Bones in the Begonias

by Dale Mayer

  Mack sat quietly, shaking his head.

  “Why would you think that?” Millicent asked.

  “I’m fairly unorthodox in my methodology,” she said with a smile to Mack. Unorthodox was putting it mildly. And the fact was, Mack was horrified if she went anywhere close to any of his cases. She hadn’t exactly proven to be very good at anything but finding bodies.

  “But it seems like this is definitely your forte. You should just wander around Kelowna and see what you find,” Millicent said.

  “I don’t think we’re allowed to do that,” Doreen said with a smile, trying to ignore Mack, who glared back at her. Doreen motioned at the garden bed. “When did you put in the begonias?”

  Millicent frowned as she cast her mind back over the years. “The begonias have been there at least twenty-five or twenty-six, maybe thirty, years now,” she said slowly. “I’d have to find my gardening journals to know exactly.”

  “What was there before the begonias?”

  “Very old heirloom roses,” Millicent said thoughtfully. “But they had such horrible big thorns. And they weren’t doing all that well. When we pulled out the first one, it’s like it had no roots at all.”

  “And how long had they been there?” Doreen could hear Mack’s mind turning as he listened to her questioning his mom. But, as far as Doreen was concerned, this was just two gardeners discussing plants and how they adapted to being moved.

  “That’s why we were moving them. Because they’d been there since forever. I really don’t know how long, and they seemed to bloom for years and years and years, and then they started to fade. I was talking about getting somebody in to take out all the roses for us. Every time we went close to them, they would rip our clothing, and Harold would end up with scratches, even though we wore gloves when we pulled them up,” Millicent said.

  “And so you took them out and planted the begonias?” Doreen smiled. “At least begonias are very mild in temperament.”

  Millicent laughed. “They are indeed. They don’t scratch or tear at us at all.” She leaned a little closer. “And they have such beautiful colors. Some of those were dinnerplate begonias. I do wish I had known you were out here earlier because I could have told you which ones were which.”

  Doreen wrinkled up her face as she studied the tarp full of begonias. “Oh, dear.”

  Millicent followed her gaze to the big tarp. “Yes, I can see that we’ll have quite the surprise when they bloom again.”

  Doreen laughed. “And maybe it’ll be a good surprise.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “I’m surprised you can leave them in the garden over winter.”

  “We brought them in for a long time. But then I’d forget to put them out in the spring again. It just seems like time went so quickly when raising a family, and we were both working all the time. I eventually put them in and thought, What the heck? If they survive, they survive. And if they don’t, well …” She laughed. “Of course, I did end up covering them with mulch as best I could. And, to my surprise, they kept coming back.”

  “Did you ever add more topsoil?” Doreen wanted to know exactly what had happened to the beds over time. There was a fair bit of dirt on them, and yet, the begonias had been a shallow planting, like added on top of another planting. As she studied the bed itself, she noticed it was slightly higher than the one beside it.

  Millicent nodded. “Yes, indeed. We used to bring in all kinds of topsoil and top-dress the lawns. Anything extra we would throw on the gardens. We put mulch in every couple of years.” She waved her hand. “It’s really hard to remember all the details. We spent fifty years in the house, and it all blends together.”

  “How wonderful that you kept journals though,” Doreen said with a smile. “I’ve never thought to do that.”

  Millicent bounded to her feet, showing more energy than she had so far. “I’ll go get them.” And she raced away.

  Doreen slid her gaze toward Mack, surprised he no longer glared at her. “Do you remember anything about what happened to that garden?”

  “I’ve been sitting here, listening to her reminisce about it,” he said quietly. “But I can’t say that I have any clear-cut memories myself. I do remember the roses though.”

  “Why do you remember the roses?”

  “Because they were vicious.” He pulled up his shirt sleeve and showed her a scar across the back of his hand. “This happened with one of them. They had thorns an inch long, I swear. They were barbed at the end. Triple hooks that, once you got caught, it just tore you to shreds.”

  “Of course. That’s a defense mechanism to protect them,” she explained.

  “Well, it didn’t help them when Dad came along and ripped them out by the roots. And the begonias were planted in their place. It’s hard to say when that wooden box was put in there. With the wood rotting, it’s got to be at least twenty years ago.”

  “Or not. It’s received steady watering,” she reminded him. “You’re not on the creek, so we can’t assume the creek bed rose and soaked it. Did they put underground irrigation in here?”

  “No, we planned to but after my father passed away, we never quite got there. They had a system all organized with sprinklers and timers. She was happy with that system in place. There was no point in changing it. I suppose we could look at it now. The garden is really too much for Mom to look after at her age. So that might be a good answer. Although it would be expensive.” He frowned pondering the thought. “We’d need to plan it all before we did much digging.”

  “And considering beds and digging,” Doreen continued, “it’s hard to say when that box would have deteriorated. Somebody will need to do the forensic work on it and see if it can be dated.”

  “The labs will do that,” he said, “but, if we’re talking about the same body, then it’s obviously closer to thirty years ago.”

