The Halloween Vistor

The Halloween Visitor

The first trick-or-treaters appeared at Frank Addison's door just before sundown. Most were toddlers, for them Halloween was a new and puzzling experience. They stood stock-still, wide eyes shifting from the leering, candle-lit pumpkin balanced on the porch railing to the white-haired stranger dropping candy into their sacks.

"What do you say to the nice man, darling?" doting mothers and fathers prompted. Uncertain what they had done to deserve this bounty, the children stared mutely up at their benefactor. The parents exchanged delighted grins with Frank before leading their bewildered offspring away into the falling dark.

This group segued into a second wave of older, cannier children. They shouted "trick or treat!" with confident gusto as Frank opened the door, candy-filled mixing bowl in hand. When he deposited his treats into their outstretched bags, the children exclaimed in reedy voices, "Thank you, Mr. Addison! Happy Halloween!" before racing off down the porch stairs.

"Bye, kids," he called after them. "Happy Halloween. Be safe now!"

Many of his visitors wore classic costumes familiar to Frank from the Halloweens of his youth: ghosts, skeletons, vampires, witches, ghouls, and vintage superheroes among them. Others were more obscure to the childless, sixty-seven-year-old Boomer.

"And what are you supposed to be, dear?" he asked one bespectacled girl. "A flamenco dancer?"

She frowned and snapped, "Like, seriously? I'm Mirabel from Encanto obviously! And what's a flamingo dancer?" Frank apologized for his oversight and doled out a double helping of candy to the nettled child.

The parade of sugar-charged masqueraders dwindled and ended altogether a little past nine o'clock. Frank sat in his living room with a newly filled bowl on his lap, waiting for last-minute stragglers. When none came, he went to the front door, snuffed out the pumpkin's candle and switched off the porch light. After locking up, he carried the bowl to the kitchen. He poured its contents into a plastic bag and placed it at the back of a cupboard, where it would remain until next Halloween.

This crap probably has a longer shelf-life than I do, he mused.

As Frank washed the bowl, he reflected on the night's events and was surprised to feel a twinge of melancholy. With not a little embarrassment, he found himself wishing that the evening's festivities had continued a little longer. This did not stem from a particular fondness for Halloween or its rituals. Rather, the stream of joyous visitors to his door had provided him a brief conduit to a world that was becoming increasingly remote to Frank Addison.

Frank had taken early retirement immediately after the death of his wife Kaitlyn five years earlier. Following a short period of numb disbelief, he plunged into anguish too savage to be called mourning. When his distress finally eased, Frank did not experience relief. Like an out of control forest fire that self-extinguishes only after incinerating the fuel sustaining its blaze, the suffering that ravaged him left him hollowed-out and desolate.

He attempted to fill his desolation by immersing himself in reading, listening to his extensive jazz record collection, rewatching classic movies, gardening and occasionally joining former co-workers for a drink. For a time, Frank was reasonably content with these rote distractions. But during this past year, the meagre pleasure he derived from his pastimes waned. The get-togethers with old work-mates became less frequent and ceased altogether. Except to run errands, shop or attend appointments, he seldom left the house. At the end of one grindingly monotonous day, Frank perceived with cruel clarity that somehow he had become a recluse trapped in a flat, sepia-toned existence.

This dreary epiphany returned often to throw its cold shadow over him. He felt its chill now as he stood in his kitchen drying the empty candy bowl.

Frank considered going to bed. But sleep was difficult in this state. Instead, he decided to try to lighten his mood with a glass of whiskey imbibed while listening to one of his cherished albums.

His physician, he knew, would disapprove of this remedy for soothing his angst.

"I realize that you're not a heavy drinker, Frank," his doctor had told him at his last check-up, "but at your age and with a heart like yours, not to mention these vertigo attacks you've been having lately, well, I think it's in your best interest to give it up. Full stop."

