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D oreen followed the instructions, and, sure enough, she found a small carriage house. She hopped out with the animals in tow and looked around. The door opened, and there stood a woman. She appeared far older than she should have been, at least by Doreen’s quick estimate. But then Sandra was still shaking and bawling. “I’m so sorry,” Doreen muttered, as she walked closer.

Mugs walked toward Sandra and shoved his face up against her knees and just rubbed on her.

She bent down and pet him. “Oh my, I didn’t know you had animals.”

“I do, indeed.” Doreen smiled down at them.

“Come in, come in,” Sandra murmured. She sniffled several times, pulled a tissue from her pocket, blew her nose, and then did it again and again. She looked back at Doreen. “I probably shouldn’t even be talking to you.”

Doreen sighed. “If we need to bring something to light because of a miscarriage of justice,” she pointed out, “I’m the one to talk to.”

Sandra nodded. “The family will be so angry with me.”

“Which ones?” Doreen asked.

The woman looked at her and said, “My uncles.”

“Ah, yeah, there is them to worry about, isn’t there?”

“Yes,” she agreed. “They’ve always been very dominant, and we could never get out from under them.”

“Meaning you and your mother?”

“Yeah, my mother,” she confirmed, scoffing. “She wanted to leave town dozens of times and even tried a couple times. It wasn’t so much that she got forced back, but circumstances were never very helpful to getting out on a permanent basis. They didn’t want her to be independent. They didn’t want her having a life on her own. It was all about keeping control of the narrative.”

Doreen nodded. “I understand. I was married to somebody like that.” When Sandra eyed her in surprise, Doreen nodded. “It’s not an easy way to go through life.”

“No, no, it’s not. My mother hated it. And then she just gave up, as if she couldn’t fight anymore. So she settled into life here, but she was never the same. She was never happy. She was never… I don’t even know how to explain it, but she was just marking time and waiting to die.”

Doreen frowned at her in surprise. “It was that bad?”

“Oh yeah.… It was definitely that bad. She made her bid for freedom, lost it, and wouldn’t do it again. It’s as if every ounce of effort she had available to her died almost immediately.”

“I’m so sorry. That would have been tough.”

“It was tough. And it was so very sad to see, since she was always so depressed. If they had told me that she had committed suicide, I would have believed it. But a heart attack? No way.”

“And why is that?”

“She’d just gone in for a physical, including a full cardiac workup. I convinced her to do that, so, if she did have heart problems, we could address them. If she didn’t,… well, we would address that too.”

“So, your doctor confirmed everything was normal?”

“Everything was fine, no heart murmur, no arrhythmia.… There was nothing.”

Doreen nodded. “And I suppose everybody just said that, because of your grandmother’s health issue, it was an inherited issue in the family and could happen anytime.”

Sandra nodded. “Wow. How did you figure that out?”

“People gaslight others all the time,” Doreen declared, “and I had the misfortune to become somebody who did it to myself as well.”

Sandra winced. “I’m so sorry. I hope you aren’t as bad as my mother.”

“No, not at all,” Doreen replied, with a gentle smile.

“It was a shock at the time, but I moved on, and I try to have a completely different life now,” Sandra shared.

“After a loss, you tend to think that there’s no life afterward.”

“Right, and, for some people, there isn’t life afterward. Still, for others, it’s important for them to find a way to make a life, and that’s where the problem comes in. In order to do that, you have to be left alone to heal, to figure out what to do in your life,” Sandra explained. “My grandfather refused to allow me that time.”

“What about your father?” she asked.

She shrugged. “I don’t even know who he was or what happened to him. My mother got in the family way , and we all paid for it.”

“Including you?”

“Of course including me,” she snapped, staring at her. “It doesn’t matter who got my mother pregnant. It’s always the mothers and the children, the ones left behind, who have to pay the penalty.”

“That’s hardly fair,” Doreen muttered.

“It’s not fair. It’s not fair at all,” Sandra cried out passionately. “I barely had a life. If I had a boyfriend, all I heard about was that I was a strumpet, just like my mother.”

“Oh, good Lord.” Doreen stared at her. “And why didn’t you leave?”

Sandra’s shoulders sagged. “I couldn’t leave my mother. She seemed so fragile and heartbroken over everything.”

“But your mother has been gone for ten years now, hasn’t she?”

