The Night Following by Morag Joss Page B

words to the dog and the sound of a door closing, and I moved on.
    Number twenty-seven, its number and name, “Overdale,”spelled out in looping black wrought iron fixed to the wall, sat quietly among its neighbors. But it didn’t quite match up to them and their immodest embellishments; everywhere along the avenue were conservatories, jutting extensions, gazebos, many of them floodlit in the dark. The front windows of Arthur’s house were black and all the curtains were closed.
    Earlier that evening I had studied a follow-up piece in the paper under the headline TRAGEDY DEEPENS. The report heaped new and wretched detail upon the case, as if the woman’s being merely killed would not interest the readers for long. It outlined the hope and waste, the ruined plans. Arthur and Ruth had been about to go on the trip of a lifetime, a world cruise ending in Australia where they were planning to spend at least six months, and possibly settle for good, in order to be close to Ruth’s bedridden brother Graham and their nephew and his family. There was a picture of retired engineer and widower Graham(74). He was propped up in bed wearing short-sleeved pajamas. His face was swollen, and he was wincing gamely at a small burning forest of candles on a cake on a trolley, watched by a cluster of people, including some nurses, holding Styrofoam cups. The caption said: HAPPIER TIMES.
Arthur, Ruth and friends mark Graham’s 70th birthday in 2000.
    And there she was: Ruth Mitchell in spectacles and a pale trouser suit, a practical, drip-dry Down Under outfit. Her hair was cut sensibly and a scarf, loosely held in a scarf ring, hung around her neck. Next to her, Arthur stooped toward the camera with his cup in one hand and a bottle in the other, proposing a toast. He was square-shouldered, gaunt, and spoon-jawed. His grin revealed a row of sheeplike teeth that met his upper gum in a row of high arches. His present devastation was analyzed under the subheading DREAMS SHATTERED
.
    The garden of his house was not as tidy as the others. A garbage can sat out on the middle of the drive near the end, under a tree. The grass was uncut. There were dark stains in the drifts of fallen petals on the front path and the smell that exuded from them was the familiar sweet stench of dying flowers. In the borders, unidentifiable stalks stood skinny and naked as pencils among sparse flower heads, spent and weather-battered.
    I made my way up the drive close to the boundary wall. I was intending to wheel the garbage can farther up, nearer the garage doors, where it would be more convenient. Just as I reached it, something made me turn my head. It was something that eyes weren’t much use for, not a figure nor quite a shape nor barely a movement, but something under a tree on the other side of the garden, more like a shimmer near the ground. It was the aftershock of a tiny disturbance, the merest righting of the surface after a departure just accomplished, the air closing again around an absence. And while I couldn’t tell that it wasn’t caused by something quite ordinary and solid and swift such as a cat, I couldn’t be sure it was, either. Perhaps it was just the passing moon shadow of a branch lifted by the wind. I waited, shivering, for what might come next.
    Then, from deeper in the garden over at the side of the house came sounds actual and unambiguous enough, the
crick-cruck
of a gate latch and the scrape and squeak of hinges. Footsteps sounded on the path, and receded. I stepped silently over the concrete in front of the garage and crossed the front lawn. I trailed through the long wet grass, tugging up strands and soaking my feet. I dared not follow at once into the gully between the house wall and the boundary fence so I paused at the side gate, which stood open. There was a faint, human sourness of sweat and exhaled breath lingering there, I was certain of it. I peered up the gully. Something was moving away from me into the darkness of the