Ruth Mackenzie was dead. She didn’t know it, of course, and neither did anyone else at that point. She was alone, on her couch, dead. The credits rolled on the sickeningly romantic film she had been watching, the glass of wine was still being held gracefully, and half filled in her right hand and the pint of Ben and Jerry’s still sat, spoon pushed into it’s melting contents, on her lap. It is often said that the dead look as though they are merely sleeping, but this was not the case for Ruth. In fact, she looked weirdly, frozenly conscious. Her eyes remained wide open, blankly staring at the television. Her mouth was twisted in a weird grimace, which was only explained when one took the care to notice the trail of a tear, or many, down her cheek and the redness surrounding her eyes. When her cat, the unimaginatively named Kitty, strolled into the room and climbed up onto the couch, it snuggled up to her curled legs, unaware of her mistress’ situation (or the situation Kitty herself would be in when someone came to visit and found Ruth in the position she was). She didn’t notice that Ruth’s hand didn’t descend to scratch behind her ear the way it normally would or that the feet she was using as a bed were unusually cold.

Kitty was only the first not to notice that Ruth was dead though. The milkman, postman, and paperboy all passed by oblivious the next day, and the next. Ruth’s best friend, a local school teacher, simply shrugged when her calls weren’t answered and went back to marking homework books. No parents called as they had died several years before. No boyfriend called because she didn’t have one and no employer called because she didn’t have one of those either. In fact, it was almost a week before anyone noticed that she was not around, and this only because there were now seven bottles of milk sitting on her doorstep uncollected (the first of which was verging on solid after sitting there in the sun). On the eighth day, the milkman, a tall, skinny man by the name of William Macleod, and the postman, of the opposite physicality and who was simply called Thompson, arrived at the same time, and commented on the situation. The postman suggested that perhaps she had simply gone on holiday, a notion that the milkman quickly dismissed as he had been delivering Ruth’s milk for several years now and she never failed to tell him, albeit with a post-it on the door. Thompson shrugged and that was that. He continued delivering her mail, barely interested in whether she was actually reading any of it or not. What business was it of his? He had never spoken to the woman.

William Macleod was not so blasé about her mysterious (at least to him) disappearance. He was not so concerned as to actually investigate though, and merely showed his interest by mentioning it to his wife when he returned home. This was a conversation that his little daughter, a certain Miriam Macleod, overheard while doing her homework at the kitchen table. As children are wont to gossip almost as much as old women, by morning break time the next day (the ninth day which Ruth Mackenzie had been dead), more than half of the pupils and at least one of the teachers knew all about it (although none of them really knew anything, as we well know).

In the forth classroom on the right of the English department corridor, a dishevelled and panting Lucy Humes was adjusting her blouse, reapplying her lipstick and carefully picking up all of her class’ yellow jotters. She separated these into two piles, those who she needed to speak to, and those she didn’t. On the top of the those-she-did pile was a name we are already familiar with, and the child in question was already standing outside the door anticipating the meeting. When called in, Miriam sat neatly, with her ankles crossed and her hands on her lap. She knew she had not done well, but there was something else on the very top of her mind. Of course, this thing was the mysterious disappearance of Ruth Mackenzie, which Lucy Humes knew nothing about.

Being of the disposition which didn’t recognise inappropriateness, Miriam launched into a great spiel, voicing theories which were both her own, her parents and her peers. Most of which were fantastical and Lucy silently wished that if Miriam were half as imaginative in her homework she would not be having this meeting. The one scenario which did not arise was that Ruth was dead. Perhaps, it is fortunate that the children in this particular school were not as morbid as others, even if this theory would have been completely correct. At this point, it would be timely to note that Miriam did not even know who Ruth Mackenzie was (as her father’s route covered the whole town) and as such she did not know that Lucy was a friend of the woman. Therefore, when Lucy sat upright and bolted from the room before Miriam had even finished with Luke Thomas’ account of what had happened, her mind constructed new and entirely separate stories. It is difficult to know whether Miriam would have addressed the situation differently if she had known that Lucy and Ruth used to go out for lunch once a week (a date which Lucy had been too distracted to remember that week).

It was at three in the afternoon of the ninth day that Ruth Mackenzie’s body was pronounced dead by a paramedic in her home. Lucy adopted Kitty into her own family of cats. And that was that.