Chapter 3
As they hopped out of Mack’s truck, the front door to the house opened, and an old man wearing bright red suspenders over a pair of khaki pants stood in the doorway. He had on just a T-shirt, which really surprised Doreen, since it was clearly wintertime here. As he studied the two of them, he frowned.
Doreen ushered Goliath out of Mack’s truck, but he immediately balked. “What’s the matter, Goliath?” His ruff stood out in warning, and he immediately returned to the truck. “You want to stay here?” she asked him.
Mack came to her side, wondering what the delay was. When Doreen explained Goliath’s reaction, Mack nodded. “Better leave him here. He’s smelling something he doesn’t like.”
“But Mugs is yanking on the leash and can’t wait to get inside. Plus, Thaddeus is calm.”
Mack shook his head. “I would defer to the animals then. To each their own.”
With Goliath safely inside, and the windows cracked to circulate some air, Doreen let Mugs pull her to the front door and the owner of this property.
As soon as the old man saw the animals, his face rippled into a huge smile. “Doreen?” he asked excitedly.
She smiled right back and nodded. “Yes, that’s me. Nice to meet you, Milford.”
“Welcome, welcome,” he boomed, his voice echoing through the air. Mugs raced toward him, and the old man bent down to give him a big greeting. Thaddeus, not to be outdone, called out, “Thaddeus is here. Thaddeus is here.” The old man laughed and laughed. “Oh my, you have made me a happy old man today.” He ushered them inside, and, as soon as he looked at Mack, he asked, “Are you her assistant?”
At that, Doreen snickered, and Mack turned on her, his eyes beading into a frown. She paused between her giggles to speak. “This is my fiancé,” she replied. Mack’s frown fell away, and he beamed. He reached out a hand and introduced himself as Corporal Mack Moreau, Kelowna detective.
“The police?” Milford asked, his eyebrows soaring upward. He turned to face Doreen. “You’re engaged to him?”
She nodded. “He asked me to marry him over the holidays.”
“That’s good timing,” The farmer faced Mack and added, “Besides, you probably need to keep her close, don’t you?”
“I do, but maybe not for the reasons you’re thinking of,” Mack replied, with a chuckle.
“Oh, I imagine she’s a handful,” Milford declared. “That brings back good memories of days gone by.” He pushed them farther and farther into his house, which was simply one big room with a wood-burning stove in the center. He walked over, crouched down, and checked that enough wood was in the stove. Then, with a nod, he turned back to them. “Can I get you some coffee?”
“Sure, I would love a cup,” Doreen replied.
Mack added, “Me too. Thanks.”
Doreen looked around, noting the single couch and the solo old chair, both which had seen better years, but the old man appeared to be in decent health and in a good humor. “Have you lived here long?” she asked him.
“All my life,” Milford stated proudly. “It’s hard when you lose your partner of fifty years,” he shared, “but that’s what happened to my Rose last year. Breast cancer took her away from me. I’ve got no use for that cancer stuff,” he muttered. “It’s got no business taking such a beautiful person from me.”
“I’m so sorry,” Doreen said.
He nodded. “That’s the problem though. Everybody’s sorry, but just nothing nobody can do about it. It’s like, tag, you’re it. It’s downhill from there, like a line of dominos falling, with the lack of medical treatments, particularly at her age and her stage of cancer,” he muttered. “Life hasn’t been the same since.”
“Do you want to move back into town?” she asked. “You would be closer to everyone.”
He snorted at that. “If I were to go anywhere, I would move farther away from people. Good night, absolutely nothing to be gained getting close to people.”
She smiled. “You’ve got a lot of snow out here.”
“Yep, I sure do,” Milford stated proudly. “I kind of like it myself.”
“The snow?” she asked.
He nodded. “I like winter. I like the hibernation. I like the fact that the road is impassable for most people.” His lips twitched as he looked over at Mack. “I was a little afraid that Doreen wouldn’t make it up here.”
Mack smiled and nodded. “I wouldn’t let her drive here, since she didn’t know the area.”
“Good thinking,” Milford said. “You never know. You may need to keep a leash on that one. Lots of guys like me are out there who would try to steal her from you.” Then he went off in a cackle of pure joy.
Doreen grinned at him. “And, if you weren’t still mourning the loss of your beloved wife, I might even be interested.”