Still, Frank couldn't see the harm in an occasional drink especially if it lifted his gloom. On his way to the den where he kept his modest assortment of spirits, he picked up an etched whiskey tumbler from the dining room sideboard. Opening the liquor cabinet, he chose the crown jewel of his collection--a bottle of twenty-five-year-old single malt. After pouring two fingers of the Scotch into the tumbler, he held it to his nose and inhaled deeply. He had intended to nurse the drink while sitting on the living room sofa. But its enticing, smoky aroma was such that he could not resist bringing the tumbler to his lips and taking a generous sip.

"Heaven in a glass," he murmured, closing his eyes. He savoured the peaty flavour and sipped from the tumbler again. The alcohol smouldered in his belly, instantly rewarding him with a hit of solace. Calmer now, he opened his eyes and looked about the den. For years after his wife's death, Frank had avoided this room altogether. Kaitlyn--a professional cellist--had used the space as her studio. Her lingering presence here had been too potent for him to bear.

Kaitlyn's practice chair and music stand still occupied a corner of the room. On the stand's lip, the score for Astor Piazzolla's 'Oblivion' remained open as she had left it. The piece was to have been part of a program of contemporary South American compositions that Kaitlyn and her pianist duo partner planned to perform in concert at the community college where she taught.

Frank vividly remembered sitting in the living room listening to Kaitlyn nurture the score's printed notes to life bar by bar. At times his eyes misted over, less a reaction to the haunting beauty of the piece than his awe--undiminished after forty-three years of marriage--at his wife's enigmatic ability to bow such expressive sounds from the strings of her instrument.

Only Frank would ever hear Kaitlyn perform the piece. In the weeks leading up to her concert, an irritating tickle in her throat grew into a hacking cough. Frank urged his wife to visit her doctor but she persuaded him that all would be well with enough rest and Echinacea tea. A few days before the performance, she developed an incendiary fever. Every phlegmy breath was a battle. In a panic, Frank helped his gasping wife into the car and rushed her to the hospital.

Hours passed glacially before a weary looking doctor came to sit beside Frank in the waiting room. She laid her hand on his forearm and explained quietly that the bacterial infection responsible for Kaitlyn's cough had progressed into pneumonia. Untreated, her condition worsened and sepsis had set in. Despite the efforts of medical staff, septic shock sucked the life from Kaitlyn with ruthless efficiency.

Dazed, Frank could not take in the details of the doctor's synopsis. All he heard was that he had acted too slowly, and Kaitlyn would not be coming home.

Frank's fist clenched around the glass. He raised it to his mouth and tossed back its contents. He considered his physician's caution, but barely hesitated before putting the tumbler on the liquor cabinet and refilling it. Just one more small one, he told himself, to sip slowly while he listened to music. He recorked the Scotch, returned the bottle to the cabinet shelf and left the den.

Frank shuffled through his record collection and chose an album well-suited to his mood. He centred it on the turntable, lowered the stylus onto the first groove and, as music filled the room, fine-tuned tone, volume and balance. He switched off all but one lamp before settling on the couch.

Frank had heard the free-form piano introduction to the album's first track countless times. But the limpid, otherworldly chords still captivated him and he listened intently to its unfolding. When the double bass and drums kicked in to give the piece its loping rhythm, Frank reached for his drink. But except for a couple of jazz aficionado magazines, the surface of the coffee table was bare.

"You're losing it, old man," he said. He shook his head at his absent-mindedness and rose to retrieve the glass of Scotch from the den.

His legs turned to rubber. The room lurched and spun. A kaleidoscopic blur of swirling colours blazed to life on the periphery of his vision and spread to obscure his entire field of sight. He managed to stay erect for a few seconds before falling backwards to land clumsily in a sitting position on the couch. The pointillistic constellations of colour receded into darkness. Just beyond the cusp of consciousness, Frank stared slack-jawed into a black void as he rode out his vertigo.

Darkness ebbed slowly. Frame by frame, the room came back into view. Still shaken, Frank bent forward, cradled his head in his arms and breathed deeply. When his dizziness passed, he straightened up but remained still until he was sure the episode had run its course.