  She really wanted it to be another body part for poor Betty Miles. Because, if they now had a different body, that was just too unbelievable. “If it is her, then we have a lot more pieces to find. The good news is, it’s not a huge foot,” she whispered. She could hear Millicent returning.

  He shook his head. “We don’t know anything yet. There could be a ten-year span between these two body parts, and their cases could be totally unrelated.”

  She shot him a hard look. “Two dismembered bodies in the same town—not only the same town but basically the same location?”

  He glared at her. “It’s not the same location at all. There’s at least a mile between them.”

  She snorted. “A half mile as a crow flies. If that. Probably closer.”

  “But we don’t know where the arm in the creek may have washed down from,” he reminded her. “In the latter part of spring, that creek is not a nice little quiet babbling brook, like it is now. It ends up being a raging river. The snow on the river melts and all the tributaries flow into this river.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I hadn’t considered that.”

  “Exactly. Remember we are the police.”

  “Right, and I’m just the body lady.”

  Chapter 17

  When Millicent returned with two journals in her hands, she also came with two policemen. They both shook hands with Mack and slid sidelong glances Doreen’s way.

  She held out her hands, palms up. “What can I say? Yes, I found more body parts.”

  Their eyebrows rose, but they stayed quiet. Just like her animals did when Millicent was around.

  With a sigh of disgust, she sat back and picked up her tea. She was figuring out how to slide the journals her way so she could take a look, but Millicent still held them in her arms. Finally, Mack got up and walked away with the officers.

  When the three men were back in the garden, Millicent sat and opened one of the journals. “This is the first twenty years of my marriage,” she said with a big happy smile. “There are lovely memories in here.” She turned some pages, her smile warming at what she found there.

  “Sounds l
ike they are more about your life shared with your husband than just about gardening,” Doreen pointed out with a soft smile. After Millicent’s faint nod, Doreen asked, “So the other one would be the more recent years?”

  Millicent nodded. “Yes. That would be the next fifteen or so years. I didn’t write anything hardly at all in the last few years since Harold died. I guess my heart hasn’t been in it anymore.”

  Doreen slipped her hand toward the second journal. “May I?”

  Millicent nodded. “Sure. Go ahead.”

  Doreen snatched it up and opened it. She flipped through the middle pages to see what kind of notes were in it. Indeed, Millicent had noted the daylight, the sunshine, the frost, trimming the hedges, even about pulling the begonias. But Doreen wasn’t at the first few pages. Realizing what she was doing would be out of sync with the time line, she quickly flipped to the front of the book and read. She wasn’t sure how long it would be before Mack understood what she had in her hand. When he did, he wouldn’t let Doreen keep it; she knew that much.

  “You’ve done a lovely job keeping track of everything,” Doreen said in admiration. And she wasn’t just saying that to be nice.

  Very detailed reports were here of when Millicent and Harold had put in extra mulch and topsoil or when they did the trimming and how they cut and thinned, when they divided the glade. There were a lot of details, including the date of the first frost and the heat in summer.

  Doreen flipped through the days, looking for an entry that might point to something relevant to the lower leg they found. There didn’t appear to be very much. Plus the dates were from thirty-five years ago. Betty Miles had disappeared only thirty years ago.

  Doreen flipped through more pages, trying not to look obvious that she sought a particular time frame. When she got toward the end of the journal, she slowed down and read a little more intently. “Oh, here it says you went to Europe for two weeks.” Doreen looked up with a smile. “That must have been a lovely trip.”

  Millicent launched into a detailed recital of everything they’d done on the trip.

  At one point, Doreen, feeling the pressure of time, interrupted Millicent. “It must have been hard to leave your garden.”

  Millicent laughed. “Yes, indeed. But we had the timers for the irrigation, so it really didn’t matter much.”

  “So nobody had to come do any work? Smart,” she said admiringly. “That’s very smart.” She wondered if Nan had considered anything like that over the years. Obviously not because no underground irrigation was at Doreen’s place. “That would have been pretty new thinking back then.”

  “I think my husband took garden hoses and drilled holes into them. Then we buried them, so everything would get water all around. We only had to set a timer to turn it on and off. Now underground irrigation is very expensive. But garden hoses and timers were cheap.”

  Doreen sat back with a smile. “That’s something I might do at my house too. I could manage some garden hoses and just drill holes into them.” Her mind fired with ideas, but she had to pull herself back a little. “It’s nice that you didn’t need anybody to water your garden. I feel bad asking somebody to do things like that.”

  “The neighbors were always around, but we didn’t really get along with some of them back then,” Millicent confided. “In fact, for a while, we had a terrible neighbor. He was nothing but trouble. He was always yelling and having parties, and, after the parties, it seemed like he got angrier and angrier. But then I think he was just a mean drunk. My husband and I didn’t have very much to do with him.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “I honestly don’t know.” She stared out over the gardens where the officers stood, looking down at the wooden box. “I think he moved away, but it was a long time ago.” She glanced back at Doreen. “Getting old is terrible. When your memory starts to go it seems like the answers are so close, and then, all of a sudden, they’re just whisked away. You don’t have any say in that, and you want to yell, ‘Stop! Give me just another minute with that information, so I can understand it.’” She smiled. “But it never happens.”

