“I didn’t know there was a children’s cemetery here,” Stevens pipes up, grimacing.
“Yeah,” Julie tells him.“Fortunately, we haven’t had a burial there in decades, as far as I know.Thank God for vaccines and modern medicine, right?I can show you if you like, Detectives.”
Rachel shakes her head fervently.“No, I’m not concerned about that.There’s no way that’s a child’s skeleton, sonota misplaced burial from those records.And you can call me Rachel, Julie.”
Deep breath.
“All right.”Julie smiles and they return to the small area on the carpeted floor, which issues hollow thuds as they kneel and sit, shifting the boxes around.
“And what exactly are we looking for?”Stevens asks, opening the lid of the box nearest him, sending a puff of dust into the air that dances in a ray of light from the large window.Rachel raises her chin at him, and finally, when he registers the heat of her eyes, he meets them a little sheepishly.
“What do you think?”she asks.She watches him with a neutral expression despite the storm brewing in her chest.
“I guess, uh, any references to plot 135?”
“That’s right.We need to check whether there’s a record for that plot that didn’t make it onto the map somehow.Some way we can ID that body, confirm whether it’s supposed to be here, or accounted for in any way.So let’s get digging.”
She glances at Julie, whose face is still pink.She’s nervous about this, doesn’t want to bear responsibility for this incident.No one likes to weara mistake, but especially not an organized introvert like Julie.Rachel understands that.
“You two go ahead and get started.I just need to, uh, excuse me.”Rachel stands and walks to the tiny washroom to her right, shuts the door behind her.
A ferocious panic attack has been building since they arrived, and she needs to succumb to it in private before it overtakes her in front of the others.Though the claustrophobia of this bathroom does nothing to help.It’s about four feet square, like an airplane washroom, and reeks of that slimy pink institutional hand soap elementary schools use.
But Rachel clutches the edge of the miniature sink and leans over it, finding her own brown eyes in the mirror.She doesn’t have time for this.And yet, is she surprised?
She closes her eyes and tries to regulate her breaths, pacing them to the countdown in her head.
Breathe in…10…breathe out.Breathe in…9…breathe out.Breathe in…8…
Of all the places an unknown body could turn up, it just had to be the Millgate Cemetery.
JULY, 1975
During the longest stretch of time Rachel could remember her mother, Mary, returning home for, she came with Rachel and her grandmother to church every Sunday.Dora was a gentle and loving caregiver whose only rules were related to safety or righteousness.
Call when you get someplace.
Don’t walk alone at night.
Never take the Lord’s name in vain.
Church every Sunday, barring illness or death.
There wasn’t much Dora seemed capable of making Mary do if she didn’twant to, but going to church seemed almost voluntary for her.It was only in her adulthood that Rachel finally understood that perhaps her mercurial mother was reaching into the earth in search of her own roots during those visits, grasping at whatever might have helped her to steady herself after the latest bad boyfriend, job loss, or arrest for some petty crime for which someone else was—of course and invariably—entirely to blame.Mary was, by both Dora’s account and Rachel’s own experience, incapable of accepting responsibility for herself no matter the circumstances, opting instead to defend even the most egregious of her own decisions with dismissive obstinacy while she holed herself up in her childhood bedroom with Gordon Lightfoot on the turntable.
One warm Sunday morning in late June, the summer Rachel was eight, she found herself pressed thigh to thigh between her mother and grandmother on a hard pew at Millgate Methodist Church.On her right, Dora smelled of lily-of-the-valley perfume layered over Ivory soap.On her left, incense and cigarettes clung to Mary’s old blue blouse with the lacy trim, pulled from the back of her closet and ironed by Dora the night before.Rachel shifted uncomfortably in her own buttercream polka-dot dress as sweat trickled down her back.She looked up at the old ceiling fan in the centre of the church as Reverend Holland droned on.It was churning slower than a merry-go-round, cutting through the humidity with all the efficacy of a spoon into a frozen watermelon.
Finally, a last round of prayers were said, heads were bowed, the organ played and the overheated flock was freed out into the breeze of the pasture.
The Methodist church was the nucleus of the little town of Millgate, and only a ten- or fifteen-minute drive from their house in Bayfield.Dora had attended the church with Rachel’s grandfather Walter from the time they were married, and his family’s rear ends had polished those pews for at least two generations before that.He was buried on the west side of the cemetery, and Rachel sighed with relief as she exited the church, feet turned in the direction of his headstone.
They visited his gravesite every Sunday after the service.When they finished, Dora always took a short walk around the cemetery on her own,saying she needed to clear her head of grief in the fresh air.Rachel was happy to wait for her in the car, sneaking Werther’s candies from the glovebox.She sometimes felt guilty about not staying longer at her grandfather’s stone, but she hated the way her grandmother lingered over it with a determined vehemence, as though she might bring him back to life if only she could grieve hard enough, pray hard enough.She also found it eerie that the stone listed her grandmother’s name, too, ready and waiting for her, like some macabre passport poised for a date stamp upon entry.
DOROTHEA “DORA” MACKENZIE
Wife and mother
1925—