She nodded. “Yes, and still I’m sitting here. You’re right. I should have left. Maybe I still should leave. But where would I go? What would I do? I don’t have any money. I’m not sure I could find work, but—”

“What about another partner?”

“I’ve never had a partner,” Sandra admitted. “It’s not as if the men in this family would allow me to have a normal life. Every male has to be vetted.”

She nodded slowly. “And they won’t let anybody pass muster, will they?”

“Even if they did, my grandfather and my uncles always mention something about my being a bad seed .” When Doreen just stared at her, Sandra shrugged. “They criticize me constantly, to where you feel that something is very wrong with you, and you can’t ever get over it. You try hard, but—”

“Got it.” Doreen nodded. “I understand that completely.”

“I really think maybe you do,” Sandra replied.

Doreen smiled. “I was married, and my husband replaced me with a much younger woman, and I got nothing when he kicked me out, except for my twenty-year-old car and my dog, Mugs. I was lost and didn’t know even the basics of so many life skills,” she shared, then shrugged. “So, it was a really tough time for me, but I found a whole new lease on life by moving here. My grandmother has been an absolute godsend, and, since then, I found Mack and eventually got engaged.”

Sandra shook her head. “I never had that serendipitous event,” she said. “So, for me, life has been a series of never-ending close calls, but never anything really good.”

“Is somebody out there you would like to spend time with?”

Sandra flushed and then nodded. “His wife passed away a couple years ago.”

“Have you thought about maybe bucking the system and spending some time with him?”

“My uncle Clarence told me that it wouldn’t be appropriate.”

“Appropriate?”

“Yeah, he’s not wealthy, so he’s not anybody special, I guess. He’s not somebody who could move the family’s careers forward,” she muttered in disgust.

“Right, and, of course, that’s the only thing that matters to them.”

“Exactly,” she agreed.

Knowing that time could run away on them and that Sandra may or may not continue to speak with her, Doreen got down to the matter at hand. “Why do you think your mother was murdered?”

“Because I’d only just had her checked out by a doctor,” she stated, staring at her. “And she’d also warned me that if something happened to her, to look to the uncles.” Doreen raised her eyebrows at that, and Sandra nodded. “What was I supposed to say? What was I supposed to do? I can’t talk to them. It’s not as if I get to speak,” she explained. “They talk at me.”

“Right,” Doreen muttered, nodding. “I’ve had that happen a few times as well.”

“Exactly, and I don’t really have any leg to stand on. If I did anything to stand up to them in any way, I couldn’t live here anymore.”

“So, who lives here right now?”

“It’s my carriage house,” she stated, doing air quotes. “Yet it’s not mine really. Apparently it’s all part of the family trust, and, if I leave, I leave it behind, with no place to live and no money to live on.”

“So, you have no way to support yourself. You have no personal money, correct?”

Sandra nodded.

“Which is what these kind of controlling men do, and this is how they keep you from becoming independent,” Doreen noted.

Sandra stared at her, and once again tears filled her eyes. “I just wanted to have a life, just something better than what my mother had.”

“But your mother made what, in their minds, was that one big mistake, and now you’ve paid for it all your life.”

She nodded. “And so did my mother. After the birth, I think they were secretly hoping that either she would die in childbirth or I wouldn’t make it,” she muttered. “After that, she told me how the men just kept it quiet.”

“Do you know of any children in the family who passed on?”

“Yes, there was one,” Sandra noted. “It’s always been hush-hush, and I don’t really know very much about it.”

“So, whose child was it?”

Sandra stared at her and said, “It was a long time ago.”

“I know,” Doreen stated, “but you need to tell me whose child it was.”

“Don’t you know?”

“I think I do, yeah, but again I need more than that.”

“Right, it was Grandma Iris’s,” Sandra replied. “I don’t know the details, but sometimes pregnancies go the way we want them to, and sometimes they don’t.”

“Of course,” Doreen agreed, “and sometimes children are born, and then they die as toddlers.”

“Yeah, you know there might have been something about that. I don’t know the details. I wasn’t privy to any information, and you can bet my grandmother never mentioned anything.”

“Do you think the details bothered her?”

Sandra nodded. “I think they really bothered her. At least, that’s what my mother said. She told me that there were all kinds of secrets in this family, and none of them were good.”