  Doreen felt sorry for Millicent, but there wasn’t a whole lot Doreen could do to help. “At least you did lots of traveling with your husband.”

  “Every year,” Millicent said. “Sometimes twice a year. And because we had the garden set up the way we did, we never had to have a full-time caretaker. Just someone to come in and check that everything was working properly. Of course, that was once we got it set up. We didn’t have Mack until we had been married for ten years. So, before Mack was born, we used to pay someone to look after the place while we were gone.”

  “And, of course, the only way into the backyard was on the side, where you have the gate, right?”

  “Now that’s true, but originally we didn’t have gates. The neighborhood changed though. It just seems like more crime is everywhere, and the older I got, I felt a little less secure. Once my husband died, Mack put in the gates on the sides for me.”

  “So they are new?”

  “Well, newish?” Millicent laughed. “They were put in the last seven or eight years, yes.”

  All Doreen could think about was that, as soon as anybody knew the couple was gone on their annual holiday, it would be easy to come in and bury a body in the garden. Doreen flipped through the journal and said, “You went in June and in August that year also?” She tapped the diary. “It looks like you even wrote that down in here.”

  Millicent smiled. “Yes, those were great years. We did a lot of traveling after Mack left for college.” She stood and said, “I better get more cups. The police are coming over again.” And she walked inside.

  Doreen grabbed her cell phone and took pictures of various pages of the latest journal. Just as Mack was about to come up the deck steps, he turned to talk to one officer a little longer. She smiled and heard Millicent returning. But Doreen had a lot of pages to cover, or maybe, with any luck, the information and the dates she needed were on the photos she just took. Because, if she could line that up with Betty Miles’s disappearance, it was possible Doreen had something to back up her earlier theory that she had shared with Mack. He had been the one to say, with the wood rotting, it’s got to be at least twenty years ago, but not really. If the bed with the rotting wood box in it had had underground irrigation, like a hose, close to it, it would rot much faster. That would also explain why one end had rotted quicker than the rest because that end would have been closer to the hose. Anything that stood in pooled water would deteriorate much faster.

  She popped her cell phone back into her pocket, then saw Millicent again outside, handing out tea to the officers, keeping Mack distracted, so Doreen slipped her phone out of her pocket again and took several more pictures of the second journal, flipping through the pages until halfway into the book.

  Millicent rejoined her at the deck table, gave a hefty sigh, and glanced toward Doreen. “Does it bother you?” she asked.

  Doreen looked up at her. “Does what bother me?” She’d almost gotten through the whole second diary. But not through the first diary near Millicent’s seat at the table. There could be at least one more diary—maybe two to cover the whole fifty years Millicent had lived and gardened here.

  “Finding bodies?” Millicent asked.

  “No, it doesn’t bother me.” Doreen thought about that for a long moment. “I guess that doesn’t say very much about me. But I think it’s much better to find the bodies and to bring these people home than it is to not find them and to know the families never got closure.”

  “Good. I’m glad you understand.” Millicent looked at her. And a big smile dawned across her face. “I do like the way you think.”

  Doreen smiled and waggled the book in her hand. “This journal stops about thirty-five years ago.”

  A frown creased Millicent’s forehead. “Really?”

  Doreen held it open toward the end to show the dates, which were thirty-five years earlier.


  “Oh, interesting. That’s right. I do have another one in exactly the same color.” She flipped the other journal open. She smiled. “I have the first one. You have the second one. I’ll go look for the third.” She hurried inside.

  Doreen snagged her camera and took more pictures. It could all be for naught. Since the journals weren’t that long, and it was just a quick flash from her cell phone, she got through all of the second journal quickly. And then she heard Mack’s voice.

  “Okay, you guys get on with that, and I’ll make sure my mother is all right. We want to keep this as low key as possible. So full blackout on the media.”

  She closed the second journal just as he came up the deck steps with a hard snap of his boot heels. She glared at him. “Sure, don’t worry about Doreen being upset by the authorities’ treatment of her gardens but make sure your mother isn’t disturbed by all this police interference.”

  He gave her a hard look. “I really don’t need more of this crap right now, you know?”

  She sighed. “That’s fine. Your mom has gone to get another journal. She forgot there was a third.”

  He reached out his hand, palm up. Quietly, without arguing, she picked up the second journal and gave it to him. He looked at her in surprise.

  “Either there’s nothing in it, or you’ve got something else up your sleeve, because I never expected you to hand it over quite so easily.”

  She gave him a look of pure innocence and a big smile. “You would take it either way.”

  He glared at her suspiciously and snagged up the first volume too. “And I’ll be taking the third one when my mother returns,” he said firmly.

  Doreen shrugged. “That’s fine. I should be going home anyway.” She stood. Turning back to Mack, she said. “I’d love to hear an update, but I know you won’t give me one.” She then remembered why she’d been here in the first place. “I need to get those begonias in the garden before long. If you still want me to …”

  He frowned as he looked at the dug-up begonias on the tarp and then over at the other side of the garden. “Yes, if you don’t mind. Maybe even later this afternoon, but I don’t know …” His voice petered out.