Chapter 41 Rachel
RACHEL
“Hey, Julie,” Rachel says as her old classmate opens the door to the cemetery office, mug in hand.
Stevens and Rachel headed to Millgate immediately after touching down at headquarters and updating Green on the case.
Rachel doesn’t want to waste any more time waiting on the final piece of this bizarre puzzle.
She tries to keep her emotions out of her work—the job would be nearly impossible if she didn’t—but her curiosity is burning by the end of any case.
And she cuts herself a little slack on that score, because it’s the curiosity that drove her to detective work to begin with. It’s her fuel and fire.
“What can I do for you, Rachel?” Julie asks, blinking in the morning sun. “Uh, come on in.”
Rachel and Stevens scale the small metal steps and enter.
“Thanks, Julie. I’ll get straight to the point,” Rachel says. “We’ve nearly got an ID for the Jane Doe, but we need to cross-reference with a family that might be buried here. The name is Helen Sharrock.”
After the briefest beat, Julie’s eyes light up. “Yes, Helen Sharrock is here! And her husband, Richard. Same plot, same stone.”
“You’re sure?” Rachel’s heart leaps.
“Yes. I know it because I always think it’s Shamrock. It’s in the northwest quad, actually, not…” Her mouth opens a little in realization.
“What’s this about Helen Sharrock?”
A flash of irritation rises in Rachel’s chest as Reverend Holland pokes his head around the corner.
“We have it in hand, Reverend, thank you. We just need Julie’s assistance with another piece of the investigation.
” She looks away from him and back to Julie.
“Let me guess: The Sharrock plot isn’t far from the unmarked grave? ”
Julie nods enthusiastically. “That’s right! Come on, I’ll show you.”
They follow Julie back out of the office, and Rachel has to increase her pace to keep up. She glances behind her, but the reverend hasn’t followed, evidently taking the hint.
The headstone is in the second last row of this section, right on the end. The Jane Doe excavation site is still taped off, not twenty feet away. She reads the tall grey headstone:
SHARROCK
RICHARD BERNARD
Mar 1, 1902—Dec 12, 1956
Beloved husband of
HELEN ANNE
June 16, 1904—Sept 2, 1978
Rachel takes out her notepad to record the names and dates, and does some quick math. This is the same Helen Sharrock—it has to be.
“So that’s her, then?” Stevens asks.
She nods. “Yes. But—”
“Detectives?” Rachel is interrupted by Reverend Holland hurrying across the grass toward them in his khakis and golf shirt.
What in the fuck does he want now?
He stops next to Julie.
“What is it?” Rachel huffs. “We’re in the middle of—”
“You need to talk to my father.”
Rachel frowns. Is this some kind of joke? “Excuse me?” she says.
“I just called him, and we can go over there now, he’s—”
“What are you talking about?” Rachel snaps. “What does your father have to do with any of this?” She notices Stevens’s eyes on her, and clamps her mouth shut, willing herself to calm down and be professional.
“Because he was the reverend at the time Annie Little’s body was buried here.”
It takes Rachel half a second to realize what he’s just said. No one around here but she, Stevens, and Green know the suspected name of their Jane Doe.
A chill runs through her despite the warmth of the morning. “How do you know that name?”
“Rachel, please,” he says, extending his hands out, imploring, as he would during a sermon.
“I know you and my father have never seen eye to eye, but…” He looks at her as though she’s about to order his execution.
“He was watching the news at his care home and saw that a body had been discovered here, and that it wasn’t Stacy Cooper’s.
He called me two days ago, said I needed to come down there to talk to him, wouldn’t give me details over the phone.
” He drops his hands. “He knows who Annie Little is, and why she was buried here without a headstone.”
Reverend John Holland Sr. has been living at the local nursing home for six years.
His room is small, with a window overlooking a corn field and the adjoining parking lot.
Rachel hasn’t seen him since her mother’s trial, but he hasn’t changed much.
He still has the same thin build, just with more papery, wrinkled skin now, the whites of his eyes yellowing, a little bloodshot.
“All right, Reverend,” Rachel says once she, Stevens, and the junior reverend are all clustered around the old man’s bed.
“Your son says you have information for us about Annie Little.” She’d been irritated enough that this investigation had involved the Millgate Cemetery, and now can’t quite believe how luck would punish her even more by having Reverend Holland Sr. emerge as a possible witness.
