Chapter 29
As Doreen waited for Milford to walk into the station, the detectives just stared at her.
Then Mack asked, “The big question is, what difference does his wife make?”
“The question is whether Rose is buried in Milford’s zucchini patch, or was someone else involved in that, or was it something completely different.”
Just then the receptionist from the front brought Milford into the conference room to join them.
He took one look at all the cops and winced. He had his hat clutched nervously in his hands. He looked at Doreen and asked, “May I talk to you privately?”
“You can, but honestly, I’ll have to tell these guys anyway, so maybe you should tell us now.”
He winced again and looked around nervously.
She added, “Maybe I can make it easier by asking some questions.”
His eyes widened, and he swallowed nervously, then nodded.
“Why don’t you tell us who your wife really was?”
He looked at Doreen blankly for a moment, then all the color fell from his face. “You know?” he cried out. “How is that possible? I just found out myself.”
“Oh boy,” she muttered, staring at him, as the pieces fell into place.
Then out of his hat, he pulled a small journal, along with a hairbrush. “After you were gone, I realized how little time I have left, so I was trying to clean up the place. Who knows if the town would even sell my place. I don’t even know what they do with property that’s just left with no family left behind for it to go to,” he explained. “So, while cleaning up the place, I found this journal under her side of the bed. I don’t even know what to think.”
Doreen walked over and gave Milford a gentle hug. “You were married to Poppy, weren’t you?”
He stared at Doreen, wearing a dazed expression, and nodded. “But I don’t know how or why.”
“Poppy was very jealous of her sister, and I think Poppy loved you very, very much.”
He nodded. “I never could understand why Rose would have been so happy to go from that busy life she had to just being with me.”
“And did Poppy explain it in her diary?”
“I don’t even think it’s a diary,” he clarified, staring down at the journal. “It’s more of a confession.”
“Ah, right.”
“Were you looking for that too?” he asked, staring at Doreen, obviously in shock.
“No, not necessarily. It depends on if Poppy killed anybody—deliberately, not accidently.”
He looked at her with tears in his eyes, and he nodded. “Rose.”
“That’s what I figured.” She turned and looked at Mack. “Rose will be your Jane Doe.”
Mack stared at her in shock, then back at the old man. “Did she say anything about where or how?”
Milford nodded. “It’s all here in her journal,” he whispered. “I’m still…”
“Of course you’re still in shock,” Doreen replied, “because you absolutely adored your Poppy.”
He nodded, tears in his eyes. “How did I not know?”
“Because, for one thing, you never spent a ton of time with Rose. Secondly, you wanted to believe you had married Rose. And finally, Poppy never gave you any reason to doubt it. You didn’t have a ton of time with Rose, and Poppy would have known that. So she didn’t have to cover up very much. Then if she made a few rules about never talking about her history…”
Milford nodded. “That’s exactly what she did. We couldn’t talk about the past. She didn’t want to talk about any of that, and I was just so happy she had chosen me that I didn’t care.” He eyed Doreen suspiciously. “Do you know how the real Rose died?”
“Yes and no. I’m pretty sure she died in childbirth.”
Again he just stared at her, his eyes almost bugging out. “My God. How do you know when I’m just finding out?”
She winced. “Sometimes things just have a habit of coming to me that way.”
He blinked at her several times. “So Poppy didn’t kill Rose, or did she?”
“It depends,” she replied. “Maybe Rose needed maternity care, and Poppy couldn’t help her, couldn’t save her.”
He nodded. “I think that is closer to what happened,” he muttered, staring at the journal. “I didn’t know anything about it.’
“Did she tell you whose baby it was?”
He shook his head. “No, I’m not sure I even want to know.”
“Right,” she muttered. “And do we know for sure that the baby died too?”
Milford frowned at her.
Doreen noted, “You seem surprised. I’m thinking that the baby didn’t die with the mother,” she muttered.
“Oh, but then where is the child?” Milford asked.
“Good question,” Doreen admitted, looking at him.
Milford glanced around blankly and just seemed to nod, as if not really seeing anybody else.
“Will you be okay?” she asked him.
“I buried her as my wife.”
“Honestly, Poppy was your wife,” Doreen pointed out. “She may not have been the woman you thought she was, but she was your wife.” He blinked several times, and she asked, “Did you love the woman you lived with?”
