One Night Read Online Free

particularly misty morning in
April when the light is always tenuous, one of her charges – a half-grown Great
Dane by the name of Hannibal – had charged into the Patterson garden after a
cat, dragging Mona behind him. There was some shouting and a refuse bin was overturned.
    Two things happened: Mona became
aware there was some other disconnected screaming coming from the house. Thinking
Mrs Patterson must be home and may have taken offence to the noisy intrusion, she
had glanced up and seen a man’s face appear momentarily at an upper window.
    The face had stuck in her mind
simply because it shouldn’t have been there. As far as Mona was concerned, the
house at that time in the morning should have been empty. Distracted by Hannibal,
she had continued her walk – and forgotten about the face at the window until the
awful facts leaked out on the next morning’s news. Julia’s mother had come home
in the evening and found her daughter dead on her bed, a length of cord coiled
deeply into her pale young neck.
    The facts slowly emerged. It seemed
Julia Patterson had let the man into the house soon after her parents had left
for work. Nobody could say why she had done this except that perhaps he was a friend
about whom her parents knew nothing. Mona realized she’d seen Julia with an
older man on two occasions: once at the bus stop (had only seen the back of
him) and once in the Patterson garden where Julia, still in her school uniform,
had been engaged in animated conversation. For reasons that made sense to nerdy
and unromantic Mona, she had assumed he was a contractor of sorts. She could
confirm (well, ninety percent) that the man in the garden and the face at the
window were the same. The police put together a picture of a young girl’s
truancy and infatuation with an older man, and Mona helped the ID team put
together a picture of the man’s face – a reconstruction that ended with dark hair,
a nose, a mouth and two eyes. And very little else. Fingerprints had been wiped
with professional care even from the cord around the girl’s neck.
    The trail went cold and they never
found him.
    After that the quiet street became
unsettled and watchful, neighbours more polite, deliveries checked, strangers
noted, doors bolted.
    But my mother was right. Mona had
changed. She became nervy, introspective and irritable. Her mother, Elva
Spears, related in worried tones that Mona had begun to suffer nightmares,
waking in the night shouting, ‘ I know him. I’ve seen him! ’ Mona couldn’t
articulate her fear that the killer might return to silence her. The where and
when she might see him and point an accusatory finger was of no doubt powerful
concern to both her and the perpetrator.
    As the months passed by and this
probability became less likely, the nightmares diminished, and while she would
never speak about it, Mona recovered some of her equilibrium. But then, the
other change: she became distinctly keen to go on a date. I introduced her to
several people but her skittishness frightened them off. I thought she was just
shy but it was more than that. Mona was looking for security of companionship
not a love affair. She was keen to become one of a pair. She wanted stability,
a presence, someone who would see her home; a man who would dispel her fears of
a darkened alley, a shadowy doorway. It was probably Brent Sedgeworth’s sudden
interest in her and not his soft good looks that attracted her. Looking back, I
realized they each had an agenda – those secret goal-tick lists that make us
moody, vital, anxious and anticipatory without making any sense to anybody
else. Agendas which only became clear after the night in Witch’s Wood.
    6 PM
    I picked up Sticky and tottered through the backyard. He weighed me down
like a small sack of potatoes. There was a gloomy light in the woods, an early
evening stillness compounded by a heavy seal of cloud overhead. The trees
looked surreal, black cutouts against the strange light.
    It