Chapter 6
Doreen didn’t hear back from Milford until the next day. His voice was that of an old man, yet it still boomed on the phone, as if he thought he had to yell.
“What questions?” he asked.
She laughed. “For one thing, were you guys home at the time this would have happened?”
“We’d been gone but were home again, somewhere around the same time period,” he noted. “I don’t rightly remember, but I think we’d gone into town.”
“And you hadn’t had any company?”
“Nope, no company.”
“And your wife wouldn’t have had anybody over to visit?”
“No, nobody was here.”
“What did you do for work back then?”
“I worked in the logging industry,” he replied. “Gone for a while and back for a while, then gone again for a while and back. We needed whatever work we could get to augment the farm income.”
“Did your wife work?”
“Sometimes. Before she had retired, she had been a nurse. In her later years, she was in town cleaning houses, but often it wasn’t worth the trip.”
“Right, I can imagine,” she agreed. She asked him a few more things about missing people around the area and whether they had any regular visitors over the years.
“Sure, but most of them have gone by the wayside now, just like my wife,” he said. “It’s hard to keep track of people, especially when they don’t really want to be kept track of.”
Such an odd tone filled his words that she asked, “What about family? Do you have any family? Did Rose?”
“Not now.” Then a note of suspicion came into his tone, when he asked, “You don’t think we killed somebody off, do you?”
She laughed. “No, I can’t imagine you bringing this to my attention if you did the deed.”
“That’s good,” he said, “because I know a lot of stupid killers are out there, but I’m not one of them.” And, with that, he added, “Now, I’ve got to get back to work.”
“What work?” she asked.
“I’ve got to chop some more firewood,” he muttered, and he ended the call.
She thought about that for a long time, then realized that, of course, chopping wood would be a daily chore on the farm, even in the summer to get a fire started in a wood-burning stove, should he not have electricity. He may do a lot of chopping wood upfront to get a stockpile going. She didn’t know how much firewood he would go through, even trying to keep that little place warm, especially in winter conditions. It was cold and ugly outside still, even here in town, although the snow had stopped. That was a good thing, as far as she was concerned.
The snow was pretty for the one day, but, after that, she complained.
So when Mack called and that was her first comment, even Mack had laughed at her. “We don’t get to pick and choose when Mother Nature decides to dump on us. She dumps, and we just react as fast as we can to clean up the streets.”
“That’s not your problem though, right?”
“No, but you can bet that the number of accidents increases tremendously when the roads are bad. So, yes, it does affect us. It’s just not our jobs to keep the streets clear.”
“And nothing new on the DNA?”
“That could take months,” he pointed out.
“I know, but it’s not a hard thing to do. It’s just a spray bottle thing to show if it’s human or not.”
“I’ll check in with the lab in a few days,” he offered, “but, meanwhile, things are a little busy at my end.”
“Right. I did phone Milford and asked some further questions, but, so far, nothing is really popping.”
“Not surprising. I did go back through all the cold cases I could find of missing persons in that area and related to that time frame. While the Joe Rich area doesn’t pull in visitors, Big White does call to a lot of tourists,” he pointed out. “So, in theory, any missing person could be a person coming here from anywhere.”
“Right,” she muttered. “That’s not helpful.”
“Nope, it sure isn’t,” he agreed, “and that’s one of the reasons why these things can take a long time to solve.” They spoke for another few minutes. “If you want to get adventuresome, putting on a hot soup or stew would be good.”
“You’re suggesting that I cook?” she asked, dread in her voice.
“Only if you want to.”
Hearing how his tone had gentled completely, she groaned. “When you expect me to cook something by myself, it upsets me, and I immediately think I won’t do a good job. Plus, it just makes me feel as if I need to get up and do it.”
He burst out laughing. “No pressure. If you don’t want to, I can always make something when I pop over.”
“Are you coming over tonight?”
“I thought I would, unless you’ve got plans.”
“My only plans are with you,” she said, and, with that, she disconnected on him.
Grinning to herself, she headed over to the computer to see just how hard it would be to create a soup. Everybody always talked about stuff being so simple, but their version of simple never seemed to match her own. She was doing okay on some things, but, once winter had hit, food took on a whole different meaning. People mentioned stews and soups, casseroles, and a wide variety of things that Doreen had never eaten in her life. It had been both fascinating and daunting to realize that the salads and cold light fare she was more accustomed to eating had been replaced by hot foods. And that presented yet another challenge amid the cooking challenges she had already. But still, it couldn’t be that hard. Right?
She searched for an easy recipe and clicked on one and read the list of ingredients and then the instructions, frowning as she realized that she surely could put on a hot soup. She went through more recipes, looking for something incredibly easy, then finally decided she could manage a vegetable soup and maybe even one with noodles. So, with that emboldened choice on her mind, she got up and started prepping for it.
She hadn’t been working on it for very long, yet had the onions stewing, when Nan called.
“So, about that shooting,” her grandmother began, “it wasn’t targeted, at least as far as they can tell, and nobody knows who the shooter was.”
“Really?” Doreen asked, frowning at the conflicting information. “How is that possible? I thought they said it was targeted, plus had somebody in custody?”
“They let the poor woman’s husband go. And Lynda’s not doing very well in the hospital either.”
Doreen didn’t even bother to ask how Nan knew this. “I’m sorry to hear that. That’s not very nice to contemplate.”
“Of course not,” Nan replied, her voice deepening in reverence. Then she popped up again and added, “But it’s already happened, so we should do something about it.”
“And what would you want me to do?” Doreen asked in a wry tone.
“Question her. I’ll head down to the hospital to see if I can visit her.”
