Millicent gasped. “Oh my,” she said, stunned. “Really?”
Doreen nodded. “Even worse, the little traitor had the audacity to die here in town. She lived on the coast with him, of course, but, no, she came up here to rant and rave at me over something. And who only knows what that was about. All I could figure out is that she was upset that Nick”—she turned to look at Millicent—“is helping me.”
“Oh, that’s right,” she said in surprise. “I’d completely forgotten Nick was doing that.”
“He had apparently filed some paperwork recently, and I guess that gave her a heads-up, or somehow she got an inkling through his investigative work that we were pushing back. So she came up here to rip into me about it all, and now she turns up dead. So naturally everybody thinks I did it.” Millicent stared at her. Doreen shrugged and gave her a tiny smile. “Just for the record, in case you’re wondering, I didn’t do it.”
Millicent burst out laughing. “Oh my,” she said. “It never occurred to me that you would have done it, dear. You’ve spent so much time helping everybody else solve their murders,” she said, shaking her head. “I can’t imagine you adding to the backlog of mysteries to solve.”
“Well, I’m glad to hear that,” she said, “though I’m not sure your son Mack agrees.”
Millicent just stared at her again, blinking.
Embarrassed, Doreen shrugged. “But I don’t really know that, of course. It’s like I said earlier. I’m just out of sorts today.” She looked at the garden, grabbed her tools, and said, “Where would you like me to start?”
“Oh dear, those marigolds are looking awfully sad. Could you trim back the old buds for me? And the tulips. They were supposed to be trimmed ages ago. But I would leave the stalks, in case I want to pull them up instead to move to a new bed. It’s so much easier to pull tulips when you have a stalk to tell you where they are. Once you trim them, it’s almost impossible to know where they are, until you start digging them up.”
Understanding what she meant, Doreen nodded and said, “Well, let’s deal with the marigolds first then. You can just sit there and tell me what it is you want me to do.”
For the next hour, Doreen worked and talked, cheerfully changing the subject whenever the topic at hand got too difficult or too depressing, and, by the time she was done, the two women were laughing merrily.
“I still can’t believe Penny hired him to take you down,” Millicent said, chuckling.
“Right, and from jail of all things.” Doreen shook her head. “I know I wasn’t exactly the friend she thought I would be, but really, was I that bad? Besides she didn’t turn out to be that great in that department either.” Then they started to laugh again.
“Well, you do seem to have a penchant for sending these people to jail,” Millicent said.
“And that’s where they belong too,” Doreen said, with a frown. “Imagine all these killings going on around here. That’s terrible.”
“It is, isn’t it?” Millicent said, “and I’m sure you’ll get to the bottom of this one too.”
Doreen looked at her in surprise. “Mack has made it pretty clear I’m not welcome to get involved.”
“Of course he has,” Millicent said, a smile blooming. “But since when do you ever listen to him?”
At that, Doreen gave a burst of laughter. “Well, I guess that’s true,” she said. “I hadn’t really considered it that way.”
“Well, you should,” Millicent said. “This involves you, after all. The victim was your lawyer and was involved with your ex-husband, so she was obviously without morals. You can’t have this going down in the annals of local lore as a crime you committed. Even if you don’t get charged, it’s just way too possible that they’ll look at you that way.”
“Which is the last thing I want,” she said.
“Of course not! That would be terrible,” Millicent said.
“I came here to make a fresh start.”
“In the meantime,” Millicent said, “we’ll put our heads together and see what we can do to clear your name.”
“Thank you,” Doreen said, with a brilliant smile. “That does make me feel much better.”
And, when she got home, she found it strange that she had blanked out that conversation, but then it came rushing back. Just what could she do at home with all this mess? She could track the lawyer. And, of course, that is something she should have looked at right from the beginning. Absolutely no reason for Doreen not to have done it already. How irritating that she’d left that undone.
But now that she felt a little bit better, while sitting with a hot cup of tea out on the deck, she created a timeline of yesterday, when she had seen her lawyer here in Kelowna. It was a little hard to think back as to what time Robin appeared here, but Doreen did her best. She wrote down as much as she could about the conversation, including the day and the weather, and anything else she could think to jot down. The thought that this woman was gone and how soon this all went down was terrifying.
It seemed Doreen had had more experience with death since moving to Kelowna than she had with life. Which is why the case involving little Isaac had touched her soul. Because it wasn’t history, it wasn’t a past-tense type of a thing. It wasn’t a cold case to bring to closure, and it wasn’t a current murderer to put behind bars; solving that case was actually freeing in a sense.
It made life so much better for both Isaac and his mother, and, for that, Doreen was
