Boy Went To Say Goodbye To His Mum. Then He Says THIS And They Quickly Stopped The Funeral!

“A young boy notices something strange about his mom’s body during her wake. He tells the adults around him, and things start happening fast. The funeral is stopped, and what follows is straight from a detective novel.

On a gloomy Tuesday in Dallas, the sky wept. The incessant rain enveloped the city in a somber mood. The funeral parlor was crowded; people from all over had come for the wake.

Tony didn’t know what to do with the terrible sadness he felt. He had No More Tears left, so the 12-year-old simply clutched his uncle’s hand tightly. Together, they navigated through a sea of mourners. Tony’s eyes were still scratchy and red when they reached the open casket. He stared into his mother’s peaceful face. He was about to sink back into his sorrow when he saw something that seemed out of place.

His uncle noticed immediately. He leaned down to the boy’s level and asked, “What’s wrong, Tony? Tony had the strain to hear his uncle’s whisper over the murmur of the crowd, and he paid little attention. His mother’s hands were folded neatly on her chest, but something was missing.

A few years back, the two of them had been fooling around in the kitchen while she was preparing dinner. A knife had slipped and cut her on the outside of her thumb. It had healed well but left an odd-shaped scar. There was no such scar on her hand now. He couldn’t make sense of it. He knew the funeral parlor would have used all kinds of makeup when they prepared the body for the wake, but it didn’t make sense that they would try to hide an old scar like that.

His uncle, proud of him, asked him again, “What’s wrong, Tony?” Tony’s heart raced. Something deep in his heart told him it wasn’t right. Or a scar. He whispered, “It’s gone.”

His uncle didn’t quite understand what Tony meant. He pulled the boy aside and assured him everything was going to be okay. He knew that sometimes lifeless people can look different from what their loved ones remember. But Tony knew his mother better than anyone else. Every detail of her life, every story she told, every emotion she felt, he knew them all. He looked at the casket again. Sure, the woman looked like his mom, but the more he stared, the more he was convinced this was someone else, and he didn’t know how to explain that to anyone else. He knew then Uncle Mike took him by the elbow and steered him away from the casket.

Tony did as he was told, but he remained unconvinced. The image of his mother’s hand without the scar haunted him. He wasn’t just a grief-stricken child like everybody was telling him. He knew what he knew. The funeral was in 3 days, and he was not going to let them bury a woman who was not his mom, that was for sure.

The moment the grown-ups started talking to each other, Tony slipped away. He made sure nobody saw him and then headed down a corridor to the back offices of the funeral home. He had read enough detective stories to know you always start an investigation by looking at records. He wasn’t 100% sure what records were or even what he was looking for, but from his favorite detective, he knew he needed somewhere to start. So he was going to wing it for now.

The room behind the reception area was quiet. The walls were lined with filing cabinets, and the big desk in the middle was strewn with papers. “These people aren’t very neat,” he said softly to himself. There were small labels on the front of the cabinet drawers, and Tony saw that they were in alphabetical order. “This was going to be easy,” he thought. “J for Jackie or D for Dorner. If they had information about his mom, he would find it in that file.”

So far, so good. It felt like an hour had passed, but finally, Tony found his mom’s file. It was a thick cardboard sleeve with a stack of papers inside. He still didn’t know what he was looking for, but at least he had something to start with now. Most of the papers he didn’t understand. He could understand the words, sure, but he didn’t know what they meant.

Dejected, he put the file back where he found it. But as he separated the hanging files in the cabinet to replace his mother’s, he noticed the folder just in front of it. The person had the same initials as his mom: JD. He pulled the file out. Tony was curious. He quickly understood that this was a file belonging to someone called Jane Doe. He knew what that meant. When they couldn’t find someone’s identity in his detective stories, they called them John or Jane Doe.

Tony’s heart bounced. He looked at the dates and the time and saw that this body had been brought to the morgue within 10 minutes of his mom’s, and there was nobody to claim the body. Tony felt as if this was important.

Tony sat at the desk in the middle of the records room and spread Jane Doe’s file open in front of him. The description of the woman was similar to his mom. She was 5 ft and 4 in tall and weighed 120 lb. On paper, it could have been his mom. She also had black hair and blue eyes.

Then something else drew his attention. The file said she had no physical scars. As Tony rejoined the wake, he was surer than ever about the missing scar being the key to something bigger. The woman in the coffin was not his mother. Other people might be fooled because she looked so much like Jackie Dorner, but he knew she was not.