"Alright," he said. "Let's try that again." This time, there was no rush of dizziness when he rose and took a few cautious steps towards the den. But while Frank's gait was steady, his coordination felt somehow misaligned, as though a synaptic lapse caused his mind to lag a beat behind physical movement. Brain fog slowed his thoughts. His vision was slightly unfocused. When he returned to the living room, he eyed the glass of Scotch dubiously. The amber liquid tempted him. But this attack of vertigo had been particularly severe and left him rattled and shaky. The idea of drinking the whiskey now struck him as wildly reckless. He shook his head and placed the glass on the coffee table just as the doorbell rang.

"Who the hell is that?" he said, glancing at his watch. "Almost nine-thirty. Surely not another trick or treater this late?"

He entered the hallway and saw light shining through the glass panes edging the front door.

Strange, he mused. Thought I'd turned off the porch light.

Frank reached the door and peered out through the glass border. Under the porch light a costumed figure stood in profile gazing out into the street, its breath translucent in the cool night air.

It was clear from the figure's attire that his visitor was female: a full-length sheath dress slit from ankle to upper thigh with a snug, waist-length jacket covering her arms and torso. A wide-brimmed, peaked witch's hat topped her head and she held a star-tipped wand in her hand. The elegant ensemble and its accoutrements were made of a luminous silver fabric that gleamed and shimmered beneath the porch light. Obviously of a high quality, the costume fit the wearer's form as though professionally tailored. Her height and the pronounced feminine contours outlined by the outfit marked the visitor as much older than the trick-or-treaters who had knocked on his door earlier that night.

Intrigued, Frank stared through the sidelight until the visitor turned to ring the doorbell again. He snapped out of his reverie and opened the door.

The silver witch regarded him impassively for a heartbeat before smiling and lifting her wand in salutation.

"Happy Halloween, Mister Addison!" she said brightly.

The sing-song cadence of his visitor's voice was familiar, but a silver brocade mask covering the upper half of her face hid her identity from Frank.

"Uh, yes, thank you. Same to you. I'm sorry, but do I know you?"

"It's Avery, Mr. Addison! Wow, I didn't know my costume was that good!"

"Ah, Avery! Hello, dear. Sorry. Took me a minute. Happy Halloween. You're a bit late for trick or treating, aren't you?"

"Well, I haven't trick or treated since I was thirteen or something so, yeah, I'm about eight years late." She laughed and continued. "Seriously, I'm supposed to go to a Halloween party later and I had my costume on so, like, I thought it'd be fun to try it out on a few neighbours. Maybe score some goodies while I'm at it. But it looks like you're the only house on the block with lights on so I'm probably not going to get much of a haul."

Frank shivered as he stepped onto the porch to survey his neighbourhood. Except for the sound of a light wind rustling the few brittle leaves still clinging to the branches of the chestnut trees overhanging the street, the night was still and silent. As Avery had observed, all the houses were dark. Curious, Frank thought: even the streetlights seemed dimmer somehow.

"I hope I'm not bothering you, Mr. Addison," Avery said. "This probably wasn't the greatest idea."

"Oh no, no, Avery. You're not bothering me at all. It's lovely to see you. It just so happens that I've got candy in the kitchen. Hang on. I'll get some for you. We wouldn't want you to go home empty-handed. Give me a minute."

Avery and her family had moved into the house next to Frank's shortly after Kaitlyn's death. He did not know her well but over the years had developed a fondness for his young neighbour. Their contact was limited to brief conversations when they bumped into one another on the sidewalk in front of their homes or chatted over the waist-high fence dividing their backyards. Frank spoke little during these meetings, certain that the humdrum details of his life would bore her. The content of their exchanges changed as Avery aged. Meandering anecdotes about the vagaries of high school and her first job at Dairy Queen segued into animated descriptions of college life and her post-graduation, entry-level employment at a tech company whose core business Frank could never grasp.

But for Frank the appeal of these conversations had little to do with their content. Like the whiskey he'd put away that night, Avery's guileless, youthful zest and vivacity were a tonic that never failed to buoy his spirits. He relished these chance meetings. But one encounter still made Frank wince when he recalled it.

