched out and opened a crematorium, he trained Helen to run it. After serving a two-year apprenticeship, she took the examination to become a licensed funeral director. Although she passed the exam with flying colors, the licensing board turned her down—they’d never licensed a female funeral director, nor anyone who’d apprenticed at an independent crematorium. After two years of training, Helen wasn’t willing to take rejection lying down. She hired an attorney, who threatened to sue the licensing board for discrimination. A few weeks later, she received a letter containing her funeral director’s license.
In its first year of operation, the crematorium had burned only four bodies, leaving her plenty of time for secretarial work. This year, she said, the number would top four hundred. Business was so good, in fact, that the crematorium was beginning an enormous expansion. She raised the blinds behind her desk and pointed out the window at a fresh excavation and enormous concrete slab. Within a year, she told me, they’d be moving to a new building five times this size. It would be equipped with a chapel for services, a viewing window, and a remote-control ignition switch, so a family member could push a button to start the cremation. The old building would remain a crematorium, but it would shift from cremating humans to cremating pets, a business that was growing by leaps and bounds. She pulled out a binder filled with architectural drawings and floor plans of the new building. I noticed it would have three furnaces rather than just two; I also noticed a large room labeled COOLER, which I asked about. The cooler would be able to hold up to sixteen bodies, she told me proudly.
“Sixteen? That’s a lot of bodies,” I said. “Nearly as many as the Regional Forensic Center can hold. You’re not planning to start killing people off, are you?”
She laughed. “I don’t have to. I’ve had as many as six or seven bodies come through here in a day,” she said. “Not often, but when it happens, I need someplace to put them. Can you imagine four or five bodies stacked up in here on a day like today?” She had a point there. The small building was air-conditioned, but between the blistering sun outside and the ovens inside, the temperature was probably close to ninety. She did need a cooler, and if business was growing like she said it was, it might not be long before she’d have that cooler filled. I was impressed with the operation, and when I said so, she beamed.
“If you’d told me twenty years ago this is what I’d be doing, I wouldn’t have believed you,” she said. “But here I am, and I love what I do.”
“I’m sometimes surprised where I ended up, too,” I said, “but I wouldn’t change it. I’m never bored, I’m sometimes able to do a good deed for victims or families, and I get to meet interesting people like you.”
“Let’s go take a look,” she said. She led me through a connecting door into the crematorium’s work space, which was every bit as spartan and utilitarian as the outside had hinted it would be. This garage was a two-furnace garage, the ovens parked side by side, their stainless-steel fronts bristling with dials and knobs and lights. She pushed a button on the furnace on the left, and a thick door slid up, revealing an arched interior about eight feet long, two feet high, and three feet wide. The interior walls of the furnace were brick—a pale, soot-stained brick, similar to what I’d seen pottery kilns made of.