“Absolutely,” he declared, then frowned. “But she’s not the woman I thought she was.”
“No, and maybe keep in mind how desperately in love with you that Poppy was. Enough that she would have done whatever she did to protect her marriage.”
That seemed to help settle him.
“Right,… the whole thing is just unbelievable.” Milford shook his head and glanced at the journal in his hand. “It’s really just unbelievable.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “And you’re right. It’s a very hard thing to take in.”
He sagged. “I didn’t do anything to hurt her, you know?”
“I know that. Now, do you know what happened that brought all the blood onto your zucchini patch?”
He held out the journal. “Apparently she did something. I was away, and I didn’t even think about it,” he began. “I wasn’t even in town at the time. I was up north with a logging load to deliver, and she told me all about finding the blood. Honestly, I’d forgotten about it, except for the fact that she wouldn’t let me ever plant anything there.… I couldn’t read any more.”
“Right.”
He nodded, but he still looked a little lost.
“Do you mind if we come to your farm with some equipment?” she asked.
At that, the captain’s eyebrows went up.
She turned to him and nodded. “A body is up there.”
The captain frowned and asked, “Whose body?”
She looked back at Milford. “Did she ever tell you more about it?”
“No.… Tell me about what?”
“I suspect it’s the father of Rose’s child, somebody who came looking for Rose but found Poppy and realized that Poppy wasn’t Rose at all.”
“Good God,” Milford groaned, as he just stared at Doreen. Then he held out the journal again. “I guess you don’t need this then, do you?”
Mack snatched it from his hands. “Maybe she doesn’t,” he said, with a long-suffering sigh, “but we do.”
At that, Darren snorted. “Yeah, you’re not kidding.”
Just then more chaos erupted as the double front doors to the station opened noisily, and the Rosemore gang soon found them in the nearby conference room.
“Oh, Lord, Nan.” Doreen seemed horrified as she turned to them. “I love you, but there is a protocol in place here.”
Nan waved her hand. “Hush, child. The captain and his men are happy to have us come help. Look at them. They’re all smiling.”
Looking at the grins on the faces of these professional policemen, Doreen knew those had far more to do with the troupe of elderly sleuths in full Sherlock Holmes regalia.
“In some ways your granddaughter has already solved it all,” the captain declared.
Nan looked at Doreen in disappointment, only to have the joy of knowing her granddaughter had closed the case win over, and she exclaimed, “You could have told us, child.”
“No, I couldn’t,” she whispered. “That’s the agreement, remember? Mack rules this one.”
Mack chuckled beside her and quipped, “That’s nice. Thank you for letting me know.”
She glanced back at him with a smile. “I am trying to uphold and to maintain our agreement.”
“I can see that,” he confirmed, with glee on his face as he caught what she was certain was a monocle on Richie’s right eye. Shaking his head, Mack asked Doreen, “This settles quite a bit of stuff, but are you saying that Poppy murdered this man, this supposed father to Rose’s child?”
“Yes,” Doreen replied, “and I highly suspect that you will find this man to be Jack Mahoney, the missing father of Lynda Mahoney, the woman who was recently shot and has since died.”
The captain stared at her in shock, as the other cops looked at her too.
“Then who shot Lynda?” cried out one of the detectives in the background.
She looked around at everybody and frowned. “Someone who didn’t want Lynda finding her father, who maybe hated her, maybe hated her father. And that would be… Clive.” When Mack frowned at her, she nodded and explained, “Remember? He owns that corner store nearby where Lynda’s shooting was and has to work double shifts there because he’s financially strapped? He was the one seen walking around the area at the time of the shooting.”
Nan shook her head in confusion.
Doreen and Mack both caught that motion. Mack groaned, finally catching up with Doreen’s theory, then explained, “Clive killed Lynda, so he would be the last remaining heir of Jack Mahoney.”
“Exactly,” Doreen exclaimed, giving him a beaming smile.
He grunted, as he glared at her. “I really wish you wouldn’t look at me as if I’m your favorite student when I say something.”
She burst out laughing at that. “I believe that Clive is Lynda’s half brother.”
“Oh, good God,” Nan muttered. “That makes so much sense.”
“But,” Doreen added, pointing to Mack, “you’ll have to prove that one too.”
Mack just stared at her, glancing around the room at the captain and the other officers, then noted, “Wow, you mean you didn’t totally lock up this one for us?”