That set Milford off again. “Oh my, this is definitely a good day now.” He motioned them over to the couch. “Take a seat. Take a seat.”
Almost as if understanding what the couch had once been used for, Mugs quickly hopped up and settled in immediately, without her even getting the chance to tell him off for his bad behavior. She gasped and rushed over to get him down, but the old man was having none of it.
“He found Old Boomer’s place,” Milford shared. “That’s where he sat all the time.”
“What happened to Old Boomer?” she asked, without thinking it through.
His face quieted, and he sighed. “Lost him a few months back.… I don’t want to say it was almost as hard as losing my Rose, but, at that point in time, it was a second deadly blow.” He shook his head. “Ain’t fair. None of it’s fair.”
“I’m so sorry.” Doreen winced, as she appeared to be constantly saying the wrong things.
“Oh, don’t you worry about that,” Milford said. “It was his time to go, and he was just as heartbroken over the loss of my beloved Rose as I was.”
Mack, as if sensing more pitfalls ahead, interrupted, “Doreen mentioned something about the zucchini plot.”
“Yeah.” The old man turned a little more belligerent as he faced Mack, as if seeing the cop in front of him now, not Doreen’s fiancé. “I have been planting in that zucchini patch since time began, until all that blood appeared one day. And my beautiful Rose told me that the murder needed to be resolved, once and for all. I told her there weren’t nothing I could do about it, but then I read about Doreen here. So, I thought, well, maybe I would give it one more try to solve the mystery. For Rose, you know?”
“I’m glad you did,” Doreen replied. “Now, if you wouldn’t mind telling us what happened?”
“Not a whole lot to tell,” Milford began, with a shrug. “I went out one day to check on the zucchini patch. Boy, was it overflowing with zucchinis.” A fat grin covered his face at the memory.
“It was one of those bumper crops, where anytime somebody came by to visit, we sent them home with zucchinis, basically forcing them to take some in order to get rid of it,” he shared, with a chuckle. “I’ve got to admit that there were probably a few times when people didn’t even want to see us because I would send them home with half a dozen each.” At that, his expression again filled with happy memories. Then a cloud passed over his features, and his smile faded.
“And then one day I went out there, and blood was everywhere. I mean, fresh blood, soaking into the ground. It was all over the place. And the ground was chewed up some, as if some big fight had happened.”
Doreen frowned at him, and he nodded.
“I went back inside, told my wife, and she just shrugged, saying some coyote or whatever must have gotten a rabbit or something,” he murmured.
“I hadn’t put up much in the way of fences for the rabbits, and honestly, I would have kept that zucchini crop outside the rabbit fence to let them eat it anyway, just to slow its growth,” he explained. “Some people have trouble with zucchinis, but they grow like crazy here. Anyway, I looked around for a carcass, but I didn’t see anything. As far as I was concerned, it was way too much blood for a rabbit.” The old man shrugged.
“Back then we had a Kodak camera, and I tried to take some pictures, but the light was funny, and the blood just didn’t show up.” He sighed. “It’s one of the reasons I didn’t worry about really forcing the issue because it seemed I had no way to prove it was blood. Plus, the ground soaked it up very quickly. I had no way of knowing whether it was something else, though I couldn’t figure out what else it could be.
“So that was part of the problem too. If it wasn’t blood, then what was it? And, if it was blood, whose was it? I thought maybe a deer got taken down, and it was certainly that level of blood, but why would there be a dead deer when I hadn’t killed one? And, if the blood was from a deer, where was it? We do have bears and mountain lions up here, cougars for sure,” he added, “and wolves definitely.”
“So, it could have been a nonhuman predator, is what you’re saying?” Mack asked.
“Yeah, it sure could have been, and I was prepared to let it go. Honestly, I didn’t want to start any big hullabaloo about it. I didn’t want nothing to do with any headache and hardship, particularly with the police,” he said, his gaze narrowing on Mack.
Mack just nodded and didn’t say anything, something he seemed to be really good about when it came to reading people.
Doreen patted Mugs, pleased to see he was being very well behaved. She looked back at the old man. “So why now?”