“Do you know her?”
“No, but women’s groups go in to comfort patients they don’t know. I’ll blend right in.”
“Perhaps, but you won’t just go in and see her. That will be limited to the family.”
“Sure, but how do we know who is family if we don’t go down there and check it out?”
“Nan, please don’t. Don’t, don’t, don’t,” Doreen muttered.
“Either I’m going or you are,” Nan declared. “We can’t just sit here and wait for people to get around to filling us in. We have to be on the ball here. This is a whole new case.”
“But it’s Mack’s case, not mine,” she reminded her grandmother, trying hard to slow her down. Mack would have a fit if he found out Nan was meddling in one of his current cases. “And I’m not sure we even have a case.”
“Just because he hasn’t told you about it,” Nan stated in a crafty voice, “doesn’t mean we can’t do something to get more information on our own. And, besides, if he hasn’t told you, he doesn’t know that you’re even on it and probably thinks you don’t know anything about it.”
“I suppose,” Doreen admitted, trying to be patient with Nan.
“But honestly, he shouldn’t be that silly because he knows very well that all of us are right on these things,” Nan declared, with a glow of importance.
“Oh, Nan, good Lord,” Doreen replied. “If Mack has some shooting victim dying in the hospital, we should be looking at other things.”
“Oh, like what?”
Doreen frowned, as she thought about it. “First off, the current shooting of that poor woman Lynda is not a cold case, so we need to keep that in mind.”
“Yeah, we already checked that box,” Nan replied. “Next.”
Nan was barking orders, looking for her next set of instructions to be given. Frustrated with the old woman, yet somehow intrigued, Doreen considered that issue. “Do we have anything on the victim? Who she is? What her history is? How long she’s been in town? Things like that.”
“Oh, I can get right on that,” Nan stated. “As I told you earlier, one of our residents here knows the neighbor.” And, with that, Nan disconnected.
Doreen sighed, sent Mack a quick text. Uh-oh. Nan is determined to work on your shooting case.
He called her and asked, “What do you mean, Nan is on the shooting case?”
“It was in the news, and she figures we should be helping out with it.”
“It’s not a cold case,” he declared, his tone ominous.
“I know, and I explained that to her, but she wants to be ready for whenever I catch it up.”
“Catch it up?”
“Yeah, you know, whenever I put my cold case together with your current case,” she explained, followed by a sigh. “I don’t know where they get these ideas from, but they’ve already got the idea in their heads, so—”
“Good Lord,” he muttered, with a groan.
“At least you can use whatever information they dredge up.”
“In what way will I use it?”
“One of the Rosemoor residents knows the neighbor next door to where the victim was shot. So Nan and that other resident have been talking, and I sent them some simple questions to ask, to figure out how long the shooting victim’s been in town, what she does, where she comes from, that kind of a thing. This info won’t come through regular police channels but from the local gossips. In this case, a neighbor, so it will be more reliable.”
He interrupted her. “Hang on. The captain’s calling me. No wait. You tell Nan to back off and to stay off. I can’t have you guys in this.”
“I know,” she grumbled. Nan would definitely get Doreen in trouble one of these times. As soon as the call with Mack ended, Nan called her right back.
“She was just visiting,” Nan shared. “That poor girl was just visiting.”
“Do you know where she came from?”
“Nope, but,” Nan’s voice dropped to a whisper, “she was here looking for information.”
“What do you mean? Information about what?”
“I guess her father disappeared in this region a long time ago.”
At that, Doreen straightened. “How long ago?” she asked. “And from where?”
“They don’t know, and it could be from here to Kamloops or maybe even South Okanagan.”
“That’s hundreds of miles.”
“Sure, but he was a rancher, buying and selling cattle and quarter horses. His big cattle ranch was in the Joe Rich area, I thought, but he may have had another parcel of land in the more northern regions. Yet I seem to remember that he had a personal residence in Kelowna or nearby, to escape the harsher winters up north. So he could have gone missing somewhere local too.”
“Maybe not, but why was his daughter shot?”
“I knew it,” Nan crowed in delight. “I knew you would be on this one. Wait until I tell Richie that we have a case.” With that, she was gone.
Doreen stared down at the phone and groaned. “No, no, no, no. That’s not how this works, Nan.” But, of course, for Nan, who was a law unto herself and becoming a little bit unmanageable at times, that was exactly how it worked. Doreen wondered if she should call Mack back, then realized he would already be in his meeting with the captain. So, the last thing she needed was to be in even more trouble for the multiple phone calls.
Only since she’d learned how the rest of the world lived did Doreen realize how much jobs meant to people. When you didn’t have money, it was everything, and, as she’d found out, having money seemed to be everything when you didn’t have it. Still, even when you did have it, it was almost meaningless. At least that’s how she felt about it now, but maybe that was foolish of her.
Multiple court cases were coming up where she might have to testify in, both criminal cases and estate matters. She really hoped she didn’t have to appear. One criminal case in particular that worried her involved Steve, who’d buried many bodies on his property, close to her own place. With that thought, she decided to go for a walk up the river, maybe take another look at Steve’s place. It should be nice-enough weather for that.
She called out to Mugs, “Hey, do you want to go for a walk?” He came running, his leash in his mouth. She laughed, hooked him up, and then put Thaddeus on her shoulder. Now she looked over at Goliath. “What about you?” His tail twitched as he stared at her. He didn’t say a word. But then what did she expect him to say? Yes, no, maybe ?
She grabbed his leash, put it on him, and he didn’t resist, so she figured he wanted to go too. But when didn’t he want to be in the middle of everything? After all, Goliath had a nose for trouble.