“I was focused on getting the DNA for Poppy. Milford has now resolved that issue for us, bringing us a hairbrush.” She asked Milford, “I’m not sure how things evolved, but maybe Poppy’s journal can tell us more?”
Milford shook his head. “I stopped reading it. Have your fiancé read it and tell you. I’m not sure I want to know more, not right now.”
Doreen nodded. “I understand. So here’s what I have in theory so far. First, twenty-some years ago, I think Jack may have heard the gossip about how Rose went missing to have a baby. So Jack was inspired to find Rose and to see if he had another child that she didn’t tell him about. So Jack finds out she is living with Milford in the Joe Rich area, which didn’t compute to Jack. So he went to confront her. Instead of finding Rose, he found Poppy. Poppy couldn’t take the chance of her secret coming out, so she pops Jack and buries him in Milford’s zucchini patch.
“Then more recently I believed Clive wanted answers about his birth parents, so he ordered a genealogy search. You’ll have to ask Clive more about that. Does it notify both parties when there is a match? I don’t know. But, let’s say, Clive orders the DNA search a year ago, gets the results six months ago, and finds his birth father to be Jack Mahoney, but he is noted as missing for twenty-some-odd years. Maybe Lynda is notified of this discovery of her half brother, but wouldn’t that work in reverse too? If so, Clive finds out he has a half sister and agrees to meet with Lynda ten or so days ago and shoots her, hoping to be the only heir to Jack’s estate. That’s just my working theory though.”
They all continued to stare at her.
The captain asked, “Do you have any proof of this?”
“No, but, if you test Clive’s DNA against Lynda Mahoney’s, the woman he shot and killed, you’ll find that they are half siblings. Then, if you test Clive’s DNA against Rose’s DNA, you’ll find confirmation of his maternal DNA. Then do the same with Jack to confirm paternity.”
“Good God.” The captain turned to face the old man Milford, who nodded.
Milford replied, “Poppy did write in her journal that she never knew who was the father of Rose’s baby boy, but the baby survived, and Poppy passed off the baby to somebody in town, but she doesn’t give any names.”
Doreen added, “Yet the whole town is a gossip center, and everybody knows exactly who raised Clive as his own child. With Poppy knowing so well how Rose’s mind worked, Poppy could have told any of the men Rose had been sleeping with that the baby was theirs, asking them to raise the child, telling them that Rose had no motherly instincts to stick around, never explaining that Rose was dead. I spoke to two different women who had their marriages damaged by their husbands having a dalliance with Rose. I’m sure there were many more men involved with Rose.”
“Ya think?” Mack quipped. “You burst into Rose’s life and didn’t really let go.”
“Yeah, I sure did,” she muttered. Then she turned to Milford. “Does any of that make sense to you?”
“It makes more sense than you know because Poppy did mention a couple different times that she’d been involved with handing off a baby to foster parents because she was a nurse.”
“So both Poppy and Rose were legitimately nurses back then, weren’t they?” Doreen asked.
“Yes. They both worked at the same place too, and often got mistaken for each other, even though they weren’t twins. It really bugged Poppy, I think, because Rose got all the attention. Poppy intentionally wore her hair completely different and dressed differently and everything. Until I guess, at some point, Poppy decided to take over her sister’s life.”
Doreen agreed. “By doing that, she got to have you, without having to live Rose’s exciting life, because, if Poppy had wanted to, she certainly could have. She had the opportunity,” Doreen explained, “particularly looking so much like her sister, Rose.”
The cops shuffled around her and her whiteboard timeline, as if still trying to sort out everything.
Doreen smiled at Milford and added, “But Poppy didn’t ever want to be her sister, not unless she had some very motivating reason. And part of that motivating reason was the fact that Poppy likely had something to do with Rose’s death, just by not rendering aid in a timely manner. Plus, Poppy wanted you out of it. By doing what she did, she just said her sister Poppy had moved far away to the east coast, removing suspicion from herself and stepped into the life she wanted with you and no longer had to live in her sister’s shadow.”
Milford stared at her and nodded. “You’re right,… about all of it. I just don’t know how. I don’t know in what way your mind works that you could figure that out. However, if one of you read all of Poppy’s journal, that’s likely what happened. Yet I feel as if I need to go home and take a shower,” he admitted. “This whole thing is making me sick to my stomach.”