“Because of my Rose,” Milford replied. “One of the things that she wanted me to do was get that settled once and for all, so her soul could rest easy. Mind you, I figured that, once you’re dead, you’re probably dead, and your soul don’t care no more. Still, she told me that it would bother her into eternity, and I don’t want anything to stop my beautiful Rose from having a good sleep,” he explained. “So, I’ve fussed. I’ve fumed, and I’ve thought about it. Then I figured there would be no help for it. I would just have to find a way. Then I heard about you,” he declared, with a beaming smile in Doreen’s direction. “I’m not even sure how I stumbled on you,” he admitted, looking at her, as if she were suddenly here out of the blue, without his even understanding that much.
Dorren watched him, noting some of the same symptoms she saw at Rosemoor starting to show with this man as well. She looked over at Mack to see if he’d picked up on it, and it was obvious that he had. “So,” Doreen asked, “did you keep any of the soil from that patch?”
“What do you mean?” he asked, looking at her. “I didn’t plant in that patch no more. If it was people blood, which I don’t know why it would be, I felt it would be bad juju if I were to plant something in that soil.”
She studied him for a long moment. “I would have thought maybe giving some of that back to Mother Nature would be the circle of life.”
He looked at her, then nodded. “I do think about that every once in a while, but my beloved Rose wanted this mystery solved.”
“Right,” Doreen agreed, as she turned to look out the window. “Where is this zucchini patch?”
“Ah, after coffee, I’ll take you out there.” He got up to tend to a big black kettle, boiling on the stove. He took off the lid, tossed something in, and then proceeded to pour two cups, which he then handed to each of them. She took hers and accepted it gently. It was hot, far too hot to drink.
Mack was busy getting them back on topic. “Did you have any visitors around that time?”
“ Nah , no visitors. We don’t get much in the way of visitors out here.”
“How long ago was this?”
“Oh, twenty-five years or thereabouts,” Milford replied, with a frown.
Doreen’s eyebrows shot up.
“As I already told you, I was totally okay to ignore it for the rest of my life, but my beloved Rose wouldn’t have it.”
“Right.” Doreen noted that everything Milford was doing now was being orchestrated by a woman from the grave. However, if something was nefarious about all that blood… “When you say there was a lot of blood,” she began.
He nodded. “A lot of blood.”
“Okay, can you tell me what a lot looks like?” she asked.
“Oh, it’s at least this whole patch, some six feet wide.” He shook his head. “Never really thought there would be that much blood.”
“Six feet? So, like a six-foot circle?” Mack asked.
The old farmer pondered that. “It weren’t no circle. It was a big mess, not exactly neat and tidy like a circle would be, but, yeah, I would say about a six-foot circle. You know, six feet across the diameter.”
Doreen nodded, pulled out a little notebook that she kept with her, then started making notes. When she looked up, Milford was giving her a big wide smile.
“See? Now if you were here twenty-five years ago, I would have brought you down to look at this. I called the cops, and they told me that it was probably a cougar or a deer or something along that line.”
“Did they come out here?” Mack asked.
“Nope. Sure didn’t. ’Course, at the time I wasn’t exactly too interested in having them out here. So I probably didn’t make it all that clear what I thought should happen.”
“Right,” Mack muttered, with a nod, “but maybe now you could tell me what you think happened.”
The old man looked at him. “It’s obvious, isn’t it?”
“Not to me it isn’t,” Mack replied. Then he looked over at Doreen, who grinned at him.
“It’s obvious from our corner,” she declared, with a knowing smile to Milford.
“What’s obvious?” Mack asked in confusion.
Doreen explained, “That somebody was murdered here.”
“Exactly,” the old man agreed, grinning broadly. “Now I know I got the right person.” He cackled hard, slapping his knee. “Drink up your coffee, Doreen. Drink up, and I’ll take you out to the crime scene.”
At that, Mack rolled his eyes and whispered something under his breath.
She nudged him, but she also knew where Mack was coming from. She worked to finish her coffee, which she had to admit was a struggle to get down. It was strong and thick and black, yet somewhat appealing. She would take a sip and almost choked as it was so strong. Yet still she had to have another sip because it had a very unique flavor.
“Campfire coffee,” Milford shared, with a nod. “It takes a bit of getting used to, but, once you’re there, you’ll crave it.”
“At least now I know where to come to get another cup,” she said, with a smile.