But Tony also knew nobody was ever going to believe him unless he had proof. And that’s what he decided to find. That night, as he lay in bed at Uncle Mike’s, Tony racked his brain for anything out of the ordinary he had seen or could remember. Then it struck him. Jackie Dorner was a well-known and respected investigative journalist. Tony remembered her talking on the phone with somebody a few days before her death.

The next morning, Tony asked Uncle Mike to take him home. He wanted to spend a day with his mom’s things. Uncle Mike dropped him off just after breakfast, and Tony headed straight up to the attic. This is where his mom worked. It was also where she kept all her papers, and it was the one place in the house he was forbidden from entering. But desperate times call for desperate measures.

It took him less than 5 minutes to find his mom’s journals. They were neatly stacked in the top drawer of her desk. Her notebooks were in another drawer. They were full of names and notes he couldn’t really understand. Beneath them was a folder with a whole bunch of printed emails.

Tony glanced at them and then sat back quickly. The emails scared him. They were threatening warnings for his mom to drop her investigation. This brought a smile to Tony’s face for the first time in days. That was never going to work. He didn’t know a single person braver than his mom. Nobody was going to scare Jackie Dorner into doing anything she didn’t absolutely want to do.

An hour later, Tony went down the stairs and to the kitchen to grab a glass

of juice. He stared out the window and let his thoughts go where they wanted. In his mind’s eye, he looked at his mom’s hand in the casket again, and like before, he was sure it wasn’t her. With the things he had seen in his mom’s notebooks and the emails, he knew something was wrong. But he had no evidence to take to the grown-ups yet, nothing that would convince them he wasn’t just another heartbroken kid.

Then his brain lit up like a Christmas tree. Miss Henderson. He would go and see Miss Henderson. She was a seasoned journalist; that’s what his mom had called her. And his mom had always said seasoned journalists have a reputation for integrity. He tried to phone her, but she didn’t answer. Then he decided to get his bicycle from the garage and ride over to her house.

“Tony, what are you doing here?” she asked when she opened the door. He told her he needed to know about his mom’s last assignment. His tone was insistent, but he made sure to be respectful, like his mom had taught him. Miss Henderson changed a little. She peered out the door and looked over his shoulder, then she looked up and down the street and pulled him into the house. She gave him a glass of juice and set him down in the living room.

When she spoke again, she was conspiratorial. “Your mother was onto something big, Tony. Something very dangerous. Why are you meddling with things you shouldn’t be?” She didn’t wait for him to answer. She told him it was a major scandal involving high-level government corruption that could end careers and ruin lives if she published her story.

The more Miss Henderson spoke, the more Tony knew he’d been right all along, and the dots were connecting in his head in a scary way. Whatever happened, his mom’s disappearance wasn’t what it seemed, and she wasn’t in the casket at the funeral home. Maybe somebody ran scared and tried to shut her up. She had told them stories about brave journalists around the world who had flown too close to the sun and scorched their wings. Maybe that had happened to her.

Tony pedaled like mad on his way home, and his mind wouldn’t stand still. It was like a rabbit running from one hole to the next, popping out here and there and pretty much everywhere. He felt like he wasn’t only a grieving son looking for answers. Oh no, he was now a key player in an attempt to unravel the secrets that threatened to overshadow his mom’s legacy. And just like she did every day of her life, he was going to fight for justice.

Back home, Uncle Mike was already waiting in the driveway. Tony mumbled an apology, put his bike away, and hopped into the car. He knew what to do next, but it would have to wait for tomorrow. He was going to knock on his mom’s partner’s door. The guy was called Kieran Daniels. Tony knew him well, and he liked him. If he shared his thoughts and what he had found with Kieran, who knows, they might partner up.

Kieran Daniels’s reaction to Tony’s visit was much the same as Miss Henderson’s. He was glad to see the boy and spent time commiserating with the loss of his mom. But the moment Tony touched on the subject of his mother’s latest investigation, Kieran became cautious. Tony pushed through as methodically as possible.

Tony unpacked his suspicions and the things he’d found that seemed to underline their veracity. He placed the threatening emails on the coffee table between them and watched as the blood drained from Kieran’s face when he read them. Then Tony asked for Kieran’s help. “Nobody’s going to believe me that the woman in the coffin is not my mother. I have one day left until the funeral. Then it will be too late,” he said reluctantly.

