He was tall and thin, in a long dark coat and a hat with earflaps, and he was looking at her house. Not walking past it. Looking at it, his head tilted back, as if he was studying the roofline. At his feet something small and pale moved, sniffing at the frozen grass.
A dog. A beagle.
She let her breath out. It was Arliss Haskell from the end of the block, the widower in the brick house with the green shutters, walking that fat old beagle of his. She'd seen him do it before, at odd hours. Del said Arliss didn't sleep much since Marjorie passed; he'd been an engineer out at Wright-Patt for thirty years, and now he built model airplanes by day and walked Buster by night.
But he wasn't walking now. He was standing still, in front of her house, at one-thirty in the morning, and staring at the roof.
As she watched, he lifted one gloved hand and pointed—at what, she couldn't see. The garage? The attic vent at the gable end? He held the pose for a moment. Then he dropped his hand, tugged on Buster's leash, and walked on, his breath streaming white behind him, until he passed out of the circle of the streetlight and was gone.
Janet stood at the window for a long time.
When she went back to bed, Milo was sitting in the doorway again, staring up at the ceiling of the hall. She stepped around him. She lay down beside Del and listened to him breathe, long and slow and regular, and she thought about waking him and didn't, because she knew how it would sound. Arliss was walking his dog, Jan. Arliss is always walking his dog.
* * *
The police came on Tuesday.
She was off that day, a rare weekday off, and she'd spent the morning doing the things she never had time for: scrubbing the bathtub, defrosting the freezer, taking the slipcovers off the couch to wash, with WHIO on the kitchen radio. The weatherman was talking about an arctic front coming down from Canada at the end of the week, lows in the teens by Friday, maybe single digits. "Bring in your pets, folks, and check on your elderly neighbors," he said, in the warm cheerful voice they used for disasters. "It's going to be a cold one."
She was wringing out a slipcover in the utility sink when the doorbell rang.
The officer on the front step was young, younger than she'd expected, with a red mustache he was probably trying to make look older and a Fairborn Police patch on his jacket. His name tag said BRANDT. He took off his hat when she opened the door.
"Morning, ma'am. Sorry to bother you. I'm just going around the street, following up on the Doyle boy. Kevin Doyle? From across the way?"
"Yes. Of course. Come in, it's freezing."
She poured him coffee in the kitchen. Milo came and sniffed his boots and then sat in the kitchen doorway and stared at him.
He took a little spiral notebook out of his breast pocket. "So, I know somebody came by when he first went missing. I'm just checking in again. Sometimes people remember things later. Has anybody been around the Doyle house? Anybody you didn't recognize? Cars that don't belong?"
Janet thought. "No. Not that I've noticed. It's just been dark."