“Oh, yes. Anytime you want a good cup of coffee, you just come right on up here,” he declared, “and I’ll get you one.”
“Thank you.”
Thaddeus poked his head out from behind the fall of her hair and whispered, “Thaddeus is here.”
“I know, buddy,” she said, then felt a little shiver pass through him. “Are you okay, buddy?” Thaddeus rubbed against her cheek. She stroked his feathers and murmured, “Doreen is here. Doreen is here.”
“Does he ever come out of your hair?” the old man asked, staring at the bird.
She looked at him and shrugged. “At home, yes, but not always when we’re out. Sometimes he likes to walk. It depends on how comfortable he is.”
Milford nodded. “He probably smells Ragtag.”
“Who is Ragtag?” she asked.
Milford grinned. “He’s my cat, and he’s huge, so a bird like yours? He would be a goner for sure.”
She again felt a slight shiver in Thaddeus, as he quickly tucked back behind her ear, as if understanding full well what the conversation was about. “That is good to know,” she replied, looking at Milford. “I don’t want anything to happen to Thaddeus here.”
“No, I wouldn’t either,” he declared cheerfully. “So, it’s a good thing you’re not letting him down on the floor.”
She frowned at that, then looked over at Mack, who studied the old man carefully. “Now that the coffee is gone,” she noted, standing up as she held her hand close to Thaddeus, “how about you show us the old zucchini patch?”
“Righto.” Milford hopped up, grabbed his jacket, and waited for them to get bundled back up again. “Let’s go. It’s out here in the back.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Doreen caught sight of a huge monster-size cat, watching them as they headed toward the door. She stopped, looked at the cat, then asked Thaddeus, “Is that what’s bothering you?” Thaddeus nodded.
“Oh, that’s him,” the old man said, laughing. “He’s a great hunter, been hunting all his life.”
“Thaddeus is not on the menu,” she stated.
“Of course not,” Milford agreed. He turned, cast a gimlet eye at the cat, and barked, “Did you hear that?” And, with that, he walked out ahead of them. A little unnerved, realizing that she had a cat of her own, and that cats were cats and required a different set of acceptance in many ways than other animals, Doreen quickly exited the house, keeping a close eye to ensure the other cat was shut up inside as they left.
She looked back at Thaddeus as they stepped outside and muttered, “See? That’s why not all animals are friendly for you to interact with.” Thaddeus just looked at her, and she nodded. “I know, but those are the facts of life.” Outside, they walked around the house to the back, where a walled-off garden was. She stepped up, looked at it, then frowned.
“Oh, it’s not here,” he declared, with a bright smile. “It’s over here.” And, with that, he led her around to the far end of the garden, to another patch that sat empty and forlorn, more or less weeded over, except for winter plants and old brown weeds, plus a couple sprigs of green still frozen in time, with snow atop them. “This is the patch,” he announced, pointing it out.
“Interesting,” she murmured.
“Right, but, ever since then, I haven’t been able to do anything with this garden,” he muttered.
She stared at the patch. “This is about ten by five?”
“Good eye.” Milford nodded. “Good eye.”
“Okay, and did this only hold zucchinis?” she asked.
“Yeah, it sure did,” he proclaimed. “That’s why we had to get rid of so much of it.”
“You could have grown less,” she suggested, turning to look at him.
“Could have, but my beloved wife, she loved zucchini, so we grew lots of it. We just gave away the surplus.”
She frowned, not quite sure she understood why anyone would grow so much, yet she also understood that zucchini plants tended to take on a life of their own. As she surveyed the patch, she asked, “And the blood filled the whole thing?”
Milford nodded. “Yeah, it sure did.”
“Interesting,” she murmured. “Did you ever dig it up?”
He looked at her. “What do you mean, dig it up?”
“Turn over the bed or do anything with it?”
“Nope, nope, nope, nope,” he said. “It’s exactly as it was.”
“Right,” she replied, staring at it. She wasn’t sure what she was supposed to say at this point, but her mind was already seeking answers. “Now,” she began, and Milford eyed her expectedly. “You say you haven’t turned it over, and you haven’t used this plot.”
“Nope.”
“So, are you saying that, if I took a sample of the dirt right here, we would end up with blood in it?”
