Liberty Street

Prologue

Several people had already asked her what it was like to live across the street from a cemetery.

Just three weeks prior, the woman had moved into the wartime-era home opposite the church.

It had age-speckled white siding and black shutters in desperate need of a fresh coat of paint.

It was dark inside, and cool, thanks to the shade of several large oak trees that dotted the lot.

They towered so high that the house sometimes felt like a dwarf surrounded by giants.

It was on a muggy night in mid-August that the woman observed the curious visitor in the graveyard.

She had stepped out onto the porch a little after nine in the evening to enjoy a cup of tea with her ginger tabby cat nestled in her lap.

She reclined into one of the high-backed wicker chairs, releasing a sigh of relief as she felt the pressure in her bad hip sink into the cushion.

The porch light was off to prevent the mosquitoes from congregating like church parishioners around the hole in the screen that needed mending.

Unless she was reading, she preferred it off, anyway, as it allowed for a clearer view of the street and the cemetery beyond.

She never saw night visitors, though.

The first weekend after she moved in, she’d witnessed a burial.

The mourners had filed out of the church, dignified and sombre, and made their way across the street to the gravesite.

Their sweaty-browed heads inclined under black hats, overheating in the summer sun.

The woman had watched discreetly as the group surrounded the grave.

She saw the reverend gesticulating with one hand whilst holding a copy of the Bible in the other.

Eyes were dabbed with tissue, elbows patted in sympathy.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

She had seen mourners come in ones and twos as well, visiting older graves.

They often arrived on Sunday afternoons, which seemed like the most popular time to remember lost loved ones at the Millgate Cemetery.

It made the woman think that she should probably get around to visiting her own parents’ graves from time to time.

She had been remiss in that, and, as the only child, held sole responsibility for the maintenance of their gravesites.

But the odd thing about the man in the cemetery tonight—for she took it to be a man, given the size and shape of the silhouette—wasn’t that he was alone, or even that he had chosen such an unorthodox hour for his vigil; it was that he wasn’t standing in front of—or, for that matter, remotely nearby—a headstone.

He stood before one of the largest trees in the cemetery, a good twenty feet away from the closest row of stones, the outline of his body illuminated in the weak moonlight that was just starting to shimmer through the dusk.

The pale glow reflected off the leaves above his head and the grass beneath his feet, but his body seemed to absorb the light, drenching him in darkness. His head was bowed.

The woman rose and walked to the edge of the porch, so close that her nose nearly brushed the screen.

She watched the man with mounting interest sprinkled with something a little more ominous that she couldn’t quite identify.

He knelt to the ground, brought his hand to his mouth, then pressed it against the grass before he stood and turned to leave, making his way over to the path that wound between the headstones.

He stopped abruptly when the woman’s cat meowed its protest at having lost its comfortable lap.

In the dead silence of the heavy night, the sound carried across the woman’s lawn to the street, and the man turned.

She held her breath as they faced one another.

He stared, and she stared back, though she couldn’t see his face clearly, and hoped he couldn’t see hers.

A moment later, he turned once again and continued down the path, disappearing into the darkness. The woman’s heart raced as she listened to the crunching rhythm of his retreat. Her cat’s tail flicked around her ankles as she sank back into the shadows of the porch.