That morning, at twenty past seven, Daniel had been at his desk with his first coffee when he saw her. The side gate stood at the edge of his vision through the office window — a narrow wooden gate in the fence between his yard and Helen Marsh's — and there she was, standing at it, her hand on the latch, her gray head bent as if she were studying something on the ground. Helen Marsh, sixty-something, alone in the house next door since her husband died, the woman of the half-drawn curtains and the fully expressed opinions.
Daniel had watched for a moment, curious. Helen rarely came to the gate. She preferred the front walk and the driveway, and she preferred them with a purpose — a complaint about the recycling bins, a question about the property line, a long story about her son Chris and his truck and his prospects. To see her at the side gate at 7:20 in the morning, peering into his yard, was unusual enough that Daniel had set down his coffee and gone to the door.
"Helen?" he had called. "Everything all right?"
She had straightened up quickly — too quickly, he thought later — and smiled the bright, brittle smile she used for strangers. "Oh, Daniel. Good morning. I'm so sorry. I thought I saw my cat slip through here."
Daniel had looked at the gate, at the yard beyond it, at the empty morning. "Your cat?"
"She's been wandering," Helen said. "The little gray one. I let her out and she just — gone. I thought she might have come through the fence."
Daniel had nodded, because what else do you do at 7:20 in the morning with a neighbor at your gate. But the thing was — the thing everyone on the street knew — Helen Marsh did not own a cat. She had never owned a cat. She was famously allergic to them; she had told Megan at a block party, at length, about the hives and the inhaler. There was no little gray one. There had never been a little gray one.
"Well," Daniel had said slowly, "I haven't seen her. I'll keep an eye out."
"Thank you, dear," Helen said, and she had let go of the latch and stepped back, and Daniel had watched her walk up her own driveway and disappear into her garage. He had stood at the door for a moment longer, the morning cool on his face, and then he had gone back inside to his coffee and his code and his ordinary day. The cat — the imaginary cat — had slipped his mind by eight.
Now, standing in his ruined yard with the police on the way, Daniel remembered it with a clarity that felt like a second collapse. Helen at the gate at 7:20. Her hand on the latch. Her eyes on the ground — or on the yard beyond. The bright, brittle smile. The cat that did not exist.
He looked up at her house. The upstairs window overlooked his fence, his yard, his garden, his chair. The curtain was half drawn, as always. He could not see whether anyone stood behind it, but he knew, with the same cold certainty that had told him the scratches were not rust, that someone had been watching his afternoons for a very long time — watching the ritual, the chair, the mug, the four-o'clock light — and that the cat had never been the point at all.
He thought about Helen Marsh the way you think about a neighbor when the neighbor stops being background. She had moved in with her husband thirty years ago, back when the street was younger and the trees were shorter. The husband had died of a heart attack on a golf course seven years back, and Helen had stayed in the house alone, keeping the curtains half drawn and the lawn immaculate and her son Chris's visits irregular. Chris was twenty-seven, drove a pickup, and had the kind of easy charm that made older women at church fundraisers press cookies into his hands.
What he could not figure out, standing there with the police ten minutes away, was the why. Helen had no grievance with him that he knew of. They had exchanged the standard neighborly currency — waves, weather, the occasional borrowed hedge trimmer — and nothing more. She had once brought over a plate of cookies when Emily had the flu. That was the entire history. There was no feud, no fence dispute, no barking dog. Just a woman at a gate at 7:20 in the morning, looking for a cat that did not exist, with her hand on his latch.
Unless the cat had been a reconnaissance. Unless she had been checking whether the gate was locked, whether the yard was empty, whether the coast was clear for whatever came next. Daniel looked at the gate — the loose latch he had meant to fix all spring — and then back at her window, and the curtain did not move, and the house gave nothing away, and he understood that he was going to have to tell the police about a woman and a cat and a morning that had seemed like nothing at all.