“Secrets have a tendency to be that way,” Doreen replied, with a smile. “People tend to get away with an awful lot of things because they think nobody will ever tell. But what I’ve found with the work I’ve been doing is that time runs out very quickly, and, while many people want to tell, some of the truth will die with them because all too many go to the grave, refusing to talk.”

“That would be because of old Buck,” Sandra muttered. “It would be a whole different story if he wasn’t around.”

“You’re still afraid of him, aren’t you?”

Sandra nodded, as a visible shudder ran through her body.

Doreen sighed. “He’s in a retirement home, but you’re still afraid of him.”

“Yes,” she cried out, “you don’t understand. He’s just mean.”

Doreen nodded. “Do you think he ever hurt Iris?”

“I know he did. But I also heard the sons had a talk with Buck, and apparently they got him to stop somehow.”

“Do you think they did that because they care?”

She shook her head. “No, they did it because they didn’t want anybody getting caught. I don’t think they particularly cared about their mother. She was nothing, just a doormat. I think they were more concerned about their father getting caught for something.”

“You don’t think they cared about their mother?”

“No, I don’t. She did something that seemed to… somehow ostracize her from the family.”

“As in had an affair?”

Sandra nodded slowly.

Doreen continued. “Did that result in a child, who might have died?”

Sandra stared at her. “I’ve never thought of that.” She then shivered. “And that’s not something I really want to think about now either,” she declared, looking sick all of a sudden.

“If you think about something that would ostracize your grandmother from not only her husband but her sons as well, it would need to be something along that line. I don’t know how strong of a faith they have, but—”

“It’s a convenient faith,” Sandra declared. “We pull it out and put it on display when we want to use it for something specific.”

Doreen filed away that phrase in her mind because it was so true of some people, and she hadn’t ever really considered it in that light before. “And, if your grandmother did have an affair, what do you think would have happened to her?”

“I would be surprised if she was still alive afterward.”

“But she isn’t though, is she?” Doreen asked. “How much do you know about the family?”

“I don’t know anything,” she muttered, “and honestly, I think, from their point of view,… I’m barely family at all.”

“Right. Do you have any idea who your father is?”

Sandra shook her head. “No, I don’t. I often thought that it might help me to adjust to my lot in life if I knew, but my mother went to great pains to keep it from me.”

“Did she tell you that she just didn’t want you to know, or did she tell you that she had no idea?”

Sandra frowned. “I’m not exactly sure. You’re scaring me a little.”

Doreen asked her, “Why?”

“Because I hadn’t considered all these dark thoughts in terms of my family.”

“Of course not,” Doreen said, with a gentle smile. “None of us want to ever think of things in those terms.”

“Do you have any family living?”

“I have a grandmother at Rosemoor.”

“Ah.” Sandra nodded. “Old Buck is at the other place, Riverdale.”

“Yes, I haven’t spoken to him, but I did understand he was there.”

“You don’t want to speak to him,” Sandra declared. “He’s very scary.”

“Okay, I’ll keep that in mind in case I ever do have to talk with him. Does he ever leave the home?”

“Not now. He’s getting much too frail.”

“Does it make you feel better to know that he’ll be gone soon?”

Sandra winced. “Karma could get me for saying this, but, yes, absolutely. The thing is, it’s not enough. Those two sons of his, my uncles, they’re just as scary.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever met the one, but I did meet the other.”

“Yeah? You would have met the politician, Clarence,” she said, with an eye roll. “He thinks that he’s some gift to the people. And that’s women and men alike.”

“Oh, interesting.” Doreen smiled. “That’s always a fun man.”

“No, it’s not,” Sandra argued, staring at her. “You need to avoid them.”

“And why is that?” she asked.

“Because they’re really not the kind you can make accusations about and then walk away.”

“Interesting, and I will keep that in mind. What is it that you think your mother did that got her killed?”

“She wanted to leave,” Sandra stated. “They all had this huge family fight, and she planned to leave. She told them that she was done, that she was fed up, and that they couldn’t force her to stay any longer. I hadn’t even realized how much she was being forced to stay. At least in her mind.”

Doreen waited and listened. “How soon after that did she pass on?”

“The next day,” Sandra stated, “and, of course, from their point of view, it was a heart attack brought on by the stress of the argument. At least that’s what they told me,” she muttered, turning to face Doreen.