This is what she gets for continuing to live in a small town.
She pulls out her notepad. She’s taking the notes for the interview this time so she won’t have to look at their subject much. She can hang it on the need to train Stevens, who volunteered to take point on this one without her having to ask. They’re on their way to a solid partnership.
“Well, she was born Annie Sharrock, but became Little, yes,” the senior reverend says, trying to make eye contact with Rachel, who keeps hers trained on the page in front of her. Eventually he gives up, and addresses Stevens.
“The Sharrock family were my parishioners, you see. I knew them from before they even had Annie, up until they moved to Ottawa when Dick got elected to Parliament. Everyone who knew the family was very proud, but none more than Dick himself. He had big dreams, that one. Never seemed to fit here. But Helen would have been happy to stay forever.” He reached out a slightly shaking hand and sipped some water before continuing.
His voice was hoarse, and slow, but full of confidence.
He never had any shortage of that, Rachel thought snidely.
“She was a devout woman, Helen, involved with the church. But after she had Annie, she became very depressed. Very depressed indeed. And I guided her through it, with prayer, and reminders that all dark clouds eventually pass. She confided in me, and I gave her counsel a couple of times a week. It took time, but Helen’s cloud dissipated after, oh, I don’t know. A year, perhaps. Maybe less.”
Rachel gnashes her teeth but says nothing, thinking of all the damn useless “counsel” he gave Mary over the years when she needed a doctor. Real help.
“And she came alive again,” he continues.
“Nothing gave her more joy than being a mother to Annie. They never had another, though. Could have been they just weren’t blessed, or perhaps she—or Dick—didn’t think she should go through all that again.
But the years passed, and then Annie got married to that chap who took her to Toronto.
There was pressure from Dick, I think, for that match, and it broke Helen’s heart.
One heartbreak of many.” He took a deep, slightly wheezy breath.
“Annie got in the family way not long after, and Helen was delighted at the idea of a grandchild, but she worried that Annie might face the same sort of depression she had after the birth. But then, oh, dear…Helen showed up at my office door, absolutely frantic. She’d spoken to Annie the day after the child was born, and she’d said she was feeling low, and not quite herself.
Helen tried telephoning back every day for at least a week, with no answer, and was trying to get Dick to drive her into Toronto when Annie’s good-for-nothing husband called.
” He swallowed, his Adam’s apple clearly outlined in the thin, age-speckled skin of his throat.
“He told her he’d admitted Annie to a lunatic asylum. ”
Rachel looks up from her pad now, pen hovering.
“Said she’d been hysterical, seeing things that weren’t there.
Voices, and the like. She thought he and his mother were trying to poison her and the baby, just dreadful stuff.
” He pauses. “I told Helen I was sure it wouldn’t last long, like hers hadn’t.
But Annie’s was darker, different, and I guess it did.
Annie was in that place for ages. Helen kept trying to get her out, but got denied every time.
And Dick wouldn’t help, even with his influence.
Because of his position, he told Helen. Wanted nothing to do with Annie because no one wanted to elect a politician with a lunatic daughter. His dirty little secret, Annie was.”
Rachel’s chest feels heavy, thinking of Emily’s article, her recollections of Annie and her insistence that she had been cured of her postpartum psychosis long before her death.
“The Sharrocks kept their home in Millgate to stay at in the summers, when Parliament wasn’t sitting, so Dick could be in the constituency he served. When he died, Helen moved back permanently, and Dick was buried there, in the Millgate. They’d bought the plot years before, for the both of them.”
Rachel scribbles furiously as the reverend continues his testimony.
“Helen told me Annie’s husband divorced her while she was in the prison and married someone else, had a family and all.
He would let Helen see the child from time to time, but goodness, she was heartbroken, being cut off like that from Annie.
Just a no-good man, that one. But then Annie died and they said she’d killed herself, poor soul.
Annie’s mother was informed of her death by her ex-husband.
In a letter! Wouldn’t even pick up the bleeding phone.
He wouldn’t claim Annie’s body, and Helen wanted her back in Millgate, anyway. But there was a problem.”
“What’s that?” Stevens asks.
“Well.” The elder reverend grunts and shifts his shoulders uncomfortably. He looks up at his son, who closes his eyes, nods at him to continue. Rachel sets her pen to the paper again.