Sweeping his deck one Saturday afternoon that past summer, he had glimpsed Avery practising yoga in her back yard. She was a lithe, graceful young woman with a mane of thick black hair framing a fine-featured face. Although Avery's looks had never been lost on Frank, his appreciation had always been an aesthetic rather than a salacious one. But that afternoon as he watched Avery run through her sequence of poses, a sensual yearning--dormant since Kaitlyn's death--rose in him like a building wave. It collapsed before cresting when Frank, to his horror, became aware of his arousal.

"Give your head a shake, you old bastard," he muttered. "She's a kid, for Christ's sake." He hurried back into his house and for the rest of the summer avoided his yard and back porch when Avery exercised.

Avery's visit puzzled him. Why was someone her age trick or treating, even as a lark? And at such a late hour. Frank pondered this as he took the bag of candy from the cupboard and shook a generous measure into the bowl. He picked it up and turned to bring it back to his visitor on his porch.

"Avery!" he exclaimed. "You gave me a start!"

Avery stood in the kitchen doorway scanning her surroundings.

"Your house looks just the same as it did last time I was here, Mr. Addison. Really old school."

Frank could not recall Avery ever having set foot in his house. But he was the first to admit that his memory was not what it had been, so did not question her.

"Bit of a mess at the moment, I'm afraid," he replied, recovering himself. "My cleaning lady comes in the morning. Not a moment too soon as you can see."

Avery appeared not to hear. She walked back into the living room with Frank following. He watched her silvery form drift through the dimly lit room, stopping here and there to examine objects that caught her attention: a framed picture of Kaitlyn, a pile of DVDs near the TV, an opened book on the end table beside the couch. While Frank was pleased to see her, Avery's presence made him uneasy for reasons he could not pinpoint. Perhaps, he thought, having a guest in his home after years of habitual solitude was now enough to rattle him.

"Do you enjoy living like a vampire, Mr. Addison," Avery chided, "or are you trying to save money on electricity bills?"

Frank laughed. "No, no. Nothing like that. I like having the lights low when I listen to music. For atmosphere. I can turn on the overhead, if you'd like."

"No, this is fine," Avery replied. "I prefer it, actually."

She stood in front of his sound system and picked up the cover of the album spinning on the turntable.

"Vinyl. Cool," she pronounced, and read the album's name aloud. "'Kind of Blue'. Miles Davis. What kind of music is this?"

"Jazz. One of the greatest jazz albums ever made, in fact. It was recorded almost seventy years ago so it's even older than I am. Considered a great classic now. Do you like it?"

She nodded absently and put the cover down. Frank had never seen Avery so subdued. Usually, words cascaded from her mouth in an unchecked, quicksilver flow. Tonight she was strangely inarticulate and distracted. Struggling to fill the awkward silence, Frank complimented his visitor on her costume.

"Your costume is really quite extraordinary, Avery," he said. "Is it custom made?"

She looked down at herself as though noticing the outfit for the first time.

"Oh, thanks," she said vaguely. "I made it actually. With help from... different people."

He noticed the glass of whiskey on the coffee table. He considered offering her a drink but decided that she might view the invitation as inappropriate. Instead he held out the candy bowl.

"Here you go, Avery," he said. "Bit boring, I know, but it's all I have unfortunately."

She looked at his outstretched hand blankly.

"Thanks, Mr. Addison, but I'm not really into candy."

"No? Well, I have some apples. Not sure how fresh they are though. Nuts? I think I've got a bag of cashews around somewhere."

"That's okay," she said. "Actually, I didn't come here to trick or treat."

"You didn't?"

Avery looked at the floor and took a deep breath. When she lifted her head and spoke, her voice was resolute.

"Mr. Addison, can we be honest?"

"I'm not sure what you mean, Avery. Honest about...?"

"I don't want to freak you out, Mr. Addison but I... I like you. A lot. You listen to me and never talk down or say the kinds of stupid, cringey things men your age usually say to me. I like that about you. That and... other things."

"That's very kind of you, Avery. I like you too. I think you're a very nice young woman." Where is this going, he wondered.

Avery pursed her lips. She tapped her wand nervously against her calf a little behind the beat of the music coming from the speakers.

"Thanks, Mr. Addison. Yes, I know you think I'm nice. But I also know you have, uh... other feelings about me."