“And your mother was buried?”

“Cremated and then buried. I figured that was so nobody could find evidence.”

“That’s quite possible, yes,” Doreen agreed. “I’m not sure about how drug detection tests work on ashes. I will have to ask an expert.”

“You would think that the intense fire would burn everything.”

“Maybe,” Doreen replied, “but, every year, technology improves. And speaking of technology, you could always take a DNA sample and upload it to the genealogy database, and maybe eventually find out who your father is.”

“Maybe,” she conceded. “I’ve wondered about that every once in a while, but then I’m afraid to.”

“Afraid, why?”

Sandra snorted. “You’ve got to understand my uncles and old Buck.”

“Meaning that they wouldn’t like it if you found out?”

“Something like that.”

But she was very cagey about it, and Doreen had a terrible thought. “Or are you thinking that one of them could be your father?”

She winced and shuddered. “I would hope not,” she gasped, white as sheet. “Dear God, I hope not.”

“Did your mother ever say anything about sexual assault within the family?”

“No, she never did, and I would hope that wasn’t it.”

“If you did find out the truth, it would put a lot of these worries to rest.”

“But what if it’s the worst possible truth?”

“Maybe it is,” Doreen replied, “but we tend to build up all this in our mind so much that it becomes very difficult to find out the truth because our fears are so prevalent.”

“Maybe,” Sandra said, then shuddered once more.

“How often do you see your family?”

“I don’t. I live in this little carriage house, and they pretend that I just don’t exist.”

“I’m sorry. That’s a tough way to live.”

“Maybe. But maybe it doesn’t matter anymore,” she muttered.

“But you’re not all that old yourself.”

“I’m old enough,” she muttered, “and I’m okay to end this life too.”

“But what if you could have a life with this man who you like?”

She smiled at Doreen. “I’m not against that, but I’m pretty sure the family would never allow it.”

“What if the family doesn’t have any say in it?” she asked. “You two could move away and could have a life of your own.”

She shook her head. “You have no idea what a stranglehold the family has on me.”

“Even if Buck was out of the picture?”

“Maybe,” she muttered. “I don’t know.”

Doreen left it for the moment. “If you ever want help doing the DNA, you just let me know. I just did it for a resident at the home, at Rosemoor.”

“And which resident is that?” Sandra asked, looking at her.

“Richie,” Doreen replied.

Sandra’s eyes widened. “Richie? As in ninety-years-old Richie?”

“Yeah,” Doreen confirmed. “Do you know him?”

“My mother mentioned something about him.”

“That your grandmother Iris had an affair with him? Because that is something I do know.”

“Good God, I’m surprised he’s still alive, if Buck knows.”

“Maybe that was something Buck and Iris fought about all the time, and maybe that was one of the reasons she stayed with old Buck.”

“If she stayed and it was because of that, she would have stayed to keep Richie safe.”

“I don’t think Richie and Iris had a relationship for very long,” Doreen shared, gazing at Sandra closely. “But I could be wrong.”

“I do remember that name though,” she muttered. “And the story was that Buck had quite a snit over it all, and then seemed to be quite calm about it. As if something had blown over, and the best man won or something. He apparently never seemed to worry about it afterward.”

Doreen nodded. “We’ve got all kinds of tests running right now. So, I’m sure the truth will come out at some point in time.”

“You really got Richie’s DNA?”

“We really did.” Doreen smiled. “We’ve been doing it with lots of other cases as well.”

“Right.” Sandra frowned at Doreen. “I feel as if you’re trying to tell me something.”

“I’m wondering about the sense of telling you more,” Doreen admitted. “In the coroner’s office is a box of bones. The bones are that of an approximately eighteen-month-old child, found thirty-five years ago in southeast Kelowna.”

Sandra’s eyes widened. “Good God.” She stuttered and sputtered. “What’s that got to do with us?”

“The child’s body was broken, as in beaten,” Doreen shared, “or run over, or something equally catastrophic. The child was not buried in a coffin, was not buried in a formal funeral setting. She was tossed in a pillowcase and buried in a garden, only to be discovered years later, when someone dug up that garden in order to plant yams.”

Sandra shook her head. “That poor baby,” she cried out.

Doreen nodded. “The thing is, we uploaded the DNA from the bones to one of the genealogy sites,” she explained, “and it came back as a match to your family.”