Trenchwork and Cold Porch Light

The final stretch of road to the Owen property in Collinsvale climbed steeply through bush that closed in with sudden density, the canopy knitting overhead until the headlights were the only illumination left. The gravel turn-off appeared without ceremony, marked by a lopsided reflector post and a battered green sign half-claimed by scrub. Jane Lathom guided the car onto it with careful precision, the tyres shifting from bitumen to stone with an audible change of register.

The driveway coiled ahead between tall banks of untamed growth, the kind that thrived where runoff collected and fog lingered past its welcome. Branches arched overhead like the ribs of a closing tunnel. Fern grunted from the back seat as the car jostled over a familiar patch of washout, her claws shifting against the vinyl.

The gate emerged in the headlights. Rough timber, slightly bowed, its lower hinge sagging just enough to make it stubborn in wet weather. The fenceposts leaned like old men in conversation. Chris had meant to replace them years ago. Karen climbed out into cold that rose to meet her like a hand pressed gently across the face, sharp but not hostile, carrying the particular purity of deep bush air layered with eucalyptus and frost and decomposing leaf mulch. She wrestled the swollen latch open and swung the gate wide.

The house stood in complete darkness.

No porch light. No warm amber behind the curtains. Not even the faint blue spill of the shed fridge bleeding through its warped weatherboards. The colonial-era cottage, with its weathered stone walls and cedar cladding, sat hunched against the hillside like a figure caught mid-thought. The windows stared back blankly, black mirrors reflecting nothing but headlights and the thin crust of frost spreading across the garden fence.

But the ute was there. Chris's HiLux, still dusty white despite their best efforts, sat backed neatly in beside the stacked firewood. Frost had already formed across its windscreen, the familiar dent in the left door catching a sliver of moonlight. He was home. But the house offered no evidence of habitation.

Jane cut the engine, and a different kind of silence took its place. Thicker. Slower. The quiet of a place with too much memory and not enough movement. Neither woman reached for the door immediately. Karen's gaze moved from the ute to the dark windows and back again. The barn light was off as well, and Chris never forgot the barn light after dark in winter. He had learned that lesson years ago, the hard way, with wolf spiders in toolboxes and rebar kicked over in poor lighting.

Jane voiced what they were both thinking. She did not love this. Karen did not argue. Jane was already reaching for her seatbelt.

Fern hopped down from the back seat with a solid grunt, shook herself once, and turned toward the house with her ears pricked and her body gathered. Not alarmed, but reading something. The three of them made their way up the stone path in tight formation, boots scuffing across flagstones slick with condensation. Jane pulled out her phone and switched on the torch, its narrow beam cutting across the warped grain of the porch boards and the frost feathering along the railing.

The security light did not trigger. Another of Chris's unfinished tasks. He had mentioned the motion sensor weeks ago, standing right there with a screwdriver in one hand and a head full of other jobs he would never quite get to.

The front door was unlocked. It turned too easily. Karen paused with her knuckles white on the handle, the stillness of the house pressing outward like the breath of something long paused. She called Chris's name into the dark. The sound rang slightly against the hallway and then was absorbed. She called again, louder. Nothing returned.

Jane swept the torch beam through the entry. The boots stood in their neat row by the door. The coats hung from their hooks, two of his, one of hers, a hat with the brim bent where it always was. Everything in its place. Everything as it should have been, except for the warmth, the hum of life, the ambient presence of a house with someone in it.

The interior was cold in a way that went beyond a few hours of absence. It was the still, weighted silence of a space that had forgotten the sound of footsteps. Karen flicked the hallway switch. The click echoed sharp and expectant, and nothing followed it. No power. Not even the hum of the fridge or the creak of timber settling.

They moved through the house room by room. The kitchen was orderly, benchtops cleared, the kettle untouched. A dish towel hung stiff with dried damp. The lounge told the same story: cushions undisturbed, a blanket folded over the couch, a mug of cold tea sitting on the coffee table with its surface unbroken. Chris's novel lay facedown on the armrest with a bookmark peeking from between the pages. It looked as though he had stepped away mid-chapter, mid-sip, mid-thought, and simply not returned.

Fern found the answer before either woman did. She paused at the rear hallway, nose lowered to the floorboards, and then turned with quiet certainty toward the back door. It stood ajar. Just a fraction, but enough. Cold bled in through the gap, sharper and more insistent than the rest of the house, carrying the raw edge of frost and open ground.

Karen pulled the door wide. The garden beyond lay silvered with moonlight, the grass shimmering like a field dusted with ash. At the edge of the porch sat a pair of gumboots, one standing upright, the other toppled into a damp patch as though discarded in a hurry. Mud-caked, cracked at the heel, unmistakably his.

A muffled curse drifted up from somewhere in the yard. Low. Human. Unmistakably Chris.

They found him behind the shed. Christopher Owen, environmental scientist, was lying flat on his stomach in the frosted grass. He was half-wedged beneath the shed's rear wall, one arm buried shoulder-deep in a narrow trench of his own digging. His feet were bare, his jeans soaked through at the knees, and a small battery-powered floodlight balanced on a brick beside him threw angular shadows across the scene. A length of PVC pipe, a garden trowel with a splintered handle, and a half-empty container of silicone sealant leaking onto the frozen ground completed the tableau.

He had been diverting water runoff from pooling beneath the shed. A reasonable enough project for a man whose entire career had been built on understanding how water moved through soil. Less reasonable at seven o'clock on a winter night, barefoot, having tripped the house's safety switch hours earlier by cutting into an old conduit and then become so absorbed in his excavation that he forgot to restore the power, forgot the time, and forgot that his wife was due home to a house that now resembled something from a crime scene.

He blinked up at them through the floodlight's glare, face streaked with dirt in long uneven lines, a piece of lawn clinging to the sweat on his cheek with the precision of a theatrical moustache. Jane observed, with characteristic understatement, that he had turned the whole house into a Hitchcock film. Chris offered the floodlight as evidence of his preparedness, gesturing toward its chunky battery pack with the weary conviction of a man who genuinely believed this constituted a trump card.

The tension that had been building since the darkened house first appeared in the headlights released in stages. Karen's shoulders dropped. Jane's mouth twitched into the dry half-smile that always preceded her best lines. Fern gave a satisfied whuff and trotted forward with her tail lifted, the posture of a creature whose suspicions had been confirmed and found entirely manageable.

Chris extracted himself from the trench with the reluctant dignity of something amphibious returning to land. He was dispatched toward the switchboard to restore the power before being permitted so much as a slice of Valerie's pumpkin loaf. He went without argument, floodlight swinging at his side, muttering about the unappreciated genius of trenchwork and the tyranny of women who withheld baked goods.