Frank stared at her. "What are you saying, Avery?"

"I'm saying that I know you're attracted to me. In that way."

Frank froze as the import of her words hit him.

"What? Oh no, Avery, that's not... yes, I like you and you're a lovely young woman but... I don't have those kind of feelings for you. Not at all!"

"Mr. Addison, I really do wish you'd be honest with me. I don't want to embarrass you but... last summer when I was doing my yoga outside, I saw you watching me. And I saw how you were watching me."

How on earth could she have seen me? he wondered, his face reddening.

"I... I don't know what to say, Avery. I wasn't--."

"You don't need to explain, Mr. Addison," Avery interjected. "I didn't mind. Not at all. Actually,... I liked it."

"You did?"

"Yes, I did. If it'd been someone else, it would've been creepy. But because it was you...."

She stepped towards him but halted when the brim of her witch's hat bumped against his chin.

"Whoops! Sorry about that, Mr. Addison. I can really be a total klutz sometimes."

She removed the skewed hat and set it and her wand on the coffee table. Her hair had been done up in a loose bun on the top of her head. Released from the hat, it spilled down over the shoulders of her waistcoat. Frank saw that she had scattered multi-coloured specks of glitter throughout her dark locks.

Avery faced him and placed her palms on his chest. Stunned, Frank grasped her wrists but did not pull her hands away.

"Avery, this isn't right. You're a child."

"No, Mr. Addison. I'm not a child. I'm twenty-one-years-old. So there's no reason why we can't.... Unless you really, really don't want to. But I think you do. Am I wrong, Mr. Addison?" She paused and pressed her hands more firmly against his chest."

"This is... I'm at a loss here, Avery. Why me? You're a beautiful young woman and I'm.... I'm a relic. I really don't understand why you would want--."

"Does everything need an explanation? Or have to make perfect sense? Especially this."

Avery delivered these words with a gravity that Frank had never detected in her. He struggled to think of an answer but Avery was not expecting one.

Lips parted, she lifted her face to his.

When Frank recoiled, Avery tilted her head to one side and said in a voice soft with bemusement, "It's a kiss, Mr. Addison. Just a kiss. What are you so afraid of?"

"I'm not afraid, Avery, but...."

"But?" she said, bringing her face so near to his that he felt her warm breath on his cheek. He opened his mouth to try to explain the apprehension that paralyzed him. But the task of articulating his reticence suddenly seemed overwhelming and irrelevant. Instead, he placed his lips on hers.

Tender, almost chaste at first, the kiss they shared became charged when Avery eased her tongue between his lips. They embraced, bodies straining together as they parsed the soft flesh of each other's mouths. Frank sensed something had been set in motion that was beyond his power to stop.

Avery lifted her lips from his. She stepped back, removed her jacket and dropped it on the table beside her hat and wand. Turning her back to him, she pointed to the zipper tab at the nape of her neck.

"Can you...?"

Frank watched his shaking hand pull down the zipper to its terminus just above her tail bone. Avery shucked off her dress. It fell in a lustrous heap over her feet. She stepped free of it and slipped off her silver pumps. But for her mask, she was naked.

The jet black hair falling over her breasts and the thatch of tight dark curls below her rounded belly rendered her flesh strikingly pale by contrast.

"Oh my, Avery," Frank whispered hoarsely. "You're beautiful."

"Now you, Mr. Addison."

"Me?"

Avery laughed and rolled her eyes. "Yes, Mr. Addison: you. Or did you usually make love with your clothes on?"

'Make love.' The words pleased him but her request did not.

"Oh God, Avery. I'm an old geezer in dreadful shape. I don't know how I feel about... subjecting you to the sight of this old wreck of a body."

"Shyness isn't a great look on a man your age," she admonished playfully. "Come on, Mr. Addison, let's get you out of those clothes. Here, I'll help."

She raised her hands and deftly unbuttoned his shirt. As he shrugged his way out of it, Avery pushed her fingers between the waistband of his slacks and the roll of fat encircling his pudgy middle to unhook the fastener.

"Wow! This is harder than it looks. Is there a trick to this? Do I need to check out an online manual or something?"