“Sure would,” he said, “although, there’s been however much rain and snow and ice thinning it down, watering it out, or whatever.”
“Right.” She turned to Mack, who just frowned at her. “Do you have a baggie?”
His eyebrows shot up, but he whispered, “Do you really think the city will pay for a soil analysis at this point in time?”
She frowned because she hadn’t thought about that. She also knew the captain wouldn’t be supportive just because of budgets and all. They might have solved a lot of cases, but they had done so without a ton of expenses. So incurring more would be a constant headache for everybody. As she considered this, she noted, “We can’t proceed if we don’t have a sample, so let’s at least do that.”
“I’ll get you a container.” The old man raced back inside.
She looked at Mack as Milford took off, his jacket flapping around as if this was the most excitement he’d had in a very long time. “What are you thinking?” she asked Mack.
“I think he’s nuts,” he stated. When she rolled her eyes, he smiled.
“Maybe this really is something that bothered his wife,” she suggested, “and he’s just trying to clear up loose ends, before it’s his time to go.”
“I get that, and I’m not against your theory, but I don’t think we’ll get this analyzed.”
“You don’t think the captain will go for it?”
“I know the captain won’t go for it,” he stated. “We’ve had a hard time getting approved for things like this on current cases that we have a shot at solving. We don’t know if this was even a crime. Oh, and I didn’t get a chance to tell you this, but we’ve just had another round of cuts.”
“More?” she asked, her eyes growing round.
“Yeah. We haven’t got the new budget numbers yet—and we might not for a while, I guess. Yet what I can tell you for certain is that we don’t have the money for this kind of thing.”
She frowned, as she went over that. “What kind of money would it even cost?”
“I don’t know. I would have to look into it.”
“Are there private labs?”
His gaze turned wary, as he frowned at her. “I suppose there are, but I don’t really know.”
“If I give the captain the money to get it analyzed, would he allow that?”
“ Hmm , maybe,” Mack replied, “but I don’t really know the answer to that. Because if it is blood—”
“Right, if it is blood of human variety,” she clarified, “then it would be a case we need to look at.”
“ We ?” Mack repeated, with a note of humor.
She looked at him and then nodded. “Yes, we , because this would be a cold case, so it would be a me case,” she explained, beaming.
“Right, a you case, not a me case. Unless of course we find the body,” Mack added.
“Which is why I was wondering if Milford had turned over the soil.”
“Meaning, you think a body is buried here?” he asked, as he looked down at the ground.
“I don’t know that there is. However, I also don’t know that there isn’t,” she pointed out. “In cases like this, it’s always hard to know.”
“Cases like this,” he repeated, his lips twitching.
She threw up her hands. “It might sound as if I’m trying to put on airs,” she admitted, “but I’m really not. But what if a body is here?”
“I don’t know. I can’t imagine.”
“And what if there was evidence of a murder here but no body? Or what if you have blood that goes to a cold case of a body that was found and not identified?”
“That’s all possible. All of those possibilities are viable, or it could be a figment of the old guy’s imagination,” Mack pointed out, staring off in the distance. “But let’s take a sample back with us, so we have it. No guarantees though,” he stated pointedly.
“No, of course not,” she agreed, with a bright smile. When he rolled his eyes at that, she grinned even more.
“You are interesting to have around,” he muttered. “I’ll give you that.”
“More than that,” she declared, with a cheerful grin on her face, “but I know it’s hard for you to see it.”
“Oh no. No way. You don’t get to say things like that. I’m always happy to have you around, and you bring up a lot of very fun information,” he noted, waving his hand at the house where the old man had gone.
She laughed. “If nothing else, it will make Milford feel as if he’s doing what he promised Rose that he would do.”
“I’ll give you that,” Mack muttered, “but we’re not into therapy or grief counseling, so remember that.”
“Right,” she confirmed. “We appear to be into the stage of getting answers as to what happened, as to the cause of that grief right now.”
“His wife died of natural causes, remember?”
“Breast cancer,” she noted. “I guess that would be classified as natural causes, although sometimes I don’t see how there could possibly be anything natural about breast cancer.”
“I won’t argue that,” he replied.
She laughed. “Good. Some things you just can’t argue.”
“And, with you,” he muttered, “there are a lot of those things.”