Moonlight Gardener

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“And the fights! Oh, the fights! Ah, the fights!” Mrs. Williams said piously, leaning forward, her ungainly flowered hat almost toppling, her small china-blue eyes intent upon the young sergeant’s unrevealing face. “Awful! Awful!” She paused significantly. “Especially the terrible one they had the night before last — Wednesday, it was,” she said, and paused again, almost breathlessly. “The night she disappeared,” she added meaningfully.

“Disappeared.” The sergeant started to write the word down on his lined pad and then stopped halfway to end it in a wiggly squiggle, culminated in an almost vicious dot. He wished, not for the first time, that he had chosen a different line of endeavor for his life’s work; he had a strong feeling he knew what was coming.

“Disappeared. That’s what I said,” Mrs. Williams said sharply. “She hasn’t been seen since — and that’s disappearance, isn’t it?” The edge of poorly concealed disdain tinged her voice. “And then that man trying to tell me, when I went over to borrow a cup of sugar—”

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