“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.Realhelp.
“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 ideaof 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.Becauseof 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 wasinformed of her death by her ex-husband.In aletter!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.
“Helen wanted her buried in the Millgate, but I knew we would run into trouble.Word had gotten around by then that poor Annie was in an asylum, and the congregation was even more conservative than it is now.Times were different then.I knew if anyone found out she’d taken her own life, well…they wouldn’t have wanted her buried there.Not with any sort of ceremony, anyway.”
Rachel exhales a long breath of realization as the old man reaches out and hands her the last piece of the puzzle.
She looks up, though reluctantly, and finds his eyes on her.
“You understand now, don’t you, Rachel?”he asks.
“Detective.And yes, but I need to hear it from you.”
He keeps his eyes on her a moment, then nods.“I didn’t think I could convince folks to allow a lunatic suicide to be buried there, even if she was—or had been—one of their own.So Helen and I had her brought back here and buried in secret, as close as we could to Dick’s plot without a headstone, at the base of that big maple.And then no one would have to know, or be offended.I didn’t want to upset anyone, but Helen needed her daughter home, needed the family to all have the same final resting place.I was glad to give her what she needed, after so much struggle for so long.”He blinks hard.“I knew Annie.And I just never could really believe that she would take her own life.But if she did, I knew she must have had a good reason.One that God would understand.”
He’s visibly upset now.
“I never meant to cause any harm,” he says, looking at them each in turn, eyes red.“We picked a spot so far off from the other headstones, I believed it would be ages before anyone wanted that plot, if we ever spreadout that far at all.”He shrugs his stooped shoulders.“I am sorry, Detectives.For the hubbub and confusion.But not for what I did.That girl deserved some peace beneath the shade of that tree.I know when Helen was in her decline, it soothed her to know they would all be together.”