Kieran agreed to help. He spoke to Tony about his mom’s last activities and shared some of their communication with him. Then he produced a flash drive. “It contains security camera footage from the days leading up to Jackie’s disappearance and so-called death.” Kieran had obtained the footage from a contact at the police department, which meant that they were probably looking into a few things too.

The first clip showed a tense meeting between Tony’s mom and an unknown individual. Their body language suggested things got heated. The second video, dated two days later, showed his mom leaving the office late at night. She had a concerned look on her face and carried a thick envelope under her left arm.

Tony and Kieran pieced together a timeline. Then Kieran dropped a cluster bomb. “What if Jackie had arranged her own disappearance to get out in front of whoever was threatening her?” He held out an envelope to Tony. “Your mother gave me this to give to you if anything ever happened to her,” he said. “I thought it wasn’t worth giving to you, but if you say she’s not in the casket…”

Tony’s fingers fumbled with the letter. He tore the envelope open and scanned the note. It read, “Honey, if you’re reading this, I’m not safe. I’ve made arrangements for a situation like this. Uncle Mike will take care of you. I love you.” The note took the wind from Tony’s sails. Firstly, it was eerie to hear from his mom in this way. Second, and more importantly, it bolstered his belief that his mom might actually still be alive. And thirdly, it strengthened the suspicion that the woman in the casket was not Jackie Dorner.

“I want to show you something,” Kieran said. He grabbed his car keys and beckoned for Tony to follow him. They drove a few miles, made a few circles, then drove out of town. A few miles later, Kieran made a U-turn and drove back in the direction they came from. He was making sure they weren’t being followed, he told Tony.

Thirty minutes later, they stopped at an nondescript house in suburban Dallas. “This is a house a few of the journalists used when a story is about to break,” he said, “a sort of safe house.” They walked around the house and knocked on the door. Nothing. The curtains were drawn, and it didn’t look as if someone had been there recently. The trash bins were empty, and the place had a distinct unlived-in feel.

It was a dead end. Tony felt as if he was about to cry. The funeral was tomorrow, and he hadn’t gathered any hard evidence that his mother was alive or that the woman in the casket was not Jackie Dorner. He wasn’t ready to give up, but it looked as if he had no choice.

“You’ve done your best, kid. I’ll keep looking,” Kieran promised as Tony hopped on his bike and headed home.

At the gravesite the next afternoon, Tony was shattered. In the car on the way to the cemetery, he had listened over and over again to his mom’s last voice notes. He wanted so much to be close to her right now, and more than that, he wanted to know the truth. Without the truth, her death would haunt him always.

Later, as the graveside service came to an end and mourners sang a last drawn-out hymn, Tony stood rigid next to the open grave. He watched as dirt was lowered into the ground and couldn’t help

thinking about all the secrets that were being buried with the coffin. Uncle Mike took Tony by the elbow and guided him forward. Then he scooped up a handful of dirt and indicated for him to do the same. Just as his uncle threw his handful onto the casket to signal a final farewell, Tony’s phone buzzed in his pocket.

Something told him to check the message before he did anything else. When he glanced at the screen, his heart skipped a beat. The message was from an unknown number. It was a picture, and in it was a woman’s hand with a distinctive scar on the side. More importantly, the hand had a newspaper with today’s date clutched between the fingers.

Time stopped. Weeping relatives, the priest, Uncle Mike, the open grave, the casket—everything faded into nothing. His quest had not been in vain. Tony pulled at Uncle Mike’s arm and showed him the picture. The ceremony was halted without explanation, and a few minutes later, the first policeman arrived. The grave was cordoned off, and an investigation started in all earnest.

For Tony, this was a blur. The search for the truth wasn’t over, but it had turned into the last lap, and the finish line was within reach. Two weeks later, detectives found Jackie Dorner in a deserted house a few miles outside of Dallas. She was dirty and emaciated, but she was alive. She had been held captive since her disappearance in the hope that she would be a bargaining chip when the story she was working on reached the publication stage.

Arrests were swift, and the corrupt syndicate that reached all the way into the federal government was fled open. The Jane Doe in the coffin was identified, and her family took charge of the burial.

When the dust settled and Jackie and Tony had their first night in their home in a long, long while, they sat huddled on the couch. Tears were shed, and the extraordinary bond between mother and son became the most important thing for both of them once more.

What a shocking tale. Do you have a story about someone being missing and presumed dead and then unexpectedly turning up again?