As they laughed, Frank overcame the recalcitrant hook himself and unzipped his fly. His slacks fell to his ankles and he kicked them aside.

Immediately self-conscious, he saw himself through her eyes: a balding, stooped old man with withering skin hanging from the underside of his upper arms, drooping pectorals dusted with wiry white hair, flabby belly, thin, varicose-veined legs intersected by swollen, knobby knees. But Avery barely glanced at his body. She embraced him and laid her cheek against his chest. A flash of giddiness made Frank unsteady on his feet and he wrapped his arms tightly around her.

"Are you alright, Mr. Addison? Your heart is beating super fast."

"Yes, yes, I'm fine," he said. "Just feeling a little... awkward, I guess. It's been a long time since...."

"Yes, it has," Avery murmured.

She hooked her thumbs in the waistband of Frank's boxers and tugged them down over his hips. She eased her body away from his, and in the space between them, trailed her hand down across his abdomen. The touch of her fingers at the centre of his groin sent a spike of pleasure through his core and his knees trembled. After caressing him for a moment, she asked, "Are you liking this, Mr. Addison?"

"Oh yes," he replied. "Very much. You can't tell?"

"Well, I just thought it might be... harder than it is. It's fine but I just want to make sure you're enjoying this as much as I am."

"I am, Avery," he said, blushing. "But with men my age, things can be, uh, iffy in that department."

Avery nodded. "I know something that might help."

She told him to sit on the couch. When he complied, Avery knelt in front of him. Frank felt the soft weight of her hair drag over his thighs as she lowered her head to his groin. When she took him in her mouth, Frank sucked in a lungful of air through gritted teeth. He stroked her hair lightly as her head moved over his lap. After a moment she paused and looked up at him.

"Well," she said, grinning. "Apparently that worked!"

Frank laughed. "Yes, it certainly did."

"Stay like that, Mr. Addison."

She got to her feet, moved forward and planted her knees one at a time on either side of his hips. After straddling him, Avery reached down to hold him erect. She lowered herself until his glans nudged the damp swell of tender flesh between her thighs. Instinctively, he pushed his hips upward but Avery checked him.

"No, no," she whispered. "I'll do this."

He rested his hands on Avery's hips as she sank down on him. Her humid pressure gripped him by degrees, drawing a low moan from the back of his throat. When his entire length was cradled inside her, Avery paused and raised her pelvis. At the height of her arc, Frank feared he would slip from her but she held him tightly, hesitated, and lowered herself again. She repeated this cycle, slowly increasing its tempo as her torso pressed against him. The radiant balm of her skin warmed his long-insensate flesh and the icy regions beneath. A visceral memory of comforted sorrow surfaced, making his throat ache and his eyes water.

Avery's fingers brushed his damp cheeks. "It's alright, Mr. Addison," she said, laying the palm of her hand flat against his chest. "You don't have to hold back. Not now. Not with me."

Her eyes caught the lamp light and shone in the holes of her mask. The iridescent green perimeters of her irises merged into coronas of brownish-gold surrounding fathomless black pupils, pinpricks of luminescence at their centres. Like tiny supernovas frozen at the instant of combustion, he marvelled--beautiful and terrifying.

She clenched her hand, digging her fingernails into the loose tissue of his breast. Frank gasped. He tried to tell her to stop but the searing pain stole his breath. Avery pressed her forehead against his. Glitter-strewn hair fell like a dark curtain across his face.

"Come with me, Mr. Addison," she urged, rocking furiously in his lap. "Don't hold back. I know you're ready."

Frank's spine arched and his head snapped back. The pain in his chest built to an unbearable peak and vanished. A voice with the resonant timbre of a bow drawn across a taut string spoke in his ear.

"Come with me, Frank. It's time, my darling man."

"Kaitlyn?" he whispered. "How--?"

The roar of phantom machinery drowned out his words as Frank Addison's essence surged into the savage, welcoming continuum of all things.

* * * * * * *

Two women stood on the porch, talking quietly in the late morning sun.

"I really appreciate you answering my questions so patiently, Mrs. Gilmore," the younger one said. "Especially under the circumstances. I know this has been a terrible shock for you."

"It's the least I can do, dear. He was a lovely man. Sad but lovely. And always so kind to me." Her eyes teared again and the detective offered her another piece of tissue. "What happens now, you know, with...?" Mrs. Gilmore nodded towards the interior of the house.

"He'll be taken to the--to a facility and kept there while we try to locate members of his family. After that, it's out of my hands. I'll be in touch if we need anything else from you, Mrs. Gilmore. Thanks again."

"You're most welcome, dear."

They smiled and shook hands. The detective returned to the living room where the city coroner was kneeling in front of the body sprawled on the couch.

"Any idea when he checked out?"

"Judging from body temperature and the progress of the rigour, I'd say he popped off last night somewhere between nine and midnight, give or take. What did the old gal have to say?"

"Not much," the detective replied, glancing at the notes she had written in her spiral note pad. "She got here just before nine this morning. Knocked a few times but no answer. The door was unlocked so she came in to check on him. Found him on the couch and called 911."

"That's it?" the coroner. He unbuttoned Frank's shirt and pulled its tails from his pants.

"That's it," the detective confirmed. "The poor woman told me she almost had a heart attack when she realized he was dead."

"Good thing she didn't or we'd have two bodies to deal with," the coroner said, running his latex-gloved hands under the dead man's shirt to examine his torso.

The detective laughed. "Thank the higher power of your choice for small favours, eh? She kept telling me that she hadn't touched anything. Said she'd watched enough CSI shows to know not to mess with a crime scene."

"Cute. Well, the good news is that I'm not seeing anything that suggests a crime here. Natural death, I'd say. Massive stroke maybe. Possibly a heart attack."

"Makes sense. I found a bottle of what might be heart meds in the bathroom cabinet." She pulled a blue vial from her pocket and read the label." Ramipril. Twenty milligrams."

"There you go. That's standard issue blood pressure medication and he was taking the maximum dose. I doubt we'll autopsy this fella, but if we did I'm sure we'd find evidence of a coronary occlusion. No mysteries here, I'd say."

"Yeah, everything seems pretty straightforward." The detective checked her note pad again and added, "Except for one small... oddity."

The coroner glanced up at her. "What's that?"

"I did a walk-through of the house with Mrs. Gilmore. Nothing out place but in the study I found a half-full glass of alcohol on top of the liquor cabinet. Whiskey, I think."

"Nothing odd about that. A lot of people with heart issues don't give up the booze even though they know they should."

"No, no. That's not what I mean. The question is, why would he pour himself a drink in the study and then come to sit out here without it?"

"Okay. Point taken. What do you make of it?"

"Best guess? He probably poured the drink and got interrupted. Phone call or someone at the door maybe. Then he has a senior's moment and forgets all about his drink. My dad was always doing things like that when he was getting on. Anyway, it's not a big deal but they pay me the big bucks to think like a cop, you know?"

They chuckled. The coroner began to get to his feet but stopped mid-crouch and looked closely at Frank. Reaching out a gloved hand, he pressed his fingertip against Frank's right tear duct.

"What do you have there?"

"Not sure," the coroner said, squinting at his fingertip. "Looks like a little chip of plastic."

The coroner held his finger up towards the detective. She bent and studied the fragment. "Confetti? Or a sequin maybe?"

"Don't know. Do you want to catalogue it or...?"

The detective reflected briefly and shook her head. "No, I don't think so. I don't know if you noticed but there's a Halloween pumpkin out on the porch, so I'm guessing he was giving out candy last night. Probably flaked off a kid's costume or something."

"So can I toss it?"

"Sure, go ahead."

The coroner got to his feet and flicked the silver speck from his finger. It drifted to the floor and was lost in the carpet's pile. The pair stood side-by-side contemplating the still, pale form on the sofa.

"Sad really," said the detective. "The cleaning lady told me that his wife died four or five years ago. He's been by himself ever since. Went out all on his lonesome."

"Not to put too fine a point on it, Detective, but we all go out alone. No one's with us at the end. Not really."

The detective nodded, and pocketed her notebook.

"Isn't